In this first installment of Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus, Matthew revisits Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s journey from the theological classrooms of Berlin to the Black churches of Harlem — where he encountered a Jesus entirely unlike the imperial figure of his upbringing. Bonhoeffer arrived in New York a servant of white European Christendom, and left transformed by the radical, suffering, and liberatory presence of Black Jesus.
Matthew connects Bonhoeffer’s awakening to today’s spectacle of white nationalism in worship — from the triumphalist religion on display at Charlie Kirk’s memorial to the enduring cultural power of “white Jesus” as theology for empire. Drawing on Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen’s The Black Antifascist Tradition, the episode traces how colonialism created a Christ built to bless domination, and how the Black church reclaimed him through solidarity, suffering, and resistance.
The contrast between the fortress hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God and the spiritual Were You There becomes the turning point in Bonhoeffer’s faith — from triumph to trembling, from power to empathy.
Part 2, out Monday on Patreon, explores how liberal Christianity tried to stand between these poles, and why it failed.
Show Notes
Hope, Jeanelle K., and Bill V. Mullen. The Black Antifascist Tradition. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2023.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Revised and Updated Third Edition. Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley. Preface by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Williams, Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014.
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