“We Are Otherworldly or We Are Secularists:” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Josh Hawley, and the Politics of the Kingdom of God

Focusing on competing understandings of the kingdom of God, this paper contrasts the political theologies of German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and American senator Josh Hawley. The paper traces the connections between Bonhoeffer and Hawley’s visions of the kingdom of God and their political choices. While Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of God’s kingdom informed his costly repudiation of Christian nationalism in his context, Hawley’s interpretation bolstered his unwavering support for Christian nationalism in his context.     

In 1932, as Adolph Hitler ascended to power with the support of many German Christians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer delivered a speech entitled “Thy Kingdom Come,” concentrating on this line from the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray. The speech began:

"We are otherworldly or we are secularists, but in either case this means that we no longer believe in God’s kingdom. …We flee the power of the Earth, or we hold hard and fast to it. Either way we are not the wanderers who love the Earth that bears them, and who only truly love it because it is on it that they travel toward that foreign land that they love above all… Only wanderers of this kind, who love the Earth and God as one, can believe in God’s kingdom."[1]

Rather than seeking to build the kingdom of God on earth or escape the earth’s suffering by focusing on the afterlife for the individual soul, Bonhoeffer contended that the church community is called to pray “thy kingdom come” by pressing into deeper solidarity with the world.[2] The church should not seek to escape or overcome suffering, but rather to bring suffering before God in the struggle with God for God’s kingdom to be realized on earth. The church’s prayer regarding the coming of the kingdom should be to “identify completely with the fellowship of the children of the Earth and world.”[3]

Committed to praying this prayer for the coming of the kingdom, Bonhoeffer maintained that German Christians were called to solidarity with suffering Jews in their society. Throughout the 1930s, he spoke out against the Nazi regime and the German church’s complicity with the oppression of German Jews. He called the church to a “costly discipleship” built around repentance and confession, community across social divides, and responsible action in the world. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in 1943 for his participation in a plot to thwart Hitler. Shortly before the war ended, he was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp. While in prison, Bonhoeffer continued to repudiate the mission of self-preservation for the church. Instead, he sought for the church to embrace the whole of reality, following Jesus as he demonstrated God’s action in the world.[4]

In 2017, buoyed by a recent endorsement from President Donald Trump for his U.S. Senate campaign, Josh Hawley, then Attorney General of Missouri, delivered a speech elucidating his own version of what he called “kingdom politics.” Emphasizing the “lordship of Christ” over all aspects of human life, Hawley invoked a famous quote by Dutch theologian and politician, Abraham Kuyper, voiced in a speech to open the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880: “There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim, ‘Mine’!” “We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Hawley reflected. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”[5]

Known for much of his career as a thoughtful, rule-following conservative, Senator Hawley made headlines for increasingly embracing Trumpist populism—most notably with his refusal to concede the 2020 election and his support for the January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. Hawley has argued that the role of Christians in politics should be to “advance the kingdom of God.”[6] Hawley’s “kingdom politics” centers on “rebuilding” a culture that protects the way of life of the “great American middle.”[7] While Hawley’s political vision is not as overtly theocratic as some Christian nationalists, it shares in common a bid to restore the power and influence of white Christians in the United States. As such, Hawley’s “kingdom politics” is ultimately secular.

Presaging Hawley, in the late twentieth century South African missiologist David Bosch identified a tendency among Christians in privileged positions to embrace the values of realpolitik and baptize them with Christianity. Referencing Bonhoeffer’s theology of the kingdom of God, he labeled this tendency the “secularist temptation.” Attempts to recreate a mythic past or realize a utopian future are expressions of the ethos of imperialism. The church sees itself as exclusively containing, and even controlling, God.[8] By contrast, Bosch advanced the _Missio Dei_ or “mission of God” movement which stressed that mission is the first and foremost the movement of God’s love toward the world, not an activity of the church. The church’s very purpose is to participate in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation in the world.[9] The paper will conclude by probing a political theology oriented around this conviction as a rejoinder to Hawley’s “kingdom politics” in the contemporary U.S. context.

[1] Bonhoeffer, “Thy Kingdom Come: The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth” [1932], in The Bonhoeffer Reader, 341.  

[2] Ibid., 344. 

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jacob Alan Cook, Worldview Theory, Whiteness, and the Future of Evangelical Faith (Lanham, MD: Lexington Book/Fortress Academic, 2021), 255-256

[5] Hawley, Untitled Speech, American Renewal Project, December 7, 2017. https://youtu.be/rw4BxVdrUnc

[6] Hawley, “A Christian Vision for Kingdom Politics: Immanentize the Eschaton!” Patheos, October 26, 2012.

[7] Hawley, “The Age of Pelagius,” Christianity Today, June 4, 2019.

[8] Bosch, “God’s Reign and the Rulers of this World: Missiological Reflections on Church-State Relationships,” in The Good News of the Kingdom: Mission Theology for the Third Millennium, ed. Charles van Engen, Dean S. Gillibrand, and Paul Pierson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 89-95.

[9] Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 389-390.