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    How the Christian right is twisting the legacy of an anti-Nazi hero

    This article is co-published with DocumentedLeading figures on the Christian right have seized on an unlikely hero in their campaign against secular government: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an antifascist theologian and pastor who resisted the Nazi regime before he was executed in 1945.Driving the trend is Eric Metaxas, a prolific author, speaker and celebrity on the Christian right, whose writings on Bonhoeffer and American politics provide the intellectual fodder for a movement that seeks to turn evangelicals against liberal policies on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ inclusion and racial justice.In the short term, this push has taken the form of a well-funded voter mobilization campaign ahead of the 5 November presidential election, with conservative organizations coordinating to screen Metaxas’s 2024 film – which lays out an argument equating liberal policies with Nazism, and urges believers to emulate Bonhoeffer – in churches across the country.In the long run, experts worry that the push to liken American liberal democracy to Nazi Germany could spur political violence, citing past examples of Christian extremists who invoked Bonhoeffer to justify bombing and shooting up abortion clinics.“We’re worried about post-election political violence, and this is a way of inspiring that,” said Victoria Barnett, a theologian and eminent scholar of Bonhoeffer and the Holocaust who has advocated for a nuanced understanding of Bonhoeffer and has cautioned against depicting Bonhoeffer as a kind of evangelical “Lone Ranger”.According to documents obtained by the Guardian and Documented, the production and distribution of the movie, called Letter to the American Church, was coordinated by the rightwing group Turning Point USA and American Letter Productions – the film division of Metaxas Media, an entertainment business founded by Eric Metaxas.Through the Letter to the American Church tour, an initiative launched in mid-2024, these groups and others have screened the film at churches, community organizations, and small groups for donations of any amount; churches willing to screen the film received an “extensive marketing kit” to promote it.Funding for this film and tour was pledged, in part, by the secretive Christian donor network Ziklag, a non-profit that embraces the aims of a growing movement of Christian nationalists who strive to rule over US government and society. As a piece of Ziklag’s larger, coordinated effort to get out the vote, the group committed to funding movie screenings in churches across the country “with a focus on oversaturation in the battleground states” to galvanize congregations and increase evangelical voter turnout.Since its launch, the film has been screened at least 170 times across the country, including more than 40 times in key swing states. Local GOP chapters and numerous outside organizations on the right have also held screenings, some in conjunction with poll worker sign-up initiatives and alongside Turning Point Action, a group the Trump campaign has relied on for its voter registration and turnout efforts.Internal videos produced by Ziklag, obtained by the Guardian and Documented, detail Ziklag’s 2024 election strategy, pledging $800,000 to “focus on rallying the church behind biblically based voting using Eric Metaxas’ new documentary, Letter to the American Church”. Organizations that partnered with Metaxas, including Turning Point Action and TPUSA Faith, were promised donations from Ziklag in this effort to engage evangelical voters.Ziklag and Turning Point USA did not return requests for comment.View image in fullscreenIn an email, Metaxas denied having “anything to do with the making of the LETTER film” – although he stars in the movie and founded one of the companies that produced it. Metaxas rejected the term “Christian nationalism”, saying it is used to “demonize people who believe that we Christians are obliged to live our faith in every sphere, including the political.”And he suggested that Bonhoeffer scholars and his critics were in fact the ones inciting political violence, not him.‘Co-opted by extremists’Born in 1906 and raised in a family of intellectuals and academics, Bonhoeffer dedicated himself as a young man to theology and ministry. At 21 years old, he wrote a dissertation exploring the idea of Christians’ ethical and moral obligations to one another and society.But Bonhoeffer’s prodigious academic career was cut short by the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party.An early dissident, Bonhoeffer wrote in 1933 that the Hitler government’s increasingly discriminatory and violent oppression of Jews was a “problem for the church”, which he viewed as responsible for opposing such policies, even if they were not directed at Christians.His work in the following decade, with other dissenting clergy and networks of resisters, would eventually lead the regime to accuse him of aiding in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested in 1943 and hanged in 1945 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, leaving behind his letters from prison and numerous writings on ethics, morality and the role of Christians in a secular, modern society.Before he was executed, Bonhoeffer warned of the dangers of zealotry and groupthink – perils he believed societies face during times of political upheaval.“[The] upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgement,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “and they give up trying – more or less unconsciously – to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”Scholars of Bonhoeffer, and Bonhoeffer’s living relatives, have argued that Bonhoeffer teaches Christians to reject nationalisms of all kinds.To their dismay, Christian nationalists have embraced Bonhoeffer, frequently invoking his participation in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler as an example of moral courage. In this interpretation, Bonhoeffer is cast not as the contemplative theologian who agonized over his role in the antifascist resistance, but as a Christian warrior with the political leanings of a 21st-century American evangelical.Tobias Korenke, Bonhoeffer’s great-nephew, has expressed frustration about the use of Bonhoeffer by the religious right, saying in a recent interview with Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper that Bonhoeffer’s name had been “co-opted by extremists”.At its worst, this interpretation of Bonhoeffer has led to violence. Michael Bray, a pastor who was convicted for his role in bombing numerous abortion clinics in 1984 and 1985, cited Bonhoeffer as an inspiration. Paul Jennings Hill, an anti-abortion zealot who shot and killed a physician at an abortion clinic in 1994, too, invoked Bonhoeffer.Metaxas’s political evolutionOne evangelical celebrity who has consistently and effectively worked to popularize Bonhoeffer on the right is Eric Metaxas, a Yale-educated talkshow host whose popular biography of Bonhoeffer helped introduce the historical figure to a broader audience in the US.Metaxas’ 2009 book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, was marketed to Christians but achieved popular acclaim – serving as a biography and an inspirational history for readers familiar and unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer.To explain Bonhoeffer’s participation in the resistance, Metaxas writes that God had called him to “get his hands dirty”.In turn the New York-based Metaxas, already an unusual east coast ambassador for conservative evangelicalism, achieved a new level of fame.“He was the rare figure in the evangelical world who was mixing it up with the culture shapers and the intellectuals in New York City,” said John Fea, a historian who has documented the rise of contemporary Christian nationalism. “And then the Bonhoeffer book came out, and that skyrocketed him.”At the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gala in Washington convening lawmakers and Christian faith leaders, Metaxas spoke about the genesis of his Bonhoeffer biography in a speech delivered with the cadence and occasional vulnerability of a stand-up routine.View image in fullscreenFifteen minutes into the 30-minute talk, Metaxas reflected on the book’s widespread popularity, joking that “it was read even by president George W Bush, who is intellectually incurious, as we’ve all read. He read the book.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMetaxas paused, turning to Barack and Michelle Obama, who were seated to his right. “No pressure,” he added, and thrust a copy of the book into the hands of the president, who played along, smiling for a photo with the book.During the remainder of his speech, Metaxas became sharply political, railing in particular against abortion.“This is a Bonhoeffer moment,” Metaxas declared, implicitly comparing abortion to the Holocaust and calling on Christians to intervene in the manner that many Germans did not.In the decade that followed, Metaxas’s political evolution has turned even more dramatically to the right. In a 2016 column in the Wall Street Journal, he endorsed Donald Trump, acknowledging his reservations about the real estate mogul but writing that if Christians voted for Hillary Clinton, “God will not hold us guiltless,” citing abortion as a top issue.Metaxas eventually embraced Maga politics fully, vowing to support Trump as the former president falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and attempted to overturn the results.“This is the most horrible thing that has happened in the history of our nation,” Metaxas told Trump on 30 November, in a since deleted recording of a phone call between Metaxas and the former president that ran on Metaxas’s show. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told Trump later in the call.Experts question the underpinnings of Metaxas’ work on Bonhoeffer. A recent petition circulated by eight Bonhoeffer scholars, and signed by dozens of clergy and scholars of religion, argues that Metaxas “has manipulated the Bonhoeffer story to support Christian Nationalism”.It warns that in his social media posts and public appearances, Metaxas “glorifies violence and draws inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany”.Barnett argues that Metaxas’s book overstated Bonhoeffer’s role in the plot to assassinate Hitler and that Metaxas “tapped right into” a “mythology that Bonhoeffer was like the Lone Ranger, the Christian hero who fought the Nazis”.In fact, the full extent of Bonhoeffer’s role in the conspiracy has been disputed – and however closely involved he might have been in the plot, Bonhoeffer did not legitimize political violence in religious terms.“He did not justify his knowledge of the conspiracy on his being Christian – he just refused to do that, because he understood the dangers of that,” said Barnett.Blurred lines between religion and politicsIn Letter to the American Church, Metaxas, who narrates much of the documentary-style film, and a roster of rightwing pastors and activists take the Bonhoeffer narrative a step further, casting liberals and Democrats as being as destructive as Nazis and calling on evangelicals to take action and oppose evil.They insist liberal teachings are destroying the family and religion in an effort to strip away freedoms from the American people. The speakers warn that if evangelicals do not rise up against ideas that they portray as evil, such as LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights, the country is headed for destruction.At the heart of their argument is Bonhoeffer.“Bonhoeffer effectively told the church that if we’re going to see any effective change for the better, they needed to start taking action and getting political,” Metaxas tells his audience in the film. “He said those who call themselves Christians have an obligation to God to get political if necessary, and to take a bold and likely dangerous stance against their own government.”Letter to the American Church has partnered with influential rightwing organizations, including the pro-Trump Moms for America, the anti-LGBTQ+ Her Voice Movement, and Patriot Academy – a Christian nationalist group that seeks to rewrite the constitution – to promote the film and spread its message. The organization also partnered with Million Voices, an evangelical get-out-the-vote initiative, to launch a “Pledge to Vote” campaign, aiming to see “250,000 pledge to vote” after seeing the movie.View image in fullscreenThe effort highlights how some tax-exempt religious organizations push the boundaries of legal restrictions on electioneering.Churches are banned from issuing endorsements or campaigning on behalf of a candidate, but they may be able to participate in the screenings without fear of incurring legal penalties, said Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney who specializes in first amendment and religious freedoms cases.“One of the ways that this Christian nationalist movement has started operating in the political space, is to create these kinds of movies and then push them out through churches,” he said.Despite the timing of the screenings – which end on election day – and the film’s ultra-political content, “the churches would all have, probably, some pretty credible deniability, if they said: ‘Hey, we were just [given] a chance to run a movie we thought our folks would be interested in.’”The Letter to the American Church tour officially ends on 5 November – but don’t expect Bonhoeffer to go away anytime soon.A splashy feature film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, is to debut in theaters across the US on 22 November. Bonhoeffer, the movie, features a star-studded cast of German actors and promises to be a captivating second world war drama. (Americans might recognize August Diehl, who plays the resistance theologian Martin Niemöller, from his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, or the 2010 thriller Salt).Posters for the movie show Bonhoeffer carrying a gun. “With world-shattering stakes,” the Christian streaming company Angel Studios writes in its promotional materials for the film, Bonhoeffer “begs the question, how far will you go to stand up for what’s right?”Bonhoeffer scholars reject this gun-toting version of the theologian – and the film’s “how-far-would-you-go” framing. “[In] the current, highly-polarized climate in the United States, these are dangerous words,” wrote the leaders of the English and German-language International Bonhoeffer Society last month in Die Zeit.In their petition, the scholars warn more broadly of a possible uptick in violence after the election linked to the Christian far right.“Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words and witness will be used to pit one side against the other, to fight ‘evil’, to put ‘America First’, and to justify violence,” they write. “The misalignment between these views and actions and Bonhoeffer’s own cannot be overstated. When you hear these grievous misuses, and you will, do not be fooled.” More

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    GOP state senator walks back comments on Nazi history in schools

    GOP state senator walks back comments on Nazi history in schoolsScott Baldwin faced backlash after his comments during a hearing on Senate Bill 167, which would ban ‘concepts that divide’ in schools An Indiana state senator has backtracked on his remarks that teachers must be impartial when discussing nazism in classrooms after he sparked widespread backlash.During a state senate committee hearing last week about Senate Bill 167, a proposed bill that would ban “concepts that divide”, Republican Senator Scott Baldwin, who co-wrote the bill, said teachers should remain unprejudiced when teaching lessons about fascism and nazism.“Marxism, nazism, fascism … I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those ‘isms’,” Baldwin said, adding, “I believe we’ve gone too far when we take a position … We need to be impartial.” He went on to say that teachers should “just provide the facts” and that he is “not sure it’s right for us to determine how that child should think and that’s where I’m trying to provide the guardrails”.Texas school official says classrooms with books on Holocaust must offer ‘opposing’ viewsRead moreBaldwin has since walked back on his remarks. In an email to the Indianapolis Star last Thursday, he said that his intention with the bill was to make sure teachers are being impartial when discussing and teaching “legitimate political groups”.“When I was drafting this bill, my intent with regard to ‘political affiliation’ was to cover political parties within the legal American political system,” Baldwin said. “In my comments during committee, I was thinking more about the big picture and trying to say that we should not tell kids what to think about politics.”He went on to denounce the aforementioned ideologies, saying, “nazism, Marxism and fascism are a stain on our world history and should be regarded as such, and I failed to adequately articulate that in my comments during the meeting. I believe that kids should learn about these horrible events in history so that we don’t experience them again in humanity.”SB 167 was filed in recent weeks in response to the fierce debates that have emerged across Indiana and the rest of the country in the past year regarding the ways schools should teach children about racism, history and other subject matters.The bill prohibits kindergarten through 12th grade schools from teaching students that “any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation” is inherently superior, inferior, racist, sexist, oppressive. Teachers would also be prohibited from making individuals feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, responsibility or any other form of psychological distress” when it comes to meritocracy and the notion that it was created by one group to oppress another.The bill also prohibits teachers and curriculums from teaching that Indiana and the United States was founded as a racist or sexist state or nation.The midwest chapter of the Anti-Defamation League has criticized Baldwin’s apology, arguing that it “doesn’t change the deep harms of using ‘impartiality’ or ‘neutrality’ as tools to sanitize history”.“This is part of the continued efforts by some to try and rewrite history and characterize extremism, racism, and genocide as somehow legitimate That is dangerous and despicable. It should be categorically, universally, and loudly rejected,” the organization added.The incident comes less than three months after a north Texas school official said that classrooms with books on Holocaust must offer “opposing” viewpoints.TopicsUS educationNazismRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    Schwarzenegger rebukes Trump and compares Capitol riot to Kristallnacht

    Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a stinging rebuke of Donald Trump on Sunday, comparing the riot at the US Capitol which the president incited to Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Nazi thugs attacked Jewish Germans and their property, a harbinger of horrors to come.
    He also compared American democracy to a weapon he wielded onscreen in the loincloth of Conan the Barbarian nearly 40 years ago, saying: “Our democracy is like the steel of this sword. The more it is tempered, the stronger it becomes.”
    Trump supporters broke into the Capitol on Wednesday after the president told them to “fight like hell” in support of his attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden. Five people died, including a Capitol police officer who was hit with a fire extinguisher and a rioter shot by law enforcement.
    Authorities have made numerous arrests, among them one man charged with bringing firearms and explosives to Washington and another who allegedly threatened to kill House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Chants of “Hang Mike Pence” were heard and one rioter was seen carrying plastic “zip tie” handcuffs, suggesting plans to kidnap lawmakers.
    Trump, who will leave office on 20 January, now faces a second impeachment.
    As a two-term governor of California as well as the star of the Terminator franchise and other action classics, Schwarzenegger maintains a presence and a voice in Republican politics. He has clashed with Trump before.
    On Sunday, in a video posted to social media and scored to rousing classical music, the 73-year-old said he “would like to say a few words to my fellow Americans and to our friends around the world about the events of recent days”.
    “I grew up in Austria and was very aware of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass,” he said. “It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out [by] the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys [a quasi-fascist group of Trump supporters].”
    “Wednesday was the Day of Broken Glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol. It has shattered the ideals we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy. They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.”
    On Sunday it was reported that another officer had died, though it was not immediately clear if the death was related to the Capitol riot.
    Schwarzenegger described a traumatic childhood in post-war Austria, the son of a police officer who joined the Nazi party.
    “I have seen firsthand how things can spin out of control,” Schwarzenegger said. “I know there is a fear in this country and all over the world that something like this could happen right here. I do not believe it is.
    “But I do believe that we must be aware of the dire consequences of selfishness and cynicism. President Trump sought to overturn the results of an election. And a fair election. He sought a coup by misleading people with lies. My father and our neighbours were misled also with lies. I know where such lies lead.
    “President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever. The good thing is he soon will be as irrelevant as an old tweet.”
    Schwarzenegger appealed to Americans’ patriotism and commended lawmakers who regathered after the assault on the Capitol to confirm Biden’s victory, despite objections from 147 Republican representatives and senators. More

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    For Trump and Modi, ethnic purity is the purpose of power | Jason Stanley

    The two strongmen favour immigration and citizenship policies designed to demonise minority groups The US president, Donald Trump, has delighted a stadium of 125,000 cheering Indians in Gujarat by declaring: “America loves India. America respects India. And America will always be a faithful and loyal friend to the Indian people.” It might seem a discordant […] More

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    Outcry after MSNBC host compares Sanders’ Nevada win to Nazi invasion

    Calls for firing of Chris Matthews after widespread anger Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist is Jewish MSNBC host Chris Matthews compared Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucuses on Saturday to the Nazi invasion of France, spurring calls for his firing. Related: Nevada caucuses: Bernie Sanders wins in resounding victory Continue reading… More