Dietrich Bonhoeffer traveled twice to the United States of America, first for a full academic year in 1930–31 and again much more briefly in the summer of 1939. While much had happened in Bonhoeffer's life in the years between his two trips to America, his judgment of American Christianity remained much the same. That judgment was remarkably negative, centering on his belief that the church in America utterly failed to preach the Gospel. In Bonhoeffer's America: A Land without Reformation, Joel Looper has provided an account of Bonhoeffer's interpretation of American Christianity and theology, grounded in a historical account of Bonhoeffer's time in the United States.

Bonhoeffer's America is divided into three sections with two chapters in each section. The first section focuses on Bonhoeffer's fellowship year in New York City in 1930–31, including detailed analyses of the courses he took at Union Theological Seminary and the professors with whom he studied. Also examined are important texts Bonhoeffer read during his time in America, especially Thomas Cuming Hall's book The Religious Background of American Culture, published in 1930. The second section turns to Bonhoeffer's own analysis of American Protestantism, focusing on his essay, “Protestantism without Reformation,” which he wrote shortly after returning to Germany from his short 1939 sojourn in New York. The third section is titled “Objections,” and provides two possible objections to the claim that Bonhoeffer maintained a negative interpretation of American Protestant Christianity to the end of his life. The first “objection” focuses on Bonhoeffer's encounter with African-American Christianity at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. The second objection refers to Bonhoeffer's prison writings. The question here is whether in his theological reflections in Tegel Prison Bonhoeffer's thought changed to such an extent that he “effectively abandoned his critique of American theology. . . .” (162) In other words, did the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters finally come to agree with the liberalism of his Union Theological Seminary teachers, which he had found so vapid during his time in New York?

Looper argues persuasively that Bonhoeffer's critique of American Protestantism was really a critique of white American Protestantism. Bonhoeffer thought the Gospel was almost entirely absent in the white American church, but the story of African-American Christianity was different. It was at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem that Bonhoeffer believed he finally heard the Gospel preached in this country. The first “objection” thus holds, in that by Bonhoeffer's own reckoning the African-American church provides a counterexample to his claim that the Gospel was not preached in American Protestant churches. As for the second objection, Looper contends that the Bonhoeffer of Tegel Prison did not shift his theological sensibilities in such as a way as to retract his earlier critique of American theology. Looper is among those Bonhoeffer scholars who read Bonhoeffer's prison writings in continuity with his earlier work, rather than in radical discontinuity.

This book is to be commended for attending to the development of Bonhoeffer's thought over time. Looper is not content merely with pointing out what Bonhoeffer said at a moment in time, but instead examines how Bonhoeffer changed his mind during his career. What this means is that Looper ends up examining a wide range of Bonhoeffer's writings, and not only his work on American Protestantism. Indeed, Looper ventures into broader questions that have occupied Bonhoeffer scholars for generations. But the question of how Bonhoeffer continued to think about American Protestantism resurfaces throughout the book as a kind of hermeneutical key. Topics are picked up insofar as they shed light on this issue. The payoff is that Looper finds Bonhoeffer speaking directly to the Protestant church in America today. The problems which beset American Protestantism today, whether on the right or on the left, are problems Bonhoeffer diagnosed more than 80 years ago. The lessons are clear, as Looper sees it, if only we read Bonhoeffer as a critic of the American church.

At times this reader wonders whether Looper is reading his own Hauerwasian-inflected ecclesiological convictions into Bonhoeffer's writings, rather than discovering them there. This tendency surfaces here and there throughout the book, but to give a single example, at one point Looper quotes Bonhoeffer's famous letter written to Reinhold Niebuhr in 1939, declaring his intention to return to Germany during its time of trial rather than remain in safety in America. In this letter, Bonhoeffer discusses willing the defeat of Germany “in order that Christian civilization may survive. . . .” (86) Looper's gloss on this statement is that “It should be noted that, though Bonhoeffer says ‘Christian civilization,’ his concern is not the survival of the West and his country's threat to it. His concern, a concern for which he is still searching for language, is that the politics of the church are lived out publicly.” (218, n.103)

Now, perhaps that assertion is true, but one would like to be given more reason to believe it. No doubt Looper would have a compelling response, but here and elsewhere, the danger in Bonhoeffer scholarship is always to read into Bonhoeffer's more enigmatic statements what we would like to believe he said.

But this is a minor point. More important is that Looper has provided a persuasive account of Bonhoeffer's encounter with, and interpretation of, Protestant theology in America. As depicted here, Bonhoeffer becomes a kind of theological de Tocqueville, an outsider who can help American Protestant Christians better understand themselves. Those of us interested in theology and church life in America have much to learn from this book, as does anyone interested in Bonhoeffer's theology in general. For, as Looper helpfully demonstrates, Bonhoeffer's account of American Protestantism provides an illuminating window into his thought as a whole.