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.  

American voters have canceled the Trump Show after 12 years. And two moments in American history cross my mind as I surveyed the extent of the MAGA army’s defeat: 

• After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, on a flight to Texas, told Bill Moyers, “Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.” 
• General Sherman’s Civil War march across Georgia and into the Carolinas, a campaign that led to the demise of the Confederacy. 

November 3 will be remembered as the birth of the new, new South. The Democratic Party broke the Solid South for the first time since the Civil Rights Act. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and maybe Mississippi fell into Democratic hands. 

This election felt loaded with historical significance. I always feel the weight of history no matter how small a role I have played in any of it. Call it a “God thing” or a “sense of calling to be responsible.” I now believe that I had not labored in vain writing three books warning of Trump’s evil and 159 articles in dissent of Trump and MAGA. 

Yes, this is personal. 

Trump and MAGA Arrogance 

The voters have rejected Trump and MAGA arrogance. Ours is the age of emotions in politics, and it is only fitting emotions played a big role in the defeat of the Republicans. The evangelical mind is authoritarian by nature. It is Manichean and apocalyptic in its dualism of good and evil. Trump and MAGA evangelicals share a number of characteristics. They are not good at sharing or giving up power. They don’t play well with others. They insist on being in control of what John Yoder called “the handles of history.” Nothing matters but winning. I am convinced the MAGA defeat on November 3 has only one biblical analogy capable of explaining the massive nature of this defeat – Isaiah 14:

You said to yourself, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of the assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”

James T. Kloppenberg, in his account of democracy, Toward Democracy, reminds us that democracy has been premised on deliberation, pluralism and reciprocity. His assessment of the present power (Trump and MAGA) is that it is marked by the strong tendency “to frame disagreements as all-or-nothing struggles between good and evil,” instead of seeing that “democracy inevitably – necessarily – involves endless negotiation and compromise between competing values and worldviews.” 

This arrogant attitude on the part of Trump and MAGA produced a rhetoric of antagonism, certainty and outrage. I believe President Trump thinks of himself as a comedian and a satirist and stoking all that outrage became more than most Americans could tolerate. Trump became a show with no interesting episodes left.

Trump, Desperate Rhetoric, and MAGA Overreach 

I am convinced Trump and MAGA labeled too many Americans as “the enemy.” All these groups finally connected the dots from the Hispanic voters in Texas to immigrant populations in Michigan and Ohio, to young white males and women of every background. 

The overreach included the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, the gerrymandering of African American districts to benefit Republicans, the dismissal of science, the pushing of evangelical “culture war” issues, the trampling of diversity, equity and inclusion, ignoring the Constitution and the judicial system, the unwarranted attack on American education, the senseless war with Iran, the President’s graft and demolition of D.C.with no attention paid to governing agencies, committees and the complete emasculation of Congress. 

Trump’s desperate rhetoric along with equally desperate and wild exaggerated evangelical preaching triggered the MAGA overreach. The language of excess – lies, hyperbole, profanity, cruelty, violence and the appeal to nostalgia that relied on historical erasures – finally short-circuited the rationality and critical thinking crucial to democracy and republican governance. Listening and reading all the desperation I gravitated between “This is nuts” and “This is bat-shit crazy.” 

Trump has never been other than a demolition expert. His “puerile discourse of redemption by demolition and deal making,” as Robert L. Ivie puts it, finally turned on MAGA and led to its downfall, as the arguments they used down the stretch were a prophetic mantra of how desperate they were and how badly they would lose. 

“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” trumpeted the President. I am convinced Americans did exactly as President Trump requested. How many Americans voted against Trump and not for any candidate? Trump put his brand on MAGA and there’s no escape. American historian John Fea observes of the evangelical predicament: “How do you critique the next president if something goes wrong ethically when you’ve been in bed with Trump for 12 years?” 

Evangelicals have been swallowing and repeating Trump’s lies for so long they will be incapable of speaking truth. An old proverb has returned to bite MAGA: “If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.” Bad company corrupts character, produces bad arguments and awful consequences. 

MAGA and Trump threatened, bullied and pushed Americans to the breaking point. Evangelicals, unable to imagine other people have deep convictions of how life should be lived, know only one way – take the evangelical truth and force feed it to everyone. Something in the evangelical mind is incapable of moderation, reticence and restraint. It’s either their way or to hell with you – all of you. 

Dusty Deevers, Oklahoma state senator and pastor at Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Elgin insists Democrats are the Babylonians.

“Now look at the God-hating Left. You may think I exaggerate by comparing them to the Babylonians. I assure you, I do not. Democrats have told us plainly how they intend to destroy us and our kids and our way of life. They are openly campaigning on opening the borders, packing the courts, abolishing the Electoral College, and adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as states to bring about permanent, dictatorial one-party rule.” 

Evangelicals paint all others as God-haters and America-haters. The Make America Great Again movement has disinterred some toxic, discredited creeds: nativism, racism and American exceptionalism. When digging around in the past, monsters were awakened. 

From the attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship to deporting millions of immigrants, President Trump made “who is an American” the heart of MAGA’s appeal. Somalians in Minnesota, Haitians in Springfield, Ohio and Mexicans across America are targets. Muslims, communists, socialists, liberals and Democrats are all lumped together. 

I am reminded of a post-9/11 ad called “I Am an American.” Images of Americans of all colors, ethnicities, backgrounds filled television screens with one message, “I am an American.” Those are the people who voted in this election. 

Bad Arguments: Trump and MAGA’s Unraveling 

As a student of American political rhetoric, I felt bad arguments would fail MAGA in this election. And this election was awash in bad arguments. Never before have we been treated to more irrational, incoherent and irrelevant claims. 

Desperation on the part of MAGA fueled bad arguments. The arguments were so emotional. Did anyone in Kansas, tell an exit poll taker, “I voted against Adam Hamilton because his church used gender neutral words for ‘boys and girls”? Did Texans buy the cheap accusations Talarico was a vegan gay whose cowboy boots were zip-ups? 

The bad arguments started to produce a stench early in the campaign, and as they piled up like week-old garbage, it became worse. As it was in the days of Amos, “I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils; yet you did not return to me, says the Lord” (Amos 4:10). Or the NIV of Amos 5:21 – “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me.”

Examples of bad arguments filled social media posts, sermons and speeches.

• “We must defend the America that we love.” (Senator Tim Scott)
• “I didn’t fight for this country for 20 years so they could hand it over to a bunch of COMMUNISTS and RADICAL MUSLIMS!” (John K. Amanchukwu Sr.)  
• “Democrat officials want illegals voting in our elections! Republicans believe Americans should decide American elections, not illegal aliens” (Speaker Mike Johnson). 

To my Aristotelian mind, our politics in the age of Trump became more about pathos than logos or ethos. And these bad arguments fell flat in this election cycle. 

Making the Other Guy Look Worse Didn’t Work 

For once, negative advertising and character attacks didn’t work. The bad argument of making the other candidate look worse had a bad night on November 3. For instance, evangelicals invested heavily in making Talarico and Rev. Adam Hamilton into devils. Their absurd argument was reduced to saying, “We have a disreputable candidate, but he is the lesser of two evils.”  The voters saw good men unfairly lambasted by bad arguments. This election was the victory of logos over pathos. 

“Chicken Little” Arguments Failed 

There are a number of MAGA arguments easily grouped under the category of “Chicken Little” arguments. Originally named “Henny Penny,” it is a European folk tale about a chicken who has an acorn fall on his head and thinks the “sky is falling.” Historian John Fea describes this sense of evangelical panic as believing “the fabric of the country was unraveling …. the barbarians were amassing at the borders.” For MAGA, the apocalypse is always just around the corner. Here is an entire tribe, standing by the road waving signs proclaiming, “The end is near.” For example, Gary Bauer apocalyptically argued that it was “pretty late” in America:  “We’re facing a serious threat from godless Marxism and radical Islamism.”

Fear of Alleged Enemies Failed

The collective fantasy of MAGA is the enemies at the gate. The God-ordained mission of MAGA is to unseat the enemies now hoarding power and destroying traditional values. Michael J. Lee, in “The Populist Chameleon,” argues that “The enemy is a rhetorical purifier, a scapegoat for societal ills.” And he adds, “The enemy is constituted as tangibly different in race, class, or geographical location.” 

The voters in Michigan rejected the fear of Muslims argument by electing Abdul El-Sayed. They had heard this bad argument before when Trump and MAGA tried to demean one of our most admired and eloquent leaders by making fun of his name – “Barack Hussein Obama.” 

The farmers in the heartland finally realized Trump’s immigrant enemies were their workers who harvested crops, packaged meat and provided the labor supply to keep farmers in business. Trump wasn’t deporting criminal immigrants; he was wiping out the cheap labor supply. This election was the triumph of ethos over pathos, rational arguments over persona and image.

Bad arguments have a way of becoming bad policies; bad policies can morph into bad actions. The sacredness of MAGA’s cause was shown to be a remix of the Pharisee/Herodian alliance pitted against Jesus. In other words, the MAGA/Musk team failed in Texas because Texans decided ethos, a critical Aristotelian mode of proof, mattered more than cash. 

MAGA has no clarity. The claim of certainty is a joke. The assertion of authority is a bluff. The lack of consensus of what constitutes authority in America makes one wonder about the psychological health of those who tell us they are certain. 

The voters said, “This is not America.” MAGA is neither greatness nor graciousness. I think the nation finally found its voice again and rejected Trump and MAGA.