MAGA pundit and best-selling author Eric Metaxas appeared recently on Elijah Streams, a platform for “prophetic voices” and right-wing politics. Metaxas compared President Donald Trump to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, saying that “God, in his mercy to us, created this man for such a time as this.”
Metaxas is promoting his book on the American Revolution, which came out in June. Baptist News reviewer Rodney Kennedy wrote, “Metaxas has not written an American history but an evangelical playbook for controlling America with MAGA politics. Revolution is a historical impostor because its underlying purpose is to produce a right-wing government in America today.”
Indeed, Metaxas called for a “holy remnant” to “unify around Donald Trump and his agenda.” He told host Kelsey O’Malley, “If we want to make America great again, we must make America godly again.”
Metaxas said that God had given him a moment alone with Trump shortly before the 2024 election:
And I said to him, almost like I'm talking to a teenage boy, because I respect and love this president so much, but I felt this urgency to say, ‘Mr. President, you need to know that God miraculously saved your life for his purposes in history. You need to know this.’ And I believe he does know it. I'm sure I'm not the only one that said this, but I said it like with this prophetic urgency because he really needs to know that God has done this for God's purposes.
Metaxas said he is “angry” that he was not taught that colonial America was “dramatically Christian” and that “the presence of God” was evident throughout the revolution and founding. He called the founding of the U.S. “a reprise of the Sinai Covenant” and said that the nation’s founders understood that they were “covenanting with God.”
“So we have a holy burden and a calling to lift up the torch of liberty because this is God's idea,” Metaxas said. “It's not secular liberty. There's no such thing as secular liberty.”
Metaxas called Trump and the late Charlie Kirk “unifiers,” and denounced figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as enemies of America for trying to fracture the MAGA movement:
So, we have wicked figures, but we have to understand that the Lord is on his throne. I believe he has ordained that we will prevail. There will be enemies, but I think those of us who can, we do need to unify. We need to stop nitpicking and attacking each other. We have to unify around President Trump and his agenda.
We the people elected him. So this is about we the people. We are the sovereign, right? We are the sovereign only because we look to the Lord as our sovereign. And we are the government. There's no separate government. We are the government. The Lord has ordained that. That's the biblical idea, that we're free under the Lord. And so, those who get that, we really need to work hard. And we need to understand that if we're in a war, which we are—we’re in an existential crisis—there will be casualties, there will be hits, there will be people who, in the case of Charlie, were literally killed, there are casualties, but the Lord has called us to fight on.
…
And so I think that's I really believe that's the Lord's encouragement to us. ‘Yes, it's hard, but it's okay. I have prepared you to be a warrior in this season. I didn't prepare you to sit on the sidelines and say, 'I know it's going to turn out well.' I prepared you to be a warrior in this season.’ And I do believe that the Lord has spoken that in a number of ways.
Prodded by O’Malley, Metaxas told a loooong and winding story (one that he told earlier this year at a conference organized by Paula’s White’s National Faith Advisory Board) that ends with Metaxas finding prophetic significance in the fact that American colonists sent two turtles to a liberty-loving British guy who’d been imprisoned by the king, with one weighing 45 pounds and one weighing 47 pounds.
Now, listen, if you’re not into the prophetic, this just sounds like lunatic nonsense. Numbers nonsense. I get it. But when I saw this, I said, ‘This is shocking, that the numbers 45 and 47 represent liberty.' Little did they know 250 years in the future there’s going to be a president elected who is going to serve a 45th and a 47th term. So, when it all fell together for me, I truly, like I said, ‘this seems like God’s prophetic hand.’
Reviewer Kennedy wrote that Metaxas is a better writer than Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, which doesn’t make his books any more accurate, but might make him more dangerous. “Revolution” has spent weeks on the best-seller lists, meaning that a lot of people are getting fed the kind of history that is used by today’s Christian nationalists to justify their reactionary and exclusionary political agendas.
