Lost in Transition: Making the Anti-Nazi “Bonhoeffer” a Trumpkin
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." —Sinclair Lewis
One of the more challenging debates within the Left today is how to precisely estimate the fascistic elements of the Trump project. Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin (dir. Todd Kormanicki, 2024) demonstrates conclusively looking for antecedents in Europe is a wasteful exercise in sectarianism.
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The picture, a biography of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church pastor, is scheduled to premiere nationwide on Thanksgiving Day thanks to distribution by a Utah-based right-wing religious film and television company Angel Studios. In a set of developments that are rather extraordinary, both the international scholastic body responsible for curating the Bonhoeffer legacy and the picture’s cast have publicly voiced opposition to the film’s marketing and promotion efforts.
Born in February 1906, Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran seminarian and clergyman who became one of the very few to publicly repudiate Nazism. Despite repeated opportunities, he refused to go into exile and instead became an active participant in the Confessing Church, which embraced subterfuge against the Third Reich. He was executed as a result of these activities and is revered as a martyr in the Liberal Church tradition.
On October 18, 2024, the Bonhoeffer family published this Public Letter:
We are horrified to see how the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is increasingly being distorted and misused by right-wing extremists, xenophobes and religious agitators. As direct descendants of the seven siblings of the theologian and resistance fighter executed by the Nazis, we can testify based on what we learned from our families that he was a peace-loving, freedom-loving humanitarian. Never would he have seen himself associated with far-right, violent movements such as Christian nationalists and others who are trying to appropriate him today. On the contrary, he would have strongly and loudly condemned these attitudes.
The Trump coalition quite clearly is described as a conglomeration of various demographic and ideological subsets lacking homogeneity besides a shared and unified desire for Donald Trump to be the President. It lacks the political unity that Italian or Nazi fascism held. Instead, Trump’s coalition, in some respects, replicated the nuances of the Reagan coalition. One component of this coalition is the audience for a distinctly conservative Christian media enterprise that found its most vivid initial expression in the early 2000s when Bush-era Evangelicals and Catholics united in movie theater screening rooms to view The Passion of the Christ (2004, dir. Mel Gibson).
Ascertaining what is underwriting this production is surprisingly difficult. The Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia both claim that it is an Original Screenplay authored by director Kormanicki. Yet the Bonhoeffer family makes it very clear that the film is taking guidance from the Christian Nationalist author and broadcaster Eric Metaxas, whose controversial 2010 biography rebranded the German cleric as a militant who would have opposed the Affordable Care Act, among other things. Metaxas has further embraced the Trump project wholeheartedly. It is no large intellectual leap to point out that the Bonhoeffer invocations peppering the Project 2025 manifesto most probably are to be attributed to Metaxas and his train of thought.
And so audiences are presented with a cross-section of the ideological concerns that inform the Trump coalition’s religious worldview. The proposition of the white cis-/hetero-sexual Evangelical Christian being besieged by an authoritarianism meriting political terrorism is a powerful and potent myth of settler colonial ideology. Transposition of that scenario onto a warped and mythical rendition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose mentorship in the Harlem Black church by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell radically transformed his comprehension of social justice and religious obligation, is the recipe for a rather disturbing motion picture scenario.
Here is a clip from a Bonhoeffer documentary released by First Run Features, which has also released multiple classic LGBTQ+ and feminist-inclined documentaries in its 45+ years of distributing films:
Rather than try digging into the whopping 640 page Metaxas tome, I instead decided to go for a much more brisk dip into the pools of his thought via his 2018 Foreword to a republication of The Cost of Discipleship.
Beforehand, it seems worthwhile to take notice of what that particular volume is actually about.
In the large and diverse intellectual history of Latin American Liberation Theology, Bonhoeffer’s 1937 treatise on the Christian notion of grace serves as a powerful foundational cornerstone. He draws out the distinction between “cheap grace” and “costly grace,” meaning the Church of the Rich as opposed to the Church of the Poor and Downtrodden. Bonhoeffer authored the book after his yearlong apprenticeship in Harlem at a time when Rev. Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the most historic Northern Black Churches in the Western Hemisphere, was becoming the hub of a People’s Front coalition including Communists, social democrats, trade unionists, consumer groups, and civic organizations. Most notably, it was a period when a new generation of radicals that came of age during the Great Depression embraced Communism as a disciplined militant street protest movement, multiracial and unified around causes like the campaigns for Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro Boys. As detailed vividly by Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression, this interwar urban coalition eventually would elect Communist Benjamin Davis, Jr. to City Council, effectively fusing with the Left wing of the Powell political machine until the advent of postwar McCarthyism.
To intern for Rev. Powell was to work on the ground floor of a radical project with a wide berth so as to embrace the secularist and believer, the Jew and Gentile, the African and European. Events like frequent lynchings naturally incubated a certain kind of socio-political inflection to prayer services. In a major metro hub known for hanging banners commemorating the occasion of these foul vigilante killings, Bonhoeffer saw how the Black community’s perseverance in the face of genocide provided an important example to Europe. Here in a prison epistle he asks ‘Who Am I?’ and provides an internal survey of his own spiritual trajectory during incarceration under the Third Reich.
And for contrast, now comes this recent interview with Metaxas:
Starting off, Metaxas literally claims in the video that his conception was ordained so as to enable the authorship of his monograph. Certainly we all aspire for divinity in our writings but I don’t believe that I have encountered something that hyperbolic since I was first appraised of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s authorial biography.
His March 2018 Foreword to Cost is rather shallow. Rather than discuss Bonhoeffer’s eschatology or soteriology, Metaxas instead paints a hagiography in service of his own devices and political motivations. The most striking effort comes at the end with an intellectual pretzel act devised so to claim Bonhoeffer as a Biblical Patriarch of Christian Nationalism.
The idea that a pastor was not required to take action the way anyone else would be required to take action if he could prevent killing was on of those theologically sloppy and “religious” ideas for which Bonhoeffer had little patience. In fact, he knew that because other Christians in Germany had such ideas was the very reason Germany had descended into the madness of National Socialism. As Bonhoeffer saw it, it was the church’s duty to call the state to account for its actions; and in the end, if the state did not do the right thing, it was the duty of the church to oppose the state with action.
Come again?
If it is not altogether clear by now, there is a subliminal code afoot in these lines. Metaxas is an anti-abortion zealot and he sees the state as an active and malignant actor for simply enabling a person to obtain medically-safe reproductive healthcare. All this business about state murder is double-edged verbiage describing abortion. In this sense, there is a rather disturbing *wink-wink* *nudge-nudge* towards assassins who murder women’s healthcare providers, who are frequently tarred with crass references to the Third Reich.
Bonhoeffer has been reinvented for the exact audiences that have a long history of opposing the core of his message, antifascism and antiauthoritarianism. His family relations write:
The right-wing evangelical production company Angel Studios has secured the rights to a new Bonhoeffer movie, and this is now their advertisement on X: “The battle against tyranny begins now. Watch Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” The accompanying image shows Dietrich Bonhoeffer holding a gun. The history-distorting biopic, which turns Bonhoeffer into an evangelical saint, is scheduled to hit theaters shortly after the U.S. presidential election.
By contrast, Metaxas told Emma Green at The Atlantic in February 2021:
Green: Some people have argued that the reputation of Christianity has been damaged by evangelicals’ wide support of President Trump. I take it you don’t agree with that.
Metaxas: I think that’s preposterous! Of course not. That’s just such a silly thing. The idea that I’m supposed to bury all of my thoughts for the hope of perhaps persuading somebody in the future that Christianity is palatable or something—Christians have traditionally stood up for human rights! When you stand up against the slave trade, you become incredibly politically unpopular. I mean, Wilberforce was totally demonized in his day. But he was doing what he felt was the right thing. What kind of a Christian would he have been if he said, “Well, I don’t want to be divisive”?
Green: Do you believe that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States?
Metaxas: No. He is the president. But there will always be an asterisk next to him for me until—if—things are clarified.
Green: Do you pray for him?
Metaxas: Oh, yeah. I take all that stuff seriously, you know? When Jesus tells us to love and pray for our enemies, it’s not to pray that they succeed. It’s to pray for them as a fellow human being.
So voting for Trump is like being ostracized over opposition to the Triangle Trade and Joe Biden is the enemy?