Dear Friends,
This essay/podcast will be a two-parter, perhaps even three. It’s a subject I’ve tried to avoid for many reasons, but avoidance is no longer an option in light of what’s going on in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Take these fresh thoughts, written in the last couple of days, for whatever value they may have for you. I rarely push for a response, but feel free to enter the conversation if you’re so inclined. Write me directly or simply hit the “Leave a comment” or “Send a message” icon.
It’s still freezing here in Indiana. My brother-in-law told me it was 34 in Naples, FL the other morning! Wherever you are, stay safe, stay strong!
With Deepest Thanks for You!
D. Paul
The Church’s One Foundation Is Jesus Christ Her Lord!
“Nuremberg,” Cities Church, and Beyond
My wife and I have been binge watching movies the past few days on the Nuremberg trials of WWII. What fun, no? Perhaps watching only three movies in two days hardly qualifies as binging, with the endless, multi-episodic, storyline shows that can keep you glued till the crack of dawn. “How is this thing going to end” is a strong antidote to sleep.
There’s no such cliff-hanging anxiety for the movies on the Nuremberg trials. The verdict is a fait accompli—the Germans will receive their comeuppance—and you know the ending before the gavel and judge bark out the first, “Order! Order! Order in the court!” But if you love history, court-room dramas, and great acting (and who doesn’t?), then the Nuremberg movies are your cup of tea, or at least worthy of a stein of one of Nuremberg’s finest—Tucher Pils beer (the brand’s been around since 1672). But beer or no beer, it does feel like you’re binging while watching these movies, for the newest one, appropriately named Nuremberg, runs just shy of two-and-a-half hours, and its predecessor by sixty-five years, Judgement at Nuremberg, runs one minute shy of three hours. That’s seven or so hours when adding the Russian documentary, whose translated name from the Russian has slipped my memory, it being midnight by then and past my “beddy time,” as we use to say to the kids. They’re long movies, but riveting.
Though the story lines vary—the earlier movie dealing with the prosecution of Nazi judges, the latest one dealing with Göring and Hitler’s inner circle—the Nuremberg courtroom and primary themes remain the same. I prefer the earlier film, shot by Stanley Kramer in 1961, with a stellar cast of Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and a baby-faced William Shatner. The thirty-one-year-old Maximilian Schell gives a tour de force performance, slightly over-the-top on occasion, but more than worthy of the Best-Actor Oscar he took home in 1961. Chief Judge Dan Haywood, played seamlessly by a wrinkle-browed Spencer Tracy, eventually convicts the German judges to life sentences,* including the renowned jurist Ernst Jennings, played perfectly by the stoic Lancaster, who, from his prison cell, tells Tracy in the closing scene that he and the German people never knew that it would come to this—the mass murder of millions of innocents. Tracy, not missing a beat, replies, “It came to that the first time you condemned a man you knew to be innocent.”
The new Nuremberg’s cast is anchored by the implacable Russel Crowe portraying the cunning Hermann Göring, who avoids Chief Robert H. Jackson’s and the court’s sentence, “Death by hanging,” by popping a cyanide tablet into his mouth, thus emulating his beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler. The remaining defendants are all hanged.
With its themes of collective guilt and personal responsibility, Nuremberg resonates well with contemporaneous events. It’s not surprising that protestors, politicians, the press, and some pulpiteers employ the exaggerated rhetoric of “Nazi” or “Gestapo” in describing the officers of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE. In truth, such usage is a disservice to the Jewish community and to the memory of the six million “innocents” who, without regard for anything resembling civilized humanity, were wantonly yet mindfully slaughtered.
Six million, Six Million, SIX MILLION (may we never forget) slaughtered, and any equivalency to what is happening on the streets of America today to the barbarity of the Third Reich must, for the reasonable minds, be rejected. Those employing such comparisons are like “the boy who cried wolf,” and then when the true wolf is at the door, we are blinded, inured by the repetitive, inflammatory “political alarmism” that leads to “alarm fatigue.” Of course, many would argue that the big bad wolf is already at the door in the form of Donald Trump; to wit—paraphrasing Spencer Tracy—an ICE officer might pause and ask himself when doing a general roundup of immigrants, “Might I be arresting somebody today who is innocent?” One can only hope that vetting safeguards are in place, making sure that the criminals and not the innocents are the ones being prosecuted and sentenced. It’s not an easy task, for the entire issue of immigration has been a disaster for decades, with neither the politicians nor the body politic having the will or vision to deal with it creatively and humanely.
The Church, once again, is of two minds (if not several), perfectly epitomized by one of the leading protestors, a co-organizer, disrupting the Sunday morning service of Cities Church in St. Paul on Jan. 18th., purposefully targeting this church because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, matched a David Easterwood “…identified in court hearings as the Acting Director of the ICE St. Paul Field Office.” The protestor in question (who was recently arrested and in “turnstile” fashion released), is a prominent activist and one-time mayoral candidate for Minneapolis, Nekima Levy Armstrong, an ordained pastor who made her position quite clear after the protest when she posted on Facebook: “It's time for judgment to begin and it will begin in the House of God!!!" I’m sure the parishioners of Cities Church and the young children in particular who were terrorized that morning by the obscene-laced cries of “ICE out!” and “Justice for Renee Good” would question Armstrong’s self-righteous call “…for judgment to begin…in their House of God.” Imagine your children being yelled at—told that their parents were “Nazis” and were “going to burn in hell!” Imagine the fear of the parents, many who were blocked from going downstairs where their youngest children were being cared for, their recalling, no doubt, in a split-second the mass shooting that took place a few miles away at the Annunciation Catholic Church less than five months before. Is there a consistent pattern developing here, recalling also the murder of six children and teachers at The Covenant School in Nashville.
In way of contrast, the progressive Baptist minister and Substacker, Brian Kaylor, called Easterwood’s serving as a pastor and an ICE official “a serious moral failure.” Easterwood raised a lot of ecclesiastical eyebrows when he defended ICE's tactic of spraying protesters with chemical irritants. Kaylor seized upon it and cleverly placed this picture and caption on his Substack page:
“An ICE agent holds a pepper spray canister while questioning a person on Jan 27, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Adam Gray/Associated Press)”
But even liberal Baptist Brian Kaylor (and a liberal Baptist is no longer an oxymoron) admitted he was “very torn” by the protesters’ actions inside the church: “It would be very alarming,” he wrote, “if we come to see this become a widespread tactic across the political spectrum.” Whew! What a relief, brother Kaylor! Finally, a moral/political position most Christians might agree upon. Churches really are sanctuaries, literally and figuratively, so let them be left alone by zealous protestors and an intrusive State alike. Certainly Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his “confessing” seminary/church at Finkenwalde knew well the overreaching hand of the State when the Gestapo disrupted their services, eventually threatening the seminarians to take the Oath of Allegiance to Hitler or be conscripted or imprisoned.
NOW HERE’S AN ADMISSION: Though less explicitly, I’m going to make some comparisons not unlike those I’ve just criticized! As a fractured, divided nation, how far are we away from forcing our wills upon others—with armed protestors entering churches and enforcing the “Pledge to De-ice ICE” be signed (sounds absurd, doesn’t it?); or ICE invading our houses of worship and arresting “illegal aliens” who have taken sanctuary there (sounds more possible, no?); or an eventual “LGBTQIA+ Ministry of Justice” coercing all churches, regardless of denominational ties, to authorize same-sex marriages in their sanctuaries upon request—think of it as a twisted variant to the Fair Housing Act, with “civil rights” trumping the first amendment and the “free exercise” of religion.
None of the above is beyond the pale of consideration, for who would have thought a generation ago that our daughters would be forced to share their restrooms and lockers and shower with men. Who would have thought an entire new species of humanity would appear—“nonbinary.” When you’re living in an age where a Supreme Court Justice can’t define what a woman is, reality is up for grabs, the law is up for grabs, sanity itself is up for grabs, and even as the land of Bach, Goethe, and Bonhoeffer became an unfathomable cesspool, we’ve no reason to believe, other than by the grace of God, that America might not come tumbling down in similar fashion.
Well, leaving you on that cheery note, dear friends, join me for our next podcast, February 18, as we look BEYOND the temporal—to Jesus, the Prince of Peace, who is not absent from the chaos about us, but our ever-present help in trouble.
Amen
