Review – Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.

The politics of Angel Studios are challenging to track, even though they’ve come to lead many of the discussions surrounding their film output in the past two years. They’ve partnered with conservative outlet The Daily Wire to release Sound of Hope and released the infamous Sound of Freedom to a ravenously conservative audience. At the same time though, the content of their releases and their creative partners skew progressive and diverse. Sight and Sound of Hope star actors of color. Cabrini is an explicitly pro-immigrant and pro-woman drama. Black Panther star Letitia Wright even attacked the studio for partnering with the conservative studio against her wishes. There was even a minor controversy in 2023 when a Chosen actor allegedly placed an LGBT pride flag on set, which the Daily Wire briefly propagated.

Content Guide

Violence/Scary Images: The film is set during WWII and several scenes involve shootings and bloody violence. The movie ends with a character being hanged in a gallows offscreen, but the sound of the mechanism dropping is heard.
Language/Crude Humor: Some harsh language and discussions of racial animosity.
Drug/Alcohol References: Characters drink alcohol.
Sexual Content: None.
Spiritual Content: The film depicts a Lutheran pastor and theologian whose life would become defined by martyrdom. The film explores this theologically and discusses his defense for attempting to help assassinate Hitler.
Other Negative Content: Some shallow theology and iffy depictions of complicated history.
Positive Content: Themes of justice, obeying Christ, and improving the world in small ways.

Review

Angel Studios’ exact politics are hard to nail down, likely due to internal disagreements within the studio. Ironically though, this makes the studio a perfect pairing for a biopic about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German pastor and martyr of World War II who participated in the 1944 conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The man is one of the most famous theologians of the 20th century, whose books The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics, Life Together, and Reflections On The Psalms are among the most popular amongst American Christians. However, he is also a political symbol, claimed by both sides of the aisle as a rhetorical weapon against political causes and theological concepts.

This came into light most recently when Bonhoeffer biographer Eric Metaxas—whose biography popularized the theologian amongst Evangelical Christians—compared Democrats to the Nazis that Bonhoeffer resisted. He’d previously written that existing Bonhoeffer scholarship had exaggerated his secular tendencies and fully ignored the depth of his piety and faith, which put him outside most contemporary scholarship. His recent comments brought down condemnation from 86 of Bonhoeffer’s surviving descendants, who signed onto a letter dismissing Angel Studios as “right-wing,” condemning “the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer [being] distorted and misused by right-wing extremists, xenophobes, and religious agitators,” and accusing the movie of encouraging Christian Nationalism and “narrow-minded” fundamentalism and bigotry.

Angel Studios’ Bonhoeffer has little to do with Metaxas, shy of him promoting, and isn’t primarily drawing on his biography. That said, its promotional campaign has been complicated by posters depicting the theologian holding a gun and suggesting the film would flanderize its titular character into a violent Hollywood spy. But given the film’s content, this doesn’t track.

The film follows most of Bonhoeffer’s adult life, starting with flashbacks to his childhood and then cutting to his adulthood where he has become a seminary student in New York. Upon returning home in the early 1930s, he finds that his nation has been consumed by a similar hatred he witnessed among segregationists in the American South, with violent nationalists subverting the country and seizing power. As he and his friends struggle to protect their faith amid growing demands by the Nazi government to pander to the Führer, Bonhoeffer ends up joining a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and bring an end to the war. All the while, the film intercuts these scenes with flash-forwards to the future where Bonhoeffer is suffering and waiting to die in a concentration camp.

The movie’s theology is fairly suspect. There’s a great deal of turmoil among scholars identifying his theology given that he was both a critic of the modernist and fundamentalist schools of Protestantism. The movie seems to suggest that Bonhoeffer is an “I hate religion but love Jesus”-style evangelical, which is a ridiculous simplification of his ideas. He directly says “We need Christ without religion,” which cuts against the real man’s VERY traditional view of ecclesiology. In reality, he was an ecumenicist and a pietist, both frustrated with the excesses of liberal Protestantism and finding himself alienated from fundamentalism.

The movie’s most visually fascinating and defining moment is when a young Bonhoeffer leaves the Union Seminary campus in New York City to attend a Black church in Harlem, where he experiences the presence and closeness of Jesus for the first time. This is followed by his tour of the South, where he’s beaten and nearly killed by a segregationist for attempting to defend a Black friend, who fortuitously makes it clear to him that such evil and hatred isn’t contained just in the American South. These sequences synthesize the character’s moral core, a desire to pursue both Christ and justice in equal measure.

Despite being condemned as right-wing, the movie is explicitly about the dangers of ascendant nationalism, bigotry, and charismatic leaders. It’s a story about Christianity being hollowed out by political priorities, which does not map cleanly onto contemporary conservative views of national revitalization and isolationism. One of its most triumphant scenes is when Martin Niemoller (August Diehl) calls out the Nazis in his congregation from the pulpit and accuses Hitler of stealing God’s throne, to which they all walk out while Nielmoller receives the thunderous applause of the sanctuary.

But much like Angel Studios’ previous work in Cabrini, the film suffers from an inability to grapple with both the secular and religious at once. His theological nuance is lost in favor of a conspiracy yarn, with its lead character being slowly radicalized. He is almost immediately ready to join the conspiracy, only reluctantly admitting “We’re pastors, not killers,” but affirms that stopping violence isn’t necessarily unbiblical in light of the violence in the Old Testament. He even goes as far as to disregard his pre-war pacificism, something the real Bonhoeffer never did.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t fully resolve the tension at the core of Bonhoeffer’s theology. He was a pacificist dedicated to obedience. He fully believed St. Paul’s directive in Romans 13 to, “Obey the government, for God is the One who has put it there.” However, he saw that the churches who obeyed the Nazi government were persecuting Jews, denying the authority of the Old Testament, and promoting political lies. As Pastor Rodney W. Kennedy writes for Baptist News Global, “The question of why a pacifist theologian became a participant in an assassination attempt can’t be answered.”

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t help clear this issue. It’s a fine little political drama and easily one of the better-made films to come out of the studio. It is nothing like what the posters and critics feared it could be. It plays the hits in Bonhoeffer’s life but fills in the cracks with shallow assertions. Angel Studios has affirmed that the movie is about the dangers of antisemitism and the necessity to love our neighbors, but its subject is too big for such pleasantries.

Christianity Today is correct in its assertion describing Bonhoeffer as “an empty container into which our own desires pour,” because the real man was complex enough to be easily abused. He’s an antifascist rebel, a pacifist, a conservative, a progressive, a fundamentalist, a secularist, a civil rights icon, and he’s everything you want him to be. However, he was most definitely a Christian, and in a world where that title is so hotly debated it can be challenging to say what they mean.