One of the concerns I’ve often had with Christian filmmaking is the lack of subtlety combined with low tolerance for complexity. As I noted in an article for the Colson Center back in 2012, “many Christian films take cheap short-cuts and simply spoon-feed a quick lesson to the viewer instead of doing the far more difficult (but ultimately, more rewarding and long-lasting) work of taking us on a journey that the viewer then has to come to terms with for himself.” The Bonhoeffer movie from Angel Studios seems to fall into this trap.
The crisis of conscience Bonhoeffer faced, and the moral dilemmas that tortured this complex, many-sided and highly nuanced intellectual, would have provided rich material for a drama of psychological depth. But the film gives us none of this in its reductionist portrayal of the Lutheran pastor. Similarly, the years of intrigue through his involvement in the Abwehr, his romance with Maria von Wedemeyer, and his continued subterfuge even while in prison, would have provided ample content for a riveting suspense film. (The 2000 made-for-TV movie, “Agent Of Grace,” draws on these events very effectively, I thought, and it is available in full on YouTube.) But the Angel Studios production misses these opportunities in their stripped-down simplistic portrayal of Bonhoeffer’s role in the resistance. Add to that the stilted dialogue, poor film editing, and jerky narrative, and the movie becomes a real let-down.
The film essentially uses Bonhoeffer’s life as a vehicle for presenting a message about the necessity of Christian activism. As Myles Werntz pointed out in Christianity Today,
Atop the familiar scaffolding of the theologian’s life, the film constructs the story of a man who, from childhood, seems destined to leave behind prayer for conspiracy, Bible teaching for political espionage, and theology for activism.
The end result is a movie well-suited to the temperament of many of Bonhoeffer’s American votaries, always quick to get to the bottom line. Yet in many ways, the Bonhoeffer that emerges is confusing. Consider that, although portrayed as a firebrand (who pleads with the British to provide a bomb to assassinate the Führer) and a would-be assassin (who delivers howlers like, “My dirty hands are all I have left to offer,”) and a man who seems to relish in duplicity (stating “sometimes you have to lie better than the Father of Lies”), nevertheless this fictional Bonhoeffer returns to Germany from the United States to essentially present himself for surrender—a decision that, had it happened in real life, would have jeopardized other members of the resistance.
In their attempt to present Bonhoeffer as an activist rather than a theologian, the filmmakers completely distort the underground seminary he started for the Confessing Church. Despite his political and theological work on behalf of the Jews, the actual Bonhoeffer refused to radicalize German churches against Nazi antisemitism. Similarly, despite his own role in the resistance, he did not try to dissuade his students from entering the army. Rather than using the church for a political agenda, he quietly worked to deepen his flock in Christian discipleship at a time when the other churches were becoming politicized. Yet in the film, the underground seminary becomes a cell of resistance to the Third Reich, leading one character in the movie to remark that “Bonhoeffer and his merry men” have “declared war on Hitler.”
Bonhoeffer’s actual story is both more complex and more intriguing. In 1939 he returned to Germany from his second stint in the United States, but not to certain imprisonment, but to four years of intrigue and subterfuge. During this period, Bonhoeffer was both less of a firebrand freedom-fighter than the film portrays, while also being more tactful, strategic, subtle, and effective in his role within the resistance. He used his role as an Abwehr agent, not to try to gather weapons, but to approach the British government on behalf of the resistance, testing the waters to see if Britain would be open to negotiating advance peace terms for a post-Hitler government, including terms of surrender that could immediately go into effect after Hitler’s assassination.
The portrayal of Bonhoeffer from Angel Studios comes as no surprise after years of Bonhoeffer’s legacy being appropriated by American evangelicalism, and more recently by Christian nationalists ready to fuse the faith with Trumpism. But the Trump supporters have missed the truly disruptive message that Bonhoeffer has to offer during this tense cultural moment: that a genuinely Christ-centered vision of society is counter-cultural to the norms and passions of worldly power-politics. Indeed, at a time when Christian pundits throughout America are comparing President Trump to King David and many pastors are promoting the President-elect as a quasi-Messiah figure, Bonhoeffer’s actual warnings are as timely as they are disruptive. Perhaps the most relevant aspect of Bonhoeffer’s legacy for contemporary Americans comes in his warnings against sublimating the church to worldly political ideology and personality.
Consider that both Hitler and President Trump created their own editions of the Bible (the Nazi version lacking the “Jewish” Old Testament, and Trump’s version including America’s founding documents) as part of a larger attempt to appropriate the legacy of Christianity for their own political ends. But while it may be unsurprising that the president-elect—like virtually all American presidents or candidates before him—would try to appropriate religion for his own agenda, Trump’s Christian supporters have gone even further by creating a new version of Christianity fused with the tenets of Trumpism. This new religion mixes the faith with a cocktail of false doctrines, including baptized political relativism and Christianized identity politics and right-wing progressivism and the ideology of an aggressive (and often violent) personality cult. At a time when the church could be a powerful witness to an alternative way of being human, and at a time when the church could be acting as the conscience of society by proclaiming that God’s kingdom is disruptive to our political idols, scores of American Christians are missing this opportunity by succumbing to this weird synthesis of Christianity and Trumpism. Yet even as false teachers are creating a version of Christianity with little in common with the traditional faith, Trump’s evangelical supporters have been quick to claim Bonhoeffer’s legacy. For example, in 2016, Bonhoeffer’s evangelical biographer, Eric Metaxas, appealed to the Lutheran pastor when urging Christians to vote for Trump, while later promoting the idea that conservatives who didn’t embrace the Stop The Steal movement were comparable to Nazi collaborators. When the Heritage Foundation published their Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” to guide an incoming Republican administration, they referred to open-borders as “a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace.’” Many others in Trump faction of the Republican Party are widely promoting the idea that we have reached a, so called, “Bonhoeffer moment,” when non-violence is no longer acceptable.
All of this is quite ironic given that Bonhoeffer’s greatest act against fascism was not his tangential involvement in the assassination plot (scholars remain uncertain how involved Bonhoeffer actually was, though it is likely he knew about the July 20 plot) but his refusal to succumb to the illusive clarity of the binary worldview offered by Fascism. A pacifist, Bonhoeffer didn’t even see the plot to assassinate Hitler as a morally clear, and Mac Loftin reminds us that “in the hundreds of pages he wrote during his years in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer adamantly warned that any sense of moral clarity we might feel is always an illusion.” Though Bonhoeffer was not a moral relativist, his ethical thinking had a strong prudential element that eschewed simplistic principles-based moralizing, while he continually acknowledged moral ambiguity (though this seems strange to us looking back on the events of WWII with the moral clarity of hindsight). Bonhoeffer’s tolerance for ambiguity, his awareness of moral complexity, and his refusal to sublimate morality to ideology, might be truly challenging to both the norms and epistemology of Trumpism with its simplistic morality, binary worldview, and low tolerance for complexity.
Bonhoeffer’s message—one he returned to again and again throughout his corpus—is that there is a different way to be human, a different way of organizing society, than the tropes of worldly ideology, whether Fascism, Marxism, National Socialism, or any other type of ism that would bypass the message of Jesus in offering a short-cut to societal redemption. Bonhoeffer was particularly concerned with the damage to the church’s mission as German Christianity underwent a process of Nazification. Should we be equally concerned as American Christianity is becoming conflated with Trumpism in many people’s minds? To adequately address these questions requires wisdom, nuance and a capacity for complexity and deep reflection. Here Bonhoeffer might make a good dialogue partner, though you would never guess this from watching Angel Studio’s portrayal of him.
While Bonhoeffer’s writings offer much insight at this time when much American Christianity is being fused with a sub-Christian ideological movement, it would be a mistake to leverage Bonhoeffer for an anti-Trump agenda. While his corpus sheds light on questions we might profitably ask during this time of political idolatry, the sheer complexity of his thought (which often modulated as he developed), together with its deep context in mid 20th century Europe, should make us cautious in trying to operationalize the Lutheran pastor for any current political agenda.
And that, finally, is the problem with “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” The movie offers an approach to Bonhoeffer that is quick to get to the bottom-line (i.e., the necessity to resist evil) without any of the wisdom, complexity, and tolerance for ambiguity that actually characterized the historical Bonhoeffer. When I saw that the studio’s website asks people to sign a pledge, called “The Bonhoeffer Declaration” to show solidarity with Israel and resist antisemitism (with warnings like “be on the right side of history to sign the Bonhoeffer declaration against antisemitism”) I found myself wondering if the entire point of this film was to present a Bonhoeffer that can be easily operationalized. At a cultural moment when complexity and nuance are in short supply, maybe this activist version of Bonhoeffer is what Americans want.
This does not deny that Bonhoeffer’s corpus and example do offer a powerful warning during this time of rising antisemitism. But even here things are not as straight-forward as Eric Metaxas and the Trump brigade would have us believe. In leveraging right-wing identity politics, President Trump has been stirring up the type of group-based grievances that have, historically, created the conditions for rising antisemitism. To understand the current dynamic, and how some of the most anti-antisemitic voices are inadvertently contributing to a climate of race-based hatred, requires Bonhoeffer-like levels of historical understanding, nuance, epistemic virtue, and theological wisdom. But again, one would never guess that from the firebrand presented in the recent film.
Further Reading