An Episcopal leader earned himself a harsh rebuke from Dietrich Bonhoeffer biographer Eric Metaxas after he compared resisting Trump to Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Nazis. In an op-ed for Religion News Service, Rev. Sean W. Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, called on the Church to be a force of resistance against the Trump administration. Calling the Episcopal Church the church of the Founding Fathers as 34 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were Episcopalian, he stated it was now the church’s responsibility to seek a different kind of freedom.

“When religious institutions like ours enjoy easy coexistence with earthly power, our traditions and inherited systems can become useless for interpreting what is happening around us. But our recent reckoning with the federal government has allowed us to see clearly the ease with which the Protestant tradition of patriotism can lead Christians to regard our faith more as a tool of dominion than a promise of liberation,” wrote Rowe. He cited a number of examples of the Episcopal Church’s resistance to the Trump administration, including joining a coalition of other faiths to sue the government over its immigration policies, canceling its refugee program after being requested to help white Afrikaners resettle, and dealing with the administration’s recent travel ban.

Rowe pointed to failures of the Episcopal church, such as not speaking out against slavery. He also noted how some churches in Nazi Germany sided with the Reich in a misguided attempt at patriotism, while those who resisted, known as the Confessing Church, stood against the Reich not to stand against antisemitism, but “rather in its belief in the autonomy of the institutional church and its resulting desire to block state interference in church affairs.” He stated the church needed to stand against the actual evils of the current climate, not just protect its own autonomy. “I do not intend to diminish the witness of the Confessing Church — especially that of Bonhoeffer, who was brutally executed by the Nazi regime less than a month before the end of the war in Europe. [Church] history, however, teaches us that when we are awash in propaganda, even our resistance can be bound by its definitions and incline us to see the world in the same categories,” he wrote.

Speaking to The Christian Post, Metaxas pushed back against what he called Rowe’s attempt “to liken his church’s uber-trendy ‘resistance’ to Trump to Bonhoeffer’s heroic resistance to Adolf Hitler.” “Of course, this pathetic plea for relevance only serves to remind us of ECUSA’s decades-long slide into an abyss of permanent irrelevance. While the silly statement will provoke some horse laughs, it is also genuinely offensive to those actual Christians who risk their lives for the truth, as Bonhoeffer obviously did — and as many around the world do today,” he said.

He accused Rowe, and the Episcopal Church at large, of being more interested in having a right standing with the cultural elite than having actual principles. “Just as The Episcopal Church said not a word against slavery when that was the political issue — and nothing against vile anti-Semitism in the 1930s when that was the cultural issue — they now say not a word about the actual problems which they should address, and which President Trump is attempting to address politically, but instead choose to live in the self-aggrandizing fantasy that they are modern-day Bonhoeffers,” he said. Adding that the Episcopal Church has fallen away from sound doctrine such as the bodily Resurrection of Jesus, he quoted the book of Jude. “They are ‘clouds without water,’ and simply follow the zeitgeist, as they have always done — and for which they should be ashamed,” he said. “May God forgive them.”