Lost in Transition: "Bonhoeffer" as Christian Nationalist Cinema
In this final report, examine the various right wing interests and groups responsible for producing a disturbing new propaganda biopic about the German minister…
While my previous reports have examined anti-Nazi Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an historical personage, this column will instead focus exclusively on the contemporary biographical film’s production. It remains impossible to deliver a conclusive personal verdict on the film itself until its disputatious release on Thanksgiving Day but it is not impossible to offer some insight based upon the existing record, particularly with regards to Director/Screenwriter Todd Kormanicki.
Read the Entire Three-Part Series:
Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin (dir. Todd Kormanicki, 2024), which has been denounced over its overt advertising and marketing appeals to Christian Nationalists, was filmed in the first quarter of 2023, primarily at three locations across Ireland.
On-set footage during film production.
Robert Reich explains Christian Nationalism.
The film was a collaboration of four different production interests, none of which have a notable history of religious cinema production. Furthermore, Director Kormanicki‘s production credits include the popular holiday comedy Elf (dir. John Favreau, 2003) starring Will Ferrell. This is to say that there does not seem any reason to initially suspect that the production is abnormal.
Hollywood sometimes can yield bizarre match-ups. In Summer 2016, Ben Affleck, a heavy supporter of Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, starred in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (dir. Zack Snyder), a picture Executive Produced by Steven Mnuchin, who would be appointed President-elect Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary that November.
Properly speaking, film advertising is the task of the studio’s postproduction and marketing/distribution department, meaning that a film is usually completely shot and almost-totally edited before the studio advertising department begins to design the posters and multimedia advertisements.
The film was produced by more than 15 individuals, according to the Internet Movie Database, but the central production personage in the film’s publicity campaign has been Camille Kampouris, a former puppeteer with Jim Henson’s Muppets who left show business to create Biblical scholarship materials.
Film producer Camille Kampouris interviewed by Forum on Christian Leaders, an Evangelical missionary campaign seeking to reverse secularization in the European Union. Its website also features over 125 different anti-Islamic videos and MP3s.
She and husband Emmanuel (also a producer on the picture) founded the Kairos Journal, part of a larger right wing theological edifice that has expanded to include an online seminary.
The Kairos website features subsections dedicated to discussing religious topics, including sexuality and gender, and the terminology used therein should obviate the level of cis-/hetero-sexism they proliferate:
Though the Bible celebrates human sexuality—God made male and female in his image—it clearly denounces sexual perversion, including promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, and other violations of God’s ideal. God’s people must insist on His standard in this matter, while never failing to love the sinner.
What level of cognizance the cast and Director/Screenwriter Todd Kormanicki had regarding the prejudices of their Producer upon commencement of shooting is difficult to ascertain.
Furthermore, Hollywood sometimes can yield bizarre match-ups. In Summer 2016, Ben Affleck, a heavy supporter of Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, starred in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (dir. Zack Snyder), a picture Executive Produced by Steven Mnuchin, who would be appointed President-elect Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary that November.
Yet this does suggest, at the very least, a certain scrutiny being merited in considering claims of complete obliviousness on the cast and crew’s part.
This is a video recording of the 2019 lecture Romarnicki gave at the national retreat of New Canaan Society. The group was given a rather innocuous description in this 2006 New York Times article, which is rather striking in hindsight.
Advertising materials for New Canaan events.
The New Canaan website has a Speaker’s page and it includes the notoriously-prudish former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who famously required every Justice Department statue have its Greco-Roman nudity obscured by drapery whilst serving during the first term of President George W. Bush, and Stephen Bennett, “one of the nation’s leading voices among men and women who have made the choice to change—individuals who once identified as gay—and now identify as heterosexual,” i.e. he promotes the debunked, harmful, and hateful “ex-gay” pseudo-scientific conversion therapy.
In early 1995, Jim Lane and his friend Eric Metaxas invited pastor Mark Browne to help them start an informal weekly gathering of men to “share life”. Lane knew men needed a safe place to take off their masks, share their challenges, pursue Jesus and develop authentic friendship with each other, because he knew that he needed it: “With every success I had really ever dreamed of professionally, in a lot of other ways my life…my marriage, my kids, my faith were a mess. I was isolated and alone, and when I looked around, I saw a lot of guys like me.” [Emphasis added]
As readers of my earlier columns will recall, Eric Metaxas is a Christian Nationalist media personality and author who has sought to co-opt the biography of the anti-Nazi Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer in service of his political agenda.
In Project 2025, the document authored by the Heritage Foundation think tank as an agenda for the Trump administration, Bonhoeffer is invoked so as to provide justification for the Christian Nationalist policy proposals, going so far as to claim ecological activism is “cheap grace,” to intentionally mis-use one of the German theologian’s key theories. (“Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience… “Cheap grace” aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism.” pg. 11) As I have mentioned previously, it is not beyond imagination to consider how much influence Metaxas and his train of thought had on the 2025 document authors.
Informational videos detailing key aspects of these complex topics.
Bonhoeffer’s own family wrote in a public letter:
A key figure in this abuse [of Bonhoeffer’s memory and legacy] is Eric Metaxas, whose 2010 biography of Bonhoeffer was first published in the United States and sold more than a million copies in 20 languages. In the book, he ignored the historical context and misrepresented Bonhoeffer as a fundamentalist Evangelical. Metaxas, now a right-wing Trump supporter, regularly compares US President Biden to Hitler, speaks of ‘total war’ and posts photos [to social media] of a gun on a Bible…
Metaxas book cover and Angel Studios film poster. Note the similarities in the subtitles for each biography.
Interviews with Eric Metaxas about Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer scholars write in their own online petition:
…Since the publication of his Bonhoeffer biography in 2010 until now, Eric Metaxas has manipulated the Bonhoeffer story to support Christian Nationalism. He has developed and inserted his distorted use of Bonhoeffer into public discourse, for example, at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2012, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2016, on his radio show, at the “Jericho March” preceding the [January 6th] attack on the US Capitol, in his comparison of violent offenders who stormed the US Capitol [on January 6th, 2021] to Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller, and other Nazi resisters, as well as in his latest book, Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil (2024) and his incessant social media posts - including one that features a gun atop a Bible. This portrayal glorifies violence and draws inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany. It is a dangerous misuse of Bonhoeffer’s life and lessons, particularly in this election season in the United States.
But is it really fair to hold the Director up to a standard that amounts to mere association with a group Eric Metaxas co-founded?
This is a news story about the film studio trying to do damage control on something that never was truly up to snuff, so to speak, and it is very obvious to those who look close enough.
Over at Culture Mix, Carla Hay lays out the picture’s unbearable whiteness of being:
…The offensive preachiness and inaccuracies in the movie have to do with sidelining people who’ve experienced the worst punishments from Nazi hate, in order to make it look like Bonhoeffer had a brand of “white savior” Christianity that deserves the most praise in fighting against Nazi hate… When Dietrich makes an apology on behalf of white people about the white supremacist racism that he hears is rampant in America, [his Black friend] Frank tells Dietrich that he expects Dietrich to set an example to other white people on how not to be racist: “We don’t need to you to be sorry, D. We just need you to show the world.” At this point, Dietrich might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says: “I’m a being propped up as a white Christian savior in this movie.”
It bears emphasizing all these shortcomings were embedded into the picture prior to the Angel Studios advertising campaign catalyzing this recent controversy.
The underlying argument made by the picture’s cast in their public letters and protests about Christian Nationalism suggests all of the trouble emerged only after principal photography and editing had completed and put the final cut of the picture “in the can.” In essence, they complain that the film’s distribution has been co-opted in a fashion at deep divergence with the original intention of the film.
But the points raised by Carla Hay instead obviate that the production was destined to be problematic.
The screenplay was extremely racist when they started shooting it on Day One of production and that needs to be foregrounded. In an Angel Studios roundtable discussion video featuring producer Camille Kampouris, she seems to suggest that she had a hands-on role in the various draft revisions of the screenplay, which would certainly explain the embarrassing simple-mindedness of such racial politics.
Right?
Or perhaps there is something more substantial to consider, something linked to an intellectual and theo-political trajectory as traditional American conservatism warped itself over the last 16 years into the Tea Party, Birtherism, Trumpism, QAnon, and finally Christian Nationalism?
The film’s US distribution rights were purchased by the Utah-based Angel Studios. Angel was created in March 2021 as the result of the bankruptcy reorganization and restructuring of VidAngel, a company originally founded so as to provide censorship services to home media viewers desiring a PG “family friendly” version of a mainstream film release. They have a customer base primarily consisting of Mormon and certain Evangelical consumer demographics, religious viewers who have strict moral opposition (or perhaps a formal religious mandate, as in the case with the Mormons), that prohibits viewing materials deemed explicit. These services have existed on the periphery of legality within copyright jurisprudence since the invention of the VCR, with the film studios and home media vendors casting a wary eye. VidAngel and similar companies essentially advertise their ability to break through the film studio’s multimedia copy protection methods, fundamentally voiding a major subsection of a motion picture’s copyright. The company fell afoul of several Hollywood studios and declared bankruptcy as a result of lawsuits related to film piracy. As a result, they created a spin-off film studio independent of the original VidAngel corporation.
But this is not the first instance of Angel Studios making headlines over their productions. Sound of Freedom (dir. Alejandro Monteverde, 2023) was reviled and lampooned at the time of its release, with film star Jim Caviezel’s performance as anti-sex trafficking militant Tim Ballard leaving many scratching their heads (especially when the star was explaining to Slate reporter Molly Olmstead how “[Ballard is] the one that opened the book with me on organ harvesting.”)
Olmstead wrote in her film critique of Sound:
Perhaps mass-distributed misinformation about child abductions wouldn’t be so bad, except we know that overblown fears of this kind of practice lead to widespread paranoia and societal scapegoating… Since 2020, panic about children’s sexual corruption has become a political boogeyman wielded by politicians, especially on the right. Remember Pizzagate? ...The conspiracy theory grew out of control, eventually helping spawn QAnon.
Soon enough, other cultural anxieties could be filtered through this theory of mass child trafficking: Supporting gay children became grooming them. The resurgence in vilification of LGBTQ+ Americans is directly related to these conspiracy theories about child-sex-trafficking rings—and the ballooning effect has created a dangerous reality for LGBTQ+ adults and children.... Where Sound of Freedom plays it safe, its star does not.... Caviezel…casually tossed out claims in…interviews that the major movie studios were “controlled by the central banks” (an old, common antisemitic trope); that the CIA, FBI, and other agencies were trying to hinder the film’s spread because they were involved in the cover-up of child sex trafficking; and that children are being sold for their organs.
Pray tell.
Caviezel, who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ (dir. Mel Gibson, 2004), is a fundamentalist Catholic who has publicly promoted QAnon conspiracy theories about adrenochrome and campaigned in Missouri against legal protections for the scientific study of fetal stem cells.
Some might be inclined to agree with the actors, who would have the public believe that their production is otherwise unproblematic, but this is something Carla Hay already explained is unacceptable. The script fictionalizes Bonhoeffer’s biography in service of its conservative political agenda. It invents a journey to Washington DC so Bonhoeffer can witness Jim Crow segregation, a symbolic act that will inform his opposition to Nazism.
Why?
Political mandates. As I previously mentioned, Bonhoeffer’s mentorship by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. was a major component in his faith formation.
Why eject that powerful story for something so tepid?
The reason is simple:
Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a historic target of conservative Republicans.
The Harlem Congressman was the original stalking horse for William F. Buckley, Jr. as he commenced publishing National Review magazine, the conservative pillar of postwar Republican politics. Buckley’s animosity towards Rev. Powell, Jr. creates an inconvenience for Christian Nationalists seeking to add Bonhoeffer to their ranks.
Buckley detested Rev. Powell on multiple levels.
The minister was repeatedly remarrying, constantly skirting ethics rules in Congress, and using his position as the Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee to push through liberal legislation originating in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. For Buckley and, to a larger degree, the nascent Religious Right, Powell’s Social Justice Gospel was and is nothing less than heresy.
In the hands of Christian Nationalists, Buckley’s animus towards the Black Church’s Liberation Theology is amplified further by the militant prejudices against such theology. (Can you imagine them trying to label Rev. Powell as ‘woke’?)
In his June 1965 New York City Mayoral campaign announcement, Buckley singled out Rev. Powell in particular as a “demagogue,” and, in later contexts, would call him “a scoundrel and a rogue”:
We cannot help the Negro by adjourning our standards as to what is, and what is not, the proper behavior for human beings… In New York, the principal enemies of the Negro people are those demagogues of their own race before whom our [white] politicians grovel. In 1961 a testimonial dinner was held under the auspices of the freshly installed Democratic administration for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.; presided over by the chief of protocol of President Kennedy’s government, attended by no less than two cabinet members. Those leaders of the Negro people who cherish resentments, who refuse to deplore misconduct among their own people, who feed on the demoralization of the Negro race, ought to be publicly and explicitly disavowed by the political leaders of the city… Mr. James Baldwin has said that the Negroes in Harlem who throw garbage out on the streets do so as a form of social protest. It is a much higher form of social protest to denounce such reasoning and the men who make it.
After the 1963 March on Washington and, two weeks later, the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that murdered four little girls at Sunday School, the National Review Editor was supposedly shaken by the sheer brutality and violation of basic civility of the act and so ceased his opposition to de jure segregation and National Review followed suit.
…But on the topic of de facto segregation, the issue underwriting everything about the economics of Northern racism, it was a very different story. A year later, in 1965, James Baldwin blew Buckley out of the water at the Cambridge Union Debate Hall. Three years after that, at the televised 1968 Republican and Democratic Convention debates, his opponent Gore Vidal riposted him constantly over his views. In both instances, Buckley’s bigotry was blatant.
For the rest of his career, Buckley was squarely in opposition to dismantling de facto’s systems of institutional racism and oppression. As a rhetorical strategy, he frequently would bait his Left-leaning television interview guests about their history of radical politics by equating membership in a Communist-affiliated civic organization with membership in the Klan. Buckley’s 1965 statements about Rev. Powell, in this regard, are at no divergence with his revised stance on Jim Crow apartheid. Instead, there is an internal logic underwriting things, the Libertarian argument that racial segregation and de jure discrimination unfairly tilted the free market’s scales in a fashion that can only be rectified by repeal of such laws.
However, as with all things Libertarian, the counter is that any attempt at Affirmative Action so as to remediate historic wrongdoing, systemic oppression, or marginalization is likewise an unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into the free market. De facto segregation as a “natural” product of the free market is therefore not just unchallenged but outright valorized and upheld as virtuous because it is a symptom of unregulated capital.
It is through this lens, I argue, that the aforementioned “white savior” characterization of Bonhoeffer (played by Jonas Dassler) needs to be situated. This film sees de facto segregation as fundamentally a matter to be left unquestioned. As such, the character enacts a very specifically American (and certainly not Prussian!) ceremonial, the Pentecostal Testimonial Bearing Witness, so as to present racism as individual sinfulness as opposed to social and structural systems.
This is a particularly bizarre reality given Bonhoeffer visited America in 1930-31, just as the initial impacts of the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression were being felt in Harlem amongst the Rev. Powell’s congregants at Abyssinian. What Bonhoeffer witnessed in those days, however, were the impacts of de facto segregation, such as racist landlord evictions and other completely legal (and undeniably disgusting) economic activities.
The Evangelical Right fundamentally rejects the acceptability of questioning property relations in America, even in dire cases such as those encountered during the Depression. Rather than allow Bonhoeffer to witness the racist violence of the Great Depression in the urban core, the filmmakers gin up a scenario where he exchanges fisticuffs with a loudmouthed southern hick, i.e. individual duel and triumph over individualized evil, sinfulness, rather than addressing the questions Bonhoeffer was taught to ask by Rev. Powell’s Social Justice Gospel. These Christian Socialist critiques are fundamentally anathema within the halls of Angel Studios and so are deleted completely.
Which returns finally to Director/Screenwriter Todd Kormanicki. It is hard to take his feigned innocence seriously. In August 2018, he appeared alongside his father David on the Christian Nationalist podcast of Eric Metaxas.
This is to say that the level of cognizance the cast and Director/Screenwriter Todd Kormanicki had regarding the prejudices of their Producer upon commencement of shooting, however difficult it may be to ascertain, seems ancillary to the level of familiarity between Kormanicki and the different personages, including Metaxas and other Christian Nationalist interests, who are implicated in this controversy.
Does this film serve Christian Nationalists as a case seeking to justify vigilantism and violence?
“They misuse Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance against that [Nazi] regime to serve their own political agendas and appeals to violence, but they should not,” warn the Bonhoeffer scholars about Metaxas and his ilk. “January 6th [2021] illustrated American Christian Nationalists’ disdain for the very idea of a democratic system marked by a peaceful transfer of power. Today, they continue to use hyperbolic rhetoric to equate political opponents with Nazi perpetrators and to portray their own militant actions as on par with resistance to the National Socialist reign of terror.”
At this point of final parting, it seems incumbent to emphasize that this is admittedly a low-budget film that will cycle through the cinemas quite rapidly before being relegated to the Angel Studios niche of home media consumers that apparently has the kind of spending habits that would warrant the studio investing in such an absurd project as this. Within two weeks of theatrical premiere, it will be on streaming.
Afterward, it will a matter of whether or not various political or religious formations will utilize the picture for their own sinister purposes, as we have them do before over cinema’s 125+ year history.
Roll of the dice, frankly…