Eric Metaxas opens up about his Trump support

Oppenheimer wrote about his interview with Metaxas in The Daily Beast. The piece blended background information and commentary with quotes from Metaxas. Like most observers, Oppenheimer was pretty stunned that the author of a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer could support Trump. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. If Metaxas spoke so well of Bonhoeffer to so many evangelicals, shouldn’t he be wary of Trump’s scapegoating, vilification, pandering to nativist-nationalist sentiment, and demagogic rhetoric?

Metaxas shrugs it off. Trump is a harmless “crazy uncle” figure who is rough around the edges but means well. Oppenheimer did not get into the history of Metaxas’ abject loathing of President Obama, Secretary Clinton, or the Democrats. But Metaxas has said plenty. An evangelical leader must harbor a pathological hatred of Clinton to so vocally and actively support Trump. Metaxas and many conservative evangelicals see Democrats as enablers and cheerleaders of a fetus crushing Holocaust. So the Hillary hatred kind of makes sense, or at least has an explanation.

And, in his Trump fandom, Metaxas is certainly not alone among evangelical elites.

The writer pushed the Bonhoeffer/Jewish angle in his piece, which is of course a very reasonable question: interesting, relevant, and rhetorically devastating to Metaxas’ rationalizations of Trump’s vile comments toward other out-groups

Oppenheimer’s conclusion:

To invoke the legacy of Bonhoeffer to explain away support for Trump is a crime against reason, unbefitting a serious thinker. We Jews are not, after all, just pawns in a New Testament end-times plan. We have reasons to be scared, and they are reasons that our so-called friends on the Christian right might want to hear.

A few other points.

Oppenheimer got in some digs against Metaxas. Secular liberals who know who Metaxas is tend to think of him as a sincere conservative evangelical, but also a pseudo-intellectual with a self-promoting streak. In addition to calling Metaxas an unserious thinker in the quote above, Oppenheimer notes that Metaxas “considers himself a historian,” and one with a “cultivated persona—pocket squares are involved.”

In conservative circles, a fashionable trend in the media this summer is to stop well short of endorsing Trump, but chide liberal reporters and pundits for freaking out over Trump’s obnoxious and reckless comments. Conservatives remind us that while Trump is not exactly meek and mild, he is not out there calling for political assassinations, ethnic killing, or other grievous violations of international law and human rights, as liberals evidently suppose. The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway is great at this, and mega-pundit-at-large Matt Lewis dabbles in it.

Somewhat in that vein, Rod Dreher of The American Conservative takes Oppenheimer to task for allegedly implying that Metaxas is an anti-Semite.

Now, my readers will know that I like Dreher. I think he’s a very interesting, thoughtful thinker and writer. I have a hard time getting on board with some of his ideas. But we’ve had constructive arguments in print and I think his ideas are important and worth engaging.

So I bristled a bit when Dreher put words in Oppenheimer’s mouth and called his piece a “morally shabby smear job.” But I come down on Dreher’s side when he cites Oppenheimer’s TIME Ideas essay from last summer calling for the state to make traditionalist religious organizations pay for their anti-gay hate:

Rather than try to rescue tax-exempt status for organizations that dissent from settled public policy on matters of race or sexuality, we need to take a more radical step. It’s time to abolish, or greatly diminish, their tax-exempt statuses.

Dreher brings this up to argue that Oppenheimer, in spite of being a respected journalist, does not have much sympathy for religious traditionalists or others who believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman.

It was fun to see these two go back and forth on Metaxas. I figure Metaxas is not as sinister as Oppenheimer makes him out to be. But a real question remains whether Metaxas will retain his status as a leading public intellectual of the Christian right’s under-50 set, or whether he has cast his lot with the Jerry Falwells and James Dobsons of the world. Even Dreher has “heard from quite a few of [Metaxas’] Evangelical admirers who tell me that he is dramatically hurting his credibility with his full-throated Trump endorsements.”

Overall, I think Oppenheimer did us a service by questioning Metaxas and writing about it. I follow these things pretty closely, and I haven’t seen any erstwhile allies of Metaxas publicly engaging him in this important conversation. Metaxas long ago blocked me on Twitter, so I just figured he must be extremely sensitive to even mild. It’s easy to live in a bubble if you’re that wealthy and famous.

I was, as I said, initially a little surprised that Mark Oppenheimer of all people scored a coveted interview with an important evangelical Trump booster. But he asked some good questions, even if they are different ones than I would have asked or that evangelicals want to see Metaxas grapple with.

Read Oppenheimer’s piece if you haven’t.