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History as flattery is a dangerous thing

History as flattery is a dangerous thing

Last updated on: October 12, 2025 at 10:52 pm by Fred Clark

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History as flattery is a dangerous thing 2025-10-12T22:52:44-04:00 Fred Clark

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Eric Metaxas first became famous as the author of two popular biographies of heroic historic figures first William Wilberforce and then Dietrich Bonhoeffer. At the time those books first came out — back in 2007 and 2009 — I was encouraged to see them praised and devoured by so many of my fellow white evangelical American Christians. People were learning more about Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer, and surely that must be a Good Thing. People were being taught to admire courageous figures who fought for justice for others and at a time when white evangelicals were sneering at “social justice warriors,” that had to be worth something.

The graves of the prophets. (Photo of an American grave by Erik Loomis)

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 democracy and authoritarianism? How did this guy go from writing serious biographies of admirable historic figures to writing children’s books for MAGA adults with titles like “Donald Drains the Swamp”? What happened to Eric Metaxas?

That bewilderment and lamentation is expressed well in Will Hinton’s recent post, “I Helped Eric Metaxas Dream Up a Talk Show in 2008. I Hardly Recognize Him Now.” Hinton and Metaxas were close friends back in 2008, a time when Hinton says his friend’s 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 “thoughtful public conversation … a space where faith, art, and culture could meet with humor and humility. … a show that could persuade, not provoke.”

Hinton is recalling that dream of a talk show because of this piece by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian (UK) last week, “A rightwing late-night show may have bombed – but the funding behind it is no laughing matter.”

Gabbatt reports on how the creepy “Ziklag Group” poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into producing four episodes of a stiff, Carson-style “Talk Show With Eric Metaxas” 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’s bad in a way that’s just sort of saddening.

Contemplating his former friend’s descent into “grievance,” 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, even he would feel bad for the guy. I’d call the show a train wreck, but train wrecks are at least compelling.

The failure of the show isn’t just a matter of poor execution — it’s ill-conceived on every level. Consider that the New Apostolic Millionaires of the Ziklag Group funded this show as part of their “Seven Mountains Mandate” ideology. The idea of the show was to “conquer the mountain of culture” by creating a new late night talk show.

In 2025.

I’ve sometimes mocked the fecklessness of the Democratic Consultant Industry for thinking they need to create a “Joe Rogan of the left,” but that at least involves a media format from this century. The Ziklag Group’s big idea here was to win the culture wars by funding what they hoped would become an Alan Thicke of the far-right.

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 have seen it coming, even back when Metaxas was still striving to be (or to be seen as) a serious “intellectual.” 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:

That transformation is especially painful because Bonhoeffer was supposed to be Eric’s moral north star.

Yet many Bonhoeffer scholars, including Clifford Green and Victoria Barnett, have criticized his biography for flattening the theologian’s complexity and turning him into a partisan symbol. They point out that Bonhoeffer’s courage was grounded in humility, doubt, and deep theological wrestling, not in self righteous certainty.

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.

“Turning prophets into mascots” is a good summary of those two biographies. The books weren’t quite hagiographies, but both were full of the sense that these were exemplary men — heroes worthy of emulation. The book on Wilberforce put that word right in the title — Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. But it’s 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 “British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.”

Replace “British historians” with “white Christians” and that works as a review of Metaxas’s book.

Wilberforce himself deserves the adulation, but I think part of the book’s popularity stemmed from the way that Metaxas enticed readers to claim a share of that adulation, just for being who they already were.

Wilberforce was a devout Protestant Christian who experienced a profound conversion — a “born-again” experience in which he came to embrace a form of nonconformist devotion that might be called “evangelical” Christianity (let’s avoid, for this post, the dispute over whether that term is useful for describing any Christians in that time). Wilberforce’s 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.

That is all true — just as it is also true that Wilberforce had many contemporaries who shared something very much like his nonconformist Protestant “evangelical Christianity” but who just as devoutly believed that their faith required them to oppose his efforts.**

Metaxas’s 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’s evangelical Christianity made him a hero, then their evangelical Christianity also makes them heroes.

The Bonhoeffer biography flattered its readers with the same suggestion — so much so that I’ve often jokingly said that the book was Metaxas’s “autobiography of Bonhoeffer” and should’ve been titled “I’m Dietrich Bonhoeffer And So Can You!” 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.

“Turning prophets into mascots” is also a decent summary of Matthew 23:29-35, a passage from that Gospel we’ve discussed here many times — most recently a few years ago in response to David Swartz’s thoughtful thoughts about the not-at-all-innocent repercussions of what he called “Innocent Readings of Evangelical History.” Swartz doesn’t mention Metaxas’s self-flattering biographies, but they fit the pattern he describes there:

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 Grimké 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 González calls “innocent readings of history.” 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.

Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer are exemplary precisely because they were exceptional, not typical. It is dangerous — not safe — to contemplate the lives of such “heroic” and extraordinary people without the prudent, humble wisdom found in one of my favorite pieces from the late great The Toast: “Reasons 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.”

That sounds funny — and that piece was funny, and I’m sorely disappointed it has disappeared from the web — but it’s also exactly the attitude Jesus commends in Matthew 23, when he denounces hypocrites who “build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.'”

It’s not bad to hope that would have been true. It’s not bad to hope that “If I had lived in the days of Wilberforce, I would have supported his efforts to abolish the slave trade” or to hope that “If I had lived in the days of Bonhoeffer, I would have also opposed my government’s descent into fascism.” But to act as though you’re sure that would have been true always leads directly to hypocrisy. The more you’re able to convince yourself with certainty that “If I had lived in the days of our ancestors, I would not have taken part” the more you ensure that you are becoming exactly the sort of person likely to take part in such evil and injustice right now.

Let the prophets be prophets without trying to turn them into mascots. Honor them without flattering ourselves.

Consider, for example, Silas Soule, who was recently the subject of the 1,981st installment of Erik Loomis’s “Erik Visits an American Grave” series.

Loomis doesn’t 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’s 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.

I knew about Soule’s 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’t 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’s Ferry. (Go read that, seriously.)

Soule lived an exemplary life. We can learn and benefit from that life, from the example of his courage and integrity.

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’d been around back then. That flattery might feel nice. It might be pleasant to imagine we’re just as worthy of praise and admiration as he was. But indulging in that pleasure almost guarantees that we never will be.

The louder we boast that “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part” the more certain it is that we will 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.

And then we’ll end up trying to turn that into our own late night talk show.

See earlier:

* For those of you reading this who don’t own a heavily underlined first edition of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Ken Myers is the former NPR arts and culture producer who founded Mars Hill Audio, a thoughtful, long-running series of interviews and audio essays on art, literature, culture, and faith that began as a cassette-by-mail subscription service.

** Consider, for example, the life of John Newton, the author of the beloved hymn that provided the title of Metaxas’s book. Newton was working as a sailor aboard a slave ship when, during a fierce storm at sea, in 1748 he had a dramatic “evangelical” conversion and became a born-again Christian. He then, as a devout “evangelical Christian … continued to work on slave ships for another decade, eventually becoming captain of his very own human-trafficking-and-torture ship. He eventually retired and got a job at a customs house, making a small fortune by investing his money in the slave trade for another decade. Years later he was ordained as an Anglican priest. Years later still he wrote the words to “Amazing Grace.” And then — 16 years after that and 40 years after his conversion experience — he began to support the abolitionist cause.

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