Blood guilt and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The fallout from the “conservative rift over anti-Semitism” continues, with Princeton professor Robert P. George announcing his resignation from the Heritage Foundation’s board on Monday. This follows other resignations and departures from Heritage, including the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. And while much of the attention has rightly focused on the changes at Heritage, the figure at the center of the controversy, political commentator Tucker Carlson, continues working to position himself in what increasingly appears to be a watershed moment for the conservative movement.

What began as a sympathetic interview with the white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes has become a flashpoint in the future of significant political institutions and alliances. On the one side are those who want to frame the debate about foreign policy and purport to be just asking the questions that no one else has the courage to ask about the relationship between the United States and Israel. On the other side are those who discern a much more malignant motive on the part of those, including Carlson, who are interrogating what have until very recently been deeply held principles in the conservative movement.

Much more needs to be said about this broader context, of course, and things continue to develop quickly. But a helpful snapshot is found in the Nov. 12 episode of The Tucker Carlson Show. This episode gained attention in part because of a brief comment Carlson made about the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945). Carlson was discussing the elevated rhetoric surrounding so many of our political conflicts in America today, including the increasingly widespread use of the so-called reductio ad Hitlerum. The point, says Carlson, is that this kind of rhetoric not only welcomes but seems to require violence.

He argued that shooting people becomes “inevitable once we decide that people are Nazis.” Carlson then referenced Bonhoeffer, criticizing him for his role in the plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer “was a great man in many ways,” said Carlson, but his critique was direct.

It is worth noting that this was a kind of sidebar comment from Carlson. Perhaps he realized as he was saying it that criticizing Bonhoeffer is not likely to be a winning strategy. Or perhaps it simply was a point that was peripheral to his larger purpose and not worth pursuing. But within the larger scope of the episode, the relevance of Bonhoeffer becomes a bit clearer.

We must clear the confusion. Bonhoeffer did not abandon Christianity or decide that it was “not enough” and move beyond it to embrace violence. He did reckon with the moral and spiritual weight of his involvement in the anti-Nazi conspiracy. But it was ultimately his Christian commitments that drove him to take action. Bonhoeffer’s choice was neither easy nor inevitable, and it involved great personal sacrifice. Carlson’s critique of Bonhoeffer is really a distraction, however, and one that Carlson quickly moves away from, as it really does not support his contemporary agenda.

And what is that agenda? The details remain to be seen, perhaps, but it is becoming clearer that Carlson is attempting to lead the vanguard of a new “America first” movement that arises in a post-Trump era. A key plank of this advocacy is disentangling the United States from interventions abroad, and particularly from supporting the nation of Israel. Despite his appeals to non-violence, peace, compassion, and charity, Carlson depicts his interlocutors as embracing identity politics, essentially the same ethno-nationalist views as the Nazis. Marc Levin and Ben Shapiro, according to Carlson, adhere to a “blood guilt” perspective that dehumanizes Israel’s opponents. Carlson invokes this “blood guilt” trope repeatedly in the episode, even as he calls the nation of Israel “irrelevant” and denies the significance of Nazis today. At one point following his reference to Bonhoeffer, Carlson says that there are no Nazis now: “Nazis have been gone for 80 years.”

Carlson does explicitly protest against anti-Semitism. “Decent people are not anti-Semitic,” he says. “Christians are universalist in their thinking,” and indeed, “No sincere Christian could be an anti-Semite.” So Carlson himself disavows anti-Semitism. But at the same time, he thinks that the continued existence of the nation of Israel is “irrelevant.” As Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948 asserted, however, “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.”

Carlson wants to sharply limit the international scope of American governmental action and is critical of much of the current administration’s activity abroad, including the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the conflict with the Maduro regime in Venezuela. But even as Carlson disclaims anti-Semitism, he accuses those like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro (as well as many others) of being more loyal to Israel than to the United States and of holding a “blood guilt” ideology. And as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines it, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism include “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”

The rift, Carlson says, is between two different visions of foreign policy, either “Israel First” or “America First.” As others have noted, though, the dispute cannot simply be reduced to policy arguments. They really are about deeper principles and commitments. And even on Carlson’s own terms, the dispute really is about whether the nation of Israel has a right, claim, or ability to continue to exist. Carlson says that such concerns are “irrelevant” at best. But the dozens of American citizens who were murdered on October 7, 2023, and the others who were kidnapped belie Carlson’s claims. “America first” does not necessarily mean “America only,” especially when the interests of American citizens themselves, including Christians who are called to certain kinds of universalist sympathies and human solidarity, rightly extend far beyond our own borders.