Bonhoeffer's heirs

Eric Metaxas a couple decades ago wrote a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxas today is MAGA, with all that entails. Last year 43/50ths of the surviving Bonhoeffer clan staged a tantrum. Project 2025 extreme Januarysixxenophobizzzz *snorkl* wait where was I?

We may all agree that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life-work was in opposing the Fascist State's claim to enforce orthodoxy. The Church in his day - German Protestant, in his line - was such that being on the slightly-liberal end of it may - superficially - look like conservatism today.

Wikipedia has every motive to make his "Confessing Church" a Church Of Happening Now. Dietrich isn't today able to express his own sentiments, the séance being frowned-upon in Christian circles.

The evidence shows that the Bonhoeffer family was close and has remained so. If there had been internal dissent, like within the Kennedy family over Robert Junior... we'd know. One might also consider the King family; Alveda vs Martin Luther III.

But surfing the Left wave of a Left-moving culture is a heady rush. The family, after Dietrich's death, has not ceased surfing: past Trump, past even the quite-mild "Project 2025". Would Dietrich have jumped off the board? If so, when? And who in this family has had the same force of character? To read Bonhoeffer, even through the Wiki lens, is to find a stern critique of government and of sin; sure. Would he critique it only when it is nominally nationalist and conservative? Is there a critique of a totalitarianism as might purport to be transnationalist and radical - say, against the Munich Soviet or Trotsky? (Being antiNazi in 1939 would at least come with antiStalinism in the package-deal.)

Ideally Bonhoeffer could have found a consistent stance in Pope Pius XI's Vatican. I must admit, however, that structurally this Vatican also included Cardinal Pacelli and, well, let's just say that the ensuing Papacy proved... insufficient, for a Bonhoeffer neoDonatism.

Metaxas smells much like 'Boomer conservatives of the 1990s trying to assure us that they were heirs of Martin Luther King Jr who was a Republican you know and that Dems are the real racists. And so's Darwinism. I think Bonhoeffer's family knows itself, and their ancestor, better than Metaxas does.

Although, Metaxas isn't Bonhoeffer's only Protestant (soi-disant) disciple. Consider also Jacques Ellul. Ellul is worth taking seriously.

SOFTENING REWRITE 3/22: My poast last night assumed a liberalism to Bonhoeffer himself which may or may not have been there. This rewrite couches that as questions. Actual questions, not disingenuous "kwesschins"; I honestly don't know, and want better people to answer them than the weakminded Bonhoeffer family or, on the other side, Metaxas.