The Grangemouth refinery strike is now happily over, for the moment at least, ending the fears of orn Church leaders ‘speaking out’ on the political stage can be unavoidable, or it can be a bad mistake. When a people is being afflicted and brutalised, as in Nazi Germany, how could any Christian voice fail to speak out for those being done to death? And yet such voices were disastrously few from any denomination in Germany. Indeed there were many very enthusiastic church leaders and theologians supportive of Hitler, Roman Catholic and Protestant. Hitler’s plan was to coordinate churches into his programme, include them under his big tent, to infiltrate their message with his own, and to a degree he succeeded.

Karl Adam, a very notable Roman Catholic theologian was taken in. In his book ‘The Spirit of Catholicism’ he refers to Hitler as an inspirational figure to save Germany, ‘the man of the South, the Catholic South’, a catastrophic misjudgement. The Vatican was the first state to acknowledge the validity of the Nazi regime with its Concordat over education. On the Lutheran side the ‘German Christian’ Ludwig Muller was elected Reichsbishop and he worked to make the church an instrument of the Fuehrer. The ‘Confessing Church’ resisted this under Martin Niemoller, with Bonhoeffer its most famous theologian and Karl Barth likewise rejecting the ‘monstrous’ perversion of Christ’s church by the German Christians. The Nazi era was otherwise not glorious in terms of Christian protest. Nor were things much better in Britain, where church leaders generally kept quiet, and Cardinal Hinsley felt he had to tell British Roman Catholics to support Britain in the war!

Until recently Zimbabwe’s Anglican leadership has seemed to be colluding with Mugabe’s thuggish and violent regime, the Roman Catholic Archbishop looking far braver and more forthright, Mugabe himself being one of his flock formally. It seems right to hear from Christian leaders in such contexts of imminent threat and persecution. What are we make of the fiery sermons of the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s erstwhile pastor, who fulminates against the USA as a thoroughly wicked nation? Wright has called upon the Almighty to ‘damn America’ rather than bless it. He has called the horrors of 9/11 divine justice, payback for American violence in the past. And he has repeated his theological judgements on political history despite immense embarrassment caused to Obama thereby.
Is this sort of ‘speaking out’ by a Christian leader a good thing, or merely showboating? Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were facing death and dealing with persecution towards the Jews and a church apparently colluding with this. Likewise Archbishop Pius Ncube spoke out against Mugabe in a context of actual murder and torture, protesting in factual terms. Jeremiah Wright’s rhetoric is far more tendentious: the USA went to war in Iraq in good faith to release the people from a tyrant, however much this is now debated. Mr Wright’s tone, moreover, seems scarcely Christian in its sheer hate of the USA: surely he should be commending his own political plans in a way according with Christlike reconciliation and working together? ‘Speaking out’ should be reserved for crisis situations.