Eric Metaxas: Outrageous republic

NEW YORK—Eric Metaxas is the author of best-selling biographies and host or co-host of two radio programs—BreakPoint and The Eric Metaxas Show—plus a regular Manhattan intellectual salon, Socrates in the City. Here are edited excerpts of our interview over Upper East Side french fries.

You’re the son of immigrants to the United States—a Greek father and German mother. How did that prompt you to write about American forgetfulness in your new book, If You Can Keep It? You couldn’t grow up in Greece without learning certain songs, certain poems. People would say, “What’s wrong with you? Did you even grow up here?” That used to be true in America. Everyone knew Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Everybody knew the story of Cincinnatus and his plow. Everybody knew the story of Washington at Valley Forge. Somehow in the ’60s we stopped celebrating America and what it means to be an American. We decided we would focus on the negative narrative—the narrative that says we’re trouble, we’re not the solution. When I memorized the Paul Revere poem with my daughter, who I think was 7 at the time, it hit me that every American should know this poem.

What traditions in that vein did your parents transmit to you? Growing up in the Greek Church, every year you would have Greek Independence Day celebration, commemorating March 25, 1821. It’s like our July 4, 1776. They broke away from 400 years of oppression, slavery under the Ottoman Empire. They celebrate that. It is real for them. My father would get tears in his eyes from a long poem I memorized when I was 12 or 13, the story of Dimos dying for his country in the Greek revolution. The same thing happened to me when I was doing “Paul Revere’s Ride” with my daughter.

Do you believe in American exceptionalism? Yes. It doesn’t mean we’re inherently better. It means these ideas are outrageous, rare, fragile, amazing—ideas that we ought not to even have. It’s like having a briefcase with millions of dollars in it.

‘What makes [America] great is that we don’t exist for ourselves. We have this fundamentally biblical idea that we exist for others.’

Maybe we should have a class where immigrants like your parents teach Americans about America? We have this almost dismissive idea—Statue of Liberty, who cares? People were weeping to see this green statue. That was very emotional for my mother. These are not people with any sense of irony. These are people who had suffered. My mother left East Germany because she said they were forcing communism down her throat. My father saw the Greek Civil War with communists in Greece. So this was real for them. They taught me to hate communism; I always knew it was wicked and anti-human. They gave me perspective to say, no matter what: This is genuinely the greatest nation in the history of the world. What makes it great is that we don’t exist for ourselves. We have this fundamentally biblical idea that we exist for others.

How did living in New York through 9/11 affect your thinking about this? This is who we are as a nation. When you murder our people, we continue to reach out to you with what I would say is the love of Christ. We still say, “We will love our enemies.” You see that strain mainly in liberals, even though their policy can be misguided. But the concept of worrying about Muslims after they’ve done this to us—that’s a healthy Christian idea. You can go too far in either direction. You need to know when to fight—but you have also to say, “We’re not here to wipe out our enemies.” We would like to reconcile with our enemies if we can bring them to repentance. We want the whole world to have what we have and to share what we have. Liberals and conservatives can agree on this idea.

You bring up dark chapters of American history. ... As a Christian you want to acknowledge your shortcomings. But if you’re some self-flagellating, guilt-ridden person, you’re not living the way God wants you to live. He wants you to get beyond your sins. We repent of our racial sins as a country. We repent of our sins against the Native Americans. Then you move on. We’ve gotten trapped in this mode of negative narratives. It’s been hugely harmful.

You attended Yale in the ’80s. What did you see there in terms of negative narratives at that time? Yale changed in the 1920s. The upper classes began to buy into the narrative—this comes really out of WWI—that heroism is a mistake. Nobility, duty, these things are part of some older order. They no longer apply. That didn’t reach the culture until the ’60s, but it reached upper-class culture and educated culture in the ’20s. The Yale library is made to look like a cathedral. It’s almost making fun of the idea of God. You think, Wow, in 1930—to do that? That’s really ahead of the curve in terms of mocking God.

Did you look back at your book this year and think about it through the lens of the presidential campaign? Of course. I talk about the importance of character in our leaders. Trump falls short. But how has republican government eroded? The prime problem is the Supreme Court, the third branch of government—legislating, rather than interpreting the Constitution. If Hillary Clinton were to nominate two or three more Supreme Court justices in the mold of Sonia Sotomayor or Ruth Bader Ginsburg—that is effectively the end of our form of government. Legislation from the bench will be effectively constant.

Many people who have cared about Supreme Court justices for a long time haven’t agreed to vote for candidates who lack character. It’s one thing 50 years ago to care about a Supreme Court justice, but now we’ve moved so far in this direction that another two or three and we will sink the country for generations. That is dramatic and scary: We need to take seriously the realization that the wrong people in the Supreme Court can effectively end our form of government. That’s why, for all the shortcomings, I would say we have no choice but to vote for Trump.

Since you write about the importance of virtuous leaders—what did you think about David French receiving so much media blowback when he considered running for president? He’s a great guy. If I could make him president, I would make him president. But to enter the fray would simply mean electing Hillary. You can say what you want but that’s the way it works. This is why we have primaries. You can mess around in the primaries, but at general election, you get a choice of one or the other.

But in terms of the importance of civic virtue in your book, how can people vote for either of these candidates? If we understood everything we’re supposed to understand and if we were doing everything we were supposed to be doing, I’m convinced you would have different choices. But this is a reflection of where we are.