Righting America

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, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.  

David Barton, Robert Jeffress, and Eric Metaxas are three current popular history revisionists. And these revisionists don’t have much interest in the facts. 

With the backing of President Trump they have launched a war against American history and historians. Trump, for instance, ordered the interior department to display signs in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that accuse the institution of inaccuracy. 

What in the name of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is going on here? If our nation didn’t already have more than 17,500 history museums, this trio might be building a “Christian America Museum” next to the Ark Encounter outside Wilmore Kentucky. 

As John Fea scans the work of the revisionists, he concludes, “Their understanding of the past has been debunked by nearly every serious American historian, including those who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges.” As a pastor and, just as importantly, a scholar trained in the history and theory of rhetoric, my contribution is to engage the revisionists rhetorically precisely because their arguments are emotionally-grounded. 

A Rhetorical Issue

Barton and company are bad rhetoricians. Plato would have called them Sophists. According to Plato the rhetoric of Sophists was “an experience in producing a sort of delight or gratification.” It was predicated on “flattery.” 

In Plato’s dialogue the Gorgias, for example, Socrates compares rhetoric to “cookery”—the equivalent of junk food—and observes that although some rhetoric might taste good, consuming it too readily or mindlessly could condemn your soul to an overweight hell of reincarnation. Barton, Jeffress, and Metaxas are junk food rhetoricians. 

Joshua Gunn says, “Junk food is pleasurable or exciting or intoxicating, at least until the first swallow. At least until the burps of shame come up.” And the revisionists serve “junk food” as comfort to people in need of a fantasy of a Christian America. Judged as rhetorical arguments, the revisionists are fantasists, flatterers, fake tellers of a facile promise of national salvation. It is a puerile gospel of redemption void of responsibility and repentance. 

MAGA has an emotional template for criticizing American historians. It goes like this: For too long, students have been taught a distorted, liberal version of American history. Teachers intentionally make students feel bad about America’s many crimes from its checkered past—slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and the oppression of women. 

Emotion coupled with reason has tremendous potential. There is powerful emotion everywhere in history. Our best historians arouse our deepest emotions when telling the stories of our nation. We feel joy, remorse, sadness, anger, outrage, happiness, pride, shame. MAGA sifts through the emotions and deletes any capable of making them feel bad. 

As a teenager from Louisiana, I flooded my bed with tears as I relived Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and the terrible blunder of General Robert Lee. I have laid furious in my bed after reading a letter from one of my ancestors. He fought for the Confederacy and sent a letter to his “Mama” from Gettysburg. He talked about the soldier next to him having his head blown off by a cannon ball. He wrote of the hell of war. He wanted to come home. He later became a prisoner of war. At the time, I felt sure I could have made better command decisions. But you have to be born Southern to feel that bitter in the dark. 

In email correspondence, University of Dayton history professor, William V. Trollinger, wrote me: “Here’s my favorite defense of history, from the great W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (1935): ‘Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?’”

The Fallacy of Emotional Arguments 

MAGA evangelicals make emotional arguments in favor of a contrived history of an American golden age. But this reveals the weakness of their argument. Unable to make the case on the facts, realities and interpretation of history, MAGA evangelicals have resorted to emotional proofs. MAGA argues not through sustained reasoning (logos) but through pathos – hyperbole, misinformation, threats, repetition and fantasy. 

Are we witnessing an entire nation caught up in an emotional storm? Has America lost its mind?  

The temptation for these writers of “Back to the Future” ideologies, prejudices, beliefs and commitments is to make characters remarkably like themselves. I shudder at the thought of George Washington looking remarkably like Barton, Jeffress like Thomas Jefferson and Metaxas like John Adams. 

MAGA historians connect their audiences with a pathos-filled tale that, in effect, is saying: “Look at our wonderful evangelical founders. They were evangelicals just like us.” They have produced a history of affects – a litany of emotions designed to make people feel good and feel free. 

Do they know they are lying? Do they know the absurdity of wish-fulfilment told as truth? The evangelical baptism of Franklin would be a spectacle. As US ambassador to France, Franklin dressed in Quaker garb and described himself as a “Quaker philosopher.” In his speeches and writings he was a secular Deist. He even testifies to being a “thorough Deist.” When Franklin arrived in Paris, his French counterparts told him they were worried about him having religious convictions. Later they told him they were gratified to learn he had none. 

Randall Balmer clarifies what is at stake: 

We tend to take history—and historians—for granted. But that is a grievous mistake. An understanding of history helps us understand who we are, where we’ve been and even provides a clue to where we’re headed. It’s no accident, for example, that David Barton masquerades as a historian. He’s a fabulist, of course, not a historian, as has been amply demonstrated by his habit of wrenching quotations out of context and fabricating “evidence” out of whole cloth. Barton is a fraud, but he recognizes the power and importance of history, which is why he’s fashioned a career out of creating this elaborate, false narrative of the American past.

The rhetorical form of evangelical argument consists of four interrelated and mutually reinforcing emotions. Practically devoid of logos and ethos, the four emotions dominating the soul of MAGA and her apologists are melancholy, outrage, resentment and shame. 

Melancholy 

The first emotion permeating all of MAGA and its revised history is melancholy. It may seem odd to think of melancholy as one of the primary effects of the MAGA movement and its revised history. The tales the revisionists fabricate are melancholic throughout. They represent a failure to confront the crimes of America against African Americans and Native Americans, and our involvement in slavery, colonialism and racism. 

I feel a deep sadness for my fellow Americans captured by the emotional arguments of the revisionists. Casey Kelly’s Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood examines contemporary white masculine victimhood and its compulsion toward death and self-destruction. He identifies the white male melancholia for better days – when “men could be men” – and the white male politics of resentments as tethering white masculinity to a fantasy of annihilation—both their own and others. 

What evangelicals claim as a loss turns out to be a lack. They mourn what has never existed. There’s an empty tomb but not by resurrection. There was never a body in the evangelical tomb. 

Melancholy has become a death trap for evangelicals. They maintain fealty to the notion of a Christian America, refusing to renounce their attachment to it. Evangelical melancholy is dishonest. They have turned it into feelings of persecution and victimization. 

Slavoj Zizek says the melancholic is guilty of committing a kind of paralogism of the pure capacity to desire, which resides in the confusion between loss and lack. Insofar as the object-cause of desire (Christian America) is originally lacking, melancholy interprets this lack as loss, as if the lacking object was once possessed and then lost. Evangelicals have not only created a fantasy history. They have also created a false claim of loss. 

The evangelical revisionist historians turn out to be politically naïve, nostalgic, and reactionary. They defend a nonexistent entity, a “purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself,” making the entire enterprise delusional. 

Outrage

The MAGA emotion machine produces outrage 24/7. These revisionist history writers are furious with what they see as the moral decline of America. And battalions of outrage disciples are on call to respond instantly to every manufactured instance where outrage is considered necessary. MAGA has already given away the rhetorical nature of their attack, as they make primary use of a negative trope – ad hominem – to attack the character of historians, and not the content of what they have written. This is the emotional rhetoric of demagogues, Sophists and evil rhetors. 

Attacking American historians as liberal, socialist, atheist, “woke,” or biased has nothing to do with the quality of historical research. Even if a few of the character attacks were factually true, their point is also completely irrelevant to whether historians are writing a biased account. It does not matter if a historian engaged in human sacrifice at every full moon and therefore wrote America was not founded as a Christian nation. Some historian might have kicked puppies and screamed at her editor, and that’s actually irrelevant to whether or not their research and conclusions are true. 

“Breathing threats and violence” (Acts 9:1) are apt descriptions of MAGA evangelicals. Those who disagree need to be deported, imprisoned, or killed. Evangelicals often speak of “Lynching,” “firing squads,” “deportation,” “imprisonment” for liberals, Democrats and immigrants. 

James Fishback, a GOP candidate for governor in Florida told a Black voter he “should be lynched.” President Trump called Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and five other Democrats “traitors” who should face trial for sedition – a crime punishable by death. A Republican congressman called for Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s deportation after her sermon at President Trump's 2025 inaugural prayer service, where she urged compassion for marginalized groups. 

Outrage is the key to virality, success and power for the evangelicals. Read the blogs, listen to the podcasts of Doug Wilson, Sean Feucht, Al Mohler, and a host of MAGA evangelicals. They ooze outrage. It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks. 

Resentment

The third MAGA emotion is resentment. And evangelicals and fundamentalists developed a chip on their shoulders in the first decades of the 20^th century. For example, fundamentalist patriarch William Bell Riley complained that conservative ministers had “about as good a chance to be heard in a Turkish harem as to be invited to speak within the precincts of a modern State university.” 

Evangelical resentment has grown to a Sequoia sized log. At the ceremony opening the Creation Museum, Ken Ham spoke of repairing 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.” 

MAGA has a particular resentment when liberals presume to teach them about the Bible. Evangelical attacks on the social gospel, liberation theology and progressive thought are as vicious as any political attack. Evangelicals are prone to snap, “Who are you to tell me what the Bible teaches? Who are you to tell me I should accept gays, welcome immigrants or forgive my enemies?” 

Shame 

The most pernicious emotion haunting MAGA evangelicals is shame. MAGA runs from shame, hides from shame, denies feeling any shame. The previous masters of shame can’t abide being shamed. I believe the consistent evangelical support of Trump comes from his rhetorical ability to offer a facile salvation where they are free to avoid shame and feel dignity. 

Most of all, evangelicals don’t want to be made to feel bad even when they deserve to feel bad. They are tired of playing the “bad guy” in the Exodus stories of all the minorities, Jews, women and homosexuals. In 37 states, hiding behind children, they have passed laws to prohibit the teaching of materials that make white students feel bad. When history is reduced to “not feeling bad” we should know we have a problem. 

Evangelicals were once the masters of shame, understanding that shame leads to repentance. Ironically, it is now progressives who have embraced shame as a pedagogy for learning how to treat minorities. As Donovan Shaefer observes, “Orientation to shame is one of the cardinal principles of progressivism. Shame on the move—an openness to shame, a trafficking in shame — is how left-wing politics feels.” 

But MAGA is having nothing to do with liberal shame. Instead, MAGA’s response to shame has been a furious refusal of culpability. In its desperate attempt to avoid shame, MAGA has perverted love, destroyed empathy and abandoned all pretense of following Jesus’ love for those who are different. The attempt to Christianize America is an attempt to avoid the shame of America’s sins and trespasses, and thus to repeat them. 

Conclusion 

Christianity represents both the best and the worst of the nation’s history. At its best, it invokes a “good neighbor” policy to the world, gives voice to the voiceless, and a place for the Other. At its worst, it produces an uncompromising resurrection of Jim Crow white supremacy and nativist, exclusionary and American exceptionalism, all of which violates the most basic of Christian principles. And the evangelical revisionist historians attempt to cover all these transgressions with a political/theological ideology fueled by melancholy, outrage, resentment and shame. The revisionist historians are fantasists dwelling in a fantasy world where emotional arguments flourish. When the costume and mask is ripped away, MAGA is left without a history, without a way out and without the promised salvation. They are scarecrows without brains, lions without courage and tin men without hearts – a perverse reversal of the Wizard of Oz fantasy tale. 

Instead they are left with a harsh reality: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6).