Aren’t we tired of the clenched fist,
the squared shoulder, the set jaw,
The high-step march with its final resolution?
The nostalgia, the victimhood, the entitlement,
The red line with its policed border?
The insecurity, the outrage, the fear,
The camps with their razor wire?
The mocking, the disdain, the disgust,
The rapacious destruction
with its wanton glee?
Better An open palm,
A minor chord, A table.
Future Regret
Regret is an underappreciated moral sentiment.
We often think of regret as synonymous with guilt,
emotions that flow from past actions
that we now judge to have been mistakes.
But unlike guilt or its cancerous cousin shame,
which both weigh heavily on the soul,
regret can be productive.
Guilt and shame freeze our gaze
in the rearview mirror.
They capture us at our worst
and ossify that vision
into a memorial that claims to be all of us.
They are debilitating.
But regret, like Janus, encourages us
to look behind and ahead simultaneously.
With regret, we acknowledge our mistakes
and imagine our better selves showing up next time.
There is also a version of regret
that can powerfully shape our present.
Our moral imaginations allow us to benefit
from the gift of what we might call future regret.
If we project ourselves into the future
and find that we look back
on our present with regret,
we can harness that insight
as motivation to act with more integrity
than we might otherwise muster.
Future regret can help us think
not only about things we’d regret doing
but also about things
we’d regret not doing.
There are harmful actions to avoid,
but there are also courageous actions to take.
Anticipating future regret helps us think more expansively,
beyond ourselves and our own time,
to imagine how we might be
a good ancestor to yet unborn generations.1
Ten years from now,
what story do we want to be able to tell about ourselves?
Seven generations from now,
what story do we want our descendants
to be able to tell about us?
What story would we regret?
We can also harness the moral power
of regret by learning from the mistakes of others,
both real and imagined.
In our personal lives,
the news of a divorce, a broken friendship,
or a failed risky business investment
often sets us on our own evaluative path.
In troubling times,
we seek the company of dystopian fiction.
It’s no coincidence that George Orwell’s 1984,
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,
and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
have seen a surge in American sales in 2025.2
These stories confirm the reality
of the dangers we see developing around us,
sharpening our moral vision
and steeling us to act lest we suffer similar fates.
We also bolster our efforts
to avoid future regret
by telling the stories of heroes and moral exemplars.
We admire the lives of courageous people,
especially those warning us across time and place
about the consequences of refusing
to resist oppression and injustice.
For the last century,
no cautionary tale has been more powerful in the U.S.
and Europe than the rise of the Nazi Party
and the complicity of everyday Germans,
including German Christians and churches.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s return to power,
many concerned Christian leaders
have invoked this historical precedent.
They frequently mention Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
the German pastor who was arrested
for resisting the Nazi Party and ultimately executed
in a concentration camp in 1945.
The question “Is this a Bonhoeffer moment?”
has appeared multiple times in my social media feed
since the 2024 presidential election.
Bonhoeffer’s story is indeed inspiring.
Unlike so many others, he saw the dangers
of Adolf Hitler early, drew bright moral lines,
and called out the complicity
of his fellow German Christians.3
But in America today,
I think the complex story of another German pastor,
Martin Niemöller, is more instructive for our nation’s
already compromised white Christians,
most of whom voted not once, not twice,
but three times to put Donald J. Trump into power.
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a Lutheran minister
and early Nazi supporter who was later arrested
and imprisoned for opposing Hitler’s regime.
He was a sought-after speaker following the war,
but he is most remembered today for his poem
“First They Came For.…”
The poem is inscribed on the wall
in the Hall of Witness on the ground floor
of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC,
and in numerous other Holocaust memorial museums
and public spaces around the world.
First they came for the Socialists,
and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.4
Niemöller’s words are well circulated.
We read them in museums and hear them
in our churches and synagogues.
We read these words to our children.
We hold them up because we believe,
at least we want to believe,
that we would act with the moral clarity of their author.
In the parlance commonly used
in Holocaust educational curricula,
we would not be among the
“Perpetrators”
of violence or the
“Sympathizers”
with such evil.
Nor would we be among the willfully oblivious
“Bystanders.”
No, we would certainly be counted
among the
“Upstanders”:
those who would see the early warning signs,
those who would risk their own safety to protect others.
But the poem, while conveying an important truth
about the inevitable expanding dangers
of unchecked tyranny,
is at bottom pragmatic,
an appeal to enlightened self-interest.
If we don’t defend others,
the poem reminds us,
there will be no one left to defend us.
In a lesser-known 1946 speech
given in Stuttgart, Niemöller offered a more explicitly
theological and confessional reflection.
He gave the following account
of a powerful spiritual experience he had during a postwar visit
to Dachau, the first German concentration camp,
opened in 1933,
and the one where he was imprisoned from 1941 to 1945.5
I stood with my wife in front
of the crematorium in Dachau,
and on a tree in front of this building
there was a white-painted board with black lettering.
There one could read:
“Here in the years 1933–1945 238,756 people were cremated.”6
While I read it, not aloud,
I noticed that my wife fainted and sank trembling into my arms.
I had to support her and noticed
how at that moment a cold shudder ran down my spine.
I think my wife fainted when she read
the quarter-million number. That hadn’t moved me.
Because it didn’t tell me anything new.
What ran through me hot and cold at that moment
was something else.
That was the other two numbers: “1933–1945.”
I groped for my alibi and knew
that the two numbers were the wanted poster
of the living God for Pastor Niemöller.
My alibi reached from July 1, 1937, to mid-1945.
There stood: “1933–1945.”
“Adam, where are you? Mensch, where were you?
Yes, I know, from mid-1937 until the end you have an alibi.
Here you’re being asked:
‘Where were you from 1933 until July 1, 1937?’”
And I couldn’t avoid this question any longer.
In 1933 I was a free man.
1933—at that moment in the crematorium yard it occurred to me—
yes 1933, that’s right. Niemöller concluded with this testimony:
And on that day, when we got home,
I read the chapter Matthew 25 with new meaning:
“I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat;
I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink;
I was sick and in prison,
and you did not come to me.”
As a Christian I could have known
and should have known in 1933
that in each of these human brothers—
may they be called Communists or whatever—
God in Jesus Christ was asking me
whether I wouldn’t want to serve him.
Reading this speech,
we understand that Niemöller did not always have
the moral clarity he captured in his famous poem.
For the first four years of Hitler’s reign,
from 1933 to 1937,
Niemöller was a free man
because he did not fully oppose the Nazis,
even as their atrocities mounted.
When he finally resisted the Nazi policies
aimed at controlling the Lutheran Church,
he was arrested on July 1, 1937,
and spent the remainder of the war
imprisoned and in concentration camps.
It is always our protective instinct
to want to envision ourselves as the Niemöller of 1937–
1945 and not the Niemöller of 1933–1937.
We do not want to imagine ourselves experiencing
the excruciating regret that plagued Niemöller and the Protestant German Church after the war.
Here is Niemöller in 1947 reflecting on the church’s failures:
We preferred to keep silent.
We are certainly not without guilt,
and I ask myself over and over again
what would have happened if we had in 1933 or 1934—
it must have been a possibility—
14,000 Protestant pastors
and all Protestant congregations in Germany,
if we had defended the truth with our lives.
If we had said back then, it is not right
when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in concentration camps, to let them die.
I can imagine that then perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have been made a head shorter,
but [I] can also imagine that we would
have saved the lives of 30–40 million people,
which is what it costs us now.7
We want to believe
that we would have broken the silence
and defended the vulnerable.
The challenge, of course,
at least for those of us who are white and Christian,
is that we have scant historical evidence
that we know how to hold such moral vision
and live such costly faith.
Although we’ve turned blind eyes and deaf ears to it,
nonwhite Christians have been calling out our complicity
with the forces of white supremacy for the entire history of our nation.
We white Christians have largely ignored what historian Jemar Tisby has called the “spirit of justice” that has steadily flowed through the Black Protestant churches, the liberation theology developed among Latino Catholic churches, and the mirror held up to our faces by Indigenous communities.8
In his 1845 autobiography—published in the same year that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was formed to declare that enslaving others based on the color of their skin was compatible
with the gospel of Jesus—Frederick Douglass declared,
“Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ,
I recognize the widest possible difference.…
The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell
chime in with each other, and the bitter cries
of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts
of his pious master.
Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade
go hand in hand together.”9
In 1963, as he sat in a cramped jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama,
Martin Luther King Jr. solemnly observed that rather than speaking up for justice and supporting racial equality,
most white Christians “have remained silent behind
the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”
He concluded, “We will have to repent in this generation
not only for the evil words and deeds of the bad people,
but for the appalling silence of the good people.”10
Across the last three decades of the twentieth century,
beginning with Custer Died for Your Sins:
An Indian Manifesto in 1969,
Vine Deloria Jr. asked white Christians
to give an honest accounting of ourselves
regarding the violence and deception
we have wielded in our interactions
with Native Americans.11
These appeals were largely ignored
by good white Christians as we continued to attend the church
of the status quo.
Amid the long shadows cast by the light of such witnesses,
at least some of us finally—
first during the Civil Rights Movement
and more recently during the Black Lives Matter Movement—
found the courage to ask painful questions
about turning points in U.S. history
when we might have acted differently.
What would have happened if white Christian pastors
and congregations had protested en masse
when Congress removed Thomas Jefferson’s original language denouncing slavery, which called it a “cruel war against human nature itself,” from the Declaration of Independence?
What would have happened if white Christians had, in 1830, opposed Andrew Jackson’s duplicitous Indian Removal Act,
demanding that we honor the promises we had made to Native Americans?
If white Baptists and Methodists in the South had,
in 1845, committed themselves to love
rather than a violent defense
of their right to enslave people of African descent?
If all white Christians in the country had,
in the 1960s,
responded to the indictments from King
and so many others by turning our faith into action
during the Civil Rights Movement?
If we had called out the racism in the predictable white backlash following the Black Lives Matter Movement?
And, in 2021, demanded that our elected officials follow the second impeachment of Donald J. Trump
with a resounding conviction for inciting a violent insurrection
against the United States on January 6?
As America’s demographic majority during nearly all of its existence,
we white Christians have always held the power
to change the course of our country’s future.
What would have happened if we had,
at any of these hinge points of history,
collectively defended the truth with our lives?
The costs to our ranks, as Niemöller notes,
may have been significant,
but we could have saved millions of others.
Those sacrifices would have preserved both a nation
and a faith in their highest principles.
In the Southern Baptist churches of my youth,
the word “backslide” was a familiar one.
I was frequently warned in sermons and in youth group Bible studies
to remain vigilant lest I backslide as a Christian.
In that context, backsliding meant falling away from the faith
after being lured by the distractions of the world
or the wiles of the devil.
These enticements, we were told,
offered short-term rewards—
worldly recognition, sexual pleasure, success—
but all led down a slippery slope,
away from the path of Christian discipleship.
We were called to deny ourselves,
metaphorically take up our cross, and follow Jesus.
“Backslide,” a word born out of the sixteenth-century Scottish Reformation, has a long theological pedigree.
The Oxford English Dictionary credits Scottish minister John Knox with coining the word “backsliding” in a 1554 pamphlet.
There, he used it to admonish English Christians who compromised their Protestant beliefs by reverting to Catholicism
during the oppressive reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I.12
A half century later, the translators of the 1611 King James Bible
chose the term to describe a plea from the prophet Jeremiah for the Israelites to return from their waywardness to a loyal relationship to God: “Return, thou backsliding Israel, saith the LORD; and I will not cause mine anger to fall upon you: for I am merciful, saith the LORD, and I will not keep anger forever” (Jer 3:12).13
In each case, the term is used as a warning, accompanied by a call to return to the right path.
My adolescent fear of backsliding was not primarily about going to hell. It is a fundamental tenet of Southern Baptist theology that a Christian cannot lose his or her salvation. “Once saved, always saved,” as the mantra goes.14
At its best, it was a reminder to stay in relationship with God, to fulfill my role in living out the gospel in love and service for the world,
rather than being consumed by the empty pursuit of things of the world. But there was always the disquieting worry that if you strayed too far, too comfortably, and too long from the path, that fact itself was a sign that perhaps you had never entered into an authentic relationship with Jesus in the first place.
Salvation isn’t about works; but, as the New Testament book of James warns, salvation without works is dead.
For me, as a teenager, the fear of backsliding, falling away from a close personal relationship with God and thereby God’s will for my life, produced a persistent white noise of moral anxiety.
Despite the theoretical assurances of the security of salvation
that Southern Baptist theology offered,
any significant moral lapses triggered second-order interrogations
of what the backsliding meant.
Were they simply stumbles from which I could recover?
Or were they a sign of something more deeply wrong
with my spiritual condition?
Was I temporarily disoriented or more fundamentally lost?
I was terrified by a word in the Christian tradition
that describes the destination to which unchecked backsliding ultimately leads: apostasy.
The Greek roots of that word mean to stand away from
or depart from a previous place.
In religious context, that powerful term describes
a falling away from formerly
cherished beliefs
and an abandonment of once-held moral principles.
The scary thing about the state of apostasy
is that it is hard to recognize
when one has reached it.
When exactly has one broken faith with a friend?
Given up on a marriage?
Betrayed one’s country?
Exchanged the truth for a lie?
We can miss the dim signposts along the way.
To be sure, the term apostasy should be used with some care.
In the Christian tradition,
when authorities have wielded it as a final
irrevocable judgment against others,
it has been the trigger for countless acts of reprehensible violence:
the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials.
But properly understood, it is a warning.
It calls attention to a state of peril,
accompanied by an invitation to return to the fold.
It is the prophet’s call in the Hebrew Bible,
the parable of the lost sheep,
and the story of the prodigal son.
A beloved is lost.
But there is still time for repentance and return—
always until, of course, there isn’t.
In these challenging days in our nation,
I’ve been brought back to words like backslide and apostasy,
both theologically and politically.
These terms help describe the indefensible willingness
of white Christians to shed
their core values like inconvenient loads
along the road to supporting Donald Trump.
The term backslide has also more recently
come to have resonance among political theorists,
who use democratic backsliding
to describe the process by which a democracy
slips into authoritarianism.
These powerful terms also help
us describe the perils of our current moment succinctly:
We are now living in a democratically backslidden nation,
abetted by an apostate white Christianity.
With the rise of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement
and Donald Trump’s return to power,
the white evangelical world of my upbringing
has now fully come undone.
That conservative white Christian world
was always built,
as the parable goes, upon sandy ground.
When the storm finally came,
it was all too easily swept away by the political current.
Many of us
—even those fully embedded in white conservative Christianity—
have sensed, deep down,
that something was amiss within the faith of our fathers.
But that malady is elusive.
It isn’t discoverable as a logical misstep
in a theological proof.
It’s not identifiable as a single fork
in the historical road.
It is more like a haunting.
We experience it as an unsettling presence
that episodically escapes the shadows
but cannot bear the full light of day.
We blink, and it is gone.
But we feel its icy breath when our faith puts us at odds
with our most fundamental human instincts.
It lulls us with a seductive heresy:
that we can only know we are Christians by our boundaries.
It tells us we must banish some people
from the community of grace:
queers, Blacks, Muslims, immigrants.
Our loves, it warns, may betray us.
Empathy, the keystone of moral sentiment, is suspect;
compassion, a threat to obedience.
Faithfulness is authenticated not by the good fruits
it produces but by our willingness to sacrifice our humanity
on the altar of submission.
But submission alone is not enough
for the vengeful god conjured by white Christianity.
It seduces us, demanding violence to others
and the self as proof of our devotion.
It does not halt Abraham’s dagger before it plunges into Isaac.
Like addicts, we even begin to crave the transgression—
our moral degradation paradoxically serving
as the evidence of our righteousness—
until that perverse satisfaction finally extinguishes
the innate impulse to love our neighbors as ourselves.
I don’t hold out much hope that what passes for religion today
among the two-thirds of white Christians who voted for Trump is redeemable. That world is now marked by a shockingly impoverished relationship to the Bible and an outright abandonment
of a genuine search for truth.
But I’m not writing for those who have fully given themselves
over to the spirit of white chosenness, supremacy, and dominion.
I’m writing to mark some waypoints for those who know,
and those who are waking up to realize,
that the foundations of both our politics and our faith
need redemption.
We can no longer pretend
we do not know where this path will lead.
We can and should know that any political ideology
that demands the circumscription of love
and the extinguishing of empathy
has moved beyond the bounds
of both pluralistic democracy and Christian faith.
If we do not defend that truth with our lives,
we will find ourselves unable to recover a democratic society
in which we can all live together.
And we will surely feel devastating regret.
If we have any hope of finding our way,
we must start by being explicit about the dangers
of our current moment.
We have no alibis.
This is our 1933.
~~~~~~
Jones, Robert P.. Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This appeared first thing this morning after a fumble at choosing...
I am almost finished with another book along similar lines, but from a female's perspective...
Yes, I am also concerned about many things now happening, but, let's face it... after thousands of years, those who chose another path have created a world that is not sustainable... No, I am NOT claiming the second coming or any thing that implies that... When somebody tells you that what is happening is written in Revelations... And assumes that we should believe that this, right now, has been created by God, please stop and start thinking beyond your religious lives...
Are you aware that many individuals such as those trying these days have attempted to use the end times for their own benefit? Surely you can remember at least one instant when a cult leader chose to have everybody drink kool aid rather than...whatever he had come to believe... These are now seen as sad events where people were fooled, were manipulated...
I realized something during the last week... Without a father as "head" of the house, I was never prone to see a male figure as somebody that held power over me. Perhaps this is why I saw right through a conman and have questioned often what was occurring that seemed illogical... I rarely need to spend time pondering this type of belief...
Especially when there are people being hurt/murdered on behalf of some religious command decided upon by any human... who somehow always are white...males... rich...seeking more and more power...
Please know that I'm trying to share as much as possible, but things are happening too fast... Courts are not able to respond to what is being ignored by this administration... This is the one time, perhaps in our lives--I know it is for mine--that voting is the only option we have to make a statement in faith... How we got to this point is important, but we need to recognize the bottom line, the beginning... And we now are looking all the way back to the year 0 when the time changed to restart our calendars, based upon a man called Jesus Christ...
Robert P. Jones says American democracy is backsliding, and white Christianity is helping push it in that direction. In his new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, Jones confronts a difficult contradiction: among white evangelicals, greater church attendance does not necessarily produce less support for Christian nationalism, anti-immigrant attitudes, or Donald Trump. In some cases, the relationship runs in the opposite direction. So what happens when the institutions meant to form Christians in the teachings of Jesus begin producing a politics built around hierarchy, exclusion, and power? Jones joins us to talk about how race and culture shape biblical interpretation, why some Christians are now attacking empathy itself, what American Christianity inherited from slavery and Jim Crow, and why he believes the country has moved beyond ordinary partisan disagreement into a fight over democracy itself. Drawing on Martin Niemöller and the failures of the German church in the 1930s, Jones ends with an urgent question: when future generations ask what Christians did in this moment, what will the answer be?
Book: Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.
GUEST BIO Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, and a New York Times bestselling author whose work focuses on religion, race, politics, and democracy. His books include The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, White Too Long, The End of White Christian America, and his newest book, Backslide. Jones holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University and writes the Redeeming Democracy newsletter
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