Americanism or Christianity

Reading Discipleship in the Wake of the 2024 Iowa Caucus

The Iowa caucus is over and the prediction is now a reality: Donald Trump won easily. He won with the help of evangelical Christians, many who see him as “God ordained”. Evangelical support for Republican candidates isn’t new or surprising. Even the rough nature of Trump’s personality shouldn’t be a deal breaker, as one evangelical pastor put it, “We’re voting for Commander in Chief, not Pastor in Chief.” Fair enough. Trump’s rhetoric with regard to immigrants and refugees, however, isn’t just rough—it’s dangerous.

"They're poisoning the blood of our country. They're coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world." 

Just as problematic is a poll that finds a majority of Republican voters agree.

In the opening chapter of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer discusses the difference between cheap grace and costly grace. He chastises the German Lutheran church for losing sight of its namesakes proclamation of salvation by grace through faith. He writes:

Luther’s teachings are quoted everywhere, but twisted from their truth into self delusion. They say if only our church is in possession of a doctrine of justification, then it us surely a justified church! They say Luther’s true legacy should be recognizable in making grace a cheap as possible…The say that the world is justified and Christians in discipleship are made out to be heretics. A people become Christian, become Lutheran, but at the cost of discipleship, at an all-too-cheap price. Cheap grace has won. (Discipleship, 53)

In describing cheap grace, Bonhoeffer invokes Kierkegaard, saying that grace has become the presupposition, the starting point, rather than the conclusion. For Luther, grace was the conclusion of a life spent trying to earn salvation, to somehow find a way into God’s grace by his own power, his own program of piety and belief. For Luther, grace was a revelation at the end of every attempt at self-justification. According to Bonhoeffer, Luther lost everything. Grace was revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, tearing down his system of belief and way of life, calling him to the path of discipleship. For Bonhoeffer, costly grace is discovered at the end and it leads to transformation.

Grace as presupposition is a program of self justification. There’s no judgement on our systems, ideology, or way of life, there is only justification and affirmation. Cheap grace merely affirms the status quo, baptizing our plans for status and power precisely because all has already been forgiven. There’s no call to a different way of life, no taking up our cross and following Jesus to the margins of society, to the poor, the sick, the outcast. Cheap grace as presupposition is a marker, a doctrine, that determines good from bad, bestowing divine blessing on those deemed worthy.

This is the situation facing the Christian community in 2024. It goes beyond right or left, democrat or republican—there’s enough cheap grace for everyone. However, the present moment facing the Christian community is a politics of hate directed at our immigrant neighbors. How will we respond? Will we choose cheap grace as presupposition and self justification? Or will we receive the costly grace that calls us beyond political party, beyond nationality and bloodline, to encounter the living Christ present in our immigrant and refugee neighbor? (Matthew 25)

For those in despair at the situation, Bonhoeffer writes this:

For integrity’s sake someone has to speak up for those among us who confess that cheap grace has made them give up following Christ, and that ceasing to follow Christ has made them lose the knowledge of costly grace. Because we cannot deny that we no longer stand in true discipleship to Christ, while being members of a true-believing church with a pure doctrine of grace, but no longer members of a church which follows Christ, we therefore simply have to try to understand grace and discipleship again in correct relationship to each other. We can no longer avoid this. Our church’s predicament is proving more and more clearly to be a question of how we are to live as Christians today. (Discipleship 55)

For Bonhoeffer, it raises the question of our allegiance as Christians. Is it primarily to a nationalistic religion with grace as presupposition? Or, is it the costly grace revealed in Jesus Christ who stands at the center of political life with the poor, the marginalized, the immigrant and the refugee.

In a letter written to his grandmother in 1933, Bonhoeffer writes this:

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that what we are going to get is a big, volkish national church that in its essence can no longer be reconciled with Christianity, and that we must make up our minds to take entirely new paths and follow where they lead. The issue really Germanism or Christianity, and the sooner the conflict comes out into the open, the better. (DBW 12, 159)

The Christian community in this country faces a similar choice: A national church of Americanism, or the costly grace of the crucified and risen Christ?