Review of Eric Metaxas, Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil (New York: Regnery Faith, 2024, $24.99)
Religionless Christianity is Eric Metaxas’ follow–up to his best–selling book, Letter to the American Church (see my review here). As in the earlier work, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remains Metaxas’ paradigm of Christian cultural engagement striving to effect societal transformation. By going so far as to participate in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Bonhoeffer exemplifies the kind of pious extremism expected of all truly radical Jesus–followers. (Yes, let the irony of that statement sink in.) According to Metaxas, Christians must reject “the idol of purity” (79). “Daring to act” (i.e. trying to kill Hitler), even if it means “making some mistake” (i.e. committing the sin of murder) is Metaxas’ exemplary motto for faithful Christian living (100).
Metaxas’ tone is strongly apocalyptic in response to the spreading “horrors” he believes have been encouraged by the Biden administration. What a difference four years of Democratic governance can make! (I say this with tongue firmly planted in my left cheek.) The dangerous implications of Metaxas’ valorization of Bonhoeffer’s decision to embrace violence are clear. Killing political opponents because they are judged to be God’s horrific opponents continues to be an important part of Metaxas’ message.
According to Metaxas, American society has become the resurrected analog of Nazi Germany complete with the demonic evils (and Metaxas means this literally) of socialism, cultural Marxism, critical race theory (all terms he never defines) as well as transgender advocacy. To his mind, one of the premier examples illustrating America’s slide into the pit of demonic thought and action is “the insane lie of the 1619 Project” (57). According to Metaxas, the 1619 Project’s lessons about the history of American slavery and the ongoing challenges of institutional racism are “lunatic,” “wicked,” “intentionally malevolent,” “dark and accusing,” and “diametrically opposed to God’s idea of grace” (58). In Metaxas’s mind, his political opponents are not well–intentioned human beings who hold different opinions or draw different conclusions from the historical evidence. No. Metaxas insists that all Democrats, liberals (whatever that label now means), progressives and left–wing social activists are involved in a dark, Satanic conspiracy.
According to Metaxas, the main instrument used to propagate this demonic, Nazi–like degeneration is the promotion of “cancel culture” (chapters six and seven). By this he means the suppression of one set of ideological voices by those on the opposite side of the debate. Metaxas warns that “at the dark heart of the evil we are seeing in our time lies that hideous thing called ‘cancel culture’” (55). His primary example of cancel culture concerns Christian voices being criticized or condemned on social media platforms. Combatting cancel culture is elevated to the status of spiritual warfare since “the spirit of cancel culture always operates in environments that are openly anti–God” revealing nothing but “a satanic spirit of accusation and cursing” (59).
In Metaxas’ worldview, only conservatives suffer the oppression of cancel culture. He remains blind to the many instances where either conservative and/or establishment forces have worked to “cancel” progressive/liberal voices in public conversation. (For instance, notice the absence from mainstream media of: anti–Zionist critiques of Israel’s war against Gaza, or any discussion of the war in Ukraine that places primary responsibility not on Russia but on the provocation created by NATO expansion. My political opinions are never represented in mainstream media. Yet, I restrain myself from imagining I am a victim of demonic forces.)
Metaxas’ believes that it is the church’s responsibility directly to attack such demonic phenomena as cancel culture and the 1619 Project. An obedient, socially active, politically engaged church that explicitly promotes conservative policies via Christian nationalism (120–25) is the only hope for national transformation.
The Christian church controls the tiller of society, according to Metaxas. A degenerate society, such as ours or Nazi Germany’s, reveals an apostate church. Bolstering his case by way of analogy to the German church prior to World War II, he lays the largest portion of blame for the rise of Naziism at the feet of the German church—a church that had surrendered to the demonic powers of secularism and religion.
This is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer reenters the picture. During Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment (for plotting to assassinate Hitler) he began writing about the need for “religionless Christianity.” Though I am not a Bonhoeffer scholar—by all academic accounts, neither is Metaxas—I understand Bonhoeffer’s call for a religionless Christianity to be a doubling down on his condemnation of “cheap grace” made so thoroughly in his book The Cost of Discipleship.
Rejecting the empty formalism and pietistic trappings of religious posturing, which includes the brand of rationalism that excludes the possibility of supernatural miracles, Bonhoeffer called for a thoroughgoing surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every dimension of life. This would be religionless, i.e., authentic Christianity which is exactly what both Germany and America require(d). A truly religionless American Christianity would lead to the final victory of conservative values in a Christian nation worthy of America’s Christian heritage.
This brief review of Metaxas’ arguments in Religionless Christianity has already indicated the book’s major problems. A little elaboration will fill in the picture.
Sections of this book sound as if the author has recently emerged from a time capsule. He seems to have missed the decades–long history of political activism instigated by America’s Religious Right movement, including such organizations as the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and more. The problem, obviously, is that acknowledging this piece of American history undermines Metaxas’ insistence about the ability of a politically active church to control the tenor and direction of American society. Why hasn’t the Religious Right’s decades of religious, political activism created a more moral, Christian society? Metaxas ignores the question because the answer undermines his thesis.
Metaxas also fails to grasp the internal problems of the German, Christian church in the early twentieth–century. Thus, his comparisons to American society consistently miss the mark. The German church’s two principal problems were theological before they were pragmatic.
First, the German church adhered closely to Martin Luther’s two–kingdom theology in which secular, political leaders—including a man like Adolf Hitler—were believed to be divinely installed by God’s providence. The Christian’s duty was to obey government leaders not to dissent; for civil disobedience was rebellion against God.
The second issue was closely related to the first. The Christian church in 1930s Germany wholeheartedly embraced its own form of Christian nationalism. Germany was God’s exceptional nation, carrying out God’s purposes in attempting to conquer Europe. Germany was establishing the kingdom of God on this earth, on both the eastern and the western fronts.
The supreme irony of Metaxas’ book resides in his failure to notice the overlap between his own political views and those of the Nazi, German Christian church which he criticizes. Though he calls upon the American church to follow in the footsteps of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he fails to recognize that he is defending the very political positions— [1] Christian nationalism and [2] seeing God’s “blessing” on one’s preferred political leader, i.e., Donald Trump—that Bonhoeffer condemned. Metaxas’ partisan applause for Trump, especially as Trump promises evangelicals that he will protect Christian dominance throughout America, are mirror images of the theological posture taken up by the German church. THIS was the “secularism” condemned by Bonhoeffer’s call for a religionless Christianity. Yet, it is the very brand of American civil religion propounded by Metaxas.
But Metaxas is too busy promoting his own right–wing political ideology to notice that in riding the wave of today’s MAGA movement and blatantly manipulating Bonhoeffer’s legacy, he has styled himself as one more political hack pretending to write as an historian–theologian. Unfortunately, I suspect that Religionless Christianity will become another bestseller for Metaxas. But then Naziism was also a bestseller among members of the German Christian church.
