Theological Disinformation

When we disagree with people, we generally give them the benefit of the doubt. We assume they mean well. We assume they may have something to teach us. (The Buddhists remind us that everything has something to teach us. Dammit.) Among Christians, it's all the more painful to write someone off as unworthy of engagement.

We're there with Eric Metaxas, who has used Dietrich Bonhoeffer to argue that electing Donald Trump is a Christian duty, and who now wedges Bonhoeffer against Black Lives Matter. 

In Metaxas we're dealing not with error but with disinformation. Metaxas authored a bestselling biography of Bonhoeffer. I'm no Bonhoeffer expert, but I know some things, and I read it with interest. About halfway in I began to smell something funky -- not good funky, either. As I continued on, Metaxas basically equated the Nazis with theological liberals and turned Bonhoeffer into a right-wing culture warrior.

Now, don't get me wrong. Bonhoeffer was no American progressive. He's hard to pin down on most anything. But as time moved forward, every review of Metaxas' book by an actual Bonhoeffer expert confirmed my suspicions, and in spades. It's awful.

Charles Marsh, a Bonhoeffer scholar whose work I greatly admire, devoted a lengthy Twitter thread to demonstrate just how misleading is Metaxas' take on Bonhoeffer and Black Lives Matter. The content didn't hold together as a single thread on Twitter, so I asked Charles' permission to represent it there. It's public content, so I'm sharing it here as well. You'll see just how devastating this thread is: an expert assessing a hack. Charles' words appear in italics.

Indulge me a long thread (my first, fingers crossed) in which I show readers the absurdity of this tweet. A more lively response (imho) can be found in my book, “Strange Glory. A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer” (Knopf, 2014)

Bonhoeffer’s life-changing encounters with the American organizing tradition initially came through two largely forgotten teachers at Union, Harry Ward and Charles Webb. (First of a dozen or so,) 

Methodist minister, professor of practical theology Christian socialist, Webber was known to friends & foes alike as the chaplain of organized labor. Bonhoeffer loved his book, “A History of the Development of Social Education in the United Neighborhood Houses of New York”. 

Bonhoeffer wrote, “I paid a visit almost every week to settlements, Y.M.C.A., co-operative houses, playgrounds, children’s courts, night schools, socialist schools, asylums, youth organizations, Association for advance of coloured people [sic]…. It is immensely impressive!”

In Webber’s courses DB went deep with the National Women’s Trade Union & the Workers Education Bureau of America and wrote reports on labor, selective buying campaigns, civil rights, “restriction of profits,” juvenile delinquency, “the activity of the churches in these fields. 

Webber introduced DB to the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, the Delta Cooperative, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the British cooperative movement. The last he visited a few years later while praying and making plans for the illegal seminary at Finkenwalde. 

Then there was Harry Ward, the Methodist activist and social reformer.

For an extraordinary portrait of Ward’s life and thought, I highly recommend this book by my friend and fellow Baptist boy. RIP, David.

Ward combined an old-time Methodist zeal for righteous action with a crusading Marxist critique of economic inequality. 

Bonhoeffer took Ward’s popular class, “Ethical Interpretations” (jointly taught with Reinhold Niebuhr), on developing the ethical and theological skills needed to interpret/evaluate “current events in light of the principles of Christian ethics.”

Bonhoeffer and his classmates were required to read and analyze newspaper articles, political journals, government reports, and various legal documents—all from the perspective of “the Jesus of the proletariat.”

Bonhoeffer said he listened closely as Ward enunciated his singular version of Pascal’s wager: Christians had the world to gain from living “as if” there existed an ethical God weighing every human action in the balance. This meant, at least for Ward, a socialist revolution. 

Next let’s meet Bonhoeffer’s classmate and interlocutor James Dombrowski and consider that DB read and admired his Columbia dissertation, “The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America.” 

Over the next three decades, Dombrowski would direct the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, serve as executive director of the Southern Conference Educational Fund and work behind the scenes with key figures in the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. (Six or seven more). 

One of Bonhoeffer’s most trusted classmates was a seminarian from Tennessee named Myles Horton, who called himself “the token hillbilly” at Union.

After he finished Union, Miles Horton returned to Tennessee and founded the Highlander Folk School-“specializing in education for fundamental social change.” In the 1930s/ ’40s, Highlander  emerged as a training centers for the Christian Left. 

This is an interesting tribute. 

In the 1950s, Highlander would shift focus from labor to  civil rights and help train the generation of church-based organizers that included Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella Baker, pictured here.

These activist/theologians blew Bonhoeffer’s mind and illuminated a way of doing theology closer to the ground. 

And we haven’t even spoken about Bonhoeffer’s deep immersion in African-American Christianity and culture. Or explored the implications of his parting observation, “I heard the gospel preached (only) in the church if the outcasts of America.”

His cousin, fellow conspirator said the American year set his “entire thinking on a track from which it has not yet deviated and never will.” Progressive protestant ethics (he first rejected for its lack of doctrinal rigor) made Bonhoeffer into a theologian of the concrete. 

A straight line runs from the progressive American organizing tradition in white and black through the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. 

Had Metaxas bothered to look at the two large bankers boxes in the Berlin public library containing files, notes and clippings of the academic year 1930-31, he would have seen this evidence. And ignored it. 

Back in Berlin, Bonhoeffer listened with new purpose as his brother Klaus -murdered for his role in July ‘44 - explained: “People are flirting with fascism. If the radical wave of right-wing sentiment captures even the educated classes it will soon be over for the nation.”

Notice that Marsh doesn't attribute Metaxas' mischaracterization of Bonhoeffer to ignorance or even to poor research. Had Metaxas seen the evidence, Marsh writes, he would have ignored it.

Metaxas reflects a larger problem in Christian right politics, one I've been screaming about for awhile now: outright disinformation. Perhaps the most prominent case is David Barton, the high school math teacher and Christian school principal who styles himself as a historian. Barton is massively influential in Christian nationalist politics and in the churches that support it.

In 2012 Barton published The Jefferson Lies with the evangelical house Thomas Nelson. Note that I don't link it. Barton's entire project is to argue that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its "Founding Fathers" were motivated by Christian conviction. Like Metaxas, Barton received immediate panning from actual historians, many of them conservative evangelicals. The response was so devastating that Thomas Nelson recalled the book.

Let me repeat that: Barton's own publisher lost faith in the book and recalled it.

So where is Barton today? You'd think he might be sitting in his basement, hiding from public scrutiny while counting his money. But no. His popularity on the Christian right has scarcely waned. He's still proclaimed an expert, still on TV, still commanding speaking fees, still providing disinformation. He's big with the Museum of the Bible people. (You'll find a short version of his story in Katherine Stewart's The Power Worshippers.)

Barton and Metaxas are popular not for their wisdom but because they say the things powerful people want them to say. They're agents of disinformation, and richly rewarded for it. There's a strong stream in American evangelicalism devoted precisely to that effort.