Hey everyone, I wanted to talk about this Eric Metaxas tweet from yesterday, because there's a lot to unpack.

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If you aren't already familiar with Metaxas, he wrote a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that's extremely popular with evangelicals, mostly because it used Bonhoeffer's life and message to reinforce everything evangelicals already believed politically about issues like abortion.
There are a few evangelicals who criticized the book--my old pastor, who's an English teacher turned minister, has spent the last decade criticizing it heavily on literary grounds as a bad biography that just exists to fit Bonhoeffer to evangelicals' current political concerns.
For the most part, evangelicals loved the book for precisely those reasons. It's gotten the endorsement of the who's who of the evangelical world. They all pretty much consider Metaxas to be a definitive expert on Bonhoeffer. It's how he made his name as a public intellectual.
Prior to the Bonhoeffer book, Metaxas was mostly known for writing the movie tie-in William Wilberforce biography Amazing Grace, based on the 2006 movie of the same name. Well, that and writing Veggie Tales scripts and voicing supporting characters.
Metaxas was one of the first evangelicals to go all in on the Trump train, going so far as to claim that Bonhoeffer would have been a Trump supporter. I'd argue the Metaxas endorsement was, at minimum, equally as important as Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham's endorsements.
Metaxas' status within evangelicalism as a respected public intellectual, combined with his status as Bonhoeffer "expert" gave legitimacy to evangelical Trump support and helped neutralize the attacks on Trump from evangelical supporters of other GOP candidates.
If the great public intellectual Eric Metaxas is saying that Bonhoeffer would have supported Trump, surely the criticism of Trump from evangelicals backing other candidates must be overblown and dishonest!
The man literally sold American evangelicals on fascism under the banner of Bonhoeffer.
Now that we've gotten the background on Metaxas, let's move on to the role that Dietrich Bonhoeffer mythos has played in the American religious right for at least as long as the anti-abortion movement has been active.
As you may know, the anti-abortion movement has long compared abortion to the Holocaust. There's a host of reasons why that's inappropriate and offensive, and a form of Holocaust denialism, but it's the accepted narrative and has been for decades.
Metaxas' book became so popular because it enforced that abortion-as-Holocaust narrative and told them exactly what they wanted to hear about following in the footsteps of a hero of the faith.
It would take too long to go into the history of the religious right from desegregation to abortion to the present, but those of us who grew up in the '80s and '90s lived through the transitional period where, "Christians shouldn't be involved in politics," faded away as an ethos
It's hard to imagine this today, but back when I was a kid, I went to a Southern Baptist church with the son of the last Dem Governor of Florida, Lawton Chiles. When Lawton was in town visiting the grandkids after announcing his run, the pastor wished him well from the pulpit.
One of the ways that American evangelicalism was taken from a world where a Democratic former Senator and Gubernatorial candidate could be wished well from the pulpit to the one we're in now was by talking all the time about the German Church under the rise of Hitler.
I've long ago lost count of the number of times as I was growing up that I heard variations on, "What happened to the German Church?" followed by admonishment that it was our duty to make sure that the same thing never happened to the American Church.
Abortion and theological liberalism were seen as warning signs and the beginning of the path to the American Church repeating the failures of the German Church under Hitler. We were supposed to hold on to absolute truth so we wouldn't be led astray and allow genocide on our watch
Bonhoeffer became the symbol of what to do if the American Church started down that path because he stood up against not just Hitler but also called the German Church to account for their complicity.
We were told time and again that we needed to study Bonhoeffer (which led to me reading Cost of Discipleship in middle school), because we needed to ensure that we never became like the German Church.
Evangelical youth were taught in no uncertain terms that we needed to be prepared because one day we might be forced to be like Bonhoeffer and be a prophetic voice calling the American Church to account for their complicity with an evil, genocidal ruler.
They never told us that they're the ones we'd end up having to call to account, while they declare us apostates who were never really Christians. All because we're doing exactly what they prepared us to do in this moment.
The thing they never considered in all of this was that the German Church actually liked Hitler because they didn't consider Jews, Communists, disabled people, LGBT people, ethnic minorities, or anybody else who wasn't exactly like them to be fully human and worthy of protection.
If they had considered that part of it, it would have hit too close to home. It's easy to pass judgement on the complicity of the German Church when you're busy ignoring all the parallels to American Evangelicals and instead make it all about stopping abortion.
That's how you get Eric Metaxas declaring that Bonhoeffer would have supported Trump. Because they've erased the actual sins of the German Church and put in their place the idea that the modern equivalent is tolerating abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Never mind that actual Bonhoeffer scholars, who aren't amoral political hacks like Metaxas, think that it's likely that Bonhoeffer was gay. Nope, Metaxas and company have decided Bonhoeffer would have voted for Trump to stop abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Throwing the Metaxas tweet in the thread again so people don't have to scroll back to the top.
As we're watching Trumpism complete its evolution into a totalitarian personality cult complete with the belief that the leader is something akin to a god, Eric Metaxas pops up with this tweet.
Eric Metaxas, who's whole brand at this point is basically, "I'm the Bonhoeffer expert, if Trump was like Hitler I'd warn you, but he's actually the opposite of Hitler and Bonhoeffer would totes support him."
At the time when Trump is rapidly being made into a god by his followers, Eric "Trust me, he's not Hitler" Metaxas jumps in to add to the deification.

And he does that using language Christians will recognize from Revelation 13.
I've screenshotted the whole chapter here, and for those who use a screen reader, I'm linking to the full passage since it doesn't fit in the image description box.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%2013&version=KJV
Revelation 13 is a passage that's widely understood by both evangelicals, and pop culture as a whole, to be describing the rise of the Antichrist. It's where the whole 666 being a satanic number that refers to the Antichrist comes from.
I'm not sure which End Times theology that Metaxas holds to, though his flavor of Presbyterian generally reads Revelation as metaphor, unlike the dispensational premillennialism of something like the Left Behind books that sees it as coded language for literal future events.
It would be too long a rabbit trail to go into the various versions of End Times theology, but if you've got a passing familiarity with the Left Behind franchise, they're basically a hypothetical version of how a huge swath of evangelicals think the End Times will play out.
Whether people hold to the dispensational premillennialism of the Left Behind books or read Revelation as apocalyptic genre literature instructing the Church on how to live in a time of evil, or anything in between, it's agreed that the Beast represents the anthesis of Christ.
Like, there's no reading of Revelation that thinks that well, actually, the Beast is the good guy. It's why at pretty much every point in history, there's been Christians seeing the evil ruler of their era as either a literal or metaphorical candidate for what's being described.
And then yesterday, we have Eric Metaxas coming along using the same, "Is there anyone like unto him?" language that Christians will recognize echos, "Who is like unto the Beast?" from Revelation 13:4
Metaxas may be a political hack, but I don't see how he could possibly be ignorant enough to not know exactly what he was referencing in that tweet. Though, if he doesn't, that makes his status as an evangelical public intellectual even more embarrassing.
Over the course of the last four years, we've gone from Metaxas claiming that Trump is the further thing from Hitler and that Bonhoeffer would have supported him, to essentially crowning Trump as the Antichrist and calling that good.
I wasn't particularly surprised that evangelicals totally missed the point with all their Bonhoeffer adulation and picked the wrong side, but I didn't see it coming that any of them would anoint Trump as the Antichrist and call that good.
The best case scenario here is that Metaxas is going all in on blasphemy, but blaspheming by declaring someone as like unto God is pretty much the definition of setting someone up as an antichrist. It's a personality cult evolving Trump into godhood before our very eyes.
Meanwhile, the dispensational premillennialists who have built their brand on preparing the Church to recognize the signs of the End Times are just sitting there going full MAGA as Trump has spent the last 4 years checking off all their End Times boxes. Including Russia.
Because that's the other thing. In the dispensational premillennialists End Times theology as interpreted and developed during the Cold War, Russia (and possibly China, or maybe Iran) plays a huge role in setting up the final Armageddon battle on the plains of Megiddo.
Everything American evangelicalism has taught about looking out for the next Hitler and about preparing for the End Times has coalesced into the person of one Donald J. Trump, and they've put on a MAGA hat and hopped on the Trump train declaring him as like unto God.
Eric Metaxas sets the tone for the more "academic" and "intellectual" flavor of evangelical Trumpism, so I expect to see a lot more of this in the coming days and weeks, especially if Trump does fully recover.
As for what happens if a man that they've essentially declared to be a god ends up dying of Covid-19, that's something that terrifies me to consider. If your former evangelical friends are acting a little freaked out these days, that would be why.
There's more that could be said about that Metaxas tweet, but I'm going to call this the end to the thread. Entire dissertations on evangelicalism and American politics could be written on just that tweet, so I'll stick to chatting in the mentions.

/Fin
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