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 there are more books to come!
What would it have been like to be the pastor of the church at Sardis in the late 60’s A.D.? You ask the secretary, “Any mail?” “Not much, but you do have a letter from Jesus,” she says. Pastor exclaims, “Jesus Christ!” Secretary deadpans: “Yes, that one!”
Opening the letter, the pastor reads:
I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God. (Revelation 3: 1-3)
Sardis is the best metaphor I have found for what has happened to MAGA evangelicals. They are on the point of death because they did a deep dive into the shark-infested waters of secular politics.
MAGA evangelicals constitute a movement, giddy with new political power, alive with emotions of anger, fear, and revenge, and determined to rule, but for all this activity, they are a dying tribe.
My purpose here is a rhetorical analysis of how MAGA evangelicals engage in self-harming practices. They are drinking to the dregs a poisoned potion of dreadful affects slowly killing them. The three self-harming practices explored in this article are cruel optimism, sad passions, and white male victimization.
Perhaps no group has ever marched inexorably toward Sheol as MAGA evangelicals with such confidence and certainty. I contend their certainty is a bluff. They are still trying to look strong and tough, but in the recesses of their minds, they know we all live in the cross pressures of an age no longer enamored with what is true. We all live in Flannery O’Connor’s Christ-haunted world.
The 21st century up to this point has battered the citadel of evangelical certainty. The alarms have been sounding for some years now, and evangelicals have been awakened in the dead of night to how precarious their precious certainties have become. They are broken cisterns, cracked pots, and echoes of a former glory.
They are nervous, sensitive, touchy as well as too loud, harsh, and hyperbolic. If they really believe what they claim why do they have to be so angry, so loud, and so arrogant?
Evangelicals, perhaps unconsciously, have revived an ancient religious practice of self-flagellation. This is an emotional self-flagellation but it may be even more painful than the physical beating of one’s back with a whip.
Cruel Optimism
One evangelical response to an encroaching secular culture has been a defensive mechanism known as “cruel optimism.” Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, argues that cruel optimism describes the process of survival people undertake when they are under pressure.
Despite the obvious efforts to destabilize democracy, demolish human rights, and ignore the rule of law, cruel optimists return again and again to their recommitment liturgies and ceremonies. When the president faces trouble he calls the faithful back to remember the fierce enemies he faces: the media, the courts, and the deep state. Even as the rights of all Americans fade slowly away, the cruel optimists keep believing Trump is always right and knows best and will lead them to the Promised Land. They are blind to the deception of his facile promise of national salvation.
For centuries, wealthy, white American males have dominated the nation. The promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy all belonged to white males. When this hegemony faced severe challenges, white males responded with cruel optimism – the “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, and toxic.”
Cruel optimism comes about when individuals remain attached to “conditions of possibility” or “clusters of promises” which are embedded in desired objects or ideas, even when those same objects or ideas inhibit people from acquiring or fulfilling such items or promises.
Evangelical frustration at not achieving all their dreams is the essence of cruel optimism. Their optimism is cruel because it longs for an unreachable, unknowable, non-existent Promised Land. It is cruel to promise people an America created as God’s “city on a hill” and God’s new people. It is cruel to hold out to people an unreachable dream. Such optimism sounds like a typical Sunday morning in a megachurch where the preacher offers Ted Talks of superficial confidence and self-belief.
MAGA cruelty toward gays, women, and immigrants is not only a form of murder; it is suicide.
Sad Passions
The second form of evangelical self-flagellation is the dominating presence of what political theorist Shannon Sullivan calls the “sad passions.” This is the hidden source of evangelical negativity and passion for being against almost all social causes. Here’s the rub: The sad passions produce a kind of death in life. They have a name that suggest they are alive, but they are actually dead to the joyful passions and flourishing of life.
Sullivan argues that cruelty, hate, fear, envy and anger are sad because these emotions are largely reactive to the Other’s existence. As such, people who are constituted by these passions experience a kind of death-in-life that can occur when a body no longer actively strives to persevere in its being but allows itself to be constituted merely by reactions to other’s conatus. The sad passions crowd out joy, love, hope, kindness, patience, empathy, and compassion. Instead of being alive in the fullness of their God-given lives, they are consumed by distaste and disgust of others.
Why should a middle-aged heterosexual couple in Dayton, Ohio be driven to constant outrage over a gay couple getting married? There are not gay couples in their gated community, their megachurch, their social clubs, or among their friends. And yet in church, at political rallies, with their friends they can’t stop talking about gay marriage. Gays live rent-free in their minds.
Such MAGA evangelical lamenting appears in the Psalms: “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping”(Psalm 6:6). In the dark they cry that God has “fed them with the bread of tears and given them tears to drink in full measure. You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves” (Psalm 80:5 – 6).
The sad passions dominate evangelical minds and keep them in a state of perpetual anger, cruelty, harshness, and resentment. The sad passions expand as emotional parasites harming the evangelical body.
Victimization
MAGA evangelical males have cast themselves as “victims” in the tragedy they play out every day. Affluent, powerful white men attempt to act as if they are the “new blacks.” They call it reverse discrimination and cry about “wokeness,” CRT, and persecution.
Wealthy televangelists and megachurch preachers purchase private jets and luxury mansions and cars while simultaneously claiming to be victimized for their far right preaching. From attacks on feminism, transgenders, and immigrants to Albert Mohler insisting that women pastors would be the death of the SBC, victimization burns fast and furious among MAGA males.
Casey Ryan Kelly’s Apocalypse Man examines contemporary white masculine victimhood and its compulsion toward death and self-destruction. White male identity politics dominated the 2024 presidential election in disquieting ways. The MAGA campaign suggested the only way to preserve masculinity was through the destruction of feminized society.
This rhetorical move of creating an almost supernatural array of enemies releases MAGA evangelicals from virtue. They can turn empathy into a vice and replace it with resentment, victimization, and revenge. Empathy purveyors make the nation “soft.” Robert E. Terrill has argued that Trump unburdens his evangelical supporters of all social obligations that might constrain the pursuit of their self-interest. Even Jesus gets the shaft from these hard-nosed evangelicals determined to “lord it over” everyone. Jesus isn’t “working” for evangelicals, and this gives permission for hatred and rage as acceptable expressions of the faithful.
Paul Elliott Johnson, in “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery”, exposes Trump’s demagoguery defined by a reliance on victimized, White, toxic masculinity. Johnson has argued that Trump’s incoherent vacillations between strength and victimhood enable his white audiences to disavow hegemonic whiteness and align themselves with a marginalized, politically-exiled deprived group. MAGA white evangelicals seem convinced they are the victims of structural racial oppression.
The primary visual of the MAGA male is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, with his bare-chested tattoo of the cross on his chest and his tough looks and language. This is the Hegseth announced, “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. No more pronouns, no more climate change obsession, no more emergency vaccine mandates, no more dudes in dresses. We’re done with that shit.”
Kelly connects the victimhood among white masculine discourse to the death drive through the concept of melancholia. Demographic and societal shifts that compel white men to relinquish even a fraction of their hegemonic power incite a desire to return to a prior state where white men supposedly possessed real power and lived where “men could be real men”.
The problem is that this moment never existed. Kelly suggests that melancholia captures what white masculinity perceives as a loss of power and purpose but is truly a lack or absence. This is the lie white males now tell to comfort one another. This lack leads to a victimized status. This apocalyptic vision of white masculinity sees no future beyond violence toward the Other and its own self-destruction. It is a way of walking the high wire without a net.
The sadomasochistic rhetoric of MAGA evangelicals is emotional self-flagellation. They are flogging themselves with pain, hurt, being left out, of being victims. Apocalyptic males end up, eventually at Masada (Jewish Zealots), Guyana (Jim Jones cult followers), or Mount Carmel, Texas (Branch Davidians). They are on the road to death, self-inflicted apocalyptic death.
The house of pain inhabited by MAGA evangelicals inclines toward death and tracks toward the shades. None who live here will ever escape or regain the paths of life (Proverbs 2:18 – 19).
Ironically, only a wise woman can save MAGA evangelicals now: the wise woman of Proverbs. She can rescue them from the evil way, from men whose speech is twisted, who delight in perversity; whose paths are tortuous, whose tracks are labyrinthine (Proverbs 2:12 – 15).
The wise woman of Proverbs has taken her stand on the high road beside the house of Death. She cries out, “It is to you, O men, that I call” as she offers her hand to all who wish to be rescued.
I fear the extended hand of the wise woman will be rejected by the ostentatious masculine posturing that dominates the house of Death.