Hey everybody. This is a Conspiratuality Bonus episode called Anti-Fascist Christianity, Bonhoeffer, Part 2, Part 1, dropped on Saturday on the main feed. I'm Matthew Remski. This is Conspiruality, as I mentioned, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults,

pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. I'm on blue sky, Derek's on blue sky, Julian's on

blue sky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle, and you can support our

Patreon. So this is one of several episodes I'll be doing on anti-fascist Christianity

that will kind of dovetail itself into the anti-fascist Woodshed series.

It's where I collect a bunch of useful stories and resources for this terrible time.

Today, in part two on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life, I'm going to pick up the story in the midst of his Harlem awakening. And I think the

story is really important because it shows that if you're white and oblivious to where you come from and what that means,

if you never really see the structure of empire around you and centering you, you can still learn.

You can begin to understand the powerlessness of other people.

You can begin to understand what struggle means. You can use privilege to understand the margins that make you the center. And I also

think that this is an important story because while there's nothing new about American fascism,

there's also nothing new about American anti-fascism,

and a lot of that is due to the strength and resilience of the black church.

So, picking up where we left off, Dietrich Bonhofer is at Union Theological Seminary. He's 24 years old, and he's starting to understand the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, who's a theologian burnished by his labor battles against Henry Ford in Detroit, and he's hanging out with all the social gospel

kids. But most importantly, he's embedded now in the liturgical life of Abyssinian Baptist Church

in Harlem. He's learning gospel music. He's teaching Sunday school. He's visiting the sick and

elderly in their homes. And he's listening to Pastor Adam Clayton

Powell, the senior, preach a newly alive gospel to him, flipping his understanding of Jesus from

the ascended and conquering hero of empire to the struggling instrument of love and solidarity.

But these services at Abyssinian weren't enough for Bonhoeffer.

He wanted to see what Pastor Powell was talking about firsthand when he railed against the Jim Crow South.

...