Eric Metaxas

Eric Metaxas (b. 1963) is a Yale-educated author whose 2010 biography 'Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy' (Thomas Nelson) became a bestseller in evangelical circles and a widely-cited intellectual touchstone for justifying evangelical political activism. It sold over one million copies. The book's central distortion — documented extensively by Bonhoeffer scholars including Clifford Green, Victoria Barnett, and others — was representing Bonhoeffer as an evangelical culture-war conservative: pro-life, orthodox in the sense that American evangelicals use the term, and resistant to liberal theology in ways that mapped onto American evangelical battles against progressive Christianity. Bonhoeffer was in fact a German Lutheran pastor whose theology was deeply ecumenical, who engaged critically with American evangelical fundamentalism when he visited in the 1930s (finding it shallow and politically disengaged), and whose opposition to Nazism was rooted in a theology of Christian responsibility to the state quite different from the Constantinian framework Metaxas's career advances. The distortion's political function was precise: by casting Bonhoeffer as the patron saint of evangelical resistance to liberal cultural power, Metaxas gave evangelical audiences a historical narrative in which they were the heroic resisters and secular liberalism was the Nazi threat. This inversion — in which the heirs of state church power frame themselves as an oppressed resistance movement — became a central theme of evangelical political theology in the Trump era. Metaxas delivered the National Prayer Breakfast address in 2012, in the presence of President Obama — using the occasion to deliver a pointed anti-abortion message. He has been a fellow at the King's College (New York), a prominent evangelical institution. His Trump support was explicit and escalating: he endorsed Trump enthusiastically in 2016, dismissed the Access Hollywood tape as irrelevant, and by 2020 was publicly declaring that Trump had won the election and urging Christian resistance to the 'steal,' telling Trump on air in November 2020 that he would be happy to die in the fight, and, according to Rod Dreher, saying in a December 2020 interview that 'we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood.' Metaxas represents the intellectual infrastructure of Christian nationalism: providing pseudo-historical and pseudo-theological frameworks that make authoritarian political loyalty legible as Christian discipleship.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Anti-Democratic
• Political Strategy

Connections from Eric Metaxas

• influenced → 2016 Election: The Machine Delivers (2016) — Eric Metaxas, who was not a member of the campaign's evangelical advisory board, was among the evangelical intellectuals and media figures who publicly championed Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and presidency. He endorsed Trump explicitly, dismissed the Access Hollywood tape as irrelevant, and delivered cultural-war framing that positioned Trump support as Christian duty. By 2020 he was declaring Trump the rightful winner of the election and urging Christians to 'fight to the last drop of blood.' Metaxas's function was to supply the intellectual and pseudo-historical scaffolding — via his distorted Bonhoeffer biography — that made authoritarian political loyalty legible as Christian resistance. Du Mez documents his role as part of the evangelical intellectual infrastructure that produced and sustained Trump-era Christian nationalism.

Connections to Eric Metaxas

• The Family / C Street (Fellowship Foundation) promoted (2012) — Eric Metaxas delivered the keynote at the 60th National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, 2012, with President Obama present. Christianity Today noted that the Fellowship puts on the breakfast while staying in the background. Metaxas used the address to press an anti-abortion argument framed through Bonhoeffer's Germany.

Sources

• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 250–265
• Bonhoeffer Banalized: A Review of Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer Biography — Clifford Green and Victoria Barnett (2010)
• Eric Metaxas Is Warping Bonhoeffer's Legacy — The Atlantic (2020)