Letter to the American Church

Eric Metaxas’ latest book, Letter to the American Church, is a biblical bugle blast in the ear of all the churches feigning sleep while our country is besieged by anti-Christ and anti-American ideologies from every direction. Metaxas takes ready aim at the churches and pastors who are reluctant to stand up and speak out against the well-coordinated assault upon the health and stability of our nation today — and he names names.

The book delivers a battle cry for the church to rise up and face these most serious matters of our day. He asks us why God’s people would evade speaking against the murder of the unborn. He asks us how the church can be silent in deference to our education system and its pernicious incursion to induce sexual confusion within our children.  

He asks us why church pastors are not pounding the pulpits to end the mutilation and castration of minors under the subterfuge of gender expression. And why is there so much acquiescence to the endless unfurling of Marxist tenets as the rise of global tyranny is boosted before our very eyes?

How can seasoned church leaders fail to understand that philosophies like Critical Race Theory are founded in Marxism and purely atheistic? Further, how can the church that is charged with discipling and cultivating healthy loving families, not realize that Transgender and Queer Theory is “…inescapably anti-God and anti-human. So they are dedicatedly at war with the ideas of family and marriage…”

Metaxas’ thesis is: We must wake up and speak up.

Throughout the pages of this prophetic work, the reader is faced with a startling proposition: We can blithely enjoy the insular safety of our small group discussions as the passing boxcars amplify the hideous shrieks of the Jews on their way to Treblinka, or — we can put down our highlighters and find our place on the battlefield.

Critics will deduce that any comparison of today’s American church with the German church of the 1930s is a reckless exaggeration. After reading Letter to the American Church, even the most outraged critics will be exposed as being wholly and desperately wrong. 

Drawing richly on his prolific and meaty research of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the failures of the Christian church in pre-WWII Germany, Metaxas roars the same warnings of heaven that Bonhoeffer did. Because the tragic reality of history is this: The vast majority of German churches remained silent, or worse yet, complicit, as one of the evilest regimes in history rose to power.  

…when we think of the death camps and the murder of so many millions, we need to understand that in the beginning [the church] had no idea where it was leading, and had no idea [the church was] facing nothing less than the forces of anti-Christ. We are now facing those same forces in different guises. But the extent of it is even worse than it was ninety years ago, because those forces do not have an agenda that is hyper-nationalistic, as in Germany, but that is actually anti-nationalistic — which is to say that it is globalist.

~ Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church

It was widely customary for Christian churches to hang the German flag in their sanctuaries. But as Hitler’s influence began to spread, churches began hanging Nazi banners and swastikas — known as the “Crooked Cross” — as a willful or fearful indicator of compliance with the regime.  

In today’s language, it’s called virtue signaling.

It is sobering to watch Metaxas correlate this with the American churches today that are getting tangled in the same type of pagan political activism by displaying BLM placards and Pride Flags. 

Most of them ‘know not what they do’ and are only trying to show solidarity with those they have deemed somehow disenfranchised. They only wish to show that they are not like those other rigid and narrow-minded churches, that they are inclusive, and generally mean no harm. They don’t seem to know the forces behind those banners are only smiling at them in order to deceive them.


~ Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church

Another prominent character throughout Letter to the American Church is German Theologian, Martin Luther. Luther’s lifelong wrestling with the doctrine of faith is juxtaposed with the book of James’ doctrine of works. This section of biblical exposition reinforces to the church that there are no options other than to act. Faith without works is dead. (James 2:17)

Eric summons the many churches today that are committed to not being political in quest of not offending anyone. These churches resolutely declare their work is only to “…preach the Gospel — as though such a thing were logically possible, as though the Gospel ever could be kept from touching upon all issues of human life.” Metaxas warns that such a position is, “an abdication of God’s calling.”

Eric strongly charges that for the church to be the transforming agent our culture desperately needs, we must stop relying solely on our Statements of Faith and fighting over the precision of our beliefs — “because our actions illustrate what we actually believe.”

What tangibly emerged for me as I journeyed with Eric through the pages of the book is: At the end of all the debates, quarrels, divisions, and criticisms stands a Person. It is wholly impossible to speak anything of the church without acknowledging that Jesus Himself stands in the midst. And Jesus is the perfect embodiment of truth and love. 

So the One who is Truth is also the One who is Love, and it is not possible to separate them without degrading each of them. It is nothing less than sin to have our own fallen view of truth apart from love or love apart from truth. God demands that we deal with the whole, that we understand Truth and Love are God Himself, who is a Person.

~ Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church

He goes on to say that we can’t claim to be loving if we step away from truth. Likewise, we can't claim to uphold truth if we step away from love. And this is precisely why the church must rely upon and surrender to The Lord, who is the Head of the Church.

* * *

Eric’s epistle to the American church can be summed up in this quote from Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesian Church:

Awake, O sleeper! Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.

It causes me to reflect on the passage of scripture where Jesus was asleep in the stern of the boat during a raging storm. As the disciples fearfully cowered from the storm and were rendered powerless, they woke Jesus up.

Jesus spoke to the wind and the sea and they became peaceably calm. While the disciples marveled how the wind and the seas obeyed Him, Jesus was amazed by something they still could not see:

Why are you cowardly, you people of little faith?

~ Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 8

They were not wrong to go to Jesus, but what He wanted awakened was the faith that was still too small and weak within each of them. So next time, by faith — He wanted them to calm the storm themselves.

May Letter to the American Church be the protein shake that puts muscles back on the church and its leaders. We all agree the storm is raging. The question is: will you stand up and speak to it?