Lying to Ourselves in the Name of Christ
Letter to the American Church. New York: Salem Books, 2022.
The following is a review essay of Eric Metaxas’s two recent books, Letter to the American Church. New York: Salem Books, 2022, and Religionless Christianity: God's Answer to Evil. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Faith, 2024.
One of the salient themes that was present in the early writings of Eric Metaxas, popular podcaster and cultural critic, was none other than freedom, but not just any kind of freedom. Indeed, his well-developed focus throughout was on religious freedom, one that he rightly recognized as a foundational liberty since it undergirds every other liberty that people enjoy. More to the point, if there is nothing above the state, if there is neither God nor transcendence, then the citizenry has little recourse when its leaders, or when the legal system itself, repeatedly fails them. Though Metaxas had already developed this theme in Amazing Grace, his 2007 biography of William Wilberforce in which powerful people hid behind the pretense of fair play with all sorts of self-justification, he began to attract an even broader following in his celebrated book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer written a couple of years later. In that work, Metaxas not only underscored the goodness of freedom, truly an emblem of the divine, but he also explored the painful reality when such freedom was clearly gone, taken away by a corrupted and downright evil German state.
Religionless Christianity: God's Answer to Evil. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Faith, 2024.
In his two most recent books, which are at the heart of this current essay (Letter to the American Nation and Religionless Christianity), Metaxas has not only shifted his attention from Europe to North America, but also believes that the twenty-first-century American church is at "an inflection point" (p. IX) in its history. In other words, the coopting forces of both the American state, its body politic, as well as those of the broader culture are so extensive and powerful that the challenges stacked up against remaining faithful as an American Church are not unlike those that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other Christians encountered in 1930's Germany. Moreover, though there is more than enough blame to go around to cover both political and cultural leaders, the main focus of Metaxas in these two recent works is on the ongoing failure of the American church. More to the point, this institution, along with its leadership, is sleepwalking into its future, with eyes glazed over, unable to discern the potent and malign forces that are currently in play.
Not surprisingly then, in the first of these two books, Letter to the American Church, Metaxas draws several parallels between the Christians of early twentieth-century Germany (Deutsche Christen) and those of twenty-first-century America. Like the German Christians of an earlier age who were coopted by the propaganda and language games of the national socialists and who thereby retreated to a “religious sphere,” unconcerned about social and political life in general and the Jews in particular, many twenty-first century American Christians are currently making very similar moves. Metaxas substantiates this basic claim, which is actually an indictment, by lifting up four major blunders that the American church has made in such a challenging environment.
First of all, the American church has "cheapened the ideas of belief and real faith" (p. 63). In other words, pastors, laity, and even a few theologians have substituted "mere intellectual assent" (p. 66), or the comfort that comes from simply being orthodox, for genuine Christian faith. This is a serious, even mischievous, fault because it assures the "believer" that all is well when in the larger scheme of things, it's not. “We cover ourselves with the fig leaf of that doctrinal statement or with the whole Bible,” Metaxas cautions, but so much of real and lasting importance is simply left aside. Such a faith, if that’s as far as it goes, is rightly termed “cheap faith.” In other words, just as Bonhoeffer reminded us all that there is such a thing as cheap grace, there is also such a thing as cheap faith. Among other things, a cheapened, ersatz faith leaves the self at the center of its own life, ensconced in its privatized religious and ideational world, unconcerned about the broader moral, social, and political realities, especially as they play out in terms of the neighbor, the “other” for whom Christ died.
Second, the American church has bowed down before the "idol of evangelism" (p. 75) in the same way that "Luther's zeal for our justification by faith was used to crowd out other essential biblical ideas" (p. 75), again during the 1930s in Germany, with the result that today the glorious gospel has been reduced to "convincing someone to assent to God's simple plan of salvation" (p. 76). Have you ever heard of the four spiritual laws? In this "hypertrophied view of evangelism" (p. 79), Christians refuse to comment on anything controversial or political, thereby forgetting that loving their neighbors in a full-orbed way always entails speaking the truth in love, even if that speaking results in being canceled or dismissed or much worse. As Metaxas painfully points out, "We pretend we would have spoken out for the Jews in Bonhoeffer's day, or that we would have spoken against the slave trade in Wilberforce's day, but are we speaking out today on the issues that are no less important to God in our time" (p. 84)?
Third, so many American evangelicals have been schooled on the notion that the gospel is not to be expressed in the public, political realm (“Be ye not political,” p. 53) because they have seen so many bad examples. However, to give up this dimension, to have Christians bracket out their beliefs, along with their ethical ways of reasoning, to self-censor in egregious ways once they step outside the church, is to privatize the Christian faith far better than any Enlightenment critic could have ever done it: “Oh, you can hold your silly, little religious beliefs, if that’s what you want, but just keep them to yourselves.”
Fourth, in his list of errors Metaxas lifts up “the pietistic and perfectly negative idea that our Christian faith is lived out principally by avoiding sin, so that we must place our own virtue and salvation above all other matters” (p. 53-54). Such a statement, of course, has to be carefully understood. To be sure, Metaxas fully recognizes the beauty and power of the gospel that sets believers free from both the guilt and power of sin. That’s not the issue here. However, even this great and glorious truth can be held improperly in the church and in a way that leads to self-preoccupation and even to a kind of spiritual narcissism that repeatedly and stubbornly forgets the neighbor. One may even take an odd sort of delight in the supposed purity of one’s own soul in sharp contrast to the filth and vulgarity of others caught up in the broader culture, giving new life to an old form of Pharisaism that only pays attention to the other by way of self-congratulating contrast.
In his first book (Letter to the American Church), then, Metaxas highlighted the current crisis facing the church by employing the language of “an inflection point.” In his second book, (Religionless Christianity), he takes up a much larger lens and considers what he calls “our final existential crisis” (p. 7) facing the American nation, a crisis that will have numerous ramifications for the American church. In this reckoning of the American story, the first existential crisis was none other than the American Revolution; the second, the Civil War; and the third and perhaps the final crisis will entail the loss of the national sovereignty of the American nation by being subsumed under "a globalist world system dedicatedly at war with the God from Whom we derive our principles of 'liberty and justice for all'" (p. 7).
Just as many Western nations have thrown off their Christian heritage in the name of supposed liberty, they have also replaced the gospel narrative with a secular one in which the state itself, in ever larger ideological combinations with other states, part of the initial phase of the globalist project, has now itself become a formidable power to be reckoned with by its citizens. To ease this enormous shift, to make it more palpable, the masses have repeatedly been offered "the secular Kool-Aid" (p.147) to drink. In other words, the vocabulary of "secularity," all gussied up to make it appear to be what it is actually not, becomes a grand euphemism that distracts the masses from recognizing the awful consequences, for both societies and individuals alike, of what is, in reality, a well-tooled atheistic project; that is, of life without God on a grand scale, covering the face of the earth. However, if God is dead as Nietzsche had proclaimed earlier, then so too in a real sense is humanity. Gone, in other words, is the glory of humanity, and its enormous worth because the glorious image in which all human beings have been created is now clean gone as well. As Metaxas observes, "So because our existence is perfectly accidental, it therefore logically and unavoidably follows that it has zero intrinsic value or meaning" (p. 146). As a result of such a broad shift, this vast emptying out, human beings are now being treated in an utterly instrumental way, not valued for themselves, but considered simply for their usefulness along the way to some newfangled utopia envisioned by increasingly powerful leaders whether by national socialists in one age or by Marxist socialists in another.
As these secular (actually atheistic) trends play out even in the American nation, which, interestingly enough, has been known for its vibrant religious heritage, religious faith, once robust and free, has now become once again increasingly privatized. It is “more like a mere hobby,” Metaxas warns, something like collecting fine China, than the vibrant faith that once characterized the historic church and that shook the world upside down. Put another way, “when you leave that [church] building, you bow to the secular authority of the state” (p. 61), in virtually every instance. Oddly enough, some in the church today have even taken up this secular narrative themselves, redefined a few terms here and there, with the result that they have ended up with a gospel that is not in the end “the faith once delivered to the saints” but a substitute narrative very much of their own making. Put another way, here is a “gospel” that has all the markings of considerable narrative drift. As Metaxas cautions: “The lurch leftward to accommodate secularist ideology has been a part of mainline Protestant churches even since before Bonhoeffer went to New York in 1930, where he saw it with his own eyes” (p. 122).
Moreover, when Bonhoeffer, himself, reflected on why the members of the German church had failed to stand up to the Nazis, he suggested that they had opted for “mere religion,” in the place of, and as a substitute for, what he, interestingly enough, called “religionless Christianity.” In terms of the former, mere religion is actually counterfeit religion. It’s phony, bogus, and fake. It has many of the trappings of religiosity, such as attending church on Sundays and giving intellectual assent to some theological ideas (p. 16), characteristics that Metaxas had developed in his earlier book, but such a mere religion, Metaxas insists, is "not the Christian faith" (p. 16). Instead, it is a religion once again marked by both cheap faith and cheap grace. It, therefore, races for the comfort of an "island unconnected to the rest of reality" (p. 21) so that its adherents will not make any waves in terms of either politics or with respect to the evils currently reigning in the broader culture. As a consequence of these moves, such believers will therefore be "free" to preach the gospel, as they put it. However, the cost of such a faith is in reality quite small, and its vision is stiflingly narrow. The realities of sacrifice, suffering, and rejection, elements that marked the life of Christ, are all stubbornly and studiously avoided. It's a religion, in other words, that in its façade offers a sentimentalized Jesus, one who is ever accommodating to the powers that be, one who is always soft-spoken, and who is never contrary to anyone, especially towards those who hold significant power or who have very popular, even celebrated ideas. In short, the actual Jesus of the Bible, the one who makes a whip out of cords, who scatters coins, who overturns tables, and who is rejected by the leadership, both religious and political, is nowhere to be seen. Such a religion, then, in the end, makes "converts but not disciples" (p. 47), and thereby keeps the whole charade very much in place. Startling as this may be, almost like a splash of cold water in the face, this is a religion that in the end allows for the rise of a Hitler—or worse! It played out in Germany in the last century. Metaxas believes it is now playing out on American soil as well.
In terms of the latter terminology developed in his second book, that is, “religionless Christianity,” which is a corrective to the former language of “mere religion,” Metaxas (and of course Bonhoeffer before him) has in mind a faith that is broad, wide and deep, one that embraces all of life and that therefore breaks out of the compartmentalization, the ghettoization, of the faith that makes it irrelevant to the leading issues of the day. It is a faith that extricates "Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment" (p. 29). As such, religionless Christianity entails a costly faith, and it is willing to sacrifice (reputation, honor, popularity, name, and even one's life) for the love of Christ and for the sake of the neighbor. Accordingly, such a Christianity does not retreat to a private island of irrelevance and religiosity, but takes a public stand against the evil of the day (p. 161) precisely in the name of the love of neighbor, one of the two great commandments. Such a Christianity therefore risks significant loss in speaking the truth in love to all people, the powerful and popular included.
Religionless Christianity, then, shucking off the privatization of religion that leads to both self-absorbed irrelevance and to the tolerating of great societal evils, is nothing less than "a prophetic word for us now to call us higher and deeper for God's history-changing purposes in this generation" (p. 160). What will we do in the face of this prophetic word? How will we respond to such a deeper call? If, however, this word and call are rejected or explained away in any number of loose and in the end ineffective arguments, then the future of the American church, according to Metaxas, will be indistinguishable from the plight once outlined by Martin Niemöller, German pastor, who warned almost a century ago:
“First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out— because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out— because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak out for me” (pp. 71-72).
Kenneth J. Collins is Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY, and a member of Firebrand’s editorial board.