The Religious Right's fraudulent co-opting of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian who resisted the tyrannical Nazi Germany government, has been a rallying cry figure among the American Religious Right in recent years as a way of expressing opposition to marriage equality, abortion, PPACA (aka Obamacare), and other issues of the day to support their cause.

The lead appropriator of Bonhoeffer is Religious Right activist Eric Metaxas.

Clifford Green at The Christian Century:

You have to read Eric Metaxas with bifocals. With the upper lens you read the Metaxas of the book, an engaging narrative by an experienced writer who presents Bonhoeffer as a Christian hero led by God to struggle against an evil regime and against his wayward church. With the lower lens you read the Metaxas revealed in numerous web interviews in which he gives his account of Bonhoeffer's "staggering" significance today.

Metaxas first read Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship at the time of his evangelical conversion some 20 years ago. Formerly a staff writer for Chuck Colson's BreakPoint, he appears frequently as a cultural commentator on Fox News and CNN. He founded and hosts Socrates in the City, a monthly event in New York featuring prominent speakers on "life, God, and other small topics." He presumably treats such topics in his trilogy of popular apologetics, the first being Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask). In 2007 he published Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, which made the New York Times best-seller list and was the companion book to the film Amazing Grace.

[...]

But that is not Metaxas's approach: polarization is a structural motif of the whole narrative, because his mission is to reclaim the true Bonhoeffer from "liberals" who have "hijacked" the theologian. Consider the treatment of Bon­hoeffer's year at Union Theological Seminary in 1930-1931. It is true that Bonhoeffer was very critical of theology at Union as well as the preaching he heard in white churches like Riverside Church. What Metaxas highlights, however, is Bon­hoeffer's experience at Abyssinian Baptist Church, where, he implies, Bonhoeffer had a conversion experience and became a serious Christian. In volume 10 of the Bonhoeffer Works I present new evidence of Abyssinian's deep personal impact on Bonhoeffer. But that is to complement, not disparage, the decisive impact of Bonhoeffer's friends at Union Seminary.

[...]

Descending to insult, even insulting the subject of his own book, is a sure sign that an author is in trouble. Why does he do this? Ostensibly because the death-of-God theologians, those "liberals," have "hijacked" Bonhoeffer. But why whip a few writers who made a brief splash 40 years ago and who have had little or no influence on theology or the church? Because they function as straw men in his polarizing narrative about "orthodox Christians" and "liberals."His real target is liberals, and not just theological liberals, but political liberals too.

Speaking of hijacking Bonhoeffer's legacy, it's the Religious Right and folks like Metaxas that do so, NOT the liberals.

Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch:

As we have noted before, the Religious Right today is absolutely convinced that the movement is a bunch of modern-day Dietrich Bonhoeffers, the German theologian who resisted the Nazis and was ultimately put to death, for taking a stand against marriage equality, abortion, health care reform, and President Obama.

Jack Jenkins at Think Progress LGBT:

It’s no secret that conservative Christians who oppose marriage equality are using increasingly hyperbolic language to describe their campaign against LGBT rights. But as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to rule on a landmark case involving same-sex marriage later this month, anti-LGBT Christians are issuing a call to arms by invoking an unlikely hero: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a prominent German pastor and theologian who was famously murdered for participating in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler during World War II.

[...]

“Because of the trends and cultural shifts that we have witnessed in culture over the past 40 years, we have all known that this day would likely come and Christians would be put at odds with the culture and the courts,” [Rick] Scarborough reportedly said. “I believe we are there. We are approaching a Bonhoeffer moment in America.”

[...]
But just because Bonhoeffer is well-known doesn’t make the use of his name appropriate or accurate, and while anti-LGBT Christians might fancy themselves heirs to his stirring legacy, scholars and the theologian’s own writings paint an image of the late pastor that doesn’t quite line up with modern homophobic theology.

Bonhoeffer assisted in an attempt to assassinate Hitler (the subject of a recent film starring Tom Cruise), primarily because the infamous Führer was actively coopting Christian churches in Germany for his own needs, seizing whole sections of Europe using one of the most powerful militaries ever assembled, and waging one of the bloodiest wars in human history with the goal of establishing a new world order based on the supposed genetic supremacy of white Germans. This in addition to Hitler’s overseeing of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Romani people, Poles, communists, and yes, LGBT people as a part of his “Final Solution.”This genocide was enacted by requiring Jews and others to wear symbols acknowledging their “non-Aryan” status, siloing them into ghettos, shipping them off to concentration camps, forcing them into gas chambers, and performing perverse, horrific medical experiments on Jewish men, women, and even children.
[...]
In fact, Bonhoeffer, trained in the meticulous German style of theology, was unimpressed with the American religious landscape of his time: although he attended the historically progressive Union Seminary in New York City during the 1930s, he was deeply critical of the school’s left-leaning theology, acknowledging its various rejections of Christian fundamentalism were “healthy” but noting that students would get “carried away with the general collapse.” He was equally disapproving of fundamentalist theology and Scarborough’s own Southern Baptist denomination, however, accusing it of preaching “the crassest orthodoxy…an unrelenting harshness in holding on to one’s possessions, possessions either of this or of the other world.”
[...]
Christians who center their faith on anti-LGBT theology will likely continue invoking his name for their causes, but the claim that Bonhoeffer, who repeatedly railed against the blindness of “bourgeois” Christians, would consider their fight his own is dubious at best.

Scott Paeth:

I could have as easily titled this post "The Egregious Eric Metaxas's misuse of Dietrich Bonhoeffer," because, make no mistake, Metaxas is egregious, and the cottage industry he has cultivated in selling right wing Christian self-righteousness under the banner of comparing their moral sclerosis to the genuine courage and moral risk taken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer is disgusting and offensive. And the fact that he has done it through a biographical hatchet job that has become successful by flattering the delusions of American evangelicals that they are embroiled in a struggle for the soul of America that is in some way equivalent to that of the German Confessing Church just piles offense on offense.

So, when I read that, once more, Metaxas is peddling evangelical victimology under the cover of Bonhoeffer, I am both unsurprised and appalled. His latest comes in the form of an interview on a conservative Christian radio show, where he states, while comparing the struggles of Bonhoeffer (who, as a reminder, was murdered by the Nazis for his involvement in a conspiracy against the Reich).

[...]
I should probably just end there, but it is worth noting a couple of the underlying problems in Metaxas's whole approach, particularly in this interview. First is his insistence that the dividing line between his evangelical cohort of followers and "liberal Christianity" is over this idea of "Biblical orthodoxy," which is of course another way of saying "Liberal Christians don't go out of their way to condemn homosexuality," a topic that occupies all of about five verses in the entire Bible. "Biblical orthodoxy" never seems to attend such issues as, for example, nonviolence, which was central to Jesus' teaching, or charging interest on loans (known in the Bible as usury, but known in the United States as "the engine of our economy").

But then again, evangelicals of the kind who like to be flattered by Metaxas's historical distortions aren't really all that concerned with war or economic injustice, both of which are much more central to the moral concerns of the Bible than any issues of "sexual orthodoxy." It's passing strange when your conception of what constitutes orthodoxy of any sort revolves around the isolated focus on such a minuscule aspect of the Biblical text. It's even stranger when your conception of orthodoxy focuses, not on questions of God's nature, Christ's incarnation, the nature of his sacrifice or the possibilities of salvation, but instead on one question that was culturally marginal at the time the Bible was written and has become crucial today only because a subset of the human family has decided that it would very much like to be treated as fully human thank-you-very-much. If that's orthdoxy, I'll take heresy any day of the week.

Carl R. Trueman at First Things (a Conservative Religious blog):

There are likely to be three things which have contributed to the phenomenon Mills describes. First, there is a subordination of doctrinal confession to aesthetics. Particularly in American evangelicalism, there is a tendency to treat doctrinal difference with chosen heroes as something to be ignored or wished away rather than addressed. Thus, C. S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have become American evangelicals as a result of posthumous virtual baptisms into the faith, the brash boldness of which would surely have made even Brigham Young blush.

Now, Lewis and Bonhoeffer both said nice things about Jesus. One wrote exceptionally well. The other died opposing Hitler. They were decent, admirable Christian fellows from whom we should all learn. But they were most definitely not conservative American evangelicals. That they have been made into such indicates how significant doctrinal differences have given way to a desire to recruit them to the chosen cause. It is a triumph of aesthetics and consumer taste over doctrinal confession.

Their fraudulent usage of Bonhoeffer misrepresents what he stood for.