On May 1, President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new national Religious Liberty Commission in the US. Eric Metaxas is serving on it. He was not present in the Rose Garden for the signing of the executive order but expressed his appreciation to Trump on Instagram.
Metaxas, an author, speaker, and host of a daily radio program, was an early evangelical supporter of Trump. In October 2016, he published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal to convince his fellow Christians that Trump, though “odious,” deserved the votes of evangelicals because Hillary Clinton was corrupt and could not be trusted to protect religious liberty or the unborn. “Not to vote is to vote,” Metaxas wrote. “God will not hold us guiltless.”
Metaxas no longer believes Trump is odious. He wrote on November 6, 2024, regarding Trump’s election, “We don’t deserve this. It is an outrageous gift from God.” Metaxas has become one of Trump’s most ardent evangelical supporters and still believes Joe Biden, Democrats, and the “Deep State” stole the 2020 presidential election. Metaxas recently claimed no violent protesters were at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
For Metaxas, politics is a form of spiritual warfare. He described Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address as “satanic” and called the former president a “puppet of the Devil.” In September 2023, he urged evangelical pastors to prepare for a holy war. He said Christian colleges are “inviting the Devil” onto their campuses by teaching students about Marxism, socialism, critical race theory, and “woke-ism.”
Metaxas did not start his career as a Trump-backing populist. He was one of the “evangelical elite.” The Washington Post described him as the next Chuck Colson—the evangelical culture critic and former Watergate criminal who taught evangelicals to be wary of getting too close to political power.
Socrates in the City, Metaxas’ Manhattan-based public-conversation series about “life, God, and other small topics,” once hosted Francis Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, Dick Cavett, Jonathan Sacks, N. T. Wright, Caroline Kennedy, Richard John Neuhaus, Kathleen Norris, and Dallas Willard.
Many of these gatherings were held in the Union League Club of New York City. Upscale evangelicals looking for an evening of intellectual stimulation attended. This was not the kind of crowd one would find at a Trump rally.
Socrates in the City was part of an evangelical intellectual renaissance in New York City that included Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, the American Bible Society’s Museum of Biblical Art, and The King’s College.
When the 2005 edition of the Metaxas book Everything You Always Wanted to Know about God (But Were Afraid to Ask) came out, the cover displayed a Tim Keller blurb: “The difficulty is not to gush.” Dick Cavett’s praise also appeared there: “For his stylish and entertaining handling of this particular subject, Metaxas deserves a prize.”
But Keller died in 2023 (Redeemer continues to pursue his legacy of serious evangelical thinking), the American Bible Society downsized and moved to Philadelphia, The King’s College closed, and Metaxas changed.
Metaxas still holds Socrates in the City events, but now he interviews mostly pro-Trump guests such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn. His Salem Radio Network program, The Eric Metaxas Show, offers a steady diet of charismatic prophets, election and vaccine deniers, and Make America Great Again pundits.
Metaxas once told a reporter that he wanted to become the next Dick Cavett. Today, The Eric Metaxas Show is a far cry from the old Dick Cavett Show, a favorite of highbrow PBS viewers.
In 2011, Metaxas published a well-received, beautifully written, and fast-selling biography of German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Evangelical readers loved his treatment of the heroic Lutheran martyr, portrayed in the book as plotting to overthrow Adolf Hitler in 1944 and getting executed for his efforts the following year.
Some Bonhoeffer scholars and members of the Bonhoeffer family did not fully recognize the man portrayed in Metaxas’ book. Rather than presenting Bonhoeffer as a liberal Protestant pastor and theologian, Metaxas portrayed him as an evangelical Christian.
Metaxas applies his historical research to contemporary politics. He wrote last year, “So we can now finally clearly see that Biden is our Hitler. In 1933–34. See my Bonhoeffer book for details. The parallels are staggering and increasingly obvious.”
After his Keller-blurbed hit, Metaxas called his 2007 follow-up Everything Else You Always Wanted to Know about God (But Were Afraid to Ask). In his acknowledgement, Metaxas wrote, “On the better parts of this book and its predecessor, the influence of the Reverend Tim Keller of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church is probably so obvious to some that it hardly needs mentioning. For his unwitting participation in these pages, I am exceedingly grateful.”
After Metaxas appeared on a podcast in 2022, the thumbnail for it proclaimed in red letters, “What if Rick Warren, Andy Stanley, and Tim Keller are Hitler’s favorite kind of pastors?” Metaxas retweeted it, saying, “I didn’t come up with this title, but it makes a VERY important point.” Metaxas will join other evangelical leaders on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which includes Paula White-Cain and Franklin Graham. The goal of the commission is to “safeguard and promote America’s founding principle of religious freedom.”
