Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
Eric Metaxas wrote the bestselling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then bent the anti-Nazi martyr to the politics of the Christian right. The Yale-educated author has become Christian nationalism’s most polished salesman, and Trump has handed him a seat on the federal religious-liberty commission.
Key Takeaways:
- Ziklag, a secretive Christian nationalist donor network whose members are vetted at a minimum net worth of $25 million, put up as much as $500,000 to fund a failed Metaxas-hosted talk show, pitched to donors as a play for the “Media Mountain” of the Seven Mountain Mandate.
- His bestselling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer remade the anti-Nazi martyr in his own political image — a distortion the theologian’s family and the International Bonhoeffer Society condemned, and one that also surfaced in the foreword to Project 2025.
- In 2025, Trump put Metaxas on the federal Religious Liberty Commission, where he serves with Franklin Graham and Paula White-Cain. The panel’s findings are due July 4, 2026, and will shape the rules on who can claim a religious exemption from federal law.
Carrot Top and the Media Mountain
Eric Metaxas, a natty dresser who is quick with the dad jokes, wanted to be a late-night host. In 2022, a group of wealthy Christian donors set out to build a conservative answer to The Tonight Show, and they handed him the desk. The backing came from Ziklag, a secretive charity whose members are screened for a net worth of $25 million or more, which asked supporters for as much as $500,000 to film pilots of The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas. It sold the venture as a play for the “Media Mountain,” the entertainment peak of the Seven Mountain Mandate, the Christian nationalist plan to take over the institutions that shape American life.
What the money bought was bad. The Guardian obtained the leaked pitch and sat through nearly four hours of pilots that mimicked the shows they meant to unseat, and were padded with guests who had aged out of fame, such as Carrot Top and Danny Bonaduce. The pilots never aired.
That the show flopped matters less than the fact that anyone tried. Serious money went hunting for someone who could carry Christian nationalism into mainstream entertainment, and the donors — a network, driven by the Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau and exposed by ProPublica, funding a swing-state voter operation in 2024 — settled on Eric Metaxas, who had made himself into one of Christian nationalism’s most useful figures over the past two decades. He was the face they believed could sell it.
The Respectable Years
For most of his career, Metaxas cut a genteel figure in the evangelical world. He grew up in Connecticut, graduated from Yale, and spent his early career writing humor and children’s scripts, including for VeggieTales, the cartoon in which talking vegetables act out Bible stories.
In 2000, he founded “Socrates in the City,” a Manhattan lecture series that invited busy professionals to chew over “life, God, and other small topics.” It put him onstage with Malcolm Gladwell, Jordan Peterson, and Dick Cavett, and made him a fixture of highbrow Christian New York.
His biographies made him a star. Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery reached the bestseller list in 2007, and Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, his 2010 work on the German theologian hanged in a concentration camp for resisting Hitler, became a runaway bestseller. In 2012, it carried him to the keynote at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he spoke from the dais with President Obama seated nearby. A book about a martyr had turned a former cartoon writer into the evangelical world’s public intellectual. Later, he would turn it into a weapon.
His catalog ran to stranger places. Among more than 30 children’s books, in 2018, he wrote Donald Drains the Swamp, one of several picture books that turn the president into a club-wielding caveman cartoon featuring villains called swamp creatures drawn to resemble Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. By then, his voice carried far: a daily show on the Salem Radio Network, a television simulcast on Salem News Channel, and a co-hosting gig on BreakPoint, a syndicated Christian radio commentary that, by his own count, reaches 8 million listeners on 1,400 outlets. When Metaxas turns, that audience turns with him.
Inventing a Christian America
His deepest mark on the movement is an argument about history: that the United States was built as a Christian nation and is meant to stay one. He argued it in a 2016 book, If You Can Keep It, and has worked it on the lecture circuit ever since. His shorthand is the Golden Triangle of Freedom (virtue, faith, and freedom), a phrase he borrowed from the evangelical writer Os Guinness: a republic needs a virtuous citizenry, and that virtue comes from religion. In America, the religion he means is Christianity, and he warns that a country drifting away from it will not stay free.
He draws the borders of that faith tight. Asked in 2016 whether any religion besides Christianity could anchor American liberty, Metaxas answered that Islam was incompatible with it. The republic, in his account, was made by Christians and can be kept only by Christians.
Historians who share his faith call that a myth. John Fea, who teaches American history at the evangelical Messiah University, rejects the founded-as-a-Christian-nation story that Metaxas and David Barton have done more than almost anyone to spread, and he notes that the two of them are far more popular than the scholars trying to set the record straight. The historians were never his audience anyway, and he hands a mass readership a usable past, one in which the secular state is the aberration and putting Christianity back in charge just means the country returning to itself.
Hijacking a Martyr
He defends that vision with a borrowed saint. For years, the scholars who edit Bonhoeffer’s collected works have argued that Metaxas Americanized him, smoothing a complicated German theologian into a patriotic evangelical. The quarrel stayed academic until Metaxas began enlisting Bonhoeffer in his own politics.
In October 2024, the fight went public. The International Bonhoeffer Society, joined by more than 800 scholars and church leaders, accused Metaxas of manipulating the theologian’s story to prop up Christian nationalism. A separate letter, signed by 86 members of Bonhoeffer’s extended family, warned that he would have condemned the movement now claiming him.
“He has developed and inserted his distorted use of Bonhoeffer into public discourse,” the scholars’ petition states. “This portrayal glorifies violence and draws inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany.”
Their fight was over how he used Bonhoeffer. For years, his loudest argument has been that Joe Biden’s America looked like Germany in the 1930s. Metaxas pressed it hardest while Democrats held the White House, before Trump’s 2024 win, at one point calling Biden “our Hitler” and steering readers to his Bonhoeffer book for the parallels. He laid out the case in Letter to the American Church, published in 2022, which holds that pastors who stay out of politics are repeating the cowardice that let the Nazis win. Charles Marsh, who teaches religion at the University of Virginia and wrote his own life of Bonhoeffer, says Metaxas gets the man backward: his account turns the Nazis into godless liberals and the Germans who resisted them into Bible-believing conservatives, recasting a figure who fought the nationalist right as one of his own. As Marsh puts it, “Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer resembles no one so much as Metaxas.” The book leans on “cheap grace,” the term Bonhoeffer coined for faith without cost, to shame any Christian who declines to fight.
He has only pressed harder since. In his 2024 follow-up, Religionless Christianity, Metaxas warned that time was nearly up for the American church and told readers not to be cowed by anyone who calls their politics “Christian nationalism.”
“We need to understand that these are demonic forces that are trying to silence the voice of God’s people,” he said. “It’s nothing less than that. And so anytime anybody refers to the boogeyman of Christian nationalism, just laugh at them and ignore them, because all they’re trying to do is create a term to silence God’s people.”
The label fits, and the “cheap grace” he trades in even turns up at the front of Project 2025, where Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, in the foreword, reaches for it to dismiss concern for refugees and the environment as hollow virtue that costs nothing. In their warning against Metaxas’ use of Bonhoeffer, the scholars also singled out that foreword and put Roberts’ borrowing of the term in the same category as Metaxas’.
From Skeptic to Brawler
By his own account, Metaxas began as a Trump skeptic in 2016, but the doubt did not last. Within a few years, he was warning that the left meant to destroy the country and that only Trump could stop it. After the 2020 election, he threw himself into the drive to overturn it, telling audiences the election had been rigged. On his radio show on Nov. 30, 2020, with Trump on the line, he told the president that God was on their side. Days earlier, he had predicted on Twitter that Trump would be inaugurated and his enemies jailed.
Three months before that call with Trump, the fervor had already turned violent. Metaxas left the president’s convention speech on the White House South Lawn on Aug. 27, 2020, and ran into a protester coming the other way on a rented bike, cursing at the Trump supporters around him. Metaxas clocked him in the head and walked off up the street. Within hours, the video was everywhere. Metaxas said only that the cyclist had menaced him and admitted the punch in an email: “It just happened.” His friend Rod Dreher was glad to see it land. “Sometimes you have to use violence to preserve order,” he wrote.
Commissioner Metaxas
Five years after the punch, Metaxas had a seat in the federal government. Trump created a Religious Liberty Commission by executive order on May 1, 2025, and named Metaxas one of its commissioners. He sits on the panel with Franklin Graham, Paula White-Cain, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Its chair, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, denies that the First Amendment puts any wall between church and state. The commission’s one-year term ends July 4, 2026, the country’s 250th anniversary, and the report it delivers will steer the religious-exemption rules everyone else has to live under.
On May 17, 2026, Metaxas appeared on the National Mall at Rededicate 250, a Trump-backed prayer rally. He shared the program with Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
It is tempting to file Metaxas under comedy. The mistake is stopping there. The Yale degree and the prizewinning biographies are exactly what a movement remaking the country wants: a seemingly respectable figure willing to stand behind Christian nationalism and carry its message to the West Wing.
In His Own Words
“Islam is generally incompatible with American liberty.”
— The Stream, June 2016, asked whether any religion besides Christianity could sustain American freedom.
“When God blessed America — and he has blessed us all these years — he didn’t do it to bless us. He did it to bless the whole world through us.”
— Constitution Day address at Judson University, Sept. 26, 2018.
“Trump will be inaugurated. For the high crimes of trying to throw a U.S. presidential election, many will go to jail. The swamp will be drained. And Lincoln’s prophetic words of ‘a new birth of freedom’ will be fulfilled. Pray.”
— X post, Nov. 26, 2020, posted on Thanksgiving as Trump’s election challenges collapsed in court.
“I’d be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us.”
— The Eric Metaxas Show, Nov. 30, 2020, speaking to Donald Trump about overturning the election.
“Those of us who know this is massive fraud, we have no choice but to fight.”
— Interview with Charlie Kirk, December 2020, days before Metaxas emceed the Jericho March that helped seed January 6.
“It’s kind of like Stalin has air-brushed these people out of the culture.”
— The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas, 2022, on the conservative guests booked for the Ziklag-funded pilots.
“Christian nationalism is the devil’s term for actual Christians who live out their faith in all spheres.”
— The Washington Times, July 2024, on the label applied to his politics.
“It’s possible for the Church to get things dramatically wrong; to be merely religious, when God is calling us to a full-throated expression of our faith in the public square — politically, in every way, in the way the German church failed in the ’30s.”
— Christian Post, May 2024, on his book Religionless Christianity.
