Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life was more riveting than most of the novels written this year. And Eric Metaxas, in his new monumental biography of the Lutheran pastor who was executed at the Flossenburg concentration camp after his participation in a failed attempt to kill Hitler, tells Bonhoeffer’s story with the fluidity of a novel. Metaxas talks about Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: When did you decide to tell Bonhoeffer’s story?

ERIC METAXAS: I first heard the story of Bonhoeffer in 1988, when I was returning to the Christian faith. I was so staggered by it — I’m half German — that I thought I must do something with it someday, but what? At the time I was planning to be a fiction writer, not a biographer. But after my first biography came out in 2007 (Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery), many people asked me who I would write about next. Some people asked me about whom I would next write. The latter were, of course, correct. I realized then that there was only one person besides Wilberforce who captured my imagination sufficiently to draw me into the rococo agony of writing another biography. That man was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

LOPEZ: Isn’t he an atheist hero?

METAXAS: He’s not an atheist, but yes, he’s been a hero to atheists! It’s absolutely crazy, as if the Tea Party were to hail Stalin and Bernie Sanders as their ideological icons. On one level it’s really hilarious, almost on par with the late Foster Brooks’s brilliant performances on the Dean Martin roasts. Of course nothing could be that hilarious, but Charlie Callas came close.

But seriously, Bonhoeffer, the ultra-devout Christian, has been celebrated by Christopher Hitchens and the heretical Episcopal “Bishop” John Spong. They thought of him as some kind of “post-Christian humanist.”  It’s sheer lunacy. In fact, the secular Left has since the 1950s hailed Bonhoeffer as an apostle of the so-called “God is Dead” movement. It’s all based on a number of myths about Bonhoeffer that I hope are once and for all exploded in my book.

LOPEZ: What are the most prevalent myths about him?

METAXAS: One of the big ones is that he was a pacifist, which he wasn’t. But the Sixties anti-war movement appropriated Bonhoeffer for their purposes nonetheless. They seemed to be under the impression that, had he lived, he would have been the third person in bed with John and Yoko. Another myth about him is that he was an advocate of income-redistributionist “social justice.” There’s just no actual evidence for that.

But the main myth about him is that while imprisoned by the Gestapo he drifted away from orthodox Christianity toward some kind of “post-Christian humanism,” that he became some kind of atheist. This one is based off of a single infamous phrase — “religionless Christianity” — that he wrote in a letter to his best friend Eberhard Bethge. It turns out that Bonhoeffer meant precisely the opposite of what the atheists and agnostics said he meant. This is a classic case of the lie traveling around the world four times before the truth gets a chance to put its shoes on. There was no rebuttal to this misinterpretation for so long that it just got out there as a fact and stayed out there — basically until now, over 50 years later.

LOPEZ: How are you so sure you’re so right and they’re so wrong?

METAXAS: Because we now simply have all the information. In the Fifties and Sixties, when these three myths were born, there was little real information about Bonhoeffer. Eberhard Bethge’s great biography didn’t come out in English until 1970, and by then the damage had been done. So people based their ideas about Bonhoeffer on a very limited amount of information. Bonhoeffer was a Rorschach blot onto which the people could project their own fantasies, which they did in abundance.

And since the Bethge book, more and more information has come out to give us some context. When you see the big picture, which I try to give in my book, it’s all rather clear and simple. Now we have almost everything he ever wrote, including journals and letters and sermons, amounting to 16 volumes, and most of that has been translated into English. We also have the correspondence between him and his fiancée, which wasn’t published until 1992. When most of these myths were formed, all people had was Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. So the secular Left was free to create a Bonhoeffer in its own image. He became a combination of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Che Guevara.