Transcription
Hey everybody. So Eric Mataxis put out a video the other day defending himself because people rightly called him out for a joke that he made at a speech on the mall in Washington DC recently. And I'm going to play that joke in a little while. But really, the bigger point is that the joke itself was just sort of dumb. It doesn't really matter.
But Mataxis's two speeches that he gave that weekend were really far more destructive than the little joke that he was responding to. He spoke at Donald Trump's big rededicate 250 event itself. And he spoke the day before at Sean Fain's Christian Nationalist Grifterfest. And those two speeches are really perfect examples of what Christian nationalist propaganda sounds like, you know, twisting both history and the gospel itself to win people over to an authoritarian nationalist vision. And he does that all in the name of God.
So, if you want to understand those speeches, we have to know first who the speaker is and where he's coming from. So today, I'm simply going to introduce who Eric Mataxis is, but then I do plan to do two more talks in the next week or so explaining just how deceptive and dangerous both of those speeches were that week. And I'm going to go through them and play clips of those in the next two talks I give. And if you appreciate this kind of content, please hit the subscribe button.
But if you don't know who he is, I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you. But at some point in our lives, I think we do all have to learn that the world contains people like Eric Mataxis. And unfortunately, he's not a fringe figure. People listen to this guy. A lot of people listen to him. That's why we need to talk about him.
He's a Yale-educated author of a lot of books, including biographies of William Wilberforce and Martin Luther that I read myself back when I was still in pastoral ministry and before he bought his first-class ticket aboard the Trump gravy train. You know, he was a fairly well-respected Christian communicator back then. And before he completely sold out, he actually did call Donald Trump odious in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in October 2016. And this was after the Access Hollywood tape came out where Trump bragged about committing, you know, sexual assault. Mataxis called him odious in that op-ed, but he was in that op-ed explaining why he's voting for Trump anyway.
But if you want to see sort of a fast forward of just how quickly a person's conscience can disintegrate once you choose to align yourself with a corrupt demagogue when you know better, you know, it was less than four years later in August of 2020 on the final night of the Republican National Convention that Eric Mataxis was actually caught on camera physically punching a guy on a bike who'd been saying some mean things about Trump. And I don't know if the protester called Trump odious like Eric Mataxis had four years earlier, but whatever he said, Mataxis didn't like it. So the guy who called Trump odious in 2016 but told Christians to vote for him anyway, by August 2020 had already degenerated to the point that he was capable of punching a guy who protested Trump, the guy that he formerly called odious.
And I remember Mataxis's attack on that protester because it happened exactly at the time that I was writing my book, Mega Seduction: Resisting the Debasement of the Christian Conscience. Eric Mataxis was one of the guys that I was thinking about when I described the debasement of conscience that happens when we align ourselves with corrupt and abusive leaders, and especially when we dare to do that in the name of God.
So, back to that op-ed in 2016, Mataxis didn't merely claim that it was worse to vote for Hillary Clinton than to vote for Trump. He said that, but he also claimed it was worse to not vote at all than it was to vote for Trump. So, at that time, he was already using his position as a respected Christian thinker all the way back in 2016. He was using that position to put moral pressure onto Christians who were rightly troubled at the thought of voting for Trump, and he was saying, "It's worse not to." You know, so he used all the same heightened rhetoric in that 2016 op-ed that he's still using today to make it seem like it's an existential moment and it's a choice between good and evil with the Democrats on the side of evil.
And so he ended that 2016 op-ed this way: "For many of us, this is very painful. Pulling the lever for someone many think odious. But please consider this. A vote for Donald Trump is not necessarily a vote for Donald Trump himself. It's a vote for those who will be affected by the results of this election. Not to vote is to vote. God will not hold us guiltless."
And I'll return to that in a minute. But first, I'll say this: Punching a guy on a bike for Donald Trump is, it absolutely is necessarily punching a guy on a bike for Donald Trump. And it's especially interesting that in 2016, while endorsing Trump, Mataxis talked about possibly assaulting anyone who spoke the way Trump did on the Access Hollywood tape. He wrote, "Over this past year, many of Donald Trump's comments have made me almost literally hopping mad. The hot mic comments from 2005," and that's, by the way, the hot mic comments are how he describes the Access Hollywood tape where Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. So he says those hot, that hot mic moment is especially horrifying. You know, "Can there be any question we should denounce them with flailing arms and screeching volume? I must not hang out in the right locker rooms because if anyone I know said such things, I might assault him physically and repent later."
So yes, many see these comments as a dealbreaker. But then the rest of the article goes on to explain why for a Christian, those comments can't be a dealbreaker because Hillary Clinton is just so much worse.
And now, 10 years after he first capitulated to Trump in that way, Mataxis now comes across like a very angry guy who got on the wrong train. But rather than admitting his mistake and getting off the train at any of the stops that he could have gotten off along the way, he's still on that train and he's still yelling out the window at all the rest of us who just knew better than to climb aboard in the first place.
Mataxis's message from the start has been radically different from mine. What I've said all along is that so long as we vote for odious candidates just because the primary system rewards the most extreme candidates, then they're going to keep giving us odious candidates. And the entire past 10 years of Republican politics has proven that. So now we're to the point where Republican voters chose Ken Paxton last week, who's just a corrupt joke of a human being. They chose him over John Cornyn in the Texas Republican Senate primary. Cornyn voted with Trump something like 98% of the time. I don't know the exact number, but he was a Trump guy. But he apparently isn't enough of a fighter, or he's not willing, maybe, to do the corrupt things that some people think are necessary for the Republicans to tighten their grip on power since they've lost the most important intellectual and moral arguments in the culture over the past 10 years.
So, you probably wouldn't catch John Cornyn, I guess, punching a protester, for instance. But if he did, I doubt we'd see film of him sprinting backwards as fast as Eric Mataxis did. But this is who the Republican party has become. And it's happened because they listen to people like Eric Mataxis and voted for someone they knew was odious. And they've spent the past 10 years downplaying his odiousness and exaggerating the faults of their competitors because they've sold out every principle that they claim to believe in that they could build an argument on.
So, as predicted, the Christian leaders who glommed on to Trump and wrote his coattails to power and wealth have not changed Donald Trump a bit. He's changed them. Or in the case of Eric Mataxis, I suspect that he just created a permission structure for Mataxis to give into the bullying side of his nature that maybe has always been there. I don't know. But whatever the case, it's an ugly sight to behold right now.
So, the last couple lines from Mataxis's 2016 op-ed just really bug me. When he writes, "Not to vote is to vote. God will not hold us guiltless." He's referencing a quote that isn't actually from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but people think it's from Bonhoeffer because Eric Mataxis said it was. I even had this quote on my own social media years ago because I believed it was a Bonhoeffer quote because Mataxis included it on the back flap of his biography of Bonhoeffer. But then other historians pointed out that they couldn't find the quote anywhere, but Mataxis still used it after that.
So, for instance, this article from Warren Throckmorton from 2024 shows a picture of Mataxis still at an event with Sean Fain in 2024. And this whole Bonhoeffer thing with Mataxis is just, I think, one of the most troubling parts of his story because he's considered by many to be a Bonhoeffer expert. But he's using Bonhoeffer's image and likeness to put forth an agenda that the actual Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I think, would have despised from everything I know about it, and I've read so much of what he's written.
So in October 2024, 86 out of 100 of Bonhoeffer's own descendants signed a public statement explicitly rejecting right-wing Christian nationalist appropriation of their ancestor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And they called out Eric Mataxis by name. Part of their statement says this: "Never would Bonhoeffer have seen himself associated with far-right violent movements such as Christian nationalists and others who are trying to appropriate him today. On the contrary, he would have strongly and loudly condemned these attitudes."
A key figure, this is them, this is them writing this, you know, Bonhoeffer's relatives. The key figure in this abuse is Eric Mataxis, whose 2010 biography of Bonhoeffer was first published in the United States and sold more than a million copies in 20 languages. In the book, he ignored the historical context and misrepresented Bonhoeffer as a fundamentalist evangelical.
And then they went on to criticize Mataxis's own public statements, including a tweet where Mataxis said, "So we can now finally clearly see that Biden is our Hitler in 1933. See my Bonhoeffer book for details. The parallels are staggering and increasingly obvious. Pray for this nation. Pray."
So rather than learning from the mistakes of the German church during Bonhoeffer's time, Mataxis seems to be using the same tools that the propagandists in Germany used back then. And the two speeches he gave during the Rededicate 250 weekend are perfect examples. Just like many German Christians did back then, he's combining a distorted version of history with a twisted version of the gospel to recruit millions of people into an anti-Jesus authoritarian nationalist movement. And just like those Germans back then, he dares to do it in the name of God. And he's not just quietly going along. He's not a bystander. He's one of the architects. He's helping to build the theological and historical scaffolding that tells this MAGA version of America that God is on its side.
So, here's that joke that he made during one of those speeches. The joke that got all the attention.
"They burned parts of the city, including the White House, which at that time, if you can believe it, did not yet have a ballroom. Yes. It's hard to believe that it would take two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand."
So, people were rightly upset by that joke and they called him out for it. But I want to spend the rest of my time today explaining why it was the first part of the statement that I found the most offensive, not the part about the ballroom. Because he says the first part all the time in many different ways. And of course, he's relishing the attention because the attention means more sales for another big Christian nationalist book that he's hawking now.
But here's what he said about the people who called him out for his joke: "The liberal media and the TDS poster child, David French, and others thought I was serious and they wrote articles fulminating with rage about this awful thing." You know, "Nothing says I'm a confident adult man who believes in what I'm selling like throwing around a phrase like Trump Derangement Syndrome to describe David French."
And I'm not qualified to do, like, a deep psychoanalysis of what broke inside Eric Mataxis over the past 10 years, but it's pretty telling that David French is the person that he's calling out by name, you know, and saying Trump Derangement Syndrome. It doesn't take a professional psychologist to put all of this together. 10 years ago, David French and Eric Mataxis were both highly respected guys seen by many people, myself included, as, you know, conservative Christian intellectuals. But like I've talked about many times, Jesus said that following him, choosing to follow him would be the sword that divides even a father from his son. You know, that divides families. But Donald Trump has insisted on himself as that sword that divides. He makes loyalty to himself the dividing line in families. And somewhere along the way, David French chose to stick with Jesus at great cost to himself and his family. But Eric Mataxis chose Trump.
So now Eric Mataxis has proximity to the President of the United States, and he's getting ever more wealthy and famous by selling books and speaking out in support of Trump and his MAGA agenda. But Mataxis is a smart guy, and he knows what he sold to get to this position. And I think that it just has to burn a little bit to be criticized by somebody like David French because David French apparently remembers that line from scripture: "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?"
So, Mataxis uses this junior high exploitative TDS to tar his critics like David French because when they expose him to the light, I think it burns. I don't know. That's my theory. But Eric Mataxis is way too smart to believe what he's selling. So I think he's just troubled by it and he lashes out.
So anyway, on the statement that he made, the ballroom part was a joke, but not the part about God raising up Trump. Like so many others who got on the Trump train to advance their own power and their own platform, Mataxis is sort of a court prophet, the kind that we see depicted in the Bible. A court prophet is a religious figure who, among other things, would stand next to the king and tell the people that God is on his side. And Mataxis loves standing next to the king. His number one agenda seems to be guarding that proximity he has to the king, like it's his golden ticket.
Here's a video he posted on X in November 2025 of Trump in the same room with him at a wedding. And he wrote, "Last night at my friend Mike Wilkerson's wedding at Mar-a-Lago, the President showed up. As he walked in, he pointed right at me and joked, 'This is the guy who's going to get me to heaven.' I laughed and told him, 'I'd really like to talk to you about that, but another time.' Then I reminded him, 'Don't forget, you're America's Super Centennial President.' Truthfully, I would love to have that conversation with him one day, but this wasn't the place."
But here's the thing: If Eric Mataxis's understanding of the gospel is some version of "say the sinner's prayer and go to heaven when you die," then sure, yeah, he would love to have that conversation. But I guarantee Trump has already heard that message many times from every other Christian sycophant who gets to bask in Trump's musky presence. But if the conversation involves challenging Trump at all for the countless ways that Trump fits the model of a biblical oppressor, of a liar and a thief, of an abuser of women and the vulnerable, then I guarantee that Mataxis does not want to have that conversation. Partly because he doesn't want to lose his meal ticket, but I think mostly because he apparently thinks that Trump's policies are just fine and that Trump has been brought to this position by God to enact those policies.
He wrote, "This wasn't the place." But for an actual conversation about following Jesus and the cost of discipleship, a phrase Mataxis, I think, ought to know from writing his book on Bonhoeffer, I don't think Mataxis is going to find any place is the right place for that conversation with Donald Trump. Instead, he's now spent years convincing his followers that God is on Trump's side.
We already saw how he punched a Trump protester in August of 2020. But then later that year, after Trump lost the 2020 election, Mataxis went all-in on election denialism. According to the Religious News Service, at an online prayer meeting after the election, Mataxis, repeating claims that God will intervene in the 2020 election, warned other leaders not to believe what they see with their eyes or with their "natural self," but to trust in the supernatural. He described the controversy over the election as a walk of faith, one in which Jesus will prevail and his nemeses in the church and the media would not. And he said, "I want to encourage people that we must not give in to the lies, to the half-truths."
And then the next day on his own radio show, he spoke directly with Trump, the guy he used to call odious, and he said, "I'd be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us. Thank you, Mr. President. God bless you."
And Mataxis stood with Trump even after that election was certified, and even after the January 6th insurrection, and all through the Biden years. And then when Trump won again in November 2024, Mataxis tweeted out a photo of himself looking adoringly at the one he serves and he wrote, "It's like we knew over a week ago. God knew. Praise Jesus. We don't deserve this. It's an outrageous gift from God. So let us use it to his glory. Hallelujah. Amen."
And now, Mataxis is still continuing to shill for Trump. And he's continuing to write books and give speeches where he's building out the historical and theological infrastructure for this authoritarian nationalist movement that uses the name of God to abuse the very people Jesus calls his followers to care for. It's a fraudulent message in service of a fraudulent president delivered by an angry man who sold everything to get this little bit of a reward in this lifetime of a little bit of fame and wealth and power for now. And for all of history, he's going to be seen as just the meanest of small men who cynically used his God-given intelligence and obvious communication skills to benefit himself at the expense of the people that he was called to serve.
So, in a week or so, I'm going to have another video where I'm going to dive into what Mataxis is actually teaching in those two speeches. But until then, thanks for listening.