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<\/a>The choice of such subjects for his books also shaped how Eric Metaxas was initially perceived as a public figure, making his later turn to full-on MAGA Trumpism that much more perplexing and confusing for those who admired his earlier books. How was it that a man who so obviously admired William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer could turn into an unquestioning advocate for Herrenvolk<\/em> democracy and authoritarianism? How did this guy go from writing serious biographies of admirable historic figures to writing children\u2019s books for MAGA adults with titles like \u201cDonald Drains the Swamp\u201d? What happened<\/em> to Eric Metaxas?<\/p>\n That bewilderment and lamentation is expressed well in Will Hinton\u2019s recent post, \u201cI Helped Eric Metaxas Dream Up a Talk Show in 2008. I Hardly Recognize Him Now<\/a>.\u201d Hinton and Metaxas were close friends back in 2008, a time when Hinton says his friend\u2019s greatest ambition was to become a kind of cross between Dick Cavett and Ken Myers.* His dream back then was to host a late night talk show that would feature \u201cthoughtful public conversation \u2026\u00a0 a space where faith, art, and culture could meet with humor and humility. \u2026 a show that could persuade, not provoke.\u201d<\/p>\n Hinton is recalling that dream of a talk show because of this piece by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian<\/em> (UK) last week, \u201cA rightwing late-night show may have bombed \u2013 but the funding behind it is no laughing matter<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Gabbatt reports on how the creepy \u201cZiklag Group\u201d poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into producing four episodes of a stiff, Carson-style \u201cTalk Show With Eric Metaxas\u201d in which he interviewed guests such as Danny Bonaduce and Carrot Top while displaying all the comic timing of Ed Sullivan and all the charisma of Joe Franklin. It is not good. It\u2019s bad in a way that\u2019s just sort of saddening<\/em>.<\/p>\n Contemplating his former friend\u2019s descent into \u201cgrievance,\u201d Hinton points to the moment Metaxas was caught on video sucker-punching a young protester outside of the 2020 Republican National Convention. I think if that kid were to watch the four episodes recorded for The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas,<\/em> even he<\/em> would feel bad for the guy. I\u2019d call the show a train wreck, but train wrecks are at least compelling.<\/p>\n The failure of the show isn\u2019t just a matter of poor execution \u2014 it\u2019s ill-conceived on every level. Consider that the New Apostolic Millionaires of the Ziklag Group funded this show as part of their \u201cSeven Mountains Mandate\u201d ideology. The idea of the show was to \u201cconquer the mountain of culture\u201d by creating a new late night talk show.<\/p>\n In 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019ve sometimes mocked the fecklessness of the Democratic Consultant Industry for thinking they need to create a \u201cJoe Rogan of the left,\u201d but that at least involves a media format from this century. The Ziklag Group\u2019s big idea here was to win the culture wars by funding what they hoped would become an Alan Thicke of the far-right.<\/p>\n Hinton did not anticipate that his old friend would go down this road, but after the surprise and dismay receded a bit, he began to realize that maybe he should<\/em> have seen it coming, even back when Metaxas was still striving to be (or to be seen as<\/em>) a serious \u201cintellectual.\u201d How could a guy who idolized Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer take such a sad, hateful turn? Well, maybe there were hints in those books he wrote about those idols. Hinton writes:<\/p>\n That transformation is especially painful because Bonhoeffer was supposed to be Eric\u2019s moral north star.<\/p>\n Yet many Bonhoeffer scholars, including Clifford Green and Victoria Barnett, have criticized his biography for flattening the theologian\u2019s complexity and turning him into a partisan symbol. They point out that Bonhoeffer\u2019s courage was grounded in humility, doubt, and deep theological wrestling, not in self righteous certainty.<\/p>\n The danger of simplifying Bonhoeffer is the same danger we see in much of Christian public life today, the temptation to turn moral conviction into branding. The more we turn prophets into mascots, the less prophetic they become.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cTurning prophets into mascots\u201d is a good summary of those two biographies. The books weren\u2019t quite hagiographies, but both were full of the sense that these were exemplary men \u2014 heroes worthy of emulation. The book on Wilberforce put that word right in the title \u2014 Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. <\/em>But it\u2019s also a book that suggests this heroism is shared by its author and by its readers. It reminds me of what Eric Williams, a historian and the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, once said about how \u201cBritish historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Replace \u201cBritish historians\u201d with \u201cwhite Christians\u201d and that works as a review of Metaxas\u2019s book.<\/p>\n Wilberforce himself deserves the adulation, but I think part of the book\u2019s popularity stemmed from the way that Metaxas enticed readers to claim a share of that adulation, just for being who they already were.<\/p>\n Wilberforce was a devout Protestant Christian who experienced a profound conversion \u2014 a \u201cborn-again\u201d experience in which he came to embrace a form of nonconformist devotion that might be called \u201cevangelical\u201d Christianity (let\u2019s avoid, for this post, the dispute over whether that term is useful for describing any Christians in that time). Wilberforce\u2019s long political battle to end British participation in the transatlantic slave trade was, for him, required by and driven by his faith. And he had the support of many allies who shared his noble cause because they also shared his faith and his understanding of his\/their evangelical Christianity.<\/p>\n That is all true \u2014 just as it is also true that Wilberforce had many contemporaries who shared something very much like his nonconformist Protestant \u201cevangelical Christianity\u201d but who just as devoutly believed that their faith required them to oppose<\/em> his efforts.**<\/p>\n Metaxas\u2019s biography of Wilberforce correctly links his heroic pursuit of justice to his faith, but it also subtly encourages readers to leap from that to imagining that if Wilberforce\u2019s evangelical Christianity made him a hero, then their evangelical Christianity also makes them heroes.<\/p>\n The Bonhoeffer biography flattered its readers with the same suggestion \u2014 so much so that I\u2019ve often jokingly said that the book was Metaxas\u2019s \u201cautobiography of Bonhoeffer\u201d and should\u2019ve been titled \u201cI\u2019m Dietrich Bonhoeffer And So Can You!\u201d It turns the real-life prophet into a mascot for Our Team, usurping the honor and praise Bonhoeffer earned with his courage and integrity and claiming it for ourselves.<\/p>\n \u201cTurning prophets into mascots\u201d is also a decent summary of Matthew 23:29-35, a passage from that Gospel we\u2019ve discussed here many times \u2014 most recently a few years ago<\/a> in response to David Swartz\u2019s thoughtful thoughts about the not-at-all-innocent repercussions of what he called \u201cInnocent Readings of Evangelical History<\/a>.\u201d Swartz doesn\u2019t mention Metaxas\u2019s self-flattering biographies, but they fit the pattern he describes there:<\/p>\n The problem is that these narrations cherry-pick unrepresentative voices from the past. Abolitionists never really represented the mainstream of [white] evangelicalism. There were always more slaveholders than Grimk\u00e9 sisters. Leaders who want to minimize (or distract from) evangelical support for Trump narrate the movement as more cosmopolitan than it has actually been. They peddle what Cuban-American theologian Justo Gonz\u00e1lez calls \u201cinnocent readings of history.\u201d They minimize the bad, emphasize the good, and ignore how moderation often perpetuates injustice. They portray their own history as more innocent than it actually was.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer are exemplary precisely because they were exceptional, not typical. It is dangerous \u2014 not safe<\/em> \u2014 to contemplate the lives of such \u201cheroic\u201d and extraordinary people without the prudent, humble wisdom found in one of my favorite pieces from the late great The Toast<\/em>: \u201cReasons I Would Not Have Been Burned as a Witch in the Early Modern Era No Matter What I Would Like to Believe About Myself and Would Have in Fact Been Among the Witch-Burners.\u201d<\/p>\n That sounds funny \u2014 and that piece was<\/em> funny, and I\u2019m sorely disappointed it has disappeared from the web \u2014 but it\u2019s also exactly the attitude Jesus commends in Matthew 23, when he denounces hypocrites who \u201cbuild the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, \u2018If we<\/em> had lived in the days of our ancestors, we<\/em> would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.'\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not bad to hope that would have been true. It\u2019s not bad to hope that \u201cIf I<\/em> had lived in the days of Wilberforce, I would have supported his efforts to abolish the slave trade\u201d or to hope that \u201cIf I<\/em> had lived in the days of Bonhoeffer, I would have also opposed my government\u2019s descent into fascism.\u201d But to act as though you\u2019re sure that would have been true always leads directly to hypocrisy. The more you\u2019re able to convince yourself with certainty that \u201cIf I had lived in the days of our ancestors, I would not have taken part\u201d the more you ensure that you are becoming exactly the sort of person likely to take part in such evil and injustice right now.<\/p>\n Let the prophets be prophets without trying to turn them into mascots. Honor them without flattering ourselves.<\/p>\n Consider, for example, Silas Soule, who was recently the subject of the 1,981st installment of Erik Loomis\u2019s \u201cErik Visits an American Grave<\/a>\u201d series.<\/p>\n Loomis doesn\u2019t do hagiography. The mini-biographies in his series tend to be skeptical and a bit irreverent, even when the subject is someone exceptionally praiseworthy. But it\u2019s hard to find anything bad to say about the life of Silas Soule except, of course, that it was too short. He crammed a lot of living into his 26 years.<\/p>\n I knew about Soule\u2019s heroism fighting for America against its adversary in the Civil War. And I knew the story of his assassination because of his brave work opposing and exposing the genocidal Sand Creek massacre. I didn\u2019t know about his earlier work as an abolitionist in Kansas, or the remarkable story of his plot to free John Brown from jail after the raid on Harper\u2019s Ferry. (Go read that, seriously<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Soule lived an exemplary life. We can learn and benefit from that life, from the example of his courage and integrity.<\/p>\n Or we can flatter ourselves by turning him into our mascot, convincing ourselves that we would surely have done all the things he did if we\u2019d been around back then. That flattery might feel nice. It might be pleasant to imagine we\u2019re just as worthy of praise and admiration as he was. But indulging in that pleasure almost guarantees that we never will be.<\/p>\n The louder we boast that \u201cIf we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part\u201d the more certain it is that we will<\/em> take part, right here, right now, rejecting the prophets that are sent to us, flogging them in our churches and hunting them from town to town and bringing upon ourselves all the righteous blood shed on earth.<\/p>\n And then we\u2019ll end up trying to turn that into our own late night talk show.<\/p>\n See earlier:<\/p>\n