Eric Metaxas

Metaxas was born in New York City neighborhood of Astoria, Queens and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University (1984, B.A., English).[2][3] While there, he edited the Yale Record, the nation's oldest college humor magazine. Metaxas lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.[4] He is Greek on his father's side and German on his mother's; he was raised in a Greek Orthodox environment.[5]

Metaxas was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church and while he has not formally left it (saying he has "great respect" for it) he attended Calvary-St. George's Episcopal Church.[6][7] He now attends Central Presbyterian Church.[8] Metaxas describes himself as a "Mere Christian" after the words of C.S. Lewis. In 2007 he said his books "don't touch upon anything at all where Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians differ. They express just the basics of the faith, from a basic, ecumenical Christian viewpoint. They only talk about the Christian faith that they have agreement on."[6] However, in his book Martin Luther,[9] he criticized the political power structures that had emerged from the medieval Catholic Church, writing that it was only with Luther that the true Gospel was rescued "from under its crushing welter of ecclesiastical and political medieval structures."[9]

Metaxas's works If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty and Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life are both New York Times best selling books.[10][11]

Metaxas's biography of Wilberforce, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, was the companion book to the 2006 film.[12]

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy was named the 2010 Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Christian Book of the Year.[13] Bonhoeffer is a New York Times best seller, climbing to #1 in the e-book category.[14] It also won the 2011 John C. Pollock Award for Christian Biography awarded by Beeson Divinity School and a 2011 Christopher Award.[15][16] Although the book is popular in the United States among evangelical Christians, Bonhoeffer scholars have criticized Metaxas's book as unhistorical, theologically weak, and philosophically naive.[17] Professor of German History and Bonhoeffer scholar Richard Weikart, for example, credits his "engaging writing style," but claims Metaxas has a lack of intellectual background to interpret Bonhoeffer properly.[18] The biography has also been criticized by Bonhoeffer scholars Victoria Barnett[19] and Clifford Green.[20] Despite these widespread and substantial criticisms of his work by experts on Bonhoeffer, Metaxas' book has been praised by popular magazines as a "weighty, riveting analysis of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer" which "bring[s] Bonhoeffer and other characters to vivid life".[21][22]

Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World claimed a New York Times Editor's Pick in December 2017[23] and became a best-selling book in January 2019.[24] Like his book on Bonhoeffer, Metaxas' Martin Luther has not been received positively by historians. Carlos Eire wrote that the book was "full of overblown claims" and accused Metaxas of doing naive Whig history, portraying Luther as "a titanic figure who single-handedly slays the dragon of the Dark Ages, rescues God from an interpretive dungeon, invents individual freedom and ushers in modernity."[25] John Vidmar writes that Metaxas ignored more than a century of scholarship on Luther in order to write a "sweeping and largely uncritical endorsement for Martin Luther." In order to reach his conclusions, Vidmar writes, "Metaxas needs to misunderstand, denigrate, and then caricature centuries of human effort and achievement in language that is colloquial, casual, and often flippant."[26]

Seven More Men, released in April 2020, is the sequel to Seven Men[27].

Other writing has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.[28][29]

Metaxas is a prominent supporter of Donald Trump.[30][31] In 2019, Metaxas published two children's books called Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp in a series called "Donald the Caveman". Other characters in the book include those Metaxas has called "an angry little girl who looks a little bit like AOC" and "an angry, crazy old man who looks a little bit like a guy named Bernie."[32] In a November 2019 interview with Franklin Graham, Metaxas said that “screaming protesters” to Trump were “almost demonic".[33][34]

In April 2015, Metaxas began hosting the two-hour, daily nationally syndicated radio program broadcast from the Empire State Building in New York called The Eric Metaxas Show. The show is syndicated by the Salem Radio Network.[39] Recent notable guests include Dick Cavett, David Brooks, Kirsten Powers, Kathie Lee Gifford, N. T. Wright, Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher Hitchens), Jimmie "J.J." Walker, Andrew Garfield,[40] Maria Butina,[41] Milo Yiannopoulos,[42] Ross Douthat, Tony Shalhoub, Morgan Freeman, Jeff Allen, Senator Rand Paul, Joseph Fiennes, Darryl Strawberry, and Suzy Welch.[43]

Metaxas speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference

Metaxas is the founder and host of a New York City event series called "Socrates in the City: Conversations on the Examined Life," where he interviews thinkers and writers, and is labeled as a forum on "life, God, and other small topics" in Metaxas' book about the series.[44] Francis Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, Sir John Polkinghorne, Kathleen Norris, Richard John Neuhaus, Dick Cavett, N. T. Wright, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Dame Alice von Hildebrand, Peter Hitchens, Sir Jonathan Sacks, and Caroline Kennedy have all been guests.[45][46]

In the late 1990s Metaxas wrote BreakPoint radio commentaries for former Nixon aide and Prison Fellowship founder Charles "Chuck" Colson. Upon Colson's death in 2012, Metaxas, along with John Stonestreet, became the voice of BreakPoint, which now airs weekdays on 1350 outlets across the country.[47]

Metaxas speaking at Ocean Grove, New Jersey (2018)

On February 2, 2012, Metaxas was the keynote speaker for the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast.[48] Metaxas has testified before Congress about the rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and abroad, and he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013 and 2014 on the issue of Religious Freedom.[49][50][51]

Metaxas was awarded the Becket Fund's Canterbury Medal in 2011 and the Human Life Review's Defender of Life Award in 2013.[52][53] Metaxas has received honorary doctorate degrees from Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Sewanee: The University of the South, Ohio Christian University, and Colorado Christian University.[54][55][56][57]

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• Appearances on C-SPAN