Resisting the Evangelical Power Grab
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).
The anti-science, anti-history Bible thumpers have invaded America again. In the past, they have suffered massive defeats. In the 1920’s in Dayton, TN, they were unmercifully mocked and destroyed by Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken.
But they have not forgotten nor forgiven. At the ceremony opening the Creation Museum, Ken Ham revealed the smoldering resentment evangelicals still feel. He swore that he would repair the damage done to Christianity eighty-two years ago when Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial. “It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. “We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn’t prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science.”
A Review of Evangelical Wars
The fundamentalists/conservatives/evangelicals were only getting started. “Here they come again.” They returned with a vengeance in the 1910s with a campaign known as Prohibition. Led by Billy Sunday, J. Frank Norris, and an army of temperance workers, they managed to pass the 18th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. This evangelical victory lasted until December 5, 1933, when it was repealed by the 21st Amendment.
Evangelicals are always attempting to stop everyone else from doing something. It is their most distinguishable mark.
After decades of adding more layers of resentment, the evangelicals returned in the 1950’s as allies of American corporate tycoons. Kevin Kruse, in One Nation Under God, chronicles how corporate America created Christian America. Evangelicals managed to secure a few trophies that looked more like carnival trinkets: “In God We Trust” on our money, and “Under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance.
Then came the 1960’s and all hell broke loose for evangelicals. They were flotsam in a secular storm of anything goes. They nearly drowned fighting free love, drugs, the Civil Rights movement, and protesters against the Vietnam War. Evangelical angst festered and their desire for revenge multiplied exponentially.
In the 1960’s they attempted to rally around the support of segregation, but this failed. Racism is a bad look for Christians. (By the way, if you think anti-immigration isn’t racism, then you are as misguided as your 1960’s evangelical kin.) Randall Balmer, in Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, shows it was government interference in ‘segregation academies’ such as Bob Jones University [and Liberty University] that sparked the growth of the religious right.
Finally, they landed on abortion as the issue capable of reviving the moribund movement of evangelical faith.. To be clear, opposition to abortion was an afterthought for evangelicals.
The birth of the Moral Majority under Jerry Falwell aided in the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. But evangelicals were disappointed in Reagan, and in George H. Bush and in George W. Bush. Reagan and George W. Bush each served 2 terms – 16 years. 20 years of Republican presidents, and yet they were unable to bring evangelicals any victories. Roe v. Wade remained the law for more than 50 years.
Evangelicals rallied again in the 1990’s with the Tea Party and Newt Gingrich – a bomb throwing politician. Gingrich was the pre-Trump. He set the course for the politics of polarization that finally erupted in 2016.
Like a giant dragon awakened from his mountain lair, the evangelicals went whole hog for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Dana Milbank documents the “web of conspiracy theories,” designed to “restrict voting and discredit elections,” while “stoking fear of minorities and immigrants.” Trump is the full-grown man-child of this movement, this old, angry, resentful movement of fundamentalist and evangelical believers. As Robert L. Ivie puts it, “The Republican Party became ‘authoritarian’ and ‘deconstructionist’ over the course of the last twenty-five years, destroying truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, their own party, and U. S. democracy.”
As they marched into the corridors of power they were singing “God’s truth is marching on.”
With the overturning of Roe v, Wade, evangelicals were finally winners. The result has been cruel “red state” laws that have imposed inhumane penalties on women seeking abortions, on doctors providing abortion, and on friends aiding women in obtaining abortions.
The Evangelicals Are Back with a Vengeance
While I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, I see signs of impending doom. Evangelicals are big on signs, fake signs of the end. I am big on seeing with clear eyes what evangelicals have in store for the nation.
In previous evangelical movements, the rule of law, the courts of the land, including the Supreme Court, thwarted the evangelical goal of rule by the minority. Now, they have a president-elect who plans to shape the Constitution into his own image, with a compliant Supreme Court ready to revisit past evangelical losses and transform them into victories.
Let me state this plainly: Evangelicals are coming for our schools and universities, our First Amendment freedoms, our science and history curricula, our right to not be religious, our scientific knowledge of the reality of global warming, our trust in medical science and vaccines, our belief in the rights of women, minorities, and migrants, our sexuality, our freedom to love, our right to live in peace.
They offer a force-fed kind of salvation that destroys the freedoms of the First Amendment. They put school prayer and Bible courses along with David Barton-inspired “America was born as a Christian nation” history books in the curriculum.
They are coming to return prayer and the Bible to public schools. See, for example, Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida.
They are coming for gay marriage and transgender rights. How long do you think it will be before lawsuits are filed with the aim of making the way to the Supreme Court to declare gay marriage illegal?
Evangelical disgust with social justice will lead to serious attempts to defund the social safety net. The dismantling of the Affordable Health Care Act, the privatizing of Medicare, the eradication of the Department of Education, reducing SNAP, welfare, and protections for transgenders. Evangelicals believe in unconditional revenge, not the conditional eye for an eye.
The evangelical movement thrives on authoritarianism, certainty, and anger that combines with a pre-existing culture of fear and hatred. Trump’s demagoguery has taken the chains of a lethal evangelical movement and intends to wrap them around all our anchor institutions. This movement shows no signs of abating.
George Lakoff reminds us, “American values are fundamentally progressive, centered on equality, human rights, social responsibility, and the inclusion of all. Yet, the majority of Americans have voted for the most radical right-wing government in our history. “
Lakoff’s words are of the majesty of the prophetic. As he notes, the radical evangelicals are coming “with an authoritarian hierarchy dominated by evangelical leaders; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken government; no balance of power; priorities shifted from the public sector to the corporate and military sectors; responsibility shifted from society to individuals; and patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics, and the market.”
The evangelical movement is an unmitigated quest for power by using Trump and his minions to violate Constitutional rules and push the nation into a far-right mode.
A Resistance Movement
I can no longer pretend a kinship with the people who introduced me to faith. It is a terrible ripping of the cords of unity, but here I stand.
I hate, I despise your excessive praise songs and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me positive thinking, prosperity-promising sermons, I will not accept them; and the disgust you have for the social gospel, I can no longer tolerate. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your drums, guitars, trumpets, and saxophones. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
Our only choice is resistance against these “religious” people. I am unable to pretend there is a middle ground for mutual understanding, a symbolic space for negotiation, or a way to work with evangelicals.
I declare myself an enemy of the evangelical movement and its evil twin, Christian Nationalism. They are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. They are a generation of snakes and vipers who have enthroned a congenital liar, a thief, a fraud, a fascist, and the incarnation of evil as our next president. I will defy them at every opportunity.
Like Salieri arguing with God, over his disgust of Mozart, I declare, “From this day forward, you are my enemy. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile man-child and give me for reward only the ability to watch in horror as he destroys democracy …. Because you are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your victory.”
