If They Had Met in Prison…

In a bin of used books, a copy of Adolf Hitler’s infamous Mein Kampf caught my eye. Curious, I thumbed through the pages and read this:

“No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race…Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of cultured people…Everything we admire on this earth today–science and art, technology and inventions–is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race.”

And thus we have World War Two, with the extermination of six million Jews in an attempt to purify the nation.

But Hitler, albeit in repulsive terms, simply described why people hate, vilify, and kill those different from themselves. It doesn’t matter who those “others” are; if not Jews, they are the gays, trans, immigrants, Blacks, Hispanic, Asian…whoever. They are a threat to “our way of life,” whatever that is. If Hitler had lived in the US in the 50’s or 60’s, he would have walked out of “Island in the Sun” or “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” movies where interracial couples kissed onscreen.

A little-known fact about Mein Kampf is that Hitler began writing it while in Landsberg prison because of a failed coup. It was as if it gave him time to focus his hatred as he perpetuated the myth of Aryan superiority.

An interesting contrast is what another man wrote from a prison cell decades after the Fuhrer.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., imprisoned in a Birmingham jail, reflected on the violence generated by whites wanting to preserve segregation. In his famous letter penned in that cell, he summarized a vision that was in stark contrast to Hitler’s.

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

I wonder what would have happened if time and culture compressed, and the two men shared a prison cell together, just the two of them.

Hitler would have been adamant about the rule of “Nature” as he called it. King would have been equally adamant about the demands of God’s kingdom. Would Hitler have been capable of hearing the articulation, brilliance, compassion, and strength of character of Dr. King? Would he have been moved, at least microscopically, to reconsider things? Hitler’s mental illness would have probably blinded him, but who knows?

Dr. King, on the other hand, would have used the time to better understand the pain, and resulting hate, that motivated his cellmate; he was, after all, well acquainted with the “Bull” Connors of life. He wouldn’t have argued as much as listened and questioned. He would have been moved by compassion for this tortured, and dangerous, person. He would have embodied a life that included instead of excluded. What else might he have done?

We who dare follow Christ always find ourselves with cellmates scarred by their own pain and hoping that some political gospel or messiah will save them. How will we respond? However we do so, it is because we believe what another prisoner once wrote: “Christ is our peace…With his body he broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us.” (Ephesians 2:14)