Eric Metaxas blasts Episcopal leader for invoking Bonhoeffer

Author and Dietrich Bonhoeffer biographer Eric Metaxas criticized the presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church on Monday for likening the liberal denomination’s antipathy toward President Donald Trump to Bonhoeffer’s resistance against Adolf Hitler.

The Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe, who has served as presiding bishop since 2024, marked Independence Day by penning an op-ed claiming the denomination, despite its cultural influence during the founding era, is now “known less for the powerful people in our pews than for our resistance to the rising tide of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism emanating from Washington, D.C.”

Claiming The Episcopal Church failed to adequately stand up against slavery and indigenous residential schooling, Rowe also expressed regret that the denomination aligned its foreign missions in the 20th century “with U.S. foreign policy in Asia and the Pacific, and in Central America and the Caribbean.”

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Rowe went on to compare present Episcopalian resistance against Trump to Bonhoeffer and his Confessing Church standing firm against the Third Reich, a comparison Metaxas described as “shocking” in a statement provided to The Christian Post.

“The history of the church in Nazi Germany is a cautionary tale about how Christians can falter in perilous times,” said Rowe. “Some Christians in that time and place sided with the Reich based on their theological tradition of nationalism and loyalty to the state. Others, who came to be known as the Confessing Church, became determined to oppose the government’s interference in religion. They resisted the Nazi regime — some, like Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to the death.”

Metaxas, an outspoken Trump supporter who first rose to prominence for his bestselling 2010 biography Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, pushed back against what he described as the presiding bishop’s attempt “to liken his church’s uber-trendy ‘resistance’ to Trump to Bonhoeffer’s heroic resistance to Adolf Hitler.”

Metaxas suggested that Rowe, whose denomination has been hemorrhaging members in recent years, invoked the famous Christian martyr’s name in an attempt to deflect from its growing cultural irrelevance. He claimed naming Bonhoeffer, who was executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945 for his role in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, is offensive not only to the memory of him, but to every Christian who suffers for their faith.

“Of course, this pathetic plea for relevance only serves to remind us of ECUSA’s decades-long slide into an abyss of permanent irrelevance,” he said. “While the silly statement will provoke some horse laughs, it is also genuinely offensive to those actual Christians who risk their lives for the truth, as Bonhoeffer obviously did — and as many around the world do today.”

Metaxas suggested The Episcopal Church is most concerned with placating the cultural elite, an impulse he claimed is longstanding and drove their unwillingness to stand up to some of the historical sins Rowe cited.

“Just as The Episcopal Church said not a word against slavery when that was the political issue — and nothing against vile anti-Semitism in the 1930s when that was the cultural issue — they now say not a word about the actual problems which they should address, and which President Trump is attempting to address politically, but instead choose to live in the self-aggrandizing fantasy that they are modern-day Bonhoeffers,” he said.

Metaxas claimed that unlike Bonhoeffer, many Episcopalians have descended so deeply into liberalism that they have stopped believing in the foundational doctrines of Christianity.

“Bonhoeffer knew what he believed and forfeited his life for those beliefs. But the ECUSA doesn’t have any idea what they believe, and are even silent about basic historical Christian beliefs such as the bodily Resurrection of Jesus,” he said.

Metaxas concluded by citing the Apostle Jude’s short epistle, which warned against false teachers by likening them to waterless clouds that appear to provide rain but ultimately offer nothing as they are driven by prevailing winds.

“They are ‘clouds without water,’ and simply follow the zeitgeist, as they have always done — and for which they should be ashamed,” Metaxas said. “May God forgive them.”

The Episcopal Church declined CP’s request for comment.

During an interview last year with CP about his book Religionless Christianity, Metaxas warned liberals are using the term “Christian nationalism” to guilt conservative Christians into withdrawing from the political process, and advised Christians to leave churches that cower from taking a biblical stand on contentious cultural issues.

In his op-ed, Rowe touted how The Episcopal Church has repeatedly made headlines in recent months for resisting Trump’s political agenda. The church joined a federal lawsuit in February to push back against a Trump administration rule that would allow more leeway for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to arrest illegal immigrants at houses of worship.

In May, Rowe issued a letter explaining the denomination was terminating its partnership with the U.S. government to resettle refugees over a request to resettle a group of white Afrikaners after the administration effectively halted the country’s refugee program.

The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, who serves as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, drew national attention in January when she publicly rebuked Trump from the pulpit during a service at the National Cathedral to mark the inauguration.

Budde urged Trump, who was in attendance, to have mercy on illegal immigrants as well as “gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families.”

The Rev. Rob Pacienza, senior pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, attended the service and was among the critics, saying in an interview with CP at the time that he believed what Budde said “wasn’t really a sermon,” but rather “a lecture that really came across as mean and divisive.”

“I think the irony was she attempted to preach on unity, but her rhetoric and her very unwelcoming spirit — from the beginning to the end of her message — actually created more division in the end,” he said.