The legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer seemed straightforward: The anti-Nazi theologian and pastor executed in 1945 for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler was a man of faith who took action against injustice in the real world.
He is one of 10 modern-day martyrs honored with a statue in London’s Westminster Abbey alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
But since a bestselling, 2010 biography put an evangelical spin on Bonhoeffer’s story, parts of the US Christian right have cast him in a new role: a poster pastor for their fight against Democrats, progressives and a culture they see as increasingly estranged from conservative values.
In the lead-up to the 2024 election, evangelicals invoked Bonhoeffer in calls to churches to stump for Trump. He was name-checked in Project 2025, the conservative policy plan for the Trump administration, and in a “Bonhoeffer Declaration” signed by prominent evangelicals in support of Israel.
A faith-based US movie studio released a Bonhoeffer biopic whose poster showed the pacifist pastor toting a pistol.
Michigan pastor Austin Kreutz, who heads the Bonhoeffer Forum for Church and Culture, a faith-based policy think tank, said conservative “Bonhoeffer types” want a return to the Christian influence on government they believe was enshrined by the US’ founders. He sees parallels between Tesla-burning demonstrators today and the Nazi “brown shirts” of the 1930s, and fears a US progressive dictatorship that would “make the Nazis look like a Sunday-school picnic.”
Bonhoeffer scholars say that right-wing politics have nothing to do with the real Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was against nationalism, against the persecution of marginalized people for an inclusive church. Last fall, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic wrote an open letter demanding Christian nationalists stop using Bonhoeffer to support their political agenda.
So did 85 of Bonhoeffer’s great-nieces and nephews. One of them, German historian Tobias Korenke, said that for Christian nationalists to cast progressives as Nazis and themselves as latter-day Bonhoeffers, is to twist history “to put themselves on the right side of it.”
In response, far-right figures trashed the family in the media. And it spiraled into a full-blown feud.
Nadine Hamilton, vice-president of the International Bonhoeffer Society’s German section, said she knows conservative US evangelicals, even in her own family, and they’re good people who want to do the right thing. But she said that in their pumped-up portrait of a righteous warrior, they’re getting Bonhoeffer wrong.
“Bonhoeffer didn’t act because he was certain he was right. He acted despite his uncertainty,” she said. “His writings are full of struggle, of ethical ambiguity. He asks what it means to act responsibly in a world that no longer provides clear answers. That’s not moral heroism, it’s theological depth.”
So, amid the trans-Atlantic mudslinging, what would Bonhoeffer do?
Hamilton said he would not pick a fight — he would talk and look for common ground.
She added, “That’s what we can learn from Bonhoeffer, still.”