This article is co-published with Documented
Leading figures on the Christian right have seized on an unlikely hero in their campaign against secular government: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an antifascist theologian and pastor who resisted the Nazi regime before he was executed in 1945.
Driving the trend is Eric Metaxas, a prolific author, speaker and celebrity on the Christian right, whose writings on Bonhoeffer and American politics provide the intellectual fodder for a movement that seeks to turn evangelicals against liberal policies on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ inclusion and racial justice.
In the short term, this push has taken the form of a well-funded voter mobilization campaign ahead of the 5 November presidential election, with conservative organizations coordinating to screen Metaxas’s 2024 film – which lays out an argument equating liberal policies with Nazism, and urges believers to emulate Bonhoeffer – in churches across the country.
In the long run, experts worry that the push to liken American liberal democracy to Nazi Germany could spur political violence, citing past examples of Christian extremists who invoked Bonhoeffer to justify bombing and shooting up abortion clinics.
“We’re worried about post-election political violence, and this is a way of inspiring that,” said Victoria Barnett, a theologian and eminent scholar of Bonhoeffer and the Holocaust who has advocated for a nuanced understanding of Bonhoeffer and has cautioned against depicting Bonhoeffer as a kind of evangelical “Lone Ranger”.
According to documents obtained by the Guardian and Documented, the production and distribution of the movie, called Letter to the American Church, was coordinated by the rightwing group Turning Point USA and American Letter Productions – the film division of Metaxas Media, an entertainment business founded by Eric Metaxas.
Through the Letter to the American Church tour, an initiative launched in mid-2024, these groups and others have screened the film at churches, community organizations, and small groups for donations of any amount; churches willing to screen the film received an “extensive marketing kit” to promote it.
Funding for this film and tour was pledged, in part, by the secretive Christian donor network Ziklag, a non-profit that embraces the aims of a growing movement of Christian nationalists who strive to rule over US government and society. As a piece of Ziklag’s larger, coordinated effort to get out the vote, the group committed to funding movie screenings in churches across the country “with a focus on oversaturation in the battleground states” to galvanize congregations and increase evangelical voter turnout.
Since its launch, the film has been screened at least 170 times across the country, including more than 40 times in key swing states. Local GOP chapters and numerous outside organizations on the right have also held screenings, some in conjunction with poll worker sign-up initiatives and alongside Turning Point Action, a group the Trump campaign has relied on for its voter registration and turnout efforts.
Internal videos produced by Ziklag, obtained by the Guardian and Documented, detail Ziklag’s 2024 election strategy, pledging $800,000 to “focus on rallying the church behind biblically based voting using Eric Metaxas’ new documentary, Letter to the American Church”. Organizations that partnered with Metaxas, including Turning Point Action and TPUSA Faith, were promised donations from Ziklag in this effort to engage evangelical voters.
Ziklag and Turning Point USA did not return requests for comment.
In an email, Metaxas denied having “anything to do with the making of the LETTER film” – although he stars in the movie and founded one of the companies that produced it. Metaxas rejected the term “Christian nationalism”, saying it is used to “demonize people who believe that we Christians are obliged to live our faith in every sphere, including the political.”
And he suggested that Bonhoeffer scholars and his critics were in fact the ones inciting political violence, not him.
‘Co-opted by extremists’
Born in 1906 and raised in a family of intellectuals and academics, Bonhoeffer dedicated himself as a young man to theology and ministry. At 21 years old, he wrote a dissertation exploring the idea of Christians’ ethical and moral obligations to one another and society.
But Bonhoeffer’s prodigious academic career was cut short by the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party.
An early dissident, Bonhoeffer wrote in 1933 that the Hitler government’s increasingly discriminatory and violent oppression of Jews was a “problem for the church”, which he viewed as responsible for opposing such policies, even if they were not directed at Christians.
His work in the following decade, with other dissenting clergy and networks of resisters, would eventually lead the regime to accuse him of aiding in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested in 1943 and hanged in 1945 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, leaving behind his letters from prison and numerous writings on ethics, morality and the role of Christians in a secular, modern society.
Before he was executed, Bonhoeffer warned of the dangers of zealotry and groupthink – perils he believed societies face during times of political upheaval.
“[The] upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgement,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “and they give up trying – more or less unconsciously – to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”
Scholars of Bonhoeffer, and Bonhoeffer’s living relatives, have argued that Bonhoeffer teaches Christians to reject nationalisms of all kinds.
To their dismay, Christian nationalists have embraced Bonhoeffer, frequently invoking his participation in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler as an example of moral courage. In this interpretation, Bonhoeffer is cast not as the contemplative theologian who agonized over his role in the antifascist resistance, but as a Christian warrior with the political leanings of a 21st-century American evangelical.
Tobias Korenke, Bonhoeffer’s great-nephew, has expressed frustration about the use of Bonhoeffer by the religious right, saying in a recent interview with Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper that Bonhoeffer’s name had been “co-opted by extremists”.
At its worst, this interpretation of Bonhoeffer has led to violence. Michael Bray, a pastor who was convicted for his role in bombing numerous abortion clinics in 1984 and 1985, cited Bonhoeffer as an inspiration. Paul Jennings Hill, an anti-abortion zealot who shot and killed a physician at an abortion clinic in 1994, too, invoked Bonhoeffer.
One evangelical celebrity who has consistently and effectively worked to popularize Bonhoeffer on the right is Eric Metaxas, a Yale-educated talkshow host whose popular biography of Bonhoeffer helped introduce the historical figure to a broader audience in the US.
Metaxas’ 2009 book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, was marketed to Christians but achieved popular acclaim – serving as a biography and an inspirational history for readers familiar and unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer.
To explain Bonhoeffer’s participation in the resistance, Metaxas writes that God had called him to “get his hands dirty”.
In turn the New York-based Metaxas, already an unusual east coast ambassador for conservative evangelicalism, achieved a new level of fame.
“He was the rare figure in the evangelical world who was mixing it up with the culture shapers and the intellectuals in New York City,” said John Fea, a historian who has documented the rise of contemporary Christian nationalism. “And then the Bonhoeffer book came out, and that skyrocketed him.”
At the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gala in Washington convening lawmakers and Christian faith leaders, Metaxas spoke about the genesis of his Bonhoeffer biography in a speech delivered with the cadence and occasional vulnerability of a stand-up routine.
Fifteen minutes into the 30-minute talk, Metaxas reflected on the book’s widespread popularity, joking that “it was read even by president George W Bush, who is intellectually incurious, as we’ve all read. He read the book.”
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Metaxas paused, turning to Barack and Michelle Obama, who were seated to his right. “No pressure,” he added, and thrust a copy of the book into the hands of the president, who played along, smiling for a photo with the book.
During the remainder of his speech, Metaxas became sharply political, railing in particular against abortion.
“This is a Bonhoeffer moment,” Metaxas declared, implicitly comparing abortion to the Holocaust and calling on Christians to intervene in the manner that many Germans did not.
In the decade that followed, Metaxas’s political evolution has turned even more dramatically to the right. In a 2016 column in the Wall Street Journal, he endorsed Donald Trump, acknowledging his reservations about the real estate mogul but writing that if Christians voted for Hillary Clinton, “God will not hold us guiltless,” citing abortion as a top issue.
Metaxas eventually embraced Maga politics fully, vowing to support Trump as the former president falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and attempted to overturn the results.
“This is the most horrible thing that has happened in the history of our nation,” Metaxas told Trump on 30 November, in a since deleted recording of a phone call between Metaxas and the former president that ran on Metaxas’s show. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told Trump later in the call.
Experts question the underpinnings of Metaxas’ work on Bonhoeffer. A recent petition circulated by eight Bonhoeffer scholars, and signed by dozens of clergy and scholars of religion, argues that Metaxas “has manipulated the Bonhoeffer story to support Christian Nationalism”.
It warns that in his social media posts and public appearances, Metaxas “glorifies violence and draws inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany”.
Barnett argues that Metaxas’s book overstated Bonhoeffer’s role in the plot to assassinate Hitler and that Metaxas “tapped right into” a “mythology that Bonhoeffer was like the Lone Ranger, the Christian hero who fought the Nazis”.
In fact, the full extent of Bonhoeffer’s role in the conspiracy has been disputed – and however closely involved he might have been in the plot, Bonhoeffer did not legitimize political violence in religious terms.
“He did not justify his knowledge of the conspiracy on his being Christian – he just refused to do that, because he understood the dangers of that,” said Barnett.
Blurred lines between religion and politics
In Letter to the American Church, Metaxas, who narrates much of the documentary-style film, and a roster of rightwing pastors and activists take the Bonhoeffer narrative a step further, casting liberals and Democrats as being as destructive as Nazis and calling on evangelicals to take action and oppose evil.
They insist liberal teachings are destroying the family and religion in an effort to strip away freedoms from the American people. The speakers warn that if evangelicals do not rise up against ideas that they portray as evil, such as LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights, the country is headed for destruction.
At the heart of their argument is Bonhoeffer.
“Bonhoeffer effectively told the church that if we’re going to see any effective change for the better, they needed to start taking action and getting political,” Metaxas tells his audience in the film. “He said those who call themselves Christians have an obligation to God to get political if necessary, and to take a bold and likely dangerous stance against their own government.”
Letter to the American Church has partnered with influential rightwing organizations, including the pro-Trump Moms for America, the anti-LGBTQ+ Her Voice Movement, and Patriot Academy – a Christian nationalist group that seeks to rewrite the constitution – to promote the film and spread its message. The organization also partnered with Million Voices, an evangelical get-out-the-vote initiative, to launch a “Pledge to Vote” campaign, aiming to see “250,000 pledge to vote” after seeing the movie.
The effort highlights how some tax-exempt religious organizations push the boundaries of legal restrictions on electioneering.
Churches are banned from issuing endorsements or campaigning on behalf of a candidate, but they may be able to participate in the screenings without fear of incurring legal penalties, said Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney who specializes in first amendment and religious freedoms cases.
“One of the ways that this Christian nationalist movement has started operating in the political space, is to create these kinds of movies and then push them out through churches,” he said.
Despite the timing of the screenings – which end on election day – and the film’s ultra-political content, “the churches would all have, probably, some pretty credible deniability, if they said: ‘Hey, we were just [given] a chance to run a movie we thought our folks would be interested in.’”
The Letter to the American Church tour officially ends on 5 November – but don’t expect Bonhoeffer to go away anytime soon.
A splashy feature film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, is to debut in theaters across the US on 22 November. Bonhoeffer, the movie, features a star-studded cast of German actors and promises to be a captivating second world war drama. (Americans might recognize August Diehl, who plays the resistance theologian Martin Niemöller, from his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, or the 2010 thriller Salt).
Posters for the movie show Bonhoeffer carrying a gun. “With world-shattering stakes,” the Christian streaming company Angel Studios writes in its promotional materials for the film, Bonhoeffer “begs the question, how far will you go to stand up for what’s right?”
Bonhoeffer scholars reject this gun-toting version of the theologian – and the film’s “how-far-would-you-go” framing. “[In] the current, highly-polarized climate in the United States, these are dangerous words,” wrote the leaders of the English and German-language International Bonhoeffer Society last month in Die Zeit.
In their petition, the scholars warn more broadly of a possible uptick in violence after the election linked to the Christian far right.
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words and witness will be used to pit one side against the other, to fight ‘evil’, to put ‘America First’, and to justify violence,” they write. “The misalignment between these views and actions and Bonhoeffer’s own cannot be overstated. When you hear these grievous misuses, and you will, do not be fooled.”
