As many of you know who have read this blog, I wondered about what is happening in our country. We used to have two dominant political parties. Both of which I enjoyed and often agreed with a particular point of view. Growing up, I learned the leader of either party could provoke hatred in people from the other party. An example, the Great Depression produced people who hated Herbert Hoover for causing it. That’s not true, as many factors caused Great Depression. On the other side, we had people who hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he passed laws such as Social Security. I remember growing up with a woman who wouldn’t even say Roosevelt’s name because he destroyed society when he had passed the Social Security law. Always people who were this dogmatic in both parties were in the minority.
For a moment, I like to switch from my views of the two political parties in this country to a YouTube video. The videos about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a Lutheran pastor who wrote about his opposition to Hitler, for which he paid with his life. If you ever wondered how Hitler was successful in taking over Germany, this video explains it. The video also explains what has happened to one of our parties, the Republicans. Bonhoeffer, in the video, attributes what happened in Germany as stupidity. I think it’s even worse than that. Hitler became a cult figure.
The word called is interesting because it’s often applied to religious groups in opposition to major religious groups. However, in the modern era, you hear the term cult used in many different ways; i.e., a singer’s cult of fans or a film has a cult following. Our president, who just left office, Donald Trump, is a cult figure. President Trump knew this when he said he could go out in a major street and shoot someone and get away with it. I don’t know if Bonhoeffer knew the term cult, but I’m sure he could see how that would apply in the current day. Bonhoeffer would warn us against that cult and as he warned a previous generation about Hitler.
