Eric Metaxas warns America’s church faces a Bonhoeffer-level crisis, comparing its silence on evil—from COVID lockdowns to border rape and pro-Hamas rhetoric—to Nazi-era complicity, calling neutrality "unbiblical." He blames cultural Marxism for undermining religious liberty and free speech, defends Trump as the only candidate addressing existential threats (and claims 2020 fraud), and predicts a revival among disillusioned Americans as reality clashes with progressive ideology. His Letter to the American Church frames the moment as a test of faith, urging pastors to resist systemic corruption like defunding the Department of Education. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with the one and only Eric Metaxas.
I have to tell you, one of the most disheartening experiences I ever had in public life was having to get up and speak on stage after Eric.
The guy is smart, he's witty, he's deeply informed about his Christianity and a faithful Christian, and he has good hair.
So he's basically a disgusting human being in every way.
I have nothing good to say about him, but I will begrudgingly give him this.
He has an amazing talent as a writer.
Maybe it's because he wrote some of the scripts for veggie tales when he was starting out, but he has a wonderful gift of making very difficult arguments, religious arguments, historical arguments, easy to understand.
His biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which deals with everything from the history of Lutheranism to the battle for the church in Nazi Germany, just gives you a pellucidly clear view of issues that sometimes get lost and obscured in academic language.
He runs a wonderful discussion group in New York City called Socrates in the City, where some of the most important thinkers of our time have spoken, and also me for some reason.
That must have been a slow week.
And he was a passionate supporter of Donald Trump, which I'm really interested to talk to him about.
He has a new book called Letter to the American Church, a passionate address to a church in crisis.
And it kind of harkens back to some of the struggles that the church in Germany had during Bonhoeffer's time.
We were together recently in New York, and we were talking about it, had a private conversation about those things.
So I thought I'd bring him on and talk about it a little online.
Eric, it is always great to see you.
How you doing?
That's the nicest introduction I've gotten in a long time.
And it's so nice.
I'm just tempted to slink away and leave it there.
Let's just leave it right there because it can only go downhill.
Yeah, it's obvious that this is the end.
And if I fooled you, Andrew Clavin, into thinking that I'm half the things you just said, my work is done, basically.
So thank you.
Well, let us talk about this crisis that you're addressing in Letter to the American Church.
You basically feel this is a time, the church is on the brink.
It's a time for choosing.
Explain it.
Open it up.
Oh, there is no doubt.
I wish I were wrong.
Boy, do I wish I were exaggerating.
Some people listening will be familiar with the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
I wrote a biography about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Came out in 2010.
And it's the story of this heroic pastor who was trying desperately to wake up the German church, to make them understand that it was their moral obligation to get political, I guess some people would say, to speak out against the Nazis, to take a firm stand against the evils that were happening.
Now, everybody today says, oh, yeah, the evils, of course, the Holocaust.
Well, most Germans, apart from what people like Daniel Goldhagen have written, they were not aware of what was happening.
They couldn't be aware.
There was propaganda.
I mean, you have a totalitarian society keeping you from knowing what they don't want you to know.
So many Germans were deluded into thinking, well, how bad could things get, right?
And Bonhoeffer was privy to some inside information and also was really, I mean, he was part of an elite family.
And he saw what was coming, or let's just say he saw what might come.
And he knew that it was the job of the Christian church to be the vocal, to be vocally against these evils.
It was not the job of the church to say, oh, we're just going to do church on Sunday morning.
We're going to do our thing.
We're going to preach the gospel.
And we're going to avoid divisive stuff.
We're going to avoid politics.
We don't want to alienate anybody.
We just want to preach the gospel and do church.
He knew that was a lie from the pit of hell, that it is the job of the church to be at the forefront of confronting evil, whether it's the slave trade.
I wrote a biography about William Wilberforce.
It's the job of Christians to stand against evil, to speak against evil, to live out your faith, not just to have your faith in some little theological box, but to live it out sacrificially.
And so Bonhoeffer saw this and he wrote about it.
I'm sorry, he spoke about it.
And some in the church understood that it is God calling us to speak against these evils, to warn against them, and really to be the number one entity in the culture that stands against this, because the German church had tremendous cultural power and could have stood against the Nazis early on if they had done so in a united front.
But many in the German church, exactly like in the American church today, said, no, no, no, you're being a little hotheaded and things can't, how bad could things get?
Come on.
You're being overly dramatic.
And by the way, it's the job of the church to just to be the church, not to get involved in all this other stuff.
And he knew biblically, excuse me, that is wrong.
That is wrong.
And by the way, if what you're saying is not biblically true, just to cut to the chase, it's from the pit of hell.
This is the voice of the devil trying to silence the church at the very time when the church had the power to stand against this evil.
And we know what happened.
We know that the evil that was unleashed because of the silence of many Christians, not all, but many Christians for many bad reasons and many good reasons.
They kind of thought, well, religiously, we're theologically, we're not supposed to get involved in that.
And so they were silent, silent, silent until it was too late.
And when it was too late, many of them woke up and they thought, what have we done?
And now there's nothing we can do.
Now we've been silenced.
And now the laws and so on and so forth have crushed our ability to do anything.
We could have done something in 33, 34.
Now it's game over.
The thesis of my book, Letter to the American Church, is that is precisely the state of the American church today, that we have evil rising up.
And many Christians say, well, we don't want to be divisive.
We don't want to talk this, talk about that.
We certainly don't want to be political.
And you think, is that biblical?
It's not biblical.
You know, if Lincoln is running and he says, I'm against slavery, and you say, because of my Christian faith, I'm going to vote for Lincoln.
And people tell you all the bad stuff about Lincoln.
And you say, well, I get it.
He's not Jesus, but I think I'm obliged to be very vocal in support of him because slavery is a moral evil.
We need to defeat it.
And there are many Christians that say, no, out of conviction, I am obliged to speak against slavery.
I'm obliged to speak in the day in Wilberforce, because my biography in Wilberforce was amazing grace, to speak against the slave trade.
I'm obliged because of my faith to weigh in on these issues and to take action politically and culturally and in every sphere.
And so the German church bought the lie that we're not supposed to do that.
And we see what happened.
And the American church today, to a large extent, many, many, many churches and church leaders have either been silent in the face of rising evils or have helped it along.
You know, they're hanging out the rainbow flag or they're hanging out.
But I'm not talking about those people who are given over to wokery and insanity.
I'm talking about those in the middle who have bought the lie that there's a safe middle way, that I don't want to be over here with the crazy Trump supporters or with the crazy political conservative.
No, no, we're just going to, we're going to be neutral.
Many Germans believed they could be neutral as the Nazis were rising because they could not see where it was going.
And they thought, we'll just hang out here and kind of see which way the wind blows.
And we know that all this will blow over eventually.
The pendulum swings back and forth and we don't want to get involved.
And we now know where it went.
And I'm saying that that's exactly what's happening in the American church today.
All right.
So let me ask you about this because all we've ever heard from the left, Nixon is Hitler, Bush is Hitler, Trump is Hitler.
Everybody who walks by is Hitler.
But you're actually saying this back to them.
What are you expecting to happen?
What is it that you fear is happening?
Well, let's put it this way.
I think we are in, the book we're talking about today, Letter to the American Church, I wrote a sequel to it, which will come out in April, where I talk about how we are in what I perceive as the third existential crisis of our nation's history.
The first was the Revolution.
The second was the Civil War.
We are now in a third existential crisis where there are globalist forces dedicated to undermining American sovereignty that are at war with American values.
I mean, we forget what an outlier we are in history and that our love of genuine liberty, of freedom of speech, of really religious liberty, of allowing churches and synagogues to flourish and to be a part of what makes us free and what makes us a thriving culture.
There are forces dedicatedly at war with that within our nation and from without.
And I think there are many people kind of act like, well, you know, that's not really, it's not an issue for me today.
I think everything will be fine.
And I'm here to say, no, that's naive.
The scripture calls us to be wise as serpents.
So this idea that I'm just supposed to be nice and winsome when, you know, these are moral issues.
For example, you talk about the southern border.
People say, oh, that's a policy issue.
We shouldn't weigh in as Christians.
And I think to myself, there is child rape going on.
That's not a moral issue for you.
You actually think you are so shallow and selfish that you don't think that you need to weigh in on that if there's something you can do.
You don't care about those people.
You know, that's one issue.
What they're doing to children in school is exposing them to things just dramatically inappropriate, just evil, that you would show children and sometimes young children things that in a previous civilized society, you would practically kill that teacher for doing that to your kids.
That is a normal response to when people do this to children is to say, no, you will never get near talking to my kids about that.
How dare you even suggest it?
These are evils that are happening.
Those are just a few that I've mentioned.
I mean, the transgender mutilation of children, dividing parents from their children and saying that the school knows better or the government knows better than the parents.
That is just Marxism 101.
It's anti-God.
It is anti-everything most Americans have believed in from the beginning of our nation.
So all of these things are genuine threats.
And when people say, oh, you know, what happened in Germany is to me, the classic case is that there were so many people who said, how bad can it get?
Come on.
You know, Hitler's a one-term Fuhrer.
And by the way, you know, he's not going to be able to.
And it was the silence of the church that effectively opened the door to his being able to do these things.
And I think that we're seeing it now with the Biden administration, but you're seeing it with a lot of these really worse than useless rhinos.
They're not taking a stand against things that are so antithetical to what we've always believed.
Censorship, freedom of speech.
I mean, the idea, I have suffered tremendously from being canceled for saying nothing particularly incendiary, believe me.
I think if you're not awake to those threats, then you're allowing it to happen.
And I think that what I have said basically is that I, as a Christian and as an American, I have a moral obligation to stand against these things.
And if I really am deceived into thinking that I don't really need to do anything, everything will be fine.
I'm sorry to say that's precisely what the Germans thought.
I think we need to understand that, you know, naivete is not something that we have moved past.
It's easy.
It's very, very tempting to be naive to these kinds of threats.
And I simply think that the America we have known and loved is, it's already effectively gone, that we have to, the very idea that we could be talking about whether we should have free speech or whether this kind of censorship is okay or whether I'm allowed to talk about election fraud.
I mean, I think to myself, even if you don't believe it happened, you should care that it might, but you're being told, no, no, no, excuse me, shut up.
You can't talk about that.
And as soon as somebody says don't talk about something, you know, they're afraid that you'll talk about it.
And so that's kind of where we are.
And I feel that many, many people are turning a blind eye to it.
And that's, if we hadn't seen what that did in Germany, we could have an excuse.
But we saw what quote unquote neutral positions in Germany eventually led to because evil is on the march.
They're not walking at the rate we're walking at.
Church And State Conflicts00:08:06
They would be glad.
I mean, we're seeing it now, obviously, with the pro-Hamas madness.
These folks would love to kill every Jew who ever lived.
Is that going to wake you up?
Will that finally wake people up that people are talking this way in America and that many people in America are letting it go?
They're not outraged.
They're saying, well, they have a point.
That's how evil takes over.
It's amazing to me that none of the professors looking at those students calling for the death of Jews have said to himself, what have I done?
What have I taught them?
Where did I go wrong?
Not one.
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I know what you're wondering.
So here's how to spell claim it.
There are no easy things.
So you talk a lot in the book, The Letter to the American Church.
You talk a lot in the book about materialism, Marxist materialism, which I think is truly one of the great evils of our time.
But I was kind of appalled during the COVID lockdowns how easily the church gave way to the state, how immediately they thought basically that there's nothing worse than death, which is one of the tenets of my faith.
That, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's worse than death.
And, you know, death is something that built the church.
We built the church on martyrdom and people who understood that there's more to life than life.
I see this too in the raising of rainbow flags and the raising of Black Lives Matter penance that basically are accepting the premises of materialism, that your blackness matters, which is not a Christian proposition, that your gayness is a source of pride, which is not a Christian proposition.
Is the church there anymore?
Is there an American church to write to?
Well, I have to say that, you know, whenever you're talking about something like the American church, it's a hopelessly vague statement or concept because there are many, it's kind of like talking about, you know, the Jews 800 BC.
Who are the people of God?
Where are they?
Well, when the prophets spoke to them, they're speaking to the ostensible people of God, telling them to do what?
To actually be the people of God, right?
So you always will have this huge group that says, we're the American church, for example.
And you and I know most of the people in that group are not actually the American church.
So the question is, how many are there who are part of a holy remnant that would stand up to Hitler at the cost of their own lives, that would stand against slavery and the slave trade, even as they're being vilified and spat upon?
How many people are willing to live out their faith?
That's the real church.
So letter of the American Church is meant to be written to those people who are still on the fence, who still might be awakened before it's too late.
And, you know, when you mention what happened during COVID, that to me was the classic test.
In other words, it was the classic.
If you wanted, you know, it's like a scientific experiment, you know, or an algebra thing.
We're going to solve for X. What do we get?
Well, what we got was we saw exactly the error of the church had drifted into this idea that we just want to go along to get along.
We want to be nice.
We're going to agree with the government.
We had forgotten that it is our job to question the government.
It is our job to be the church.
And when the government tells you to, you know, pinch a little incense to Caesar's statue, you say, excuse me, no.
When the government says to Mordecai, you will bow down to Haman, Mordecai says, no.
Christians in Germany in the 30s and many Christians today, they act like Romans 13 is the only text on the subject, like we're supposed to bow down to the government.
No, that's not right.
And what happened during COVID was the classic test case where the church failed dramatically.
And many churches didn't, by the way, very, very few, but a number did not fail.
And they were heroic and they stood alone and they were sued by the government.
I'm in Pasadena today.
Pastor Che An, I'm speaking in his church later for an event.
He was heroic.
Pastor Rob McCoy, Jack Hibbs, a number of pastors were heroically against Governor Newsom and around the country, heroic.
Most were not.
Most said, you know what?
We don't want any trouble.
Sound familiar?
We don't want any trouble.
We just want the Nazis to leave us alone.
And you know what?
We'll be fine.
We'll be fine.
Don't worry about it.
Well, that's basically, to me, this was, it wasn't just a test case.
It was a warning.
It was a warning to the church.
Like, you see what just happened?
Okay, there's going to be another test and another test.
You have now, you've had batting practice.
You whipped.
Did you learn anything?
Are you going to learn?
Because if you didn't learn from that, what's going to follow is going to be infinitely worse.
So if the church will be the church, we can stand against this evil.
But the encroachment of government, first of all, you don't need to be a Christian.
You just need to be an American to be disgusted by a government that would dare behave in that way, that would not understand that we the people are the bosses.
I mean, I can watch, I just watched John Ford's, you know, Who Shot Liberty Valence the other day.
You can watch Capra films.
Most Americans understood this.
Most Americans understood we the people were the bosses.
We are free.
We decide what happens.
We have drifted and drifted, and many Americans don't know this.
Many Christians naively think it's the nice thing, it's the winsome thing to go along.
And, you know, to some extent, that's true, but we've gone past that extent, and it was our job to fight back.
And many in the church did not.
And so to me, we are at an inflection point right now where if the American church does not stand heroically and boldly against all of these evils because they're afraid I'm not supposed to be political, that's a lie from the pit of hell that you're not supposed to be political.
You're supposed to stand up for truth.
And if somebody wants to tag you and say, oh, you're being political, they're just trying to silence you.
And you need to have enough wisdom to understand that they're trying to silence you because they don't like what you're saying.
So they're labeling you.
But it works in many cases because many American Christians are so thin-skinned and have been so, in a sense, trained to think that any kind of fight or disagreement is bad.
I just need to, I want people to like me.
That is simply unbiblical.
And there's a chapter in the book Letter to the American Church called The Idol of Evangelism, which I think there's been this mission drift in the American church over the decades where it's all about evangelism.
Standing Up For Truth00:08:10
It's all about, you know, agreeing with people so that we can sell them, you know, whatever we're trying to sell them.
Well, I'd like to know what you are trying to sell them because I don't think it's worth it.
Yeah.
So let's talk about Donald Trump.
I voted for him twice.
No way am I a never Trumper.
I think he's changed since the last election.
I'm very disturbed by the fact that he's the only guy who seems to have a chance of taking it back.
But you have been a passionate supporter.
Do you remain as passionate?
Do you see any problem now that wasn't there before?
Where do you stand?
Honestly, Andrew, I do not.
I simply don't.
In fact, I would argue that he is awake to these threats in a way that he was clearly not awake in his first term or before his first term.
I mean, he really, it's funny talking about Donald Trump as being naive, but I mean, politically he was naive and he invited people in who not only were not on board with him, but who actively undermined him, who took advantage of his political naivete and who undermined him.
He was prevented from building the wall.
He was prevented from doing all kinds of things.
Nonetheless, he accomplished a lot of things.
One of those things is he appointed three Supreme Court justices.
Now, that is, you want to talk about an existential crisis.
If Hillary Clinton had appointed three Supreme Court justices, America would be a concept in the past.
We averted that nightmare.
But I am not, I'm not at all worried about him because, in a sense, as I was just saying, I think he's been so attacked that I think he kind of gets it.
Like, he thinks if they're coming for me like this, if the, I mean, the gloves are off is kind of a mild metaphor.
They would put a bullet in his head.
They would love to do that if they could get away with it.
They will do anything.
And I think, why would they do that?
I think it's because he knows where the bodies are buried.
He knows of the corruption of the deep state and so on and so forth.
And I think that, you know, like we always have to say, well, he's not perfect.
Yeah, of course he's not perfect.
But I think that we need a warrior to fight against the forces that they're at war with America as we know it.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
The sovereignty of America, whether it's, you know, allowing in, is it a zillion now?
I think it might be a zillion people across our border, many of whom are evil actors.
I mean, most of them are going to be, you know, nice people looking for a better life, obviously.
But the reason you have a border is because really wicked, wicked people will come in, will take advantage of your openness, and will put a bullet in your head or rape your kid or do far worse things if you're not aware that there's this thing called evil and that we need to be careful.
And so, anyway, that's my long-winded way of saying that I don't see any reason to be troubled by Trump's candidacy.
On the contrary, I think, first of all, let me say this: I am genuinely convinced that he was robbed of a second term.
And the more every day that passes, I see more evidence to believe that.
And I just have to say that scandalizes me as an American.
Like, that's so offensive to me that that would happen, that people wait in line to vote.
And then you find out, oh, your vote didn't count because the powers that be decided to play a game and they don't really care about you.
They care about winning.
They don't believe in truth and principles.
They just care about winning.
And screw you, little guy.
That offends me as an American.
And I just feel that for that reason alone, he deserves a second term.
But listen, there is no doubt that whoever gets the nomination, I will do everything I can to help them succeed.
What would you like to see happen now?
I mean, one of the things that I felt about Trump was he was disorganized.
You know, he definitely, and this was naive today, he definitely surrounded himself with people who undermined him.
What do you hope for in a second Trump term?
Well, I think he would, you know, take a page out of the head of Argentina, you know, and just basically, you know, drain the swamp in the sense that say, like, okay, Department of Education, goodbye.
Like, we're going to defund you because you are utterly useless.
You're sucking American taxpayers dry.
You're doing nothing but evil.
Goodbye.
I mean, basically, slash and burn what has become a deep state bureaucracy, which is the antithesis of what the founders had hoped.
I would think that, you know, you'd be a little, you'd have to be a little bit of a maniac to do that.
But I think he understands that.
Listen, the weaponization of the FBI and the IRS and so on and so forth, that is evil.
That is utterly evil.
Every single American should be disgusted by that and should say we need to do everything we can, just as if the Mongol hordes were trying to crawl over our borders and to destroy us and behead us.
We should be standing against that.
That is the end of America.
If you have a weaponized government, weaponized against we, the people, the J6 situation, I mean, I could weep when I think of what people have been put through.
And it is just such political evil.
I never dreamt I would see it in America.
Simply never dreamt that that could happen in America.
I have a friend, John Strand.
He's in solitary.
I know for a fact he did less than nothing.
It is absolutely evil, hard for me even to talk about it.
And so I think you need people in government who are awake to this and who understand it is their job to deal with this.
And if you're not up to it, get out.
Don't even run.
So I've only got a minute left.
Let me ask you this.
I was recently kind of encouraged by Ian Hercia Lee announcing that she had become a Christian.
I've been thinking for a decade that a rebirth of faith was coming.
Do you see that or are you pessimistic?
No, absolutely, absolutely.
I see it.
I think it's inevitable.
And I think it's part of where we are that as evil has arisen, many people have looked around and said, what is this?
This looks like evil.
It doesn't look like political differences.
It looks like evil.
And if it's evil, the only answer is God.
And I think tons of people who otherwise would not go there.
Tucker Carlson is the classic case.
I mean, he was kind of like a happy-clappy sort of Episcopalian or whatever.
He sees what is happening and he sees the answer is we need to pray.
Who thought that they would live to see Tucker Carlson in a big speech say, we need to pray?
I think it's happening all across America.
I think the media, including Fox, they don't talk about it.
You know, they don't speak that language.
But I really believe that it is happening right now while we're having this conversation.
People are coming to faith.
People are being red-pilled.
For me, it's all about reality.
In other words, you wake up to this idea.
There's this thing called reality.
And there's this group over here that denies reality, denies that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and that having a border is common sense, and that we need to have a robust police force and we need to worry about whether our elections are fair.
This is all reality-based.
And I think that there are people that are saying, okay, I'm with team reality.
And by the way, if you're with team reality, eventually it will lead you to God, who is the author of reality.
Eric, I always love talking to you.
It's great to see you.
Eric with Taxis.
The book is Letter to the American Church.
You should read a lot of his books because they're all good.
Thanks for coming on.
It's great to see you.
Thank you.
God bless you.
Thanks.
All right.
Love talking to Eric.
Get the letter to the American church and come back on Friday for the Andrew Clavin Show.