In retrospect, one feature of that prison environment stands out: the guards and prisoners whose irreligion so shook Bonhoeffer were all men. Christianity across most of the world, since the eighteenth century at least, has been predominantly a women’s religion. Patriarchal Christians, among whom we have to include Bonhoeffer, have often worried that this makes Christianity seem weak. The post-war prophets of religionless Christianity, like most radicals before the arrival of new-wave feminism in the 1970s, were men. Their quest for revolutionary relevance was very masculine. There is an instructive contrast with twentieth-century Chinese Christianity, which (as we shall see) embraced its huge numerical preponderance of women and thrived as a result. Religionless Christianity was a stirring vision. Attempts to put it into practice, however, both denied the lived reality of its believers and treated faithful pew-fillers with presumption and disdain rather than recognizing them as their community’s lifeblood.

We must take very seriously that concept of love which, in Christianity, is the rehabilitation of the wrongly-accused victim. This is both anthropological truth and Christian truth. And I think that this anthropological truth can give Christianity the anthropology that it deserves. Traditionally, Christian theology, while correct in itself, has been based on an erroneous anthropology: Greek anthropology, a pagan anthropology, which fails to see the responsibility of human beings for violence. I believe that this anthropology can finally provide Christian theology with an anthropology of which it is worthy.

Christianity did not ‘cause’ slavery, anymore than Christianity 'caused’ the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion’s share of American history. That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, 'the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime’ […] gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.