Two kingdoms Doctrine vs. the “Me” culture

Lecture at Annual Convention of the Augsburg Lutheran Churches in El Paso, TX, July 25, 2011

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

I am sure that all you pastors had nothing better to do during the last two months than to follow the Casey Anthony trial in Orlando on Fox or CNN. If you have not done so you might have missed a paradigm for what we will be discussing this morning – the destructive force of the Me culture and how to resist it.

In simplistic terms, had Casey been found guilty of killing her two-year old daughter the paradigm would even have been perfect: Mother murders kid because the kid prevented her from having a good time. The Me trumps a child’s right to live. Case closed. Theologically speaking, my argument would have been the same as in the case of abortion. But that’s just the theological perspective, not the legal, secular view.

Casey Anthony was acquitted of all homicide-related charges, and from this point onward this case becomes even more fascinating for us Lutherans with our two kingdoms doctrine -- the doctrine that every Christian holds dual citizenship in God’s two realms: the spiritual realm of Christ, of grace and faith, and the secular kingdom where the hidden God reigns through His masks – meaning all of us.

Casey Anthony is not guilty coram hominibus, before man, period. She might be guilty coram Deo, before God, but only God alone can judge that. We have no say in this. We must accept the acquittal.

But a hateful rabble roused by massive media malpractice thinks otherwise. During my 55 years in journalism I have not seen anything as appalling as this in any democratic country.

Media stars called the jurors morons. So-called reporters opined before millions of viewers that Casey Anthony had no place else to go but into porn industry. They openly discussed that her life was at risk, pointedly suggesting that some kook out there might well hunt her down and kill her.

We were told that Casey was considering plastic surgery to change her appearance. Television anchors claiming to be Christians declared her doomed; the possibility of repentance was clearly not an option.

The scandal came to a head when entire fleets of media vehicles pulled up at the Orange County jail in Orlando a week before yesterday in anticipation of her release.

When she slipped into an SUV to be driven to a secret hiding place, scores of “reporters” chased her in helicopters through the night, clearly intent on letting the vengeful public know her whereabouts; thankfully, they did not succeed.

I am telling you all this at a Lutheran conference because what we were witnessing here was a vile symbiosis of the contemporary Me culture and a sinister, judgmental strain of American popular religion, which is not rooted in our tradition but, Max Weber would say, in Chapter III of the Westminster Confession of 1647.

The “Me” culture shows in these reporters’ flawed perception of their vocation. Their behavior proved that they felt no calling to serve their neighbors out of love.

Instead they instead pursued their craft in a self-aggrandizing manner. They sought their 15 minutes of fame, as Andy Warhol would say, by catering to the hateful lust in the hearts of their audiences, for nothing useful could be accomplished by putting this young woman’s life at risk. That’s the Me trumping the You in the singular and plural sense of the word.

The Westminster Confession, which according to Weber shaped American Calvinism and both independent and Baptist creeds, showed its impact on the crowds clamoring for “justice” for Casey Anthony’s dead daughter Caylee. This frightening Confession’s chapter on God’s Eternal Decree states that God predestines some unto everlasting life and foreordains others to everlasting death.

Clearly, Casey Anthony belongs to the latter category in the opinion of the plebs; she has no hope for redemption; hence she must be shunned, possibly destroyed.

This must make us shudder. But where were our Lutheran leaders in all this? Why did they not thunder: No, no, no, no, no; the option of grace, repentance and forgiveness is open for everybody, including Casey Anthony?! Why did Lutherans withhold the treasure of their theology from the rest of American Protestantism? Why did they not remind all those involved in this case – including reporters -- to live up to their vocations?

I fear that this is so because too many of us have become too evangelical in the wrong sense of the term.

I have had to say this because once again I sensed that Lutheranism was living up to its reputation of being America’s sleeping giant and snoozing on. I am told that Teddy Roosevelt coined this phrase and Billy Graham picked it up from him, but I might be wrong.

Never has the genius of the Lutheran theology of the two kinds of righteousness been more glaringly evident and more blatantly ignored by too many of its own practitioners.

And – to beat my own drum -- never have I found the need for the League of Faithful Masks, which I am heading, more palpably confirmed. I am not saying this because we seek glory, but because Lutherans too must be reminded of the self-evident Lutheran question: Now that we know that we are saved by grace through faith, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?

The Christian answer is: We roll up our sleeves and engage this sinful world – the world of Casey Anthony and the rest of us – and help manage it as an act of love. We follow our vocations in all our daily endeavors, in the present case as lawyers, voters, jurors, witnesses and, yes, defendants, and most definitely as journalists.

What does our fledgling organization do? And why have we set out to start chapters across the country? We are confronting the Me culture by championing the Christian worldview, which says that we are called to serve our neighbors. Our sights are set on the You rather than the Me, and we are spreading this message by mentoring the young, by lecturing, and publishing. You will find more about this in the brochures you were given. I do hope that some of you will intiate new LFM chapters in your congregations.

And why do we call ourselves “Faithful Masks?” We have borrowed this term from Luther’s definition of all creation, especially human beings.

According to Luther, humans are “Larvae Dei”. They are the masks behind which God hides while carrying out His hidden purposes in the world.

Luther described God’s action in this world as a masquerade. If we accept our part in this masquerade as a service of love, then we are priests in the secular world, according to Luther. This requires some elucidation for which I beg your indulgence.

First let me stress where Lutherans differ from certain other Protestants concerning the Christian’s role in the secular world.

Unlike some other Protestant denominations, Lutherans do not teach that Christ transforms culture. And here we take great exception to American religion of which we have seen an ugly side in Orlando. The idea that Christ transforms culture has had an enormous influence on both sides of the political and religious spectrum in the United States.

Take the Social Gospel Movement, an essentially American phenomenon. Its preachers started from the assumption that the secular realm can be converted by religious means. Social Gospel preachers believed that the Second Coming could not occur until mankind rid itself of social evils by human effort.

But conservative evangelicals also insist that this world can be fixed with the help of the Gospel, for example by shunning people we believe are predestined to doom. In Orlando we saw evidence of this. I have no doubt that all those irate demonstrators considered themselves to be righteous Christians.

At the extremes of the political-religious spectrum even President Obama’s ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright fits into the category that preaches Christ as a transformer of society. But so does Baptist minister Steven Anderson who proclaimed from the pulpit that he hates Obama, wants him dead and burn in hell.

Lutherans say that such outlandish views mix pulpit and politics in a dangerous way.

As a Lutheran I am therefore often lost in the religious jabber that comes with political campaigns of the United States and elsewhere in the public square.

It reminds me of certain artery-clogging types of American food -- something topped with something else, and that topped with yet different stuff, plus more gunk and more and more and more, and finally everything smothered in melted cheese running over the rim of the plate.

I am overcome with a similar kind of distaste when I hear quotes from the Bible, blended with personal idiosyncrasies, recreational sociology and Marxist-Leninist liberationist rhetoric, plus theatrics – or when I listen to Bible thumpers abusing God’s word for their own political ends.

To quote Luther, this is the mark of “false clerics and schismatic spirits.” To Luther, the act of knitting and brewing spiritual and secular concerns together, amounts to presuming to give God a helping hand in the construction of His kingdom Here and Now.

In Lutheran terminology, this is Schwärmerei. It is utopianism. It tries to drag the Hereafter into the present reality. Impatient with God’s hidden timetable for the trajectory of the universe, utopians attempt to build little Elysian islands in our imperfect world. They try to craft quasi paradises tailor-made for their own preferences.

Remember what the Communists promised to create? A Workers’ and Peasants’ paradise! Remember what the Nazis claimed to have established? A thousand-year Reich, a kind of preliminary millenarian heaven with limited access. What was the Orlando rabble clamoring for? A neighborhood without Casey Anthony, a sinner.

According to Luther, man has no such divine assignment. In Hitler’s Day certain misguided Lutheran theologians spoke otherwise. But they manifestly betrayed their own theology.

Lutherans do not believe that the secular realm can be straightened out by religious means. Lutherans argue that this world is finite. It cannot be fixed but, as I said, must be managed until it disappears. This can only be done by virtue of reason.

And now I must take you along on an excursion to the specific part of our theology that pertains to the interface between the spiritual and secular aspects of human existence, the Two Kingdoms doctrine, also known as the Law-and-Gospel dialectic. Please refer to my chart; it makes it easier to follow this dialectic.

The two kingdoms doctrine is often confused with the ideologically inspired rhetoric in the United States about the separation between Church and State. What I am here to discuss is no separation but the need for making proper distinctions between two realities none of which can really exist without the other.

First we must understand that that both kingdoms belong to the same God. As man can’t separate God from God, the very idea of erecting a Berlin Wall between these two realms is absurd.

According to Lutheran theology, God simply reigns the universe in two different ways. The God who has revealed himself in Christ is also the Lord of this world, which He will never allow to slip from his hands. The two realms are not in an antagonistic but exist in a paradoxical relationship.

Lutherans say that all Christians have two citizenships. Christians hold the passport of the Kingdom of Christ (please refer to the right side of the two-kingdoms chart). This realm is infinite. Here God has revealed himself in Christ. We refer to this reality as the right-hand kingdom.

The reason why only Christians can be citizens of this realm can be found in Christianity’s core conviction that by the grace of God, Christ has redeemed the believer with His sacrifice on the cross.

Whoever believes this has eternal life.

On the other hand, Christians do share with everybody else a citizenship in the secular left-hand kingdom – the realm of which Christ told Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).

This secular kingdom will ultimately disappear. Still, until this happens it will remain the realm of the hidden God. Here He reigns through his masks – through all of us. This is where we live out our biological lives.

In this world, we are God’s cooperators. We are His partners in the process of ongoing creation – by planting trees, by plowing fields, by raising children, by scientific research, by building spaceships, and perhaps by colonizing other planets and keeping order with the help of the police and the courts and – this will be my topic tomorrow – the military.

The two kingdoms are governed by different principles. In Christ’s kingdom this governing principle is the Gospel, the good news of the believer’s salvation by grace through faith. This knowledge, called Heilsgewissheit or assurance of salvation, frees us to engage in the sinful world.

This is the secular kingdom, where the governing principle is the law in two different manifestations – Mosaic and natural. Mosaic Law applies to Jews, Christians and Muslims, who were given the law.

But God has also written His law – natural law -- on everybody’s heart. Natural law is inscribed in our sense of right and wrong, it shows in our built-in sense of ethics. It is the universal morale code.

Though from God, the sense of natural law is a property of the secular left-hand kingdom. To be sure, it can be warped. It can be bent. It can be numbed to a point where it will be barely perceptible in the public mind.

This has become particularly evident since natural-law thinking was replaced by a new kind of positive-law thinking coming out of the French Revolution.

Luther made it plain that man-made “positive law” always had to be rooted in the “lex inscripta,” the law God has inscribed in man’s heart.

By contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the principal philosopher of the French Revolution, interpreted “Positive Law” as freedom from internal constraints that limit vice.

It seems to me that Roe versus Wade offered this freedom from internal constraints limiting vice. Similarly, the fact that in the Nazi era most Germans did not express outrage at the persecution of Jews suggests generalized departure from the universal moral code.

On the other hand, when law is religiously embellished but not accompanied by reference to the Gospel, then you also liberate it from internal constraints, for example the innate constraints of human decency.

This is what we have in Islam, and what we have seen in Orlando. Can a case can be made for the existence of a kinship between Islam and a perverted kind of Reformed Christianity? Absolutely! They are akin in that they both deny the Gospel. Orlando has made this blatantly obvious.

Before we move on, let me emphasize in passing that natural law, not Scripture, is the perfect platform from which to argue against abortion rights. Lutheran often foolishly follow the evangelical example of randomly choosing Bible verses to stem the contemporary genocide of one million babies a year.

These references are meaningless when you talk to people who do not even know the Bible. On the other hand, it is easy to ask anybody of any culture: “Is it right to kill innocent human beings? Is it right to suck out their brains to collapse their skulls in order to yank a child’s body out of the birth canal?” If you will check the Internet you will find a website of an organization called “Atheists and Agnostics for Life.” Clearly, the moral position of these nonbelievers must be rooted somewhere. I suggest it’s natural law.

But let us now look at the problem that has been troubling me ever since I began covering American politics as a journalist back in the 1960s: the improper use of both leftwing and right-wing religious rhetoric in affairs of state.

Lutherans should be much more outspoken about this issue. Against the religious junk food offered by other Christian traditions we should address the following questions from our perspective:

Where does government fit into the two-kingdoms scheme to which Calvinists, Methodists and others object out of doctrinal ignorance? By what means are we governed?

Here is the answer based on Scripture:

Christ’s kingdom is governed by the Gospel, by grace, love, and faith. But the Gospel can tell you nothing about how to fight the war in Afghanistan, how to end the world’s immigration quagmires, whether or not to impose speed limits or gun control or a universal health system.

These are all issues of the secular realm. And the secular realm is governed by natural reason.

Luther’s detractors often argue that he called reason the Devil’s whore. This was an especially popular charge in England during World War II. Dean William Inge of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London used to make this point.

Luther did say this, but let us quote him in the proper context.

What Luther said was this, and I paraphrase: Reason is the empress of all things in this world. Reason is a gift from God enabling us to find our way around this world. Reason can even tell us that God “is.” But if reason presumes to tell us anything about God’s nature then reason becomes the Devil’s whore.

It is by natural reason, not the Gospel, that Kings and Presidents, Prime Ministers and mayors must run this world. ”The emperor need not be a Christian, as long as he possesses reason,” Luther said.

But of course rulers are themselves divine masks, like the rest of us in our secular vocations.

So did God govern through Hitler? Did He govern through Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot? Were these tyrants God’s masks? Are dishonest judges His masks? Are greedy businessmen? Is God hiding behind a coke-snorting brain surgeon?

Let me remind you of how Luther defined Satan. He called him God’s imitator, and this imitator too, like God Himself, conducts a masquerade in this world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor martyred by the Nazis, addressed this phenomenon most succinctly when he wrote in his prison cell:

“The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to disguise as light, charity, historical necessity or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethics, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.”

In this crazy situation, we have to do what’s reasonable while operating in the secular realm. But how does one act reasonably when a tyrant poses as the mask of the hidden God? Luther has often been accused of preaching quietism in such a situation, and indeed some Lutherans, though not all, have acted that way in Nazi Germany.

Yet Luther said, “If the coachman has lost his mind he must be removed from the driver’s seat.” But even in so doing we can make mistakes; we are fallible after all. Therefore if before we topple the tyrant and we must find the right replacement, for we cannot leave the carriage driverless, lest chaos ensue.

Even then there is no guarantee that things will work out well. Bonhoeffer participated in the plot to rid Germany of Hitler by means of tyrannicide. When asked about this he said he knew that he was engaged in a sinful plot. But he added, “Right now reason compels us to do this.” He added that he must turn to Christ’s right-hand kingdom for forgiveness.

Bonhoeffer’s plans failed, and he was hanged.

Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of my hometown of Leipzig and leader of the German civilian resistance against Hitler since 1937, tried to remove the coachman not by assassination; Goerdeler plotted to have Hitler arrested by the German military and tried for treason before a German court; and Goerdeler put together an elaborate list of candidates for a post-Nazi German government – from chief of state right down to county police chief.

He also failed and wound up on the gallows.

So where does this leave us now?

In his Nazi prison cell, Bonhoeffer wrote these memorable words:

“I believe that God will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For these purposes, he needs men to make the best use of everything.”

This paragraph contains the quintessential Lutheran paradox, that shows that for all of their differences, no Berlin Wall separates to two realms: We have a statement of faith in the first sentence and an affirmation of God’s ultimate sovereignty over the left-hand kingdom in the second.

I have taken this quote from the prologue to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. A little further on, Bonhoeffer pushes this faith-and-reason dialectic even more forcefully:

“I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds. I believe that God is no timeless fate, but that he waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible actions.”

Prayers belong to the right-hand kingdom; responsible actions are performed in the secular realm. Thus the two complement each other and therefore are not separate from one another, just distinct.

This is the tension field in which all Christians live, and in which Lutheran theology seems to provide a helpful compass.

Such a compass is particularly vital in a democracy because the sovereigns in a democratic nation are not a select few as in Luther’s day five centuries ago.

In a democracy, voters are the divinely appointed sovereigns. Therefore Romans 13:1 applies to voters as much as to all other rulers: “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

This has such profound implications for Christians that neither the social gospel approach nor Bible thumping seem right when considering the thorny issues of church and state, faith and reason, religion and society.

These implications can be summed up in three points.

1. According to Romans 13, Christians in the voting booth must be aware that they have a divine calling to help manage God’s secular realm.

2. In this vocation they will not proclaim the Gospel, as little as a responsible brain surgeon preaches the Gospel to the patient whose head he is operating on. They “share” the Gospel in church or in prayer groups or in private discussions. But in the voting booth or political assemblies, Christians serve God by serving their fellow man.

3. If they do so with love and circumspection rather than for selfish ends voters rank as members of the universal priesthood of all believers.

These three points pertain to the world of which Christ said that it was not His kingdom. They pertain to the world whose empress is reason, according to Luther. The Gospel will hopefully illume reason. Still, Christians like non-Christian voters – who have the law written upon their hearts – must base their decision on reason.

The Church has no business to tell the sovereigns of this world how to vote, but as the Church is imbedded as a corporate citizen of the left-hand kingdom it can and must counsel these sovereigns in a non-partisan way.

Take the race issue. The Church must make it clear to its members that under the Gospel there is not racial divide in Christ’s right-hand kingdom.

But the Church is in no position to opine on the means with which the results of racial segregation can be overcome. Would affirmative action the right way, for example? This is a question so be discussed reasonably in the secular realm.

But here is a neat point: If whites and blacks worship and commune together in a colorblind congregation on Sundays, to would surely be easier for them to discuss secular matters during the week. Here one must hope that Luther’s dictum should apply: The Christian faith illumes reason.

The Church must tell is congregants that they have an divine obligation to be relentlessly curious. The Church must urge them to muster the courage to ask candidates be brutally truthful about the dire state the world is in, and how they intend to deal with this, even at the risk of proposing unpopular measures.

The Church has a calling to warn voters against basing their decision on prejudice, ideology, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness, and a sloppy desire for an “easy way out,” rather than informed logic and neighborly love, lest they neglect their priestly duties.

This applied to politics as much as to court cases. The Orlando rabble based its actions on prejudice, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness and the sloppy desire for an “easy way out,” in this case a witch hunt against Casey Anthony.

The Church must also inform its members that playing ostrich is not a Christian option, but neither is kneejerk reaction to an unpopular verdict. A Christian failing to go to the polls for fear of voting wrongly resembles the useless servant who kept the pound entrusted to him laid away in a napkin (Luke 19:20). The same applies to Christians deaf to the calling to run for public office.

By the same token, a Christian behaving like Pavlov’s dog when a jury arrives by use of sound reason at a judgment is sabotaging God’s trust because that Christian implicitly denies the divine origin of the jurors’ vocation and thus rejects the created order of secular government, which includes secular justice.

Secular vocations are part of the created order. In my life I have witnessed the chilling consequences of attempts to undo created order. The behavior of the Orlando rabble shows the pitfalls of such behavior, which was an expression of self-righteousness has nothing in common with the Christian faith.

MEDIA MATTERS: The Casey Anthony story – a farewell to journalism

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

No self-respecting newsman will shed a tear over the demise of The News of The World, London’s reprehensible Sunday paper whose reporters acted like a cross between KGB spooks and Mafia thugs for years. These weren’t journalists. Professional journalists don’t tap other people’s telephones; nor are professional journalists vile bigots stirring their readers’ hatred of foreigners, which was another News of the World specialty.

So I suppose that we must be thankful to publisher Rupert Murdoch for putting an end to this depraved parody of the great British press tradition whose noble home used to be Fleet Street where I worked nearly half a century ago. That said, the world has just witnessed in an Orlando courthouse a massive case of media malpractice with infinitely wider ramifications than anything ever perpetrated by the News of the World ruffians.

The way cable television, including Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Broadcasting Company, covered Casey Anthony’s acquittal in her murder trial was a travesty. It violated all professional standards to which trial reporters in the civilized world were rightly held for as long there has been a free press, whipping up public emotions to the level of lynch mob frenzy in a manner that reminded me more of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s evil propaganda minister, than of Edward R. Murrow, the celebrated American radio reporter.

To be sure, Casey Anthony was not a sympathetic defendant. That she partied for 30 days after her daughter Caylee’s death seemed incomprehensible, at least to those mercifully unfamiliar with the phenomenon of dancing around the rim of a volcano in the face of impending doom. What do contemporary media philistines know of the reaction of people who have witnessed unfathomable horror collectively or individually? It is quite conceivable that after her child’s accidental death Casey Anthony just “snapped” and went wild. I am not saying that this was so, but having seen times of great calamity I could make a case for such a scenario.

Watching the media coverage of this trial took my breath away. Even before the jury retired, cable TV hosts and panelists, mainly lawyers, former prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys who dominate America’s airwaves nowadays, reached their verdict before tens of millions of viewers: guilty. Disgustingly, this was undergirded by observations of “experts” such as a specialist on body language who told us that Casey Anthony’s mimicry clearly suggested deep hate.

And when the jurors acquitted her, two Fox anchors, including a comely ex-judge, went apoplectic, as did former prosecutor Nancy Grace on another network. In his signature exercise of populism, Bill O’Reilly did what contemporary media stars love to do: he made the audience retry the defendant. Result: 90 percent vote for a guilty verdict. Ninety percent: In real terms, that's a hung jury. Prompted by O'Reilly, comedian Dennis Miller jested that every defendant was entitled to a jury of twelve of his or her peers; hence “this defendant is a moron who found a jury if twelve morons.”

Casey’s future was generally described as dire, and though the panelists by and large professed to be Christians, the option of repentance did not come up; the possibility that some competent pastor or priest might find his way to Casey to bring her the quintessential Christian message of forgiveness for whatever she might have done was not even mentioned. On the other hand, the whole world was told that she would probably wind up in the porno industry.

This revolting display of judgmental self-righteousness was punctuated by perfunctory references to the assumed superiority of the American legal system over anybody else’s legal system I wonder how much this type of media hyperbole might have contributed to an increase in anti-Americanism abroad. I love this country, but, friends, this was definitely not your finest hour.

It became even more disgusting when U.S, television, which can be received around the world, showed the mob outside the Orlando courthouse demanding “justice for Caylee” and spewing hatred against the jurors who voted, presumably with great compunction, the way they had to vote in the case of reasonable doubt. In a democratic system, Court decisions must be respected; this is the first lesson I learned when I covered my first trial more than 50 years ago. In a free society, journalists are not called to be jurors or judges. The rabble out in the streets has no such vocation either, regardless of its prejudice. Jurors and judges are called to be jurors or judges; they alone.

There was a time when this was the iron rule of journalism. That was a time when journalists practiced journalism, not thugs as in London or lawyers and hyperventilating anchors as in Orlando. I don’t know why courts allow these poseurs to displace rightful judgment in the eyes of the public, quite possibly kicking off a witch-hunt against an unpopular young woman. I don’t know why Mr. Murdoch and other cable TV bosses conspire in letting these people undermine free journalism, and with that, free society. I fear that they will come to regret this farewell to journalism as evidently Rupert Murdoch has come to regret that he allowed the rogue behavior by the News of the World reporters for far too long.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com . He has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications.

Drawdown in Afghanistan – will populism again trump victory?

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

President Barack Obama’s decision to set a timeline for the withdrawal of 33,000 U.S. forces from Afghanistan against the advice of his generals begs the question: Will populist reflexes inevitably prevent democracies from winning wars of long duration?

One of democracy’s most determined antagonists came to this conclusion 60 years ago. North Vietnamese defense minister

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara exchanging recollections of the Vietnam War with his past foe, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, in 1997. / AP

declared that “the enemy,” meaning the West, “does not possess … the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war.” Fighting the French and later the Americans, he based his whole strategy on this insight – successfully, as we now know.

In all likelihood, Giap explained, public opinion in the democracy would demand an end to the “useless bloodshed,” or its legislature will insist on knowing how long it will have to vote astronomical credits without a clear-cut victory in sight. This is what eternally compelled democratic politicians to agree to almost any kind of humiliating compromise rather than to accept the idea of a semi-permanent anti-guerilla operation, he added.

In a cartoon in The Oregonian newspaper, Jack Ohman recently sketched a hand drawing dotted lines mapping “The Way out of Afghanistan.” The last image of this political comic strip showed the contours of Vietnam next to a briefer saying, “UM.”

Given General Giap’s statement about the political-psychological shortcomings of the democratic system when faced with an inconclusive military operation, Ohman’s analogy was frighteningly accurate. Once again, we keep hearing the term, “war fatigue,” though not in reference to the military but to civilian populations far, far away in the United States where 56 percent of the Americans demand a U.S. troop withdrawal as soon as possible.

Once again, maligning local allies as corrupt has become fashionable, so as if Western politicians were paragons of honesty. Once again, wordsmiths craft smarmy euphemisms for defeatist courses of action. In the Vietnam days the slogan was “peace with honor,” today it is “responsible peace” (Obama), although there was nothing honorable about handing over South Vietnam to totalitarian aggressors, from whom millions fled with many drowning in the South China Sea. And there would be nothing honorable in surrendering Afghanistan once again to fanatics manifestly belonging to the global Islamist movement that is determined to subjugate the world to its hideous faith.

Jack Ohman’s analogy was correct as far as it went. But I wonder if in a future cartoon he would remind the Oregonian’s readers of how the Vietnam story continued, for example with “reeducation camps” where hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were interned, starved and subjected to unspeakable pain; thousands of Vietnamese refugees in the United States are still suffering from the effects of torture inflicted on them during communist captivity decades ago, according to a recent study led by Harvard psychiatrist Richard F. Mollica. This is a story you can only read in a student publication; the mainline media did not consider it newsworthy.

Mr. Obama spoke of his desire for peace negotiations in which the Taliban should be included. Before Saigon fell in 1975, there were also “peace negotiations” with Hanoi and the Vietcong. In the end, the Communist invaders vanquished the democratic half of their country. It is not hip to say that South Vietnam was a democracy, albeit a flawed one. It had one of the most elegant constitutions and, fighting for its survival, conducted admirably free elections while back home in the U.S.A. hordes of Boomers marched through the streets waving Vietcong flags and shouting “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh.”

So now “peace talks” have again become the mantra. But peace talks with whom? With insurgents believing that they are under God’s command to impose their system on the whole world? What concessions can we expect from such interlocutors? That they proceed at first gingerly in whipping and stoning their women should they dare to drive, study, leave their husbands or, Allah forbid, resist arranged marriages at an age when others have just stopped toddling? Knowing the Taliban’s past, I marvel at the Western women’s movement atypical restraint when pondering the possibility; hypocrisy is of course another feature of populism.

One can be grateful that comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan ends when it comes to the treatment of returning warriors. Four decades ago they were badmouthed, called baby killers, abandoned by wives and girl friends, even asked not to attend their home churches in uniform; this was a time when America truly showed its ugly side.

Today this is not the case, thank God, but it seems that once again populists, driven by the growing impatience of their home front, might deprive their military from completing their mission victoriously. If so, populism will trump democracy. The consequences will be much more dire than in Vietnam. There the adversaries were Marxists, belonging to a movement that soon imploded worldwide. In Afghanistan the foe is a radical strain of a religion with a 1,400-year history and global missionary aspirations, though they are currently in the defensive, just like the Vietcong after the Têt Offensive of 1968. Still, they might yet succeed. How? Read General Giap.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com. He has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Homobonide twaddle, the cause of Robert Gates’ frustration

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

Who is to blame for Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ frustration with NATO? In one word: Homobonides.

You don’t know what Homobonides are? Not to worry. I have just made up this term, translating the sardonic German expression, Gutmenschen, into English with a little help from Latin.

So what are Gutmenschen? Not really “good people,” as you might falsely assume after splitting this composite word into its two component parts. There are and always have been truly good people in Germany, of course, for example Helmut James von Moltke, whose farewell letters from a Nazi prison to his wife, Freya, have just been released. Moltke explained why he was facing the gallows: “Not as a Protestant, not as a landowner, not as a nobleman I stood before the [People’s] court, but as a Christian, and none other.“ That was a good man writing, not a Gutmensch.

Or take that retired West German army captain I met in a Jaffna restaurant during the civil war in Sri Lanka. He had come at his own expense to clear landmines, a benevolent activity that had already cost him the use of one eye in Angola. You find plenty of this kind of good Germans, particularly overseas – good men and women, not Homobonides.

Homobonides are the European incarnation of political correctness, originally an American affliction. Homobonides make pronouncements that sound good until you start to think. They talk a lot about peace, for example, not in a theological, historical or pragmatic sense but solely because of the word’s heartwarming properties. It’s this constant kitschy reference to peace that has caused defense budgets in Europe to decline thus rendering NATO military irrelevant, according to Gates, who predicted in his valedictory speech in Brussels a dismal future for the alliance.

Homobonides don’t believe in the Latin adage, “sic vis pacem, para bellum” (if you want peace, prepare for war), if in their appalling lack of historical knowledge they have ever heard of it. If Homobonides ever thought responsibly about the future, they would by definition cease to exist; therefore they don’t dare to. Let’s enjoy our prosperity here and now and let our children fend for themselves; that’s their motto.

The poster girl of German Gutmenschentum is the Rev. Margot Kässmann, 53, Lutheran bishop of Hanover and chairwoman of the state-related Protestant Church in Germany until she resigned last year, having been caught careening around town at the wheel of her Volkswagen Phaeton office car with a blood alcohol level of 0.154.

This resignation, seen as an act of valor rather than the necessary consequence of misconduct, has since made her Germany’s idol by giving speeches and churning out books filled with moralistic clichés, which literary critic Denis Scheck wickedly rated as “Eiapopeia-Prosa,” or lullaby baby prose. Misogynists have noted that women above the age of 50 make up the majority of her acolytes; if true this would be a troubling observation, given the successes of past German populists especially among this segment of the population.

Before giving up her bishopric last year she stepped into the splendid pulpit of Dresden’s baroque “Frauenkirche” (Church of Our Lady) and proclaimed, “Nothing is good in Afghanistan,” which was not a sensitive thing to say given that German soldiers are fighting and dying valiantly in that country. It was also a thoroughly un-Lutheran statement. Lutherans are not pacifists, and they especially object to “cooking and brewing” secular and spiritual matters together, which according to Luther is the devil’s work. Luther called preachers doing this “false clerics and schismatic spirits.”

But Dr. Kässmann knows what she is doing. She is catering to Europe’s Homobonide Zeitgeist, which is pacifist, thus gradually elevating herself to a position of the opposition Social Democrats’ foremost intellectual, according to the newsmagazine, Focus.

And so at the recent “Kirchentag” in Dresden, a meeting of 120,000 Protestants, she piled on some more gobbledygook. Instead of bombing the Taliban, she told a cheering crowd, we should pray with them. Now that’s rich coming from a pastor whose own career displayed an infatuation with the idea of female empowerment.

Let’s not belabor the fact that in the eyes of churches representing 70 percent of world Christendom, including this writer’s branch of Lutheranism, a female bishop is an ontological absurdity, kind of like the pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1994 movie, Junior.

But imagine NATO followed Kässmann’s advice. Imagine the Taliban, spared allied bombing, returned to Power in Kabul. Imagine they picked up from where they had left off a decade ago. Imagine an “Afghan Margot Kässmann,” perhaps named Maha, elevated herself to the rank of a Muslim Mufti, left her husband and were caught driving drunk through Kabul with an unidentified man an her side, and then suggested praying with infidels. From what we know about the Taliban’s past behavior, what would happen to poor Maha on Friday after church?

I pondered this question with a specialist on Islamic law computing the number of lashes she might first receive at Kabul’s sports stadium: 80 for having learned how to read and write? 99 for driving a car? 150 for drunkenness? As for her presumption of being cleric-in-chief, praying with infidels, and allowing an unknown guy so close to her, there’s no question of what would happen after that: They would stick her into a hole in the ground and lob rocks at her head until she is dead.

The good news is that in Germany even the liberal media are souring of Homobonide hypocrisy, to wit Der Spiegel’s admonition to Margot Kässmann to remember the Decalogue. Here is how this normally left-of-center newsmagazine paraphrased the Eighth Commandment to fit ex-bishop Kässmann and fellow Homobonides: “Du sollst keinen scheinheiligen Stuss reden.”

In English: “Thou shalt not talk sanctimonious twaddle.”


Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com . He has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Germany’s anti-nuclear Schwärmerei

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Germany’s radical decision to quit nuclear power by 2022 has me worried, and not just for economic reasons. My concern is primarily philosophical for this development suggests the robust return of a troubling mindset that has served Germany and the world badly for centuries. It is called Schwärmerei and translates literally into “swarming.” Martin Luther invented this term for a murky combination of utopian mass enthusiasm and fanaticism.

Luther used the word, Schwärmerei, to describe 16^th-century theological-political movements that taught that man should give God a helping hand by establishing Elysian entities already here on earth in anticipation of His ultimate paradise. The quintessential “Schwärmer” was Luther’s antagonist Thomas Müntzer (1489-1525), chief ideologue of the 16^th-century peasants’ wars in Germany. Müntzer had a great influence on the bloodiest political movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Marxism and National Socialism.

Both Friedrich Engels, the father of Communist theory, and Nazi chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg deferred to Müntzer, even though they were atheists and he was not. But it was from Müntzer that they inherited the idea of having to create a miniature paradise with limited access here and now. The Communist self-declared goal was to create a “Worker’s and Peasants’ Paradise;” the Nazis tried to establish an idyllic reservation for one particular tribe, the Aryans. Both proved to be irrational and ultimately lethal schemes.

It would be unfair to suggest that the unattractive alliance between environmentalists and dull populists driving Germany’s exit from atomic power is in a league with genocidal fiends such as the Communists and Nazis. My point is merely that, like those movements, they are responding to irrational sentiments like fear, envy and insularity; the dreaded German word, Sonderweg, springs to mind.

That the earthquake and tsunami disaster in faraway Japan should send a majority of Germans, whose country rarely experiences seismic tremors of a magnitude of minor itches, into mass hysteria, and that their center-right government now responds to this frenzy in the manner of populist Pavlovians, is a disturbing development indeed. It seems no less alarming than Chancellor Merkel’s and Foreign Minister Westerwelle’s flip-flop policy of breaking solidarity with Germany’s partners in NATO and the European Union in the Libyan crisis, thus catering to the mushy pacifist mindset that has taken hold of the German people since World War II.

The spectacle of the world’s most successful economic power succumbing to its people’s angst seems unbecoming, all the more so as there is no European nation more dependent on electricity that Germany, and none with more open borders; Germany has 10 immediate neighbors, all with nuclear reactors whose radiation clouds, if there were ever to be a disaster, would not ask Berlin for permission before traversing German territory. Thus it is fallacious Schwärmerei to assume that a nation of 80 million surrounded by ten other nations could be turned into a nuclear-free land of bliss.

Not that concerns about atomic power lacked legitimacy; particularly the issue of what to do with the nuclear waste remains unresolved. But it surely makes no sense to act according to the motto of “stop the world I want to get off.” By all means let’s accelerate the search for alternative energies, but in the meantime build the safest reactors imaginable, which is precisely what German manufacturers have been doing thus far.

It seems sad that the German genius to which my country owed its postwar success has evidently deserted the political arena. But at least it is still present in the economy and in industry, where imaginative minds will doubtless find a response to the mess our latter-day Schwärmer and populists are currently causing. This is of course a statement of faith of sorts. Would it be that I could be as confident about my country’s future leaders!

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

WORLD MATTERS: A royalist dream – Harry, King of Saxony

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Pardon this outburst from an unreconstructed German monarchist: Scanning the Internet for news about the impending royal wedding has rendered me envious, morose and frustrated. Never mind the uncomprehending sniggers by Bill O’Reilly about this display of allegedly antiquated glamour. O’Reilly might have many merits but he does not grasp the need for glamour in this era of vulgarity and triviality every one of his T.V. shows so aptly portrays night after night.

Being German, I am keenly aware of the dearth of glamour that has marked my country for almost a century. In church we have surly preachers in black robes opining from the pulpit about separating garbage instead of chanting the rich Lutheran liturgy and joyfully proclaiming the Gospel. In academia, colorful commencement proceedings have been abolished; graduates are told to pick up their diplomas in the Admin Building, room 312/A, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. In affairs of state, we are represented not by Kaisers or kings with spiked helmets but grey-clad presidents; some of these have been impressive, I admit, but glamorous they were not. Recently, one of our heads of state just walked off the job like a peeved bookkeeper; compare that with the iron self discipline of Queen Elizabeth II who has just turned 85 and never missed a single workday in the 58 years of her reign.

What galls me most is that royal ceremonies in neighboring countries, in Britain, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Monaco or Spain, are all implicitly German affairs because the blue blood in the veins of at least one of the players is our blue blood – quality German blood. The German yellow press reports every minutiae of these events while missing the central point: A little more of this kind of style in our own country would insert a modicum of elegance into our political and societal discourse, which is even more annoying than its American equivalent because we tend to systematize everything, including imported bad taste.

At this point, though, I must report some good news blessing our bland republican reality with a ray of potential glitter. In my home state of Saxony a baron by the name of Hildebrand von Thumbshirn is waging a campaign to place Prince Harry on the throne of Dresden. I confess that I know little about Herr von Thumbshirn, other than that his family hails from Schloss Ponitz, a fine Renaissance castle in the duchy of Altenburg.

According Thumbshill, there is only one problem with his proposal. He lacks the €250,000 ($360,000) required to start a “Saxon Windsor Party.” There is another problem, too: why Windsor? Why this name that is as spurious as “liberty cabbage,” the American neologism cooked up in World War I to camouflage the German origin of sauerkraut; as specious as the British misnomer, Alsatian, for German Shepherd dogs, and as daft as the term “freedom fries” latter-day American know-nothings invented for French Fries ten years ago when France and Germany opposed the second Iraq war?

So I wonder: Is it not a little petty of the royal family to cling to the fake name it adopted after their own relative, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s first grandson, had become their adversary in Europe’s fratricidal World War I? Why not acknowledge what they are – a blend of German clans, the Hanoverians plus the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, whose name they bore until they traded it in for the name of a small town in the County of Surrey? Here you might interject: What about that Greek in the equation? Indeed there is one; Prince Philip of Greece married Elizabeth née Windsor and became the Duke of Edinburgh, but what, do you suppose, is the Greek royal family’s real name? Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

You see, if you look carefully, you can’t escape us. Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost of Germany’s 16 states. It has a discrete but still wealthy and influential ducal family by this very name; its branches reign in Denmark and Norway and once upon a time lorded over Greece; via its Greek line it is related by marriage to the royal families of Spain and Britain. In addition to Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg a second German dynasty with an Anglicized name contributed to the noble genealogy of the Queen’s consort. They call themselves Mountbatten but used to be known as Battenberg; Philip’s mother is one of those.

Germany’s top aristocracy has held thrones almost everywhere in Europe – in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Belgium, Scandinavia and Luxembourg. They even left their mark across the Atlantic, in Brazil and Mexico, but also in Hollywood where Prince Frederic von Anhalt shares the glamour of his name with Zsa Zsa Gabor, although he acquired it by adoption; at birth he was called Hans Lichtenberg. Real Anhalt blood has survived in the Romanov family; Catherine the Great was a Princess of Anhalt before becoming a tsarina. And perhaps the noblest Anhalt was Joachim Ernst, the last reigning duke. He resisted the Nazis, was sent to Dachau concentration camp, then liberated by the Americans only to die 1947 at Communist hands in Buchenwald concentration camp.

He was a stellar example of German royals opposing Hitler, a phenomenon rarely acknowledged by Germans or their former adversaries, but this is a story for another day.

Before I proceed with my and Baron von Thumbshill’s monarchist reveries, I may be permitted a historical reminder. Preceding the invention of the automobile by Carl Benz 125 years ago, princes and princesses were Germany’s most precious export items. Our nation with its countless dukes, margraves and landgraves was an amazingly rich source of bluebloods. The British in particular couldn’t get enough of them. They loved King George III, even though the United Kingdom lost much of North America during his reign. They loved this Hanoverian eccentric, especially when he stepped into the sea at Weymouth stark naked, while a band hidden in a nearby bathing machine struck up “God Save the King;” bathing machines, an English invention, were large-wheeled carts that were rolled off the beaches into the water to afford bathers privacy; sometimes they had pianos and even sizable musical ensembles on board.

Or think how much leverage the British allowed George’s daughter-in-law, Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, even though she often neglected to wash, wore dirty clothes, consequently emitted unpleasant smells, and then eventually absconded to Italy with her manservant, Bartolomeo Pergami, leaving her husband, the debauched George IV, in the arms of Maria Fitzherbert whom he had secretly married before even meeting Caroline. The British loathed him and loved her.

Far be it from me to try to wrestle away from our British cousins the scions of our finest families. By all means, hold onto them, you are welcome! But it would be nice if they sent us back just one of them and stopped the false labeling. Please, they are not Windsors but Saxe-Coburg-Gothas! Now I know from personal experience that hyphenated names can be cumbersome, and names with two hyphens must be especially awkward, which is why the Bulgarians quite sensibly called their royal family Sakskoburggotski, though the Belgians, who were twice invaded by the Germans in the 20^th century, seem to have no problem to have a king sporting two German hyphens.

To get back to Baron Thumpshirn’s proposal, and to propose to the British a way out of their Windsor bagatelle, how about reverting to the elaborate family’s real name, which is Wettin. The Wettin dynasty has been around and much beloved by its subjects in assorted principalities of central Germany since the 10^th century, 100 years before William the Conqueror invaded England. A Wettin prince-elector, Frederick the Wise, was Luther’s protector. Another Wettin, Augustus the Strong, built baroque Dresden and with one of his numerous mistresses, Countess Maria Aurora von Königsmarck, sired Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750), who became one of France’s most celebrated field marshals; one of his grand children gained literary fame calling herself George Sand.

So let’s take up Thumbshirn’s suggestion and make Harry von Wettin King of Saxony. That he is a brave military officer with a great sense of humor won’t hurt. A wholesome display of manliness and humor from the throne will do us Saxons, actually all Germans, a lot of good.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.