Maren Freudenberg on “titel, thesen, temperamente” and “Tag für Tag”

Maren Freudenberg was interviewed for the 10.11.2024 edition of the ARD program “titel, thesen, temperamente”. The sociologist of religion gave an assessment of the significance of Donald Trump's election as the 47th President of the United States for conservative evangelicals. For the 81% of white evangelicals who voted for him out of deep religious conviction, Trump is part of biblical prophecies that herald the imminent return of Jesus to earth. Freudenberg came to this conclusion in the context of a report on a film about Dietrich Bonhoeffer that was recently released in the USA and was produced by conservative evangelicals.

In the movie “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin”, the theologian and Nazi resistance fighter is historically misrepresented and ideologically appropriated in order to spread an image of him established in right-wing conservative circles in the USA as a kind of ultra-conservative Christian of an evangelical persuasion. Right-wing conservative publicists relate this narrative to the fact that the church in the USA today must take a stand against the decline in values for which liberals and left-wingers in American society are supposedly responsible. Bonhoeffer's descendants massively criticized the production. The participation of German actors such as Moritz Bleibtreu and August Diehl in the film has also caused criticism in cultural and academic circles.

You can watch the ttt program here: https://www.daserste.de/information/wissen-kultur/ttt/sendung/Kampf-um-Bonhoeffer-100.html

In the Deutschlandfunk program “Tag für Tag”, Freudenberg also recently explained the role of white supremacy in the worldview of US Christian right-wingers and looked at the connection between racist ideas of superiority and Christian claims to power from a historical perspective and in the context of the presidential elections on November 5. The contribution focuses on evangelicalism and Donald Trump's promise to “Make America Pray again” as a variation of his MAGA slogan.

You can listen to it at the following link and Freudenberg's assessment from min. 5:30:
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/donald-trump-und-die-evangelikalen-make-america-pray-again-dlf-698be9d9-100.html