Evangelical biography recast historical heroes to mirror contemporary conservative concerns

Evidence

Metaxas’s version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer bore an uncanny resemblance to conservative American evangelicals, in that he battled not only Nazis but the liberal Christians purportedly behind the rise of Nazism. Once again, evangelicals emerged as heroes. Evangelicals loved the book. Meanwhile, historians panned it; the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust described it as “a terrible oversimplification and at times misinterpretation of Bonhoeffer’s thought, the theological and ecclesial world of his times, and the history of Nazi Germany.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 544

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast between scholarly reception and evangelical reception of Bonhoeffer is a strong data point for the consumer-culture method: the book’s function was identity affirmation, not historical accuracy.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: the historiography of ‘resistance heroes’ as identity mirror — how Bonhoeffer, Wilberforce, and Luther get rewritten to validate present politics.