Abbreviated transcript
T Carnes
Welcome to journey through NYC religions television. I’m your host, Tony Carnes.
We are still trying to figure out what do the presidential election results in 2020 mean for New York City?
We are nonpartisan, non-sectarian. So, we don’t have any opinion about the winners or losers.
Did you know that there was a substantial shift toward Trump among the immigrant, Latino and African American voters in New York City? According to The New York Times, in the immigrant and Latino areas of the city, particularly the shift from Democrats to Republicans, was 15 to 35 percentage points from the 2016 vote. Wow, that’s stunning. Of course, the democrats are so dominant here that Biden still won easily.
Another interesting fact was that when we checked last fall, Trump got more donations per capita in the Bronx than did Biden. What is going on?
So we reached out to somebody that perhaps the most prominent and vocal supporter of Donald Trump in New York City, that’s Eric Metaxas. Welcome to the show!
Eric Metaxas
That is the weirdest introduction, Tony. I’m like, I’m speechless. What do I say? That’s that certainly couldn’t be true. But I’m gonna go with it. Since I’ve known you for so many years, anything you say, I know, you fact checked it. But I feel I’m speechless.
T Carnes
You find out that at A Journey we get we get the story before anybody else. And it turns out to be true.
Eric Metaxas
I listen. I know I you know, I don’t doubt you. It’s just kind of funny to be introduced that way. But it’s only because I’m nonplussed. Not not because it’s maybe not true.
When you talk about the immigrant thing, that’s where I’m coming from. And I try, it’s puzzled me, I’ve come to terms with this. But it took me time to figure out why I feel the way I do or why I’ve turned around on certain things.
As you know, I went to Yale University, I live in Manhattan. I’m part of a certain world. But I grew up in Queens. Among the immigrant community: my dad came from Greece, my mom came from Germany, they met in an English class here in Manhattan. And so I grew up among working class, immigrants, which does give me a really dramatically different perspective. And I kind of feel that can help people make sense of why I would think the way I do, My book is called Fish Out of Water, a search for the meaning of life. But it really is about the immigrant experience. I know, that’s why you introduced things the way you did. I do think that that’s really important, especially for New York. So thanks for bringing that up.
T Carnes
Well, tell us a little bit about that immigrant experience. And what points along the way that led you to eventually supporting Trump?
Eric Metaxas
Listen, I wrote a piece making fun of Trump! Yeah, in the New Yorker magazine. So, I’m not exactly somebody that was, you know, pro-Trump in the beginning, but I think it’s very complicated, especially, you know, for New York audiences.
I mean, I have a lot of Jewish people in the building that I live in, who are incredibly pro-Trump, and I would have thought, huh, New York Jewish? I wouldn’t think that! But they’re very pro Trump.
It’s important to understand the different demographics as you’re doing my story really. As I said, I grew up as a working class kid –with an immigrant background. The reason my book is called Fish Out of Water is because my father’s a Greek and my mother’s a German. So, I always joke around that if you’re raised Greek and German, you will be raised Greek. Yet, my mother, you know, still has a German accent to this day. My father still has a strong Greek accent to this day, but when you put together Greeks and Germans, Greeks, you know, they have this idea that they’re just the best ethnic group and there’s nothing they can do about it.
So, my upbringing was in the Greek Orthodox Church, and in the Greek community, first in Corona, Queens at Transfiguration of Christ Church. I went to the parochial school there, but the reason my book is titled fish out of water, is that if your mom is German, and you speak Greek at home, when you’re hanging out in the Greek community, everybody speaks Greek at home. Everybody has two Greek parents. They’re virtually Greek Creek, except they happen to be here in Queens.
And so for me, I always felt like a fish out of water. It’s nothing traumatic. It was a wonderful experience of growing up in an immigrant community. And I am, of course, a little bit more Greek, I think just because I did grow up in that community in that church environment. But it is so different.
When we moved to Connecticut, Danbury, Connecticut in 1972, I suddenly thought, wow, I really am an immigrant from New York, because I felt like I had moved to America. It was a completely different environment, it was still a working class environment. It wasn’t like Darien or Greenwich or anything like that. But it really was fascinating to me how steeped I was in an immigrant New York community. Then growing up, you know, someplace in the suburbs where kids ride bikes and stuff!
T Carnes
And you made this shift. But you were sort of grasping for God along the way.
Eric Metaxas
I don’t think most people are necessarily looking for God, they’re just going through life, just like I was. I was not, you know, running from God. I was not running toward God, either. I was just a kid growing up, you know, normal kid.
And I think when you grew up in a faith community, like the Greek Orthodox Church, you kind of take everything for granted. You just figured, well, if I’m not Jewish, I’m not atheist. I’m not Buddhist. I’m not Muslim, I guess, you know, we’re Christians. But we never really got clarity on, what is it that we believe? Do we really believe this? Do we really believe what we shout and sing at Easter feast? That Jesus rose from the dead?
When I got to college,I thought, do I believe this? And I actually think that’s typical. For a lot of people. They’re not against things. They’re just, they’re just going through stuff.
And so I did have some experiences with God. You know, it wasn’t like a secular church experience. But it’s just weird.
The first time I heard what Christians call the gospel, the Good News was in a Russian Orthodox Church. The Greek Orthodox youth group, the Goya, we’d been sent off to a Russian Orthodox Church, in Danbury, Connecticut. And the funny thing is, it’s hilarious to me that the Greeks really only hang out with the Greek. So the fact that we were sent off to this Russian Orthodox Church, I thought, What is going on here! You don’t trust us with the Russians!?
T Carnes You were going over the mountain.
Eric Metaxas
It was really, really funny to me. And yet the priest at this Russian Orthodox Church was delightful. And he was very humble. He was American, you know, pretty young also. He shares the basics of the faith with us in a very clear way. I had never heard it before.
I think that a lot of times, you know, if you’re raised in an ethnic Catholic background, or an ethnic Orthodox background, you sort of assumed this stuff you got baptized, you go to church on Sundays, you know, you don’t really break it down the way the Evangelicals do. And so for me, I’d never heard this stuff before. And I thought, Wow, this is amazing. And I agreed with everything.
And I prayed to accept Jesus and all this different stuff. And it was, it was kind of powerful! And from that point on age 12, I would pray at night, but I never talked to anyone about it. And I never had any discipleship, or anybody following up. It was like, that was it.
Later on, when I was in high school, I had a friend that I met, you know, working, we were working as I was working as a cashier at Marshall’s or something. And he was part of this Catholic charismatic community. This was like the Jesus people in the 70s. In Danbury, Connecticut.
And it was the sweetest group of people. I just would visit once in a while. And then he sitting on folding chairs and they’d be praying. sometimes they’d be praying in tongues, which I’d never heard before. But mostly it was just people praying, praising God, but it was so sweet.
That even as a 16 year old, I remember thinking this is really, this is really touching. This is the seems right this this this Jesus stuff that seems right. And so that kind of encouraged me a little bit. Maybe a lot, you know, at the time, but then I went off to college.
And in college, same thing, I didn’t really talk to anybody about faith. And I would sneak off to the Christian group, like every Friday night for the, you know, hour and a half or whatever. And then I would go, I would, there was just zero, follow up or community or anything like that. And by the time I got to Yale, I really drifted away from it. So that by the time I graduated, I was thoroughly confused. I didn’t know what I believed.
That was the hard time. I was floating and drifting around. And things got so bad that I ended up moving back with my parents! Which if your parents are working class European immigrants, you don’t want to go to Yale and then move back home, because they’re going to think that, ‘What is wrong with you, like we, we sacrificed unbelievably, to send you to college, you get to live in America, we lived in war torn Europe, communist East Germany, and what’s, what’s the problem!’
I write about this all in the book. And it’s obviously a lot of is really beautiful, because of the love that my parents had for me, and I see now was the undergirding of my life, that just to give me a give me a sense that I really am loved.
And even though they might not have known, theologically, or intellectually, that this is the love of Jesus being passed through to our son, it doesn’t matter that they knew it explicitly: it was the love of God. And it really, that’s, to me, the baseline of my life, that’s what kept me going when things got really dark.
T Carnes
You know, Eric, the book is really well written. And I noticed one thing that was interesting, it has a sort of alternation between low culture and high culture, between ordinary people, everyday life, when you walk it, eat. You actually give more voice to the low culture people. They’re there. And I mean in this technical sense that the populace, the popular culture, your parents, your relatives, and also people you ran across in your workplace, like, the painter that you worked with, or the guy down in the village, the relative or distant relative you stayed with. They are in their memorably etched, you can read them, and you’ll never forget them there is so gripping and so sometimes sort of tough, but honest.
So, you start with this sort of low culture richness. When you write about your family in Greece, and about here, which one of your relatives, your grandfather, or your aunt or your grandmother, who your father stayed with.
Eric Metaxas
I don’t know that I etched anyone perfectly, much less, most perfectly. I’m grateful that you think that I’ve done a good job. I mean, listen, I’ve been writing my whole life, which now extends many decades. And I gotta tell you, writing about oneself is the strangest experience. I mean, it really is the strangest experience, because we naturally tell stories about ourselves, right? We say, Oh, I was here. And here’s what happened. I was there. And here’s what happened. And so I’ve told stories, my whole life very naturally. And you tell them over and over.
When you finally sit down to write them, you realize, well, it really is like a tape recorder. I know exactly how I’m going to tell the story. But it’s an interesting thing to finally put it into words. And to look at it on the page and to realize other people are going to read this because there is no doubt there is a lot of love in this book.
I mean, I adore my mom and dad, who I thank God I still have with me. And I adore the relatives I write about the book. My grandmother was just one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known. And my grandmother, she’s really tough to describe, you know, she was like, barely five feet tall, really, really thin. She had a ton of energy.
This is my mother’s mother, but I just knew her as Grandma. Grandma was one of the things funniest, most up people that I have ever known. She was just full of fun. And you know, when you think of Germans you don’t typically think of this! But my family were from Saxony and the area where Luther was from. And they’re kind of you know, peasant stock. And they’re just full of jokes and kidding around — constant kidding around. I thought that was normal growing up that my mother and my grandmother are constantly kidding around joking, making fun of people, you know, not in a nasty way, but like, just constant.
I look back kind of, I think not many people have a German grandmother who is hilarious, she was really funny. And not certainly not in a highbrow way, not in a witty way, but just funny, really funny. And I think that I get my sense of humor, to some extent from her, it has to be.
She grew up very poor, lost her father when she was seven. My mother lost her father, my grandmother’s husband, when she was 10. They really suffered, they went through World War Two and my grandmother had to raise two girls, and literally had no food sometimes to give her girls for dinner,
T Carnes
Your grandfather was tried to stay out of the war as long as he could. Is that right?
Eric Metaxas
Yeah, he was, you know, this is the other thing too is like for a lot of people life is so complicated. Here he is a German man living under Hitler. And he was not on board with Hitler. I mean, when I wrote my book on Bonhoeffer, I really was amazed to hear my grandmother telling me the story that my grandfather would listen to the BBC . He would literally press his ear against the radio speaker, because if you were caught listening to enemy broadcasts, you’d be sent to a concentration camp. But of course, many Germans were not on board with Hitler, and what was happening in the nation. They were frightened. And he tried to stay out of the war.
And a family friend who ran the factory able to keep him working in the factory until 1943. So he didn’t have to go off to battle. But eventually in ‘43 he went, and in ‘44, he was killed. His train was blown up by partisans on the way to the Russian front.
You know, it’s one of these horrifying things, and my grandmother, it’s so obvious how much she loved my grandfather. It’s just so obvious from the story she would tell about him over the years.
And my grandmother really had spiritual experiences. She was not not a churchgoer. She was not somebody who read the Bible, but she knew God, she knew Jesus and prayed every morning, and every night. And it was very real and very simple. And she had a number of experiences with God. She knew God and walked with God. It’s really extraordinary to me to think about that, because it didn’t mean much to me at the time. But then in retrospect, once I came to faith, I realized that, you know, that’s where she got a lot of her inner peace and joy that was so clear in her life. And that she shed this abroad to our family at every opportunity, it’s really amazing the difference one person can make, you know,
T Carnes
I noticed in your book, Fish Out of Water, one thing that often moved you close to God, or at least to think about God, was music, I didn’t realize you were so musically attuned. And yet, over and over again, you respond to sound and music and rhythm.
Eric Metaxas
I was not even conscious of it now until you mentioned it. So now I’m going to ask you, Tony Carnes. What do you mean, because I’m fascinated that you pick that up? What what specifically did you pick up? Because I, I mean, I am very musical, but I’m not at all conscious of having put any of that in the book or of having any relationship between that and in my fate. So now I’m fascinated what you picked up.
T Carnes
Well, let me give a really big example, and there are many more subtle examples, of course, in some ways more important, but let me give a really big example. You decide to sing acapella “Amazing Grace” at the National Prayer Breakfast with the President there.
Eric Metaxas
Yeah, 10 years, nine years ago, President Obama and the Senate leaders had invited me to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast. My Bonhoeffer book came out in 2010. And in 2012, when when President Obama was in office, I was invited.
So many years before, I had seen Garrison Keillor at the Boston Opera house in 1985, during the lean years when I was struggling and stumbling around. Garrison Keillor at the end of this evening, led, you know, 2500 people at the Boston Opera House in singing Amazing Grace acapella. And it was so moving, it was so transcendent, that it was like a religious experience.
I was not, you know, any kind of a Christian particularly, but I was so moved by it. And then many years later, I get invited to the Washington prayer breakfast, and President Obama’s right here and Vice President Biden’s right here and Nancy Pelosi is here and right in front of me is, is Hillary Clinton.
And I get to speak about Jesus and about Bonhoeffer and about Wilberforce. It was an amazing thing. And I got this crazy idea, because years before I spoke, Francis Collins spoke. He’s the head of the National Institutes of Health, a super genius scientist who’s a Christian. He spoke the year before I did, and at the end of his talk, he pulled out a guitar and played.
And I thought, you know what, that would be pretty wild. If I if I lead everybody, including President Obama in singing, Amazing Grace acapella! Because everybody knows the lyrics to Amazing Grace, or at least to the first verse, so I did that.
People can watch it, if they go to my website, which is just my name, EricMetaxas.com. There’s a video of the National Prayer Breakfast, and at the end of it, everybody sings am”Amazing Grace.”
And I should really be clear, this book is utterly apolitical. I mean, there’s just nothing political in the book. It’s meant to be, you know, just to the portrait, you know, of the artist as a young man, growing up and trying to make sense of life.
The book is not particularly theological. It’s very dramatic, but it’s utterly apolitical. It’s just the story of me growing up.
Eric Metaxas
I’m glad you appreciate my writing. That means a lot to me. Because, you know, I think of myself as the literary writer. And this is really a literary memoir, more than a spiritual memoir for sure.
I sort of wrote it for all my friends who hate Trump, to be honest, to give them an insight into where I’m coming from the book is not about Trump, as you know.
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