Remembering Collective Shame

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

This column requires a caveat: I am not an American citizen and
therefore neither a Republican nor a Democrat. But as a German
residing permanently in the United States I believe I have a duty to
opine on at least one aspect of the upcoming elections – the question
whether years from now Americans will have to wrestle with collective
shame, just as I have had to deal with collective shame over what has
happened in Germany in my childhood for my entire life.

It was West Germany’s first postwar president, Theodor Heuss, who
coined the phrase, “collective shame” contrasting it with the notion
of collective guilt, which he rejected. No, I cannot be expected to
feel guilty for crimes the Nazis committed while I was still in
elementary school. But as a bearer of a German passport I have never
ceased feeling ashamed because three years before I was born German
voters elected leaders planning the annihilation of millions of
innocent people.

I am certain that in 1933 most Germans did not find the Nazis’ anti-
Semitic rhetoric particularly attractive. What made them choose
Hitler, then? It was the economy, stupid, and presumably injured
national pride, and similar issues. This came to mind as I read the
latest Faith in Life poll of issues Americans in general and white
evangelicals in particular consider “very important” in this year’s
elections.

Guess what? For both groups, the economy ranked first, while abortion
was way down the list. Among Americans in general abortion took ninth
and among white evangelicals seventh place, well below gas prices and
healthcare. Now, it’s true that most evangelicals still believe that
abortion should be illegal, which is where they differ from the
general public and, astonishingly, from Roman Catholics even though
their own church continues to fight valiantly against the ongoing mass
destruction of unborn life. Still, 54 percent of Catholics and 60
percent of young Catholics have declared themselves “pro choice,”
according to the Faith in Life researchers.

What I am going to say next is going to make me many enemies, of this
I am sure: Yes, there is a parallel here between what has happened in
Germany in 1933 and what is happening in America now. The legalized
murder of 40 million fetuses since Roe v. Wade in 1973 will one day
cause collective shame of huge proportions. So what this wasn’t a
“holocaust?” This term should remain reserved for another horror in
history. But a genocide has been happening in the last 35 years, even
if no liberators have shocked the world with photographs they snapped
of the victims as the Allies did in Germany in 1945. And it has the
open support of politicians running for office next month.

If most Americans, and shockingly even a majority of Catholics think
physicians should have the “right” to suck babies’ brains out so that
their skulls will collapse making it easy for these abortionists to
drag their tiny bodies through the birth canal; if even most white
evangelicals think that economic woes are a more important concerns
(78 percent) than legalized mass murder (57 percent), then surely a
moral lobotomy has been performed on this society.

I agree it would be unscholarly to claim that what is happening in
America and much of the Western world every day is “another
holocaust.” No two historical events are exactly identical. So let’s
leave the word “holocaust” where it belongs – next to Auschwitz,
Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen. Still there are compelling parallels
between today’s genocide and the Nazi crimes, for example:

Man presumes do decide which lives are worthy of living and which
are not. “Lebensunwertes Leben” (life unworthy of living) was a Nazi
“excuse” for killing mentally handicapped children and adults, a crime
that preceded the holocaust committed against the Jews. Notice that
today fetuses diagnosed with Downs Syndrome are often aborted as a
matter of course in America and Europe.

In German-occupied territories, Jews and Gypsies were gassed
for no other reason than that some people considered it inconvenient
to have them around. Today, unborn children are often slaughtered
because it is inconvenient for their mothers to bring their
pregnancies to term.

Murder is legally defined as killing another human being
with malice and aforethought. The Nazis killed Jewish and Gypsies with
deliberation – and maliciously. But what are we to think of babies
being killed deliberately simply because they would be a nuisance if
they were allowed to live? No malice here?

Ordinary Germans of the Nazi era were rightly chastised for
not having come to their Jewish neighbors’ rescue when they were
rounded up and sent to extermination camps. Ordinary Americans and
Western Europeans might find the fad to kill babies disagreeable, but
as we see from the Faith in Life poll, most have more pressing concerns.

Some future day Americans and Western Europeans will be asked why they
allowed their children to be slaughtered. They would even have less of
an excuse than Germans of my grandparents’ and parents’ generation. In
Germany, you risked your life if you dared to come to the Jews’
rescue. In today’s democracies the worst that can happen to you is
being ridiculed for being “a Christian.”

As a foreigner I have no right to tell Americans whom to elect on Nov.
Recently, though, a friend asked me: “If you worked in an office
and a colleague asked you at the voter cooler, whom he should vote for
what would you tell him?” Well, I would say: “I am not here to make
up your mind for you. But personally I could never give my vote to so-
called pro-choice candidates.”

This would doubtless lead to a heated postmodern dialogue. Perhaps the
colleague is not a Christian; he might chastise me for mixing politics
and religion. “If you as a Christian oppose abortion,” he could say,
“then by all means don’t get involved in an abortion, just don’t
impose your religious views on the rest of us.” How would I answer
that? An evangelical might yank out his Bible and quote passages
pertaining to this issue. But to a non-Christian the Bible is
meaningless; I am not sure a political debate around the water cooler
is a great venue to start individual evangelization.

My Lutheran approach would be different. I would argue natural law,
the law God has written upon the hearts of all human beings, including
non-believers. Unless they really have undergone a moral lobotomy they
should be open to this story: Down in Wichita, Kansas, there is a
physician by the name of George Tiller. On his website he boasts that
he has already performed 60,000 abortions, mostly late-term, and week
after week he is killing 100 more unborn babies.

Dr. Tiller does not think of these fetuses as clusters of cancerous
cells. He knows they are human because he baptizes some of them before
he incinerates them in his own crematorium. You don’t baptize non-
humans. Dr. Tiller knows that. He is a practicing Lutheran. His former
congregation, Holy Cross of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod,
excommunicated him as an unrepentant sinner. But the Lutheran Church
of the Reformation, which belongs to the ELCA, communes him. Did I
mention that he kills 100 human beings every week and has already done
away with 60.000? Sixty thousand! In Nuremberg they hanged some fiends
for murdering less than 60 -- zero point one percent of Tiller’s toll.
Perhaps this little tale will give even non-believers pause if they
have not discarded their conscience, known to Christians as the law
God has written upon every man’s heart. One day, of this I am certain,
this will indeed result in collective shame – and God knows what other
horrible consequences.

Uwe Siemon-Netto Ph.D., D.Litt.
Director
Center for Lutheran
Theology & Public Life
801 Seminary Place
St. Louis, MO 63105