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 rightingamerica interview. And check out Rod’s new webpage!

The academic discipline of history is under attack. Donald Trump and his MAGA minions are systematically eliminating any history that makes the USA look “bad.” 

Anyone paying attention can tick off the obvious efforts at deconstructing history: 

• dismantling all DEI efforts.  
• attacking institutions of higher education. 
• disrupting the Smithsonian Museum.
• defending Confederate monuments. 
• returning Confederate name to military bases (under a weak subterfuge).
• removing web pages of women and African American military heroes from the Arlington National Cemetery website. 
• rewriting history curriculums to make America look “great.” 
• wiping out history curriculums considered too liberal.  

The Trump administration has placed history – written, symbolic, visual – in the crosshairs of its weaponized assault on truth and democracy.  MAGA wants Hollywood endings, not history’s realities.

The History Pickle

I believe MAGA evangelicals are in a history pickle. Borrowing from Freud’s observation that clinical perversion is noted by a “fixation,” I am suggesting MAGA evangelicals have a “fixation” about history. They are obsessed by a particular vision of history that harms their ability to see the truth. There is something damning and redemptive in looking at what has been done in the name of our God, but evangelicals can’t stand the damnation. But in attempting to erase what has been done (history), they stand naked before God’s judgment seat without redemption. They believe they are smarter than the liberals, but all this effort at hiding, erasing, deleting the records of hate, oppression, and violence as if it never happened, only increases the damnation. 

The MAGA pickle puts the movement in a particular bind because they are fighting against the truth. Historians are not a tribe of radical left-wing America-haters. To think in such a Trumpian way is to ignore reality. 

The history pickle really sours for evangelicals when they are exposed as those opposing truth and God. For me there is no more delightful story than the one told by historians Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson. They relate the story: Highway 20 runs across northern Kentucky and ends in the small river town of Petersburg in Boone County. The highway leads to Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. The rocks by the side of the highway testify to the truth of the earth’s age, as people wind their way to witness the fantastical and mythological tale of a 6,000-year-old earth at the Creation Museum. The rocks on the side of the road contains some of the richest fossil beds in the world. These rock and fossils are a half-billion-years-old. 

As much as evangelicals despise archeologists, we owe our understanding of our ancient past to their “digs.” We build on long centuries of human evolution, and history tells our stories. It’s an odd, essential enterprise of guiding civilization into the future by the study of the past. No wonder my 60’s generation kept asking, “Can you dig it?” 

I am attracted to all stories that come from African Americans, women, the previously voiceless and powerless. Imagining the Trump administration shutting down this vigorous enterprise of lifting every voice fills me with more than sadness. It fills me with the fury of dissent. 

MAGA knows history matters. Otherwise, they would not be attacking history and historians with such animosity. We now inhabit a society littered with thoughts which discourage the discovery of truth about the past. Our right-leaning culture now wants a society where Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller are honored and Frederick Douglass and Justice Thurgood Marshall are exiled. Herbert McCabe observes, “The asking of radical questions is discouraged by any society that believes in itself, believes it has found the answers, believes that only the authorized questions are legitimate.” 

Another pickle in the evangelical barrel: Evangelicals can’t stand to be told that they don’t have as much epistemic right as anyone else on any topic that they like to think they understand: “Who are you to tell me that I have to defer to some historian?” It is truly farcical, for instance, for an untrained, uncredentialed, history hobbyist to defy the entire American Historical Association in a complete rewriting of American history. David Barton claims fifty-two of the fifty-five original signers of the Declaration of Independence were “evangelical believers.” This would be a surprise to the founders who were Deists, Anglicans, Unitarians, agnostics, and maybe even one atheist. 

Lying: A Toxin in History

Lynn Hunt, in History: Why It Matters notes how politicians lie about history: “Everywhere you turn, history is at issue. Politicians lie about historical facts, groups clash over the fate of historical monuments, officials closely monitor the content of history textbooks, and truth commissions proliferate across the globe.” 

David Blight notes, “The lies have now crept into a Trumpian Lost Cause ideology, building its monuments in ludicrous stories that millions believe, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilfer.”

Like Shakespeare’s Richard II, Trump and MAGA lie with abandon. “I am subtle, false and treacherous,” Richard boasts (1.1.37), later smiling that he uses “lies well steel’d with weighty arguments” (1.1.147).

Lies are an alien, invasive entity in the bloodstream of history. Keep insisting America was born as a Christian nation, and the lie spawns Christian nationalism, Charlie Kirk, and Seven Mountains Dominionism.

History Faces an Invasion of Emotions

The outpouring of emotions unleashes an entire barrel of pickles spilling all over our democracy: outrage, anger, jouissance, ressentiment, resentment, cruelty, disgust, hatred. The emotional juggernaut of the right has a meme: Pepe the frog. Pepe’s smug but goofy hangdog routine evolved into the perfect emblem for the Alt-Right’s approach to politics—a refusal to be shamed. Pepe’s slogan: “Feels good man!” As Lauren Berlant points out, ““[t]he Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free.”

Historians are not usually buffeted by the strange fruit of “affect” or emotions. As a rhetorician, I am aware of how pathos has bullied its way into the center of American politics and how those “touchy feely” politics are undermining the logos and ethos of American history. 

Emotions now have the power to “trump” facts and evidence. “Opinion,” offered with no warrant, can “trump” the truth. Lies told with emotional fervor get more attention than historical manuscripts. Words have been replaced by memes, tweets, and clicks. We inhabit an emotional jungle. 

A National Memory War

We are now engaged in a contentious epistemological war over the meaning of truth. This fight takes place within the framework of the Civil War. 

 “The Civil War is our felt history – history lived in the national imagination,” argued Robert Penn Warren. Blight says, “Three overall visions of Civil War memory collided and combined over time: the reconciliationist vision, the white supremacist vision and the emancipationist vision.” 

The reconciliationist vision combined with the white supremacy vision to give us Reconstruction and a segregated society where blacks’ subordination was taken for granted in the North and South. Blight says, “Another way of putting it is that the Confederacy lost the war on the battlefield but won the war over memory.” 

White men, North and South, made a deal to restore the Union at the expense of the newly freed Blacks. Almost as soon as Blacks had rights, they disappeared like fog on a Louisiana bayou. Jim Crow, the KKK, the Lynching Era, segregation – all became the horror of Black existence in the South. Read James Cone’s The Cross and The Lynching Tree for a grasp of how deeply embedded the white supremacist vision is in the American memory. “The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are so amazingly similar that one wonders what blocks the American Christian imagination from seeing the connection.” 

Feel the lash of truth when Cone insists white supremacy is the negation of Christian theology. 

With the passage of the Civil Rights bill, the emancipationist vision of Frederick Douglas became the American vision. This vision, filled with the promise of dignity, rights, and equality, has lasted for 61 years but now faces determined opposition. 

America’s memory war has shifted beneath our feet like the shifting tectonic plates of a California earthquake. Emancipationists and white supremacists now face off in a battle of life and death of apocalyptic expression. Rights thought to be carved in stone are being chipped away by an administration dedicated to white supremacy. 

Using its 1875 playbook, the white supremacist vision once again has aligned with the reconciliationist vision to undo the emancipationist vision. Trump would have never won the presidency with only MAGA support. He had to win the hearts of “reconciliationists” who were amenable to his promise to make America great again. 

MAGA is succeeding after decades of failure because they now have the power of the presidency in their hands. Paula White and Robert Jeffress and the Pentecostals are no longer props in Oval Office photo shoots. They are the shot callers in a demolition of history, truth, and equality. Adam Laats, a historian of education at Binghamton University, noted “Never before has this kind of fervor from the right owned the Oval Office.” 

The attempt to replace solid history curriculum with Barton-inspired fables and Prager University fantastical videos making a hero of Columbus is only the beginning of the birth pangs of a movement feeling the fervor of unmitigated political power. 

Historians are Truth Tellers 

Historians have become the prophets who interpret the present by the past. They are what the Greeks called the parrhesiastes. They are the equivalent of the saints who have for centuries protected the church from the beast kings (Daniel) who would rule our lives in fear.

Truth wins. Historian Jill Lepore says, “Most forms of tyranny do come to an end.” As Vaclav Havel demonstrated, dissent takes down most tyranny. 

If the power silences the historians, a vast army of ordinary folks, will carry the torch of truth. They will whisper the truth in those private gathering spaces, “hush harbors,” where they are free to speak. They will preserve the truth. Like those nameless, faceless scribes who faithfully produced the scrolls of sacred scripture, the truth bearers will keep truth alive. 

If all the voices were silenced, the rocks of creation would cry out. “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out’” (Luke 19:40).

As a preacher, I can think of no better way of ending than with a doxology on the universality of the voices of Truth. 

Praise the Lord from the earth,
    you sea monsters and all deeps,
fire and hail, snow and frost,
    stormy wind fulfilling his command!

Mountains and all hills,
    fruit trees and all cedars!
Wild animals and all cattle,
    creeping things and flying birds! (Psalm 148:7 – 9).