I write an occasional article for my congregation's weekly news email. Here's today's:
On World Refugee Day this past June 20th, the ELCA tweeted this message from the Lutheran World Federation: “At the end of World War II, 1 in 6 Lutherans were refugees.” It's a statistic intended to strip away the veil that divides us from today's refugees.
Those Lutheran refugees were among the ethnic Germans expelled from East Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia under the Potsdam Agreement. These were areas from which the Nazis had intended to expel Slavic people, creating “Lebensraum” (“Room to live”) for their own. The one-in-six statistic cannot help but also remind us of the fraught history of Lutheranism in Nazi Germany, and of the complicity of many German Lutherans, and of the active participation in the Nazi movement of more than a few Lutherans.
As Lutheran Christians, we prefer to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the other saints of the Confessing Church, who opposed the Nazis at grave personal risk and sacrifice. But the sad truth is that the anti-Semitism that Hitler tapped into was latent in Luther's later writings, and so was in the Lutheranism of his day. We have unclean hands as a denomination, but have tried mightily in the years since to redeem ourselves from the sins of that era. We have told ourselves, with a conviction that comes from never having been tested, “It could not happen here,” and joined others in saying “Never again.”
Our test has come. There are concentration camps in our country today, where people demonized by our country's political discourse are imprisoned. It is happening again. It is happening here.
And if today's camps are not the industrial death camps of the Third Reich, they are places where basic sanitation is neglected, and where people are crowded into pens with too little water, too little shelter, and too much heat. They are places where death is invited and places where death comes.
And we, as American Lutherans, must speak. “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:34, NRSV)
