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A Satanist Reads the Bible continues today with our series on the rising threat of Christian fascism in America. Today we’ll be looking at the thought of two Christians, one early 20th century German and one from our own day, respectively, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Metaxas.
We’ll start with a reminder of what exactly we mean by fascism: authoritarian ultra-nationalism, often with a highly racist component, devoted to a mythical past which justifies social hierarchies, and authority vested in a strongman leader. Fascism is not a political ideology among others; it is a rejection of the political as a category in favor of rule by strength. Because it has no values beyond the nation-state, it is incredibly dangerous, capable of consolidating and weaponizing the worst human tendencies. The fascist regimes of the 20th century resulted in the worst atrocities in human history: World War Two and the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews and somewhere between 5 and 6 million members of other minority groups were systematically murdered by the German state. Placed in the context of modern technology, it is among the greatest threats to human peace and prosperity that we presently face. Its aim to nullify the intelligibility of the world and to make the world intelligible only in terms of the state frames it as a fundamental moral evil—not evil in opposition to what Christian conservatives call good but rather evil in opposition to the Good itself.
Among its proponents in our era is the conservative pundit Eric Metaxas. Metaxas, born in 1963, was raised in the Christian tradition of Greek Orthodoxy and is presently a non-denominational evangelical. He graduated from Yale in 1984 with a degree in English and went on to work as a writer, eventually leading him to write episodes for the Christian children’s show VeggieTales.
VeggieTales first aired in 1993, featuring anthropomorphic talking fruits and vegetables and presenting moralizing narratives from a Christian viewpoint. Phil Vischer, who created the show, is another evangelical, though one of quite a different bent than Metaxas. Vischer was forced out of the VeggieTales franchise in 2004 and has since started a YouTube channel in which he argues for, among other things, antiracism (Vischer, 2020). I don’t know the full extent of his views but his takes on that topic are insightful, thoughtful, informed, and compassionate. That said, some of the storylines for VeggieTales were quite bizarre, including one (“Rack, Shack, and Benny” from 1995) in which characters who refuse to worship an idol are immolated, though God intervenes to save them from death, mirroring the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Book of Daniel.
Metaxas now enjoys popularity as a public speaker in Christian evangelical circles, and he has a radio show, The Eric Metaxas Show, peppered with transphobic rants and claims supporting the Big Lie that a supposed victory by Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election was subverted by a conspiracy on the part of the American Democratic Party. His broader narrative is aimed at painting America as a nation inching towards fascism—the fascism of what he calls the American Left, though by this he is referring less to America’s actual socialists and leftists than to its majority of centrist liberals. He compared the government response to the violent January 6th insurrection, in which protestors attempted to prevent the government from affirming the election victory of President Joe Biden, to the Reichstag fire in Germany in 1933, which the Nazi-led German government used to institute new laws to suppress dissent.
In an interview in The Atlantic, Metaxas commented
I wasn’t in D.C. for the Capitol riots. But I was blown away at how instantly anybody who supported Trump—which is, you know, half the country—was demonized as potential white domestic terrorists. I just thought, Holy cow. What am I, in Nazi Germany? This is really sick. That’s not what we do in America.
(in Green, 2021)
It’s worth noting here that Trump himself has advocated for terrorist tactics against his political opponents. This is an empirical fact, not a difference of opinion. In an article for Mother Jones entitled “National Security Experts Warn Trump ‘Is Promoting Terrorism,'” national affairs editor Mark Follman (2020) writes
In the waning days of his presidency, Donald Trump is engaged in a deliberate campaign of terrorism aimed at Americans who oppose him politically. That description of his actions is neither a metaphor nor hyperbole—it is the assessment of veteran national security experts, whose view of the political violence being stoked by the outgoing president is echoed by law enforcement and political leaders.
Metaxas believes that America is becoming fascist in that it is suppressing political dissent, but there are two major problems with that line of thinking. One, suppression of political dissent is a necessary condition of fascism but not a sufficient one—all fascist states suppress dissent, but not all states which suppress dissent are necessarily fascist.
Two, what Metaxas is referring to as “suppression of dissent” is merely people disagreeing with claims he and others have made, claims which are demonstrably wrong and dangerous. After the Reichstag fire, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending many civil liberties, including freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Mass arrests of suspected communists and other political opponents of the Nazis followed. Then the Enabling Act was passed, allowing the German Cabinet, led by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the parliament or President Paul von Hindenburg. Nothing at all like that has been launched in response to the January 6th insurrection. Only a measure increasing security at the Capitol was passed into law, a measure which was clearly warranted given the event itself.
In 2022, Metaxas published a book, Letter to the American Church, in which he argues that the American church is going in the direction of the German Evangelical Church, which supported and enabled the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. In the introduction, he writes
Throughout this book I will touch on some of the issues we are facing, but let us here say that it is something almost unprecedented: the emergence of ideas and forces that ultimately are at war with God Himself. It’s easy to see this with regard to Germany in the 1930s, when we think of the death camps and the murder of so many millions, but we need to understand that in the beginning they had no idea where it was leading, and had no idea they were facing nothing less than the forces of anti-Christ. We are now facing those same forces in different guises. But the extent of it is even worse than it was ninety years ago, because those forces do not have an agenda that is hyper-nationalistic, as in Germany, but that is actually anti-nationalistic—which is to say that it is globalist.
First of all, anti-nationalist fascism is a completely incoherent concept. Beyond that, Metaxas doesn’t clarify what he means by “globalist” here or anywhere else in the book. It’s a term that can refer to advocacy for free trade, open borders, and international cooperation, but we also see it used in the contemporary public sphere as a pejorative with anti-Semitic connotations. An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Sommer, 2018) describes its use as a dog whistle, a term which seems innocuous to casual observers but which has a hidden, often racist meaning for those in the know. The article, written by Alison Kaplan Sommer, points out that “globalist” is especially prone to this double-meaning when contraposed against nationalism, exactly as Metaxas has done. Sommer writes
…the term “globalist” echoes the ideology of Adolf Hitler, who fomented against the Jews as “international elements[“] that “conduct their business everywhere,” thus harming and undermining good people who are “bounded to their soil, to the Fatherland.”
This usage originates largely with political strategist Steve Bannon (ibid.), whom Metaxas interviewed for his show on 21 December, 2020.
Elsewhere in the introduction to Letter to the American Church, Metaxas writes
Critical Race Theory—which is atheistic and Marxist—and radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies are all inescapably anti-God and anti-human. So they are dedicatedly at war with the ideas of family and marriage, and with the idea of America as a force for good—as a force for spreading the Gospel and Gospel values throughout the world…. As Stalin and Hitler and Mao would butcher millions in the name of fighting for “the people,” so these forces do the same and are angling to do much, much more of the same—if we will allow them the time to strengthen themselves, if we do not fight with all our might and main against them right now.
This is completely absurd. Critical race theory might observe how religion has been used as a tool of systemic oppression but has nothing to say on theological questions themselves, and while it overlaps substantially with Marxism, it isn’t itself strictly Marxist in nature. What Metaxas calls “radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies” reduce to bodily autonomy. As to America being a force for good, we could look into that quite dubious proposition on its own, but Metaxas is explicit about what he means by it: global domination by a thoroughly Christian America. That goal requires a human surplus employed as cheap and expendible labor by the capitalist war machine, every womb supplying babies to patriarchal nuclear families who in turn supply them to the armies and the labor force which sustains them, the total productive and destructive capacity of humanity united in single-minded obedience to the Christian State. Those who have something else in mind for themselves, who rightly want no part of that, must be suppressed or exterminated, and those, Metaxas claims, are the real fascists.
Metaxas’s book advocates for the stance taken by the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who appears frequently in Metaxas’s work. Metaxas wrote a biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (published by Nelson, Thomas in 2020), as well as an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship (published by Touchstone in 2012, originally published in 1937). Bonhoeffer is famous for his resistance to Nazi leadership, resistance which ultimately resulted in his execution by hanging in 1945. Knowing this, when I started researching for this episode, I expected to find that Metaxas had badly misinterpreted Bonhoeffer’s ethics and theology, that he had twisted the work of an antifascist into support for fascism, much as Metaxas himself has described antifascism as being itself fascism. In fact, given Bonhoeffer’s actual ethics and theology, Metaxas’s hero worship couldn’t be less surprising.
Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau, Germany (now part of Poland) and studied theology in Germany and the United States. As the Nazis came to power over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, he stood up as a vocal opponent. He was a member of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazi-supporting German Evangelical Church, and helped to establish an underground seminary to train pastors. In 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo for alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and was executed in 1945, just prior to the end of the war. In the decades since his death, he has become a symbol to the Christian Right and people like Metaxas of Christian resistance to fascism.
The thing is, Bonhoeffer’s disagreement with Hitler and the Nazis was not their fascism or their anti-Semitism, but rather the specific form in which their fascism and anti-Semitism manifested.
In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer takes a close read at the second chapter of the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus calls his disciples.
And [Jesus] went forth again by the sea side; and all the multitude resorted unto him, and he taught them. And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the receipt of custom, and said unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him.
2:13-14
Bonhoeffer notes that the text does not say why Levi chose to follow Jesus, and takes this as itself being a message about the authority of Jesus:
The call goes forth, and is at once followed by the response of obedience. The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus. How could the call immediately evoke obedience?… Unfortunately our text is ruthlessly silent on this point, and in fact it regards the immediate sequence of call and response as a matter of crucial importance. It displays not the slightest interest in the psychological reasons for a man’s religious decisions. And why? For the simple reason that the cause behind the immediate following of call by response is Jesus Christ himself. It is Jesus who calls, and because it is Jesus, Levi follows at once. This encounter is a testimony to the absolute, direct, and unaccountable authority of Jesus.
Obedience, then, is prior to faith. Clarifying this point, Bonhoeffer writes
First, faith, then obedience. If by that we mean that it is faith which justifies, and not the act of obedience, all well and good…. If, however, we make a chronological distinction between faith and obedience, and make obedience subsequent to faith, we are divorcing the one from the other—and then we get the practical question, when must obedience begin?
This is utterly paradoxical. Levi does not know or believe that Jesus is the Christ, but obeys Jesus because he is the Christ. What are Christians to do with such advice? Follow anyone who commands to be followed?
In chapter 3, Bonhoeffer argues that to follow Jesus for reasons would be to submit Jesus to human reason.
The elimination of single-minded obedience on principle is but another instance of the perversion of the costly grace of the call of Jesus into the cheap grace of self-justification. By this means a false law is set up which deafens men to the concrete call of Christ. This false law is the law of the world, of which the law of grace is at once the complement and the antithesis. The “world” here is not the world overcome in Christ, and daily to be overcome anew in fellowship with him, but the world hardened into a rigid, impenetrable legalistic principle. When that happens grace has ceased to be the gift of the living God, in which we are rescued from the world and put under the obedience of Christ; it is rather a general law, a divine principle, which only needs to be applied to particular cases.
“Legalism” functions here much as “globalism” does for Metaxas and Steve Bannon, as an anti-Semitic dog whistle used pejoratively to refer to the Jewish people and their religion, referencing the extensive Mosaic Law by way of claiming that the Jewish people are not a people of authentic faith but rather of a rigid law. In essay entitled “The Church and the Jewish Question,” Bonhoeffer stated that, for the crime of having killed Jesus, the Jewish people “must endure the curse of its action in long-drawn-out suffering” (in Scott-Blakely, 2019).
In 2003, Bonhoeffer’s name was submitted to Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Holocaust, as a candidate for the award of Righteous Among the Nations, given to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem rejected him for the following reasons:
- First and foremost, Bonhoeffer did not save any Jews.
- He did not directly save any [Jewish] converts [to Christianity]….
- He never spoke out publicly against the persecution of the Jews, only against the negation of the rights of converts inside the churches.
- In April 1933, three months after the rise of the Nazis to power and the first actions against Jews by the regime, Bonhoeffer published an article stating that the country (Nazi Germany) had the right to take steps towards the Jewish problem as long as it sees this as a necessity to keeping order and that the church should not intercede unless Christian converts are affected…. (“The Israeli Supreme Court…,” 2003).
You see, Bonhoeffer was an anti-Semite, but his anti-Semitism was purely religious, whereas that of the Nazis was racial. Bonhoeffer believed that, though non-convert Jews were condemned by God to suffer on Earth and in eternity, Jewish converts to Christianity were properly Christian and entitled to access to the church. The German Evangelical Church, however, had prohibited membership to Christians of Jewish ancestry. It is on that point, and not on the point of anti-Semitism itself, that Bonhoeffer differed from the German Evangelical Church and the Nazi Party. Furthermore, Bonhoeffer’s theology, as we have seen, has strongly fascist implications: a leader who commands obedience prior to reason is, according to Bonhoeffer, theologically justified. Bonhoeffer seemed to have no problem with authoritarianism so long as it is grounded in the ultimate authority of Christ, which was not the case for Hitler.
Opposition to a particular fascist regime does not necessarily entail opposition to fascism itself. We have every reason to believe that Christian nationalists are attempting to steer America in the direction of Christian fascism; their ostensible opposition to the Nazis does not preclude this and is actually quite sound from a purely strategic perspective. They are thoroughly aware that they’re drawing from the Nazi playbook in their quest for power, but are at a disadvantage in that history has seen those plays, and their consequences, before. In order to surmount that disadvantage, they need not paint themselves as antifascists; they need only muddy the waters to prevent themselves as being seen as the fascists prima facie.
A famous quote by Jean-Paul Sartre reads
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
Now, there’s evidence that, towards the end of his life, Bonhoeffer was more sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish people as a general matter and not just in terms of their being potential converts. It may be the case that he died a decent person, but looking at his life in total, we have no reason to laud him as a hero.
On the matter of Christian religion pertaining to the Nazis and the Holocaust, it’s important to avoid any reductionist account painting the Nazis as either having been thoroughgoing atheists or as having been inspired by a deep Christian faith. I’ve seen plenty of both. Christians like Metaxas want to use the Holocaust as an example of the dangers of atheistic and social Darwinist thinking, and atheists want to use it as an example of the dangers of religious ideology, much as Sam Harris does in his 2004 book The End of Faith, which describes the Holocaust as having “arisen, logically and inevitably, out of the Christian faith” (p. 106). Both are dangerous oversimplifications of a complex reality, dangerous because they mislead us as to the true causes of a major threat to human welfare, to say nothing of the outright bigotry and ignorance of such statements. Hitler consistently asserted his Christianity, but the reality was that Christian religion was, for Hitler and the Nazis, either a tool to use or a barrier to overcome in order to gain power. Otto von Bismarck had largely assimilated Protestant Christianity into his project for a Prussian nation-state, and World War One had cemented those ties, with Protestant clergy advocating for participation in the war as a crusade against the Catholic French and Belgians (Evans, ch. 3.1). After the war, German Protestants came to see Marxism, atheism, and Judaism as three threats in one package, and these were sentiments that the Nazi leadership was able to exploit, but the Nazis also resented traditional moral values and at times sought to shift German Christianity in the direction of an antisemitic Germanic paganism (ibid.). The lesson of religion and the Holocaust is certainly not that atheism or religion lead to genocide; the lesson is how religion can be used to gain and implement power.
It’s important to understand this lesson because that’s exactly what’s happening now. It’s quite obvious that Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis care very little about authentic Christian religion. Metaxas does, I think, but his idea of what that means is badly warped and misguided. That makes him a useful tool to help people like Ron DeSantis gain power, and to exploit their power towards evil ends once they attain office. Bonhoeffer, by making public declarations of the rightness of Jewish suffering, did much the same for Adolf Hitler, despite however much he may have rescinded those views later on.
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Works Cited
Bonhoeffer, D. (1937/2012). The cost of discipleship. Touchstone.
Du Mez, K. K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne: how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. Liveright.
Evans, R.J. (2006). The Third Reich in power. Penguin Books.
Follman, M. (2020, 17 December). National Security Experts Warn Trump “Is Promoting Terrorism”. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/12/trump-stochastic-terrorism-violence-rhetoric/
Green, E. (2021, 14 February). Eric Metaxas Believes America is Creeping Toward Nazi Germany. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/02/eric-metaxas-2020-election-trump/617999/
Harris, S. (2005). The end of faith: religion, terror, and the future of reason. W.W. Norton and Company.
Metaxas, E. (2022). Letter to the American church. Salem Books.
Metaxas, E. (@ericmetaxas). (2021, 15 January). The behavior of the Left & almost ALL Dems is now SO UNHINGED & hysterical that one wonders whether they truly believe they won all three branches of our govt — or are perhaps somehow deeply afraid Trump might rise from his political grave… and enact #justice upon them all… [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/ericmetaxas/status/1354501648199151623?s=20
Scott-Blakely, N. (2019). The Legacy of Anti-Judaism in the Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning.
Sommer, A. K. (2018, 13 March). How Did the Term ‘Globalist’ Become an anti-Semitic Slur? Blame Bannon. Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2018-03-13/ty-article/.premium/how-did-the-term-globalist-became-an-anti-semitic-slur-blame-bannon/0000017f-e93f-df5f-a17f-fbffacae0000
The Israeli Supreme Court Ruled in Favor of Yad Vashem’s Compromise Regarding the Center for Jewish Pluralism’s Receipt of Protocols from the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous Among the Nations. (2003). Yad Vashem. https://www.yadvashem.org/press-release/02-october-2003-10-25.html
Vischer, P. (2020). Holy Post – Race in America, part 2. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-yun74BJEc