By Andrea Widburg | Am Thinker | Nov 14, 2025
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Image by AldrianMimi – Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and fierce anti-Nazi, a man so dangerous to the Nazi movement that he was one of the last people they killed lest he taste liberation, was a man of extraordinary moral courage. For Tucker Carlson, however, he was a failed Christian for having dared to stand up to Hitler (and, probably, for having rescued Jews).
One of the problems with being your own boss is that there’s no one around to stop you when you go too far. Another problem with being rich, famous, and your own boss is that the sycophants in your world will encourage you to go too far, since their entire being is dedicated to saying “yes,” in the hopes that they’ll benefit from your wealth and fame. Maybe that explains Tucker Carlson’s latest madness in attacking Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a bad Christian.
It’s worth noting in this regard that Tucker hasn’t unearthed any previously unknown facts about Bonhoeffer’s life, hidden secrets that would undermine his legacy. Instead, Tucker just doesn’t think that it was a good idea to fight Hitler.
No, really:
Tucker Carlson: "Killing Hitler is bad."
Yes, he's really saying this. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who participated in a covert attempt to assassinate Hitler during WWII.
Tucker says this is bad and un-Christian. pic.twitter.com/podFLa7CzQ
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) November 13, 2025
That runs by pretty quickly, so let me make sure we have the salient posts, which I’m listing in the order I’ll discuss them:
- Dietrich was a great man…but only sort of (“in some ways”).
- Christianity bans all killing.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer had gone beyond reason and Christianity in opposing the Nazis.
- Calling people Nazis requires you to shoot them.
First, Bonhoeffer was a great man in all the ways that mattered. A Lutheran minister, he was utterly committed to Christ’s teachings and had planned a career as a minister and (small E) evangelist. All his plans ended when Hitler achieved power. His courage was such that, despite continuous Nazi persecution, he refused to stay in England or America, drawn to fight for German—and Jewish—liberty.
In Germany, Bonhoeffer created underground seminaries—eventually creating a new church—because he was concerned that the Nazis had co-opted Lutheranism, the dominant Protestant faith in Nazi Germany. Eventually, he joined the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency that had within it a strong resistance group. His role was to act as a spy, saboteur, and courier. In that capacity, he was aware of efforts to assassinate Hitler—and this was during a time of war—and he worked actively to rescue Jews, whom he considered to be God’s people, along with other Nazi opponents.
Eventually, the Nazis caught up with Bonhoeffer, and he was arrested in 1943. On April 9, 1945, one of the Nazi party’s last acts before Germany fell was to hang Bonhoeffer and other Abwehr members, one day after they were found guilty during a kangaroo trial.
In other words, Bonhoeffer’s entire being was dedicated to saving Christianity from Naziism. Along the way, he fought with his words and his actions to save Jews from Hitler’s killing machine. He was a person of exceptional courage, conscience, and faith—that is, a great man without any qualifiers such as “in some ways.”
Second, Christianity does not ban all killing. For one thing, it functions according to the Ten Commandments, which ban unjustified murder, not righteous killing. All Christian societies have acknowledged that war and self-defense are just forms of killing. By saying Christianity bans killing, Tucker is flying in the face of St. Augustine’s teachings about a “just war,” something necessary to attain true peace against true wrongdoing. During a hot war, working for the death of the leader of the opposing military (a death cult) was completely in line with the Bible and Christian thought.
Third, when one considers the situation in Germany, as well as the words of the Ten Commandments (and Bonhoeffer spoke Hebrew) and the evil concentrated in Hitler himself, it was scarcely “beyond reason” for Bonhoeffer to oppose the Nazis and work for Hitler’s death.
Fourth, calling people Nazis does not require you to shoot them in 2025. Being in a war against the actual Nazis from 1939 to 1945 does justify shooting them, beginning from the top down.
However, in today’s world of heated, ill-educated rhetoric, the “requirement” to shoot anyone called a “Nazi” is something that left-wing, antisemitic, anti-Christian radicals who seek world domination merely use as an ex post facto argument to justify killing those whom they oppose.
I don’t know the context of Tucker’s rant, but I suspect it was because he was opposing Ralph Reed’s WSJ editorial, which reminded Evangelical Christians of their long-standing reverence for Bonhoeffer, a reverence that sustains their ties to Israel. In other words, one can’t escape the feeling that Tucker’s real problem with Bonhoeffer is that this great man’s respect for Jews led to generations of American Evangelical Christians respecting them, too.
When Bonhoeffer visited America in 1930, it was a time when church goers paid for their spots in the pews. I believe it was Passover, the church calls it Easter or Resurrection Day, but Bonhoeffer could not find a church where there were seats available for him to attend since he had failed to buy a ticket. He instead visited a New York synagogue and enjoyed the service immensely. While in America he also visited black churches and loved them as well.
Thank you for this excellent article Andrea. I’ve read several books about Bonhoeffer. One of his famous quotes is so fitting for the times he lived…”Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.”
In any case, I have never seen any evidence that Bonhoeffer was a party to the consspiracy to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime. However, it is true that he did what he could to save the lives of Jews, at some risk to his own life. Most of those Jews whose lives he attempted to save were his in-laws. I think they were his brother, his brother’s Jewish wife, and their children, who were Boeshoffer’s neices and nephews. Or was it his sister’s Jewish husband or their children. I can’t remember the specifics. Could some fellow Israpundit reader remind me of these relationships? But even if most of the people whose lives he saved were personal acquaintences or in-laws, it wouldn’t change the fact that his religious and ethical convictions were a major motivation for him to save the lives of innocent people. His disgust and outrage at Nazi crimes was sincere.
. In my opinion, the German officers who conspired to assassinate Hitler, as well as their civilian supporters, were heroes, not villains. They gave their lives attempting to save their country from an evil regime. Anyone who says it was wrong to conspire to assassinate Hitler, at a time when men and even some women acting in response to his commands were murdering millions of innocent people and invading numerous sovereign nations without any just cause, is plainly a Nazi sympathizer. And that certainly includes Carlson and his neo-Nazi “guests.” They not only sympathize with Hitler’s genocide of the Jews, but with all his other crimes as well.
Why are we spending so much time advertising for an ignorant raving lunatic?
Because it looks like he is taking a branch of Christianity in a Nazi like hatred of Jews? Just saying. He may not have even plotted this out consciously, but the mood is taking him and his mob in that direction.
@keelie
Because the stakes are actually quite high. The narrative being pushed by Carlson, while not mainstream, is being adopted by more and more of what had been formerly perceived to be the main talking heads of the Republican party.
American cultural norms have been very badly abused by its trusted elites and elders in the past years, and to this day it is still being attempted to discern to what degree this betrayal has gone. In light of this introspective moment of investigation, Carlson using his personal popularity to manipulate the conclusions being drawn towards his own strengthening base of political influence, and he is doing so by harnessing, weaponizing and indoctrinating Jew Hatred in the American people. Which is why we have been spending so much time trying to deal with the contemptible nature of what is being pushed as ‘Truth’.
Make no mistake, Carlson is no lunatic, and he isn’t raving, and while you may perceive this to be what you see in him, his millions of followers do not see him as such, something which is perhaps the only credible comment which Megyn Kelly made in her interview with Ben Shapiro.