The Worship of the Leader

Bonhoeffer was the first person to make a public pronouncement inside Germany against Hitler. As Hitler was being inaugurated as supreme chancellor, Bonhoeffer wrote this:

"If [the true Leader] understands his function in any other way than as it is rooted in fact, if he does not continually tell his followers quite clearly of the limited nature of his task and of their own responsibility, if he allows himself to surrender to the wishes of his followers, who would always make him their idol – then the image of the Leader will pass over into the image of the mis-leader, and he will be acting in a criminal way not only towards those he leads, but also towards himself. The true Leader must always be able to disillusion. It is not just that this is his responsibility and real object. He must lead his following away from the authority of his person to the recognition of the real authority of orders and offices…He must radically refuse to become the appeal, the idol, i.e. the ultimate authority of those whom he leads…He serves the order of the state, of the community, and his service can be of incomparable value. But only so long as he keeps strictly in his place…He has to lead the individual into his own maturity…Now a feature of man’s maturity is responsibility towards other people, towards existing orders…
…Only when a man sees that office is a penultimate authority in the face of an ultimate, indescribable authority, in the face of the authority of God, has the real situation been reached. And before this Authority the individual knows himself to be completely alone. The individual is responsible before God. And this solitude of man’s position before God, this subjection to an ultimate authority, is destroyed when the authority of the Leader or of the office is seen as ultimate authority…Alone before God, man becomes what he is, free and committed to responsibility at the same time. "

I think this message is pertinent in light of the recent events in the Ukraine. The people of Russian have abdicated far too much power to their Czar Vladimir Putin. While I try to shy away from political issue on this blog, there are theological undertones here that bear examination. There are also some chilling parallels between the Nazi situation in Germany and the rise of Putin's power. I think the reasons for that rise are as much spiritual as economic and political.

It must be remembered that there was a theological aspect to Nazism. Nazis sought to consciously undo the work that had been done by the Hebrew prophets, namely disconnecting God from politics. The ancient prophets sought to show the people that God was not synonymous with the king, and that the nation as a whole had no guarantee of safety in the world just because God had chosen them. Before God all men were nothing but filthy rags, and the safety guaranteed by covenant was only operable if you chose to follow the will of God. This was roughly the prophetic message. The later apocalyptic message was even more discomforting: following God meant drawing the ire of forces of evil that would persecute you. Forces that, in fact, incarnated themselves in the political order of the world.

In other words, the state and its leaders could not be worshiped nor equated simply with the presence and Will of God. This was an attack in tribal religion in favor of a universal religion that sought the equality of all mankind, at least before God. Jesus arrives on the scene at a time when Caesar is being worshiped as divine. God came in the form of a lowly crucified carpenter, who eschewed the political power people strove so hard to put upon him. The message seems to be that politics cannot save you, and indeed that God is the opposite of all those things we normally and naturally value: power, money, fame, respect etc.

Hitler and his ilk tried to turn back the clock, creating a purely tribal God. They turned the state into God. People had suffered terribly under the evil political order that preceded the Nazis, and just as they experienced that suffering as something like 'damnation' they experienced the political and economic success of the Nazis as 'salvation'. They looked to the state and the state's leader to save them.

It seems to me that the situation in Russia with Putin is frighteningly similar. The earlier political order was weak and brought about a loss of national self-respect and economic status. Putin came in and crushed corporate oligarchs, taking their money and giving it to the people and other oligarchs that would support him. He is a slavophile, and the entire reasoning given behind the Crimean invasion has a racist tone to it. In fact, it is almost the exact pretense given by Hitler for invading Czechoslovakia and Austria. The statues, the obsession of Putin with appearance and power, and the way the people have come to idolize him for it, reveal the exact kind of political idolatry that Bonhoeffer, and the prophets, warned about. Russia's esteem in the world is all that matters, except for the one thing that matters more: Putin's ego.

Russia has always had a bad tendency to idolizing its leaders, even when its leaders espoused an atheistic philosophy. Void of God, Stalin and Lenin became gods in their own country, as is evidenced by the endless statues and the preservation of dead bodies as if they were one of the holy 'incorruptibles' of Russian Orthodoxy (look it up).

What will the end result of all this be? I don't know. All options are bad options. This can get very nasty indeed. The only hope is that the world, the whole world, will stand up and say 'no' to this kind of behavior. But in the end, for each of us, it is only Jesus Christ who can really blow this endless pattern sky high. It is only by refocusing on the idea that it is THAT reality, THAT reality on the Cross that is truly God, and contrasting it with the false gods that grow up endlessly throughout history (really how many times have we been here? When will this pattern end?), that we as individuals can stand up and refuse to seek salvation, genuine salvation, from any political order, liberal or conservative, whether the leader is someone like us and someone we like or not. The moment we let our trust in our leader reach the level of religious faith that leader has become, for us, an incarnation of satan and we are truly lost. Political idolatry may be inevitable at a societal level, and perhaps it will eventually end the human race as we know it, but as individuals we can resist it and salvation can come by putting our faith in God and Christ.

It is no coincidence, I think, that some of the greatest resistance to Soviet political idolatry came from the orthodox church. Nor is it coincidental that in the Ukraine at least, some of the most hopeful signs come from the same locus. Hope springs eternal. I do not believe the false god Ego will win out over the true God who lives among us. But I know that satan is a dragon (Revelation 12) that can cause tremendous suffering to those who want peace and truth in the meantime.