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In this interview, Ralf Grünke explains how he became involved in politics. He advises Latter-day Saints on how to lessen negative attitudes about the church in their communities. He also relates a touching experience concerning a fellow city council member who initially was hostile toward him. This interview was conducted on June 17, 2021, by Kate Hall, a BYU student majoring in political science and minoring in civic engagement leadership.

Kate Hall: For a little bit of context, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself: where you grew up, went to school, maybe a little bit about your family?

Ralf Grünke: Sure, I was born and raised in the German city of Erlangen. That’s in the region called Franconia, which today, mostly constitutes the northern part of the state of Bavaria. I served a mission in England. My wife is a US citizen, so we spent the first almost four years of our marriage in the United States. I also studied political science. I started at the University of Bamberg, then transferred to BYU, where I got my undergraduate degree with a minor in journalism. Then I returned to Germany and got my graduate degree at the University of Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, to be exact. And ended up getting a PhD in political science from the University of Chemnitz in East Germany. So I’m a political scientist, and I’m an alumnus of your department. I felt flattered and excited to be asked to participate. And as far as my family is concerned, I mentioned my wife. We have three children; two of them have already moved out. And our youngest is about to begin a year abroad in Utah living with relatives this summer.

Kate Hall: Are you a lifelong member, or are you a convert to the church?

Ralf Grünke: Can there be something in between? I was christened Lutheran as a baby, but my parents joined this church when I was only five years old. My grandmother, my paternal grandmother, was baptized in December of 1951. So my dad grew up with a Latter-day Saint mother; however, he remained Lutheran and raised us that way for the first few years of our lives. And I remained on the Lutheran membership records until the age of fourteen, which in Germany is the legal age for individuals to change their religion without parental consent. By international comparison, it’s very young. And my parents took a very liberal approach. I was baptized in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age eight. So I guess technically I carried on a dual membership and then had my name taken off the Lutheran membership records at age fourteen when I could do so without my parents having to sign anything. So for most of my life I have grown up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Kate Hall: When did you first become interested in politics?

Ralf Grünke: April 26, 1986. That was when the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl occurred. I grew up mostly leaning towards Social Democrats, so politically leftist. But my family was mostly apolitical. We never talked about politics at home. But then I noticed that from one day to the next I was told that we couldn’t go to the football grounds or to the playground, or we should stay at home, not go to the woods because of the nuclear disaster and exposure to radioactivity. I noticed that something was going on. The same year I was introduced to a small political party, a party of conservative environmentalists. And I was exposed to their political ideas and decided very early on, also through the influence of some of those activists, that I needed to get involved somehow. And that as a society at large, we need to rethink not only the way we generated energy but also the way we ran the economy and politics at large.

Kate Hall: What was the first public office you ran for or served in, and what made you decide to run?

Ralf Grünke: OK, so for the first eighteen years of my political activities, I was involved in various interest groups, pressure groups, advocacy groups, and that political party. And I left that party for a while, and I returned. So this is a minor party. And when I mean minor, I guess it compares to some of the third parties in the US. I believe the first time I ran for office for them, for the Ecological Democratic Party, as they are called, as I said, conservative environmentalists, was in 2002 for the national election. And then you run for office very well knowing that you have absolutely no chance of being elected. You do so for agenda setting because I felt that the main party candidates ignored some of the issues that some people really cared about. And it gave them an option on the ballot, to vote for someone who represented them and to address those issues.

So that was the first time I ran for office. I ran for the city council in Erlangen, and a little while later, in 2011, that was the time when I had officially left that party. I ran as an independent on a Green Party ballot for the Nidderau City Council, and that’s when I was first elected. And I also ran for state parliament for the same minor party again in 2018. I think those were my campaigns for public office.

Kate Hall: What are all the positions that you have served in in your time of political service?

Ralf Grünke: Well, if you’re talking about public office, then it wasn’t that much. I served a total of one term on the city council of Nidderau in the state of Hesse between 2011 and 2016. If you want to include party offices, I’ve done a lot of different things. At age seventeen I was elected press spokesperson for the county chapter of my party. The county chair was a very reputable and a well-known university professor who told me as a seventeen-year-old high school student that if he received media inquiries and he wasn’t available or if there was a tight deadline that I could just tell them what I thought. The professor said, “Put quotes. Provide quotes,” and attribute them to him. And then he said he could read the next day what his thoughts were on any given issue. So that was one of my first offices. But I’ve been delegated for party conventions on the state level for a while. I was vice chair for part of our county chapters, a treasurer, and a board member. And currently I am on the leadership board of the national party caucus on foreign policy, Europe, and democracy. And I lead the subcaucus, if that term exists, on democracy, and I’m also the spokesperson on democracy issues.

Kate Hall: Were there any specific church teachings that influenced you to become involved?

Ralf Grünke: Well, I think of Doctrine and Covenants 58:26–27, about becoming anxiously engaged in a good cause. I felt that I needed to do that. And it was an obligation and duty and also a marvelous opportunity really, for someone who holds on to the perspectives of the restored gospel to try to promote values that are true and lovely and praiseworthy. So yeah, even when I was very young, I kept returning to that particular passage of scripture.

Kate Hall: Did your religious beliefs affect the party that you chose to affiliate with?

Ralf Grünke: Yes, it did. When I think of various passages, both in the New Testament and particularly in the Doctrine and Covenants but also in the Book of Mormon, it’s clear that as Latter-day Saints we have a sacred task and duty to be wise stewards of the earth and of God’s creation. So it was clear that I wanted to support a party that made that a focus in their politics. And I consider myself a conservative environmentalist. It’s certainly not a leftist issue, but it seems like people—activists—from the political left have hijacked that issue and have run with it. And today I get the impression, particularly talking to my conservative friends in the United States, even more so in Utah, that environmentalism is a bad word because it’s considered to be owned by the left side of the political aisle. I have absolutely no idea why that is.

But in Germany, very simply put, there are two Green Parties. There’s the main green party that right now is head-to-head with Chancellor Merkel and the CDU in the polls, and then there’s the tiny little conservative green party, the Ecological Democratic Party. And because of my faith, I had certain values and views of the family, of faith issues, of the value of religion, of traditions, of our cultural heritage; so I just couldn’t get myself to join a leftist party like the Green Party.

Kate Hall: How do you balance holding church callings, and being involved?

Ralf Grünke: That is a very good question, as if it had been designed for me. When I was called as bishop for the second time—I served as bishop in Eningen and then in Hanover—the stake president interviewed me to call me as bishop right during my campaign for the city council. And my service as bishop and my service on the city council both lasted for five years. They both began around the same time in 2011 and ended around the same time in 2016. And I don’t think I did a very good job balancing the two. It was very challenging to find enough time for both of those and, of course, for my family and for my job.

So that was difficult. It was an unusual situation for members in my ward and in Germany. It happens in Utah all the time that you have members of the church on either side of the spectrum running for political office. But when I ran for the city council, another brother in my ward also ran for the same city council, in the same city, but for another political party.

I ran as an independent on the Green Party ballot. It gets complicated. You can’t truly run as an independent. You always have to affiliate yourself with a party. And he ran as a Social Democrat. And I recommended him, and he was called as one of my counselors in the bishopric. So to German members that was very confusing. And they kept asking, “What do we do? Do we vote for the bishop or for his counselor? Are we obligated to vote for one of them? Are we allowed to vote for one of them? How does this work?”

And these were new experiences for the members. Fortunately, my first counselor who most of these questions were addressed to, who didn’t run for office, said, “There’s no obligation and I’m not voting for either one of them.”

Kate Hall: How does your religion affect your approach to your political positions?

Ralf Grünke: OK, to my political positions. Well, I certainly think that my political positions are formed by my faith. If I’m committed to the idea that all men and women are children of God, then being kind and giving people a fair chance and denying all kinds and forms and shapes of racism, for example, is an obvious conclusion. If I take it further and read in the Pearl of Great Price that all plants and animals have living souls and if I look around and, through the lens of a Latter-day Saint, see sacredness all around me, how can I be careless? How can I assume that we can consume and pollute more and more and celebrate economic growth, even though we know that we have limited national resources that simply cannot be unlimited economic growth?

Now that’s just a few examples of how my religious thoughts inform my political position. I may have reached those political positions without basing them on Latter-day Saint scriptures or teachings of living prophets. But I feel that I have a more firm and clear foundation to do so.

Kate Hall: Did you seek inspiration while making decisions regarding public policy?

Ralf Grünke: Now, yes, I did seek inspiration on how to approach issues. Also, on how to approach relationships with other council members and with political opponents. That may even be more so than policy. It was something that became a matter of inspiration.

Kate Hall: What do you think the relationship between religion and politics should be?

Ralf Grünke: I think politics and religion should, as far as on an institutional level, be clearly separated, which they aren’t in Germany in many ways. But I fully understand that office holders and politicians are human beings and that human beings are informed and influenced by what they believe in outside of the political realm. And I think that’s understandable and perfectly fine, and I would expect that. But as far as the institutional perspective is concerned, I think there should be a clear separation.

Kate Hall: Have you ever faced a conflict between what your religion wants and what your constituents want? And, if so, how did you handle that situation?

Ralf Grünke: I have not experienced that. I have not encountered such conflicts, which probably is due to the nature of local politics. There was never any issue I addressed in local politics where my faith or my church would have given me very clear and obvious direction.

Kate Hall: If there had been a conflict, what do you think you would have done in that situation?

Ralf Grünke: Well, and that would come down to seeking inspiration and then considering my role. I’m always a Latter-day Saint, and I’m always a Christian; I’m always a follower of Christ. But if I’m elected to represent constituents and if I’m elected to seek solutions and compromises, working with other council members or political office holders from other political parties, then I can’t expect them to agree with my religious beliefs. Nor would I expect myself to ignore the nature of my political office and simply restate what official positions of the church have suggested.

Kate Hall: Do you believe that incivility in politics and partisan polarization are problems today? And, if so, how would you suggest that we address these problems?

Ralf Grünke: I think it’s a serious challenge. It seems like you can’t articulate your political opinions in a public setting, maybe on social media or offline, without being harshly criticized, threatened, or otherwise discredited. I’ve experienced that myself. I’ve been involved in politics and political discussions online and noticed that there was name-calling. There were threats that my private address was posted online so that political opponents could intimidate me. That’s a serious issue. What do we do about it?

I don’t have any good solutions. I’ve done research on political extremism, and it coincides with that, because it seems like the political spectrum is opening and more and more people tend to go to either extreme. In the past, the solution was to carefully listen, to take people seriously, and to maybe consider some of their positions and meet them halfway. Such was the case in the late 1980s, early 1990s, in Germany, when a far-right political party started to have successes. Funnily enough, they called themselves the Republicans, which has nothing to do with the American Republicans. And I wrote my dissertation on their rise and fall and on the treatment of them by mainstream political parties. The fact that some of their positions were considered and incorporated led to serious decline of support, and today they have no significance at all. But today, particularly in East Germany, which has a longer history of dictatorship-like regimes, a significant portion of the population have turned their backs on Western democracy, democratic values, civility, and basic expectations towards kindness and courtesy. And that concerns me.

I think that political education and allowing a broad spectrum of opinions to be voiced and exchanged helps to some degree. But as I just said, I fear that we are losing, or that we’ve already lost, a significant portion of the population, and I can’t tell you how to get them back. And I’m not sure if that’s just exclusively a German phenomenon.

Kate Hall: Do you believe that Latter-day Saints can belong to different political parties and still be faithful members of the church?

Ralf Grünke: The answer to this question is very obvious—namely, yes of course. President [Dallin H.] Oaks has emphasized that in his most recent conference talk from what I can recall. But it’s so obvious. The political spectrum among Latter-day Saints being active in politics, whether or not they’ve ever won an election or held political office or public office, is much broader [in Europe] than it is in Utah. I know Latter-day Saints or I have come across Latter-day Saints who are active in conservative parties, the Social Democrat Party, the former Communist Party, the Free Democrats, the Green Party, my little party, far right, far left, anything back and forth, if at all. And I don’t know if there’s been any research done, any quantitative research on the issue; but I get the impression that on continental Europe, church members tend to lean towards the political left. So the long and short of it is obviously yes.

Kate Hall: What lessons have you learned about politics that you would like to share with young Latter-day Saints considering an involvement in politics?

Ralf Grünke: Yeah. Do get involved. Do find like-minded people and do your research and learn what your conclusions and positions are on a certain issue. Try to make a difference. I learned very early that you can make a difference. I think, other than starting to attend party meetings, my first time assuming leadership in a community in a political setting was when I was fourteen. I started a local citizen group to prevent a local community playground and football ground from being lost to parking for cars in the neighborhood. There was a shortage of playgrounds and opportunities to be out there and to play football or meet with friends. And I had some pretty powerful opponents who wanted, for economic profit, to build those parking garages and the parking lot. And I was just a fourteen-year-old, with the help of a few neighbors who, with my mom’s typewriter, started writing leaflets; and this was in 1986–1987.

And at that young age, I gave my first radio interview—I remember that still—and made it to the newspaper, and we won the battle. No parking garages were built, and I continued to have a place to meet friends to play football. And I continued like that, with a few other things. So, if you have something that you’re passionate about, speak up. And sometimes you will fail terribly. I could also give examples of where I put great effort and sacrificed lots of time and money and resources to promote a certain cost, and I was not successful at all. But at a young age, I had a number of experiences that showed me that it’s well worth it to speak up on issues you care about.

Kate Hall: Is there anything else that you would like to share that we haven’t necessarily talked about yet?

Ralf Grünke: Well, I’m not entirely sure who’s going to read this and who is going to consider the information you’ve gathered. But, particularly in Europe, where the reputation of the church is such that it’s often considered an American church or a cult, other members of the church feel like they’re constantly in the position of having to justify themselves for belonging to a church that is viewed by many as odd or strange or even dangerous or problematic in some way. The perspective changes completely if you decide to get involved. I moved here to the Hesse, to the Frankfurt area, some fifteen years ago. And one of the first things I did was to volunteer for a community project. There is a project—actually it’s more of an art project––by a Cologne-based artist by the name of Gunter Demling. It’s called Stumbling Stones, or Stolpersteine, and it’s the world’s largest decentralized memorial for victims of the Nazi dictatorship. It’s small memorial plaques, metal plaques, put on the sidewalk of the last voluntary places of residence of both Jewish victims and other victims of the Nazi dictatorship. I volunteered to organize and coordinate the implementation of that project in the place I just moved to. And immediately I was connected to members of various political parties, religious groups, community groups—those who are active in the community. And if anyone tried to discredit me on the basis of my religion, people would just laugh at them because they’ve gotten to know me otherwise.

It was once tried when I ran for the city council. A member of the Green Party tried to discredit me because I was a “Mormon” and “a member of a homophobic group.” And the local Green Party chapter wrote to that guy who later became a member of state parliament and said that they know Ralf Grünke. They know that he has coordinated the Stumbling Stones, that he is an active member of the local chapter of Friends of the Earth and various other community projects. And they will not allow anyone to try to discredit my character or mischaracterize my character based on religious beliefs, which are an entirely private matter as far as they were concerned. So, yes, if I can give that advice, if at all, we need a lot more Latter-day Saints, who get involved in not just running for office, but in community and political and public life.

Kate Hall: Is there anything else that you would like to share, or are there any stories that you have?

Ralf Grünke: Not that I can think of right now. All right, I’ll tell you another story, because I mentioned that sometimes it’s a matter of inspiration on how to deal with political opponents. When I was first elected to the city council and assigned to represent my party group in the Infrastructure and Building Committee, there was a conservative member of the committee who apparently didn’t think much of me. He basically attacked me on a very personal level during every committee session and any chance he could during planetary sessions of the city council. And people asked me afterwards, what I have done to that guy for him to be so spiteful towards me, and I didn’t know.

Later on I learned through third parties that he felt somewhat threatened. He was at retirement age. He had spent most of his spare time serving in the community and on the city council. And he felt uncomfortable having a young guy with a PhD on the city council who challenged his leadership position, generally speaking. But anyway, having been attacked for a while, questioning my intelligence, my character, my integrity, I discussed the matter with my wife. And she said, “Well, Jesus tells us to love our enemies. You’ve never had enemies before. Now you have one, so you can just do what Jesus says and love him and pray for him and bless him.”

My wife is a very good counselor to me when it comes to important issues. So I did start praying for that fellow council member by name. I made it a point both publicly and privately, when we passed by each other, to point out the things we agreed on, to praise him for the detailed research—he was a very hard-working member of the city council—and to be as kind as I possibly could be.

And his entire behavior and conduct towards me changed and completely reversed. It wasn’t a sudden moment. It took a while, but after about a half a year, my city council buddies didn’t ask me what I had done to the guy and why he was so spiteful towards me, but they asked me if I had maybe married his daughter. They asked me what happened because he was particularly kind and gracious and complimentary and thanked me for my contributions during the committee meetings. And I’m sure it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes we’ll do everything we possibly can to be disciples of Christ and to show kindness to others, and we will still receive a hateful response. But that doesn’t change my or our personal responsibility to follow Christ.