Blue Tsunami, and the Persistence of the Christian Right
by William Trollinger
It was the evening of October 06, 2008. The highly-respected and long-time Washington Post and Commonweal columnist, NPR and PBS commentator, and Georgetown University professor E. J. Dionne gave a public address here at the University of Dayton on “Faith and Politics in the 2008 Presidential Race.” Borrowing heavily from his recently published book, Souled Out, and reflecting the fact that the polls made clear that Obama was going to win the election decisively, Dionne argued that the era of the Christian Right had come to an end. As noted in the press release accompanying the lecture, “Dionne claims many Christians feel like they have been used to push a narrow agenda of causes such as opposition to gay marriage and abortion, but now those Christians are discovering common ground with secular Americans on issues of social justice, peace, and the environment.”
Sue and I were sitting in the front row of the Kennedy Union Ballroom to hear Dionne’s address. And when it came time for the Q and A I was one of the first – if not the first – to ask a question: “If the Christian Right is dead or irrelevant, why did John McCain select Sarah Palin as his running mate?”
After a brief pause, he averred that he could not answer that question. Whether or not Dionne really could not answer the question – and I am pretty confident he actually could – I definitely knew that McCain’s choice of Palin had much to do with the fact that the Christian Right was alive and well. While it was not a good fit for him, and he came to regret his choice of running mate, McCain was trying to ingratiate himself with those voters. And after the 2008 election the Christian Right became an even more important — the most important, I would argue – constituency within the Republican Party.
But now it’s 2026. Just one week ago, the “blue tsunami” swept through American politics. And as Lauren Jackson and numerous other commentators have pointed out, the Religious Left played a crucial role in the Democratic landslide, the result being seven Democratic clergy members now serving in Congress (not to mention three Democrats who attended divinity school or seminary). Interestingly, “two Black pastors already in Congress, Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia – who calls himself a ‘Matthew 25 Christian’ after the Gospel chapter that says we’ll be judged by how we treat the vulnerable,” serve as models for their white counterparts, showing them how to “fuse their faith with their politics.”
The “blue tsunami” is a wonderfully encouraging moment. A moment worth celebrating. But, at least for now, it’s not more than that. Not only is the Christian Right not extinct, it is not close to dying. And this will be crystal clear in the months and years ahead. While many of us would like it to be otherwise, I am afraid that American politics and religion will be afflicted by the Christian Right into the foreseeable future.
I concluded my first book (God’s Empire) – which was published in 1990, and which is coming out next year in a second/revised edition – by observing that “the funeral for fundamentalism . . . in America seems a long, long way off.” Still true, for fundamentalism, and for the Christian Right.
A Rhetorical Reflection on the Election: Yes, This Is Personal
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.
The Wounded Body of Christ: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic and Evangelical Church
by William Trollinger
I have been at the University of Dayton (UD) for 30 years. And one of my proudest moments in those 30 years came in 2004-2005, when this Catholic university hosted “The Wounded Body of Christ: Sexual Abuse in the Church,” a three-semester lecture series sponsored by the president’s office, the Religious Studies Department, and Campus Ministry. Presentations included:
- A clinical psychologist (Anna Salter) whose expertise is on sexual abusers and their victims.
- A victim who was abused at the age of 11 by his priest.
- A former FBI official (Kathleen McChesney) who headed the U.S. bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection.
- A historian (R. Scott Appleby) who spoke on the Church’s response to and responsibility for the sexual abuse crisis.
- A scholar (Sidney Callahan) who discussed Catholic teaching on sexual abuse.
- A law professor (Patrick Schlitz) who talked about how financial settlements for clergy sexual abuse threatened the survival of several dioceses.
- A theologian (Robert Schreiter) who talked about whether reconciliation was possible when it came to clergy sexual abuse.
- A number of presentations by UD faculty, including then-Religious Studies chair Sandra Yocum on the virtue of hope.
The dramatic high point of the lecture series came on March 10, 2004, when Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk spoke on the topic, “What Were Bishops Thinking?” A few months earlier Pilarczyk had pled no contest on behalf of the archdiocese to the failure to report the crime of clerical sexual abuse on the part of 49 priests over the past 53 years. The Kennedy Union ballroom was absolutely jammed with 400 attendees – most of whom were Catholic, and many of whom were very angry – and quite a few print and TV journalists, as well as an alert contingent of campus security personnel (as there had been a threat of violence).
I was the moderator for the event, or, as one friend put it, I was the “bouncer,” as it was very clear that perhaps my primary task (along with reminding one extremely presumptuous TV reporter that he was not running the Q and A) was to stand between angry attendees and Pilarczyk. The archbishop was both succinct and contrite in his remarks; as reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer article, “Archbishop faces faithful at public forum,” Pilarczyk expressed remorse, saying that he was “sorry about what happened in this archdiocese,” and that he “will carry that sorrow to my grave.” Still, as moderator, I found his comments lacking in the kind of genuine empathy and heart-felt regret that could have helped defuse the hurt and anger in the room. As the leader of the Cincinnati chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) put it, “he basically read off a piece of paper that sounded like it was written by his attorney.”
That said, he was there. He made himself available. He was part of the approximately thirteen months of public presentations devoted to the Catholic clerical abuse scandal.
Why am I telling this story now? Because whether or not they want to acknowledge it, Protestant evangelicals are enmeshed in their own clerical abuse scandal. Almost every day in the remarkable Roys Report – thank you, Julie Roys – one reads of yet another evangelical pastor or missionary or Christian college administrator who has engaged in some sort of sexual abuse or who has turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse in their own institution. In just the past three weeks we have learned that:
- A South Carolina worship minister – who worked in Baptist and Methodist churches, and who produced an album of worship music – is facing 50 years in prison for producing child sexual abuse material over the past two decades.
- An Indiana Assemblies of God pastor – who had also been involved in rescuing individuals from sex trafficking – has been accused of sending erotic text messages to sex workers; while the denomination has revoked his ministerial credentials, the local church refuses to take action against him, and is instead seeking to “remove Assemblies of God from its official name.”
- A former Youth for Christ worker and nondenominational missionary in Haiti – who has been there for three decades – has been arrested for a history of sexually abusing young boys, while a Baptist missionary with a large TikTok following has also been arrested for molesting young boys.
- A megachurch pastor in New York has been sentenced to eight years in prison for raping two children under the age of 15.
- A Calvary Chapel pastor in Colorado has been charged with sexual assault and child abuse.
- The founding pastor of two community churches in Michigan has been removed from his post for using his “spiritual authority” to groom women for unwanted sexual encounters.
- A pastor of a Baptist church in suburban Kansas City resigned in response to allegations that he sexually abused multiple women, some of whom were underage, over a span of two decades (with some alleged victims critical of the church’s failure to respond).
- The youth pastor of a Pentecostal church in Oklahoma has been arrested on charges of raping teenage girls, one of whom was in his foster care, while the lead pastor – who happens to be his father-in-law – failed to act on complaints about the youth pastor’s abusive behavior.
And again, this is just from the past three weeks.
It is long past time for a Protestant institution to step up and host an evangelical version of the University of Dayton’s Wounded Body of Christ series. There are so many colleges and universities and seminaries, so many megachurches and parachurch ministries, that could host a year of events and lectures devoted to unpacking and confronting and analyzing the evangelical clerical abuse crisis.
But for an evangelical institution to do this would take the willingness to own the fact that this abuse is rampant in evangelical institutions, and to address the question as to why this is the case, and what needs to change. That is to say, to do this would take real courage.
A daunting task, to be sure. Are there any volunteers?
Ken Ham’s Attacks on James Talarico, or Right-Wing Politics as the Gospel
by William Trollinger
As Rod Kennedy has made abundantly clear, James Talarico – the Texas Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate – drives fundamentalists like Ken Ham absolutely nuts.
And it is easy to understand why. The Democratic nominee for the Texas Senate is a Christian (and former seminarian) who is very open about his faith, and who is very clear that it drives his social and political commitments. But Ham – who has created a video about Talarico entitled “Perhaps the WORST ‘Christian’ Politician in American History” – finds Talarico’s commitment to a social Gospel and progressive politics to be fundamentally anti-biblical. For Ham, to be a “Bible-believing” Christian includes support for unfettered capitalism (and thus opposition to regulatory efforts that seek to address global warming, which Ham and his colleagues at Answers in Genesis see as a “leftist hoax”). It also involves strenuously opposing efforts to expand the role of government in providing for the welfare of its citizens; to give one example, Ham claims in the aforementioned video that efforts to ensure affordable childcare are simply ploys by secularists to “indoctrinate and brainwash children as young as possible.”
As he makes clear in another video, “They All Say They’re Christians, but Here’s What They Won’t Tell You” (which also includes attacks on KY Gov. Andy Beshear and children’s educator/YouTuber Ms. Rachel), what really infuriates Ham about Talarico is that he “frequently uses Christian language to explain his political positions.” As Ham sees it, Talarico cherry-picks Bible verses that highlight the necessity to love your neighbor as yourself, while conveniently setting aside verses on sin, repentance, marriage and salvation. In doing so, Talarico presents a truncated Christianity that fails to make clear that we are saved by faith in and obedience to God.
Ham concludes this video with a challenge to his viewers:
My final question for you is a personal one. Are you relying on your good deeds to save you? Have you made a Christianity of your own by picking and choosing from the Bible’s teaching?
Fascinating that Ham would ask this question.
In his speeches Talarico makes frequent reference to Matthew 25, which, as it happens, is the one place in the Bible where Jesus explicitly presents himself as King and Judge on the throne at the Last Judgment:
Then He will also say to those on the left hand, “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. (Matthew 25: 41-46)
Seems pretty straightforward. It’s hard to imagine how Jesus could have been any clearer. It certainly makes sense that James Talarico frequently cites this passage. And it also makes sense that Ken Ham – the vehement anti-Social Gospeler — does not want to bring attention to these verses. In fact, in the Jesus Room at the Creation Museum there is a “Teachings of Jesus” placard that includes Matthew 25:41 (“Depart from Me, you curse, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels”), but that elides the verses that come after, thus allowing Museum visitors to insert their own list of those who will be condemned (e.g., LGBTQ-affirming progressives).
Talk about picking and choosing from the Bible’s teaching.
Oh. One other thing. James Talarico’s opponent in the Senate race is Ken Paxton. Paxton is a self-proclaimed Christian who happens to have an unbelievably long trail of scandal, including felony securities fraud indictments, bribery, extramarital affairs, failure to disclose sources of income, Texas House of Representatives impeachment, and more.
All of this, and yet Ham is silent about Paxton and his “Christian faith.” Instead, it is Talarico whom Ham attacks as not being a real Christian.
It seems that Ham would benefit from answering his own question: Have you made a Christianity of your own by picking and choosing from the Bible’s teachings? More to the point, have you substituted radical right-wing politics for the message of the Gospels?
America is Afflicted with an Evangelical Troll Infestation
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.
I woke with Woody Guthrie on my mind:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island.
But my land – our land – is infested with trolls. Politicians, performers, preachers, bloggers, professors and the public are producing an epidemic of trolling. Jason Hannan, in Trolling Ourselves to Death, sounds the alarm to the dangers. I feel a moral obligation to troll these trolls.
A troll is a person who intentionally uses outrageous, provocative, offensive, or off‑topic attacks against others. The goal is to anger others, avoid rational deliberation and to reduce all conversations to emotional proof, for their own amusement or cruelty.
A cluster of descriptors of trolls include antisocial, paranoid, combative, and violent. angry and sanctimonious culture warriors of various ideological stripes. In addition they produce frustration, anger and despair. Hannan adds the “‘dark tetrad’ of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism….Social parasites, digital delinquents…. Abusers of the collective trust of the community.”
Surprisingly, the ubiquitous word “troll” has never been named “word of the year” but 2025’s slop, 2024’s rawdog, 2023’s enshittification are part of the troll family.
According to Merriam Webster, slop is “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
Rawdogging can mean speaking without filters, accepting no sense of accountability and ignoring all norms, traditions and decorum of public declarations.
Enshittification is the systematic decline in quality of online platforms over time, driven by profit motives and platform growth dynamics. The word can be aptly applied to President Trump taking his wrecking ball to Washington, D.C.
The most ancient meaning of troll refers to cave-dwelling, club-wielding and human-devouring monsters of mythology. Trolls have appeared in many works of modern fiction, classic examples being the portrayal of trolls in works such as in Tolkien’s Middle-earth or the Dungeons & Dragons game.
The other primary use of troll is a fishing metaphor, a technique in which a fishing line is pulled back and forth along the edge of a boat in the hopes that some unlucky fish will take the bait.
Words have a chameleonic ability to change meanings across eras, but original traces of a word are always visible. A troll now refers to a person using obnoxious, insulting language to hurt others. Hannan says, “One of the signature tactics of a troll is luring unsuspecting users into their noxious and fetid traps.” We are not far from “click bait,” misinformation, grooming and temptation.
Twenty-eight percent of Americans admit to participating in “malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know,” according to an online survey of 1,125 adults by YouGov. Over 80,000,000 Americans admit to using offensive, hurtful, insulting and cruel speech.
Trolls manifest a perverse form of glee and laughter enjoyed at the expense of others. Whitney Phillips, in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, explains, “Trolls are driven by the ‘lulz,’ the peculiar and perverse form of glee and laughter enjoyed at the expense of others.” The “lulz” signify that nothing is sacred, that everything, even the worst forms of human suffering, misery, violence, and tragedy, are potential objects of laughter and derision. In Southern-speak, trolls are “lower than a hog’s belly” (See “slop” and enshittification”).
Evangelical Trolls
Evangelical trolls have turned away from good faith participation in pursuit of truth to push a political/religious agenda. Evangelical trolling defines a movement unrestrained by Christian norms. They exude a nihilistic apocalypticism coupled with a destructive spirit of harsh judgmentalism. The provide evangelical pastors and conservative politicians fuel for an emotional religion of fear, nostalgia and toxic masculinity. Their outsized dependence on character assaults and vitriol is not a Christian habit. But when it comes to trolls, the evangelical “cup runneth over.”
Trolls are both a symptom and promoter of outrage clothed in Christian language. They ravage Christian norms, undermine Christian witness and inhibit Christian acceptance in a secular culture. Trolling is a logical expression of a widespread cynicism, suspicion, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism rooted in excessive Christian reliance on individual salvation.
Evangelical leadership has taken trolling mainstream. The “hogs at the trough” are now seated at the table of power. Political mudslinging has become click-baiting. The evangelical movement is troll driven. Hannan argues, “We are now arguably immersed in a new political language game, in which the speech act of trolling has become a normalized part of public discourse.”
I can’t decide if politicians taught preachers to troll or if preachers taught the politicians the dark art. Paraphrasing Walker Percy’s Lancelot, “Well, I found out who you are. Your profession, that is. A preacher-politician. Which is to say, a screwed-up preacher or a half-assed politician. Or both.”
The 1980’s gave us the proto trolls like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Sr. Next generation trolls like Robert Jeffress, Richard Land, Gary Bauer and Mike Huckabee have devoted their careers to trashing fellow Christians who are liberal. Representative of the trolling habits of evangelicals, Robert Jeffress has attacked fellow Christians as “worshipers of Moloch,” “liberal theologians who can’t find God if they tried,” “a bunch of atheists” and “the godless party.”
The young “Turks” among the evangelical trolls pose as spiritual gurus. They speak with certainty on any issue they think they have a right to discuss. Some of the more prominent evangelical trolls include Doug Wilson, Andrew Walker, Sean Feucht, Ted Cruz, Johnnie Moore, Tony Perkins, Eric Metaxas, Lance Wallnau, Todd Starnes, Megan Basham and Stephen Wolfe.
From the Moscow, Idaho mountain troll (Wilson), to the seminary troll (Walker), to the singing troll (Feucht), to the apostles and prophets of the independent pentecostal network, to the journalist Wallnau, to the slick, fast talking Dallas Texas Baptist troll (Jeffress), the trolls are everywhere.
Of course, no troll expose can avoid mentioning President Donald Trump – the Troll-in-Chief. But Trump is not an evangelical. But then there is his Vice President, J. D. Vance.
Vance may actually be the best example of how MAGA Christians combine a version of Christian faith with their pagan trolling. Vance, the Christian, has written Communion: Making My Way Back to Faith. But Vance, the evangelical troll, routinely insults his opponents as “idiots” and “scumbags” including “limousine socialists” on the left to “disgraceful” conservatives on the right. There’s nothing suggestive of “communion” in Vance’s profane attacks. For example, “I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit,” he wrote of a podcaster who called Trump supporters “very, very dumb.” He declared a Wall Street Journal story reporting that Mr. Trump sent a bawdy letter to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be “complete and utter bullshit.” To Democratic senators grilling Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, he wrote, “You’re full of shit and everyone knows it.” He has said of a conservative journalist who criticized him, “If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”
Evangelical Preachers as Trolls
Why have so many evangelical preachers become trolls? Stanley Hauerwas muses that preachers are “constantly tempted to imitate the false politics of the world.”
Much of what they are saying contradicts Christian truth, manners, integrity and basic decency and is often offensive at best and bigoted at worst. Evangelical preachers are producing more pathos than logos, to put it in traditional Aristotelian terms.
The goals of trolling have nothing to do with advancing Christian beliefs or practices but getting attention and winning elections. A preacher ranting about a social issue or crazy liberals is more likely to elicit the expected congregational “Amen” than if he preaches forgiveness, salvation or grace.
Hannan observes, “Our present historical moment—the plague of trolling, the loss of trust, the epidemic of paranoia and antisocial hostility, the deterioration of public reasoning, the mass contempt for truth, the spread of conspiracy theory—can be seen as the fulfillment of MacIntyre’s dark and foreboding warning forty years ago [of the loss of a common language of morality].”
Jesus did not say, “Go forth and troll.” Jesus said, “Go forth and teach.” To the evangelical trolls I say, “I hear you with all your inglorious “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions and envy” (Galatians 5:20 – 21). If I were trolling the trolls, I’d be tempted to say, “You are from your father the devil” (John 8:44), but such a charge is above my pay grade. I leave the trolls to the reward they have already received.
Desiring Certainty: The Making of Biblical Inerrancy
An interview with Jason Hentschel
Jason Hentschel is author of Desiring Certainty and senior pastor of Wyoming Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Dayton and an MDiv from Truett Theological Seminary. He serves as an editor for Foundations, the journal of the American Baptist Historical Society, and his work has been published in the Journal of Theological Interpretation, American Baptist Quarterly, and Christian History.
One of the great strengths of this book is that it grows out of your personal experience. As you note in the “Acknowledgments” you state that “after writing the dissertation that became Desiring Certainty, I realized that what I had written was my own story of deconstruction and reconstruction.” Could you elaborate upon this statement? In particular, what did you have to deconstruct, and what led you to “deconstruct”?
JH: Looking back, I think part of the impetus for my deconstruction lay in my growing disillusionment with the over-intellectualization of Christianity as I knew it. Evangelical faith is far more than just intellectual assent to certain propositions, but the logic of inerrancy often runs there because it tends to idolize the Bible. Instead of worshiping the God of the book, we end up worshiping the book itself. So, I began to deconstruct and then reconstruct how we relate to God and God to us. This becomes a through line of Desiring Certainty and provides a lot of the grist for my discussions of inspiration and hermeneutics and, ultimately, my appeal to the language of trust rather than faith.
In Desiring Certainty you make very good use of a variety of secondary sources, including some that are not usually included in discussions of contemporary evangelicalism. One of these works is Daniel Rodgers’ masterful Age of Fracture. What is this age of fracture that we live in, and how exactly does biblical inerrancy serve as a seemingly perfect response?
JH: The “age of fracture” is Rodger’s way of describing the widespread cultural upheaval Americans experienced during the second half of the twentieth century. Think of the rise of feminism, the various movements for civil and later LGBTQIA+ rights, and even the political and social anxieties stemming from the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The church was not immune to these fractures, and Christians, like all Americans, responded to them in various ways, some of which evangelical leaders would eventually consider unbiblical and immoral.
With all this change and this cornucopia of responses, how was a Christian to know what was right? Did God create men and women with distinct, albeit complementary roles? Was America truly God’s chosen nation and his choice for the salvation of the world? If my son comes out as gay, does that mean he’s going to hell? These were (and are) very live questions for evangelicals, and inerrancy provided an answer. I quote a hymn in the book’s introduction that gets to the heart of this. Its author was one of the lead inerrantists of the day, and he titled his hymn “God’s Sufficient Word.” Here is its third verse: “Sufficient too in daily strife // Providing clear directions // For how to live a godly life // Creating right affections.” In this age of fracture, where do we go for certainty and security? For evangelicals, the answer was easy. We go to the Bible.
You devote your second chapter to the King James Only movement. Given that many would see this as a fringe movement, it is striking that you make the case that King James Onlyism “shares the same concerns, presuppositional methodology, and often the very same rhetoric” as many evangelicals battling for biblical inerrancy. Could you expand on this argument?
JH: Without giving away the whole chapter, let me just say this. While King James Onlyism may be fringe, it is firmly within the evangelical fold. It, too, argues that the Bible is without error. The difference is that King James Only folks quite reasonably ask which of the hundreds of Bible translations we have are actually inerrant. Is it all of them, even when many of them disagree with each other in any number of important places? In other words, if the doctrine of inerrancy is to have any meaning at all, then we better have those actual inerrant words in our hands and not, as greater evangelicalism often qualifies, only in some lost original manuscripts. And if our inerrancy is only in lost manuscripts, what good is that to us?! What chapter two does is trace King James Onlyism’s argument to this end, including its own often ugly battles with greater evangelicalism, and how a deep-seated fear of subjectivism drives both.
Your discussion in chapter 5 of the biblical scholar Clark Pinnock – particularly his intellectual/religious journey away from inerrancy – is simply fascinating. You end the chapter (appropriately entitled “Gaining Consciousness”) thusly: “Sola scriptura, as traditionally understood, had collapsed for Pinnock under the weight of historical consciousness. It had been exposed as a modern objectivist’s ruse – a clever, rationalistic fiction – and we had best be done with it.” Could you explain and elaborate upon this rather provocative statement?
JH: Sola scriptura translates as “scripture alone.” It’s a classic expression from the Reformation era, often coming coupled with two other “solas”: sola fide (“faith alone”) and sola gratia (“grace alone”). The quick and dirty of the history here is the phrase was used by some Protestant Reformers to push back against what they believed to be the church’s practice of putting its tradition on the same authoritative level as scripture. The Bible, these Reformers argued, stood alone. I was first introduced to the phrase growing up in my church’s youth group, where we were genuinely encouraged to question, wonder about, and even challenge interpretations of the Bible. Despite this relative openness, we had one hard and fast rule: Always make sure you are searching for what God truly wants, not what you want. Translated into practice, this meant opening our Bibles with a conscious wariness not to read into them our own desires and beliefs. The goal, as my college textbooks would later put it, was exegesis not eisegesis. These textbooks taught us how to read scripture alone — without any outside influence from our cultural beliefs, personal desires, or denomination’s traditions, however well intended. I came to call this “Blank Slate Interpretation,” and the point of it was to secure objectivity. But what Clark Pinnock came to realize was just how impossible such a blank slate, objectivistic interpretation is. This was the reality of which he grew conscious thanks to his own experiences interpreting the Bible and living through its battles. To say we should best be done with sola scriptura, in this sense then, is simply to say that an inerrant Bible demands an inerrant reader. And since none of us are inerrant, sola scriptura is a fool’s errand just as much as the search for certainty itself.
Interestingly, in your epilogue you (following the lead of Christian Smith and other scholars) point out the obvious failure of inerrancy to give evangelicals “the unadulterated interpretive and epistemic certainty its proponents desired,” but you then go on to observe that “in the end, it gave them something just as powerful. It gave them a weapon.” What do you mean? What sort of weapon is inerrancy?
JH: Inerrancy is a weapon that silences debate. It is used to write off alternative interpretations of the Bible prima facie. Take, for instance, the story I tell in chapter three of Robert Gundry, whose argument that the Gospel of Matthew uses ancient midrashic techniques in its construction of Jesus’ birth narrative was determined to be in error because it did not fit evangelicalism’s conflation of truth with historical accuracy. Historicity, it appears, had been written into the definition of an inerrant Bible. So, to argue — as Gundry did — that Matthew “created” his story was simply unacceptable. Gundry effectively offered a losing argument right out of the bag.
In more popular contexts, we witness such weaponization in the common evangelical appeal to the authority of scripture: The Bible says it; I believe it; That settles it. Suggest, for instance, that Genesis 1 might be theological poetry instead of scientific history, and it’s proof positive that you are following your own whims instead of the Bible’s. In evangelical parlance, what you’ve done is commit eisegesis. You have read into the text what you want it to say rather than reading out of the text what it wants to say. In short, you have placed your will over God’s will. What results from this is an ad hominem argument, an attack on the person instead of on the actual merits of her argument. To call someone “woke” because they support women in all forms of ministry is a dogwhistle that allows people to write that person off as an “errantist” simply because they do not read the Bible as a complementarian would. It shuts legitimate conversation off before it can even begin.
Given that you are a pastor, here’s a pastoral question for you. A young woman from your church – a young woman who grew up fundamentalist — comes by your office. Quite agitated, she informs you that she has had it with the intolerance and absolute certainty of Christians, and she is simply done with Christianity. What would you say to her that might persuade her to begin the journey of “reconstructing” her faith?
JH: I’ve had this happen a lot of times! My answer is, “Me, too.” And then I try to tell a bit of my own story. That’s actually a big part of the reason why I wrote this book. When I began asking these kinds of questions (and running up against these kind of frustrations), it was stories like the ones I tell in the book, especially that of Clark Pinnock, that helped me realize that intolerance and certainty were not the whole of Christianity. It surely wasn’t Christ. But it’s hard to see anything else because this certainty thing is in the water. This is what I mean in the book when I say historical consciousness cannot be taught. It must be grown. You said it yourself — this is a journey. Not a journey of self-discovery, however, but a journey of divine discovery. And when we consider that God is someone who, like all of us, can and needs to be discovered — even now! — then we can start to move on from the desire for certainty.
I am hoping that this is not the last word from you. Do you have another book project in mind? What else would you like to say?
JH: The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, which ran throughout the 1980s and drafted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, has a story that needs to be told in full, and I was lucky enough to spend a few days a number of years ago at Dallas Theological Seminary, where the council’s archives are held. It was a phenomenal experience. One day, I opened up a manila folder and out fell a short letter from one of the architects of the council. It was written on airline letterhead — Delta’s, if I recall — as if the author had an epiphany mid-flight and needed to jot it down quick. These kinds of artifacts make historical work exhilarating. You never know what you’re going to find, and one thing I found was the council’s intention of hosting a couple inerrancy “congresses” for the general public. Think of them as Billy Graham crusades for inerrancy, and in some sense, that’s exactly what they were — evangelism for an inerrant Bible. If Desiring Certainty tells the intellectual side of the making of biblical inerrancy, a deep dive into the history of the ICBI promises to offer a good chunk of its material and political side, as well as a deeper analysis of its theological underpinnings.
“Stop filming me”: Influencing Christianity and Yesteryear
by Elise Abshire
Elise Abshire is a graduate of the MA program in Theological Studies at the University of Dayton. Currently, she is finishing her PhD, and works at UD as a Grant Coordinator on a grant from the Lilly Endowment centered around creating and enhancing worship for children with disabilities using Montessori methods. Her areas of research include disability and theology, the intersection of social media and Christianity, and Louisiana Catholic cultural traditions.
“The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting” (247)
Caro Claire Burke’s work, Yesteryear, recently hit the shelves and has already spent nineteen weeks on The New York Times‘ Best Sellers list. I originally heard about the book from a friend, and then suddenly I was hearing about it from most of my friends. Both of my book clubs mentioned reading it for our book of the month. I had to figure out what all the buzz was about with this tradwife satire, so I grabbed a copy, and after reading the first few pages, I was hooked. Burke’s writing is sarcastic, witty, and clever, but underneath the humor are some important themes to think about in both the Christian life and the world of social media.
The story revolves around the character of Natalie Heller Mills who is a traditional wife and influencer living in a rustic farmhouse with her husband and six children. At first sight, it may seem that her Instagram shows the perfect traditional family life full of aprons, chickens, and sourdough bread. However, Natalie’s household is full of modern gadgets, producers, and nannies. Anyone who disagrees with Natalie is simply an “Angry Woman” who is jealous of her supposedly perfect life. Natalie even goes as far as to say: “Sometimes it actually makes me nauseous, how satisfying – no how perfect my life is, and how good I am at living it” (269). Natalie’s obsession with creating this image is important because she eventually begins to believe the image herself. Her family becomes part of the brand she is building, and she becomes more concerned with appearing like the perfect wife and mother than actually caring for the people around her. This is especially obvious with her children. Natalie frequently records them for her social media, and at one point her daughter Clementine tells her, “Stop filming me” (24). The problem is not simply that Natalie shares her family online. Parents share pictures and stories about their children all the time. The deeper problem is that Natalie’s understanding of her family becomes shaped by the need to produce a particular image of family, a Christian family at that.
Spoiler alert! One of the main twists in the novel is that Natalie seems to travel back in time to the 1800s where her trad wife life looks bizarre while still strangely familiar. Burke uses this shift to show what Natalie’s idealized tradwife life might actually look like in the 1800s. Instead of the beautiful farmhouse and carefully staged Instagram posts, life in the past is difficult and not aesthetically pleasing. This is where Burke really plays with Natalie’s ideals. Natalie wants her Instagram page to “feel like stepping into a time machine,” while still having “all the aesthetics of the olden times and all the amenities of modernity” (45-46). Platforms such as Instagram can function as spaces of cultural and religious formation. They shape what people see, what they value, and eventually what they understand to be normal. Even something as simple as clicking “follow” can place a person within a much larger network of cultural, political, and religious influence.
There are around 170 million Instagram users in the United States, with women making up approximately 55 percent of U.S. users. Additionally, there are three billion people worldwide reported to use Instagram each month. The size of this audience matters when thinking about influencers as cultural and religious figures. Kristin Kobes Du Mez makes a similar point in Jesus and John Wayne when she writes, “The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit” (10). Media has long been connected to evangelical identity, and social media has only made that relationship more visible.
Many people online have suggested that Burke based Natalie on Ballerina Farm, the popular social media account associated with Hannah Neeleman. Hannah Neelman has responded to the claims that Yesteryear is based off of her life, saying that she tries to stay away from conversations about the term “tradwife” because the term is a stereotype without true meaning. She expanded on that thought saying, “I don’t think women who want to work are winning. I don’t think mothers are winning. In fact, I think it’s a step backward. If someone wants to be a mother, great. If someone wants to be a mother and sell sourdough-bread kits, great. We have to support and cheer each other on even if it doesn’t look like what our home life looks like.”
There are many other influencers who could have inspired Burke’s creation of Natalie. I have long been intrigued by Madison Prewett Trout, one of the token Christian influencers of The Bachelor franchise. Prewett Troutt left the show abruptly, and she framed her exit as an act of conviction, grounding it in biblical standards. She commented on her presence on the show saying, “So many girls have given their heart to Jesus and girls who have decided to wait until marriage, just hearing me talk about my decision. It has just been so cool… We’re all called to step out in faith and sometimes it doesn’t look like what we thought.” What followed from this type of exit from The Bachelor was the creation of her as the “true” Christian influencer who stands up for her beliefs, especially actions and beliefs backed by Scripture. Prewett Troutt has since extended this narrative on TikTok, Instagram, and podcasts, gaining a massive following online, with 2 million TikTok followers and 1.7 million Instagram followers. Along with Hannah Neeleman, MadisonPrewett Troutt offers a window into the character of Natalie and religious ideals, especially how evangelical fundamentalism is not only thriving today but adapting, finding new life through social media platforms.
Natalie’s religious identity is also puzzling, as Burke never fully explains her faith background. She defies classification in a particular religious tradition, since she has a baptism that took place during her teenage years, but there is still no evidence that she belongs to the Mormon faith, as she does not go to a temple. Another question I had with the book was the story line of Natalie and her producer that lives in the house, Shannon. Natalie finds out that her husband, Caleb, is having an affair with Shannon, and Natalie goes to confront Shannon with yells and even physicality. Their conversation raises the question of Natalie’s queerness because Shannon later says her pants were pulled down, so there is an allegation of sexual assault here. To say that Natalie was in the closet and then possibly abuses a woman to get her sexual frustration out is to paint a picture full of assumptions of Christianity and queerness.
Additionally, Natalie often invokes Scripture, resorting to it whenever she faces difficulties. While doing that, she fails to use the text properly, and she interprets it in a way that she finds consistent with her conservative beliefs. If Scripture cannot be wrong, then she must find ways to justify her life with the verses. The inerrancy of Scripture is the basis of religious fundamentalism. Natalie begins to see God as someone who tests and manipulates his children and rewards them when they behave correctly. She does not seem to understand God as a kind, just, and loving Father. When “Old Caleb” is coercing Natalie to have sex with her against her wishes, she says “I’m not alone. I’m not stuck, not lost, not forgotten, not punished. I am here, a chosen one, with Him, and I will remain here, wherever here is, until He decides to take me elsewhere” (259). Natalie’s view of a God who keeps people in abusive situations and wants their suffering is not a healthy theological view. Thus, with Yesteryear, Burke is also asking what happens when Christianity becomes part of an image that someone is trying to maintain. One can justify their life off of the interpretation of Scripture to the point that it becomes toxic and dangerous.
By the end of Yesteryear, Natalie’s fantasy completely collapses. Natalie is left to confront the difference between the family she imagined and the family she actually created. Ultimately, this work leaves the reader with a much more complicated picture of Scripture, social media, and influencers. Burke’s novel is not trying to say that traditional family life is bad, but instead, Burke is asking what happens when religion and homemaking becomes an aesthetic, when faith becomes part of a personal brand, and when Scripture is used to defend an image rather than to transform the person reading it.
Life After Fundamentalism: Carl Ruby, Pierre Damas Bel, and Haitians in Springfield
by William Trollinger
On June 25 of this year the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could end Temporary Protected Status for citizens of Haiti, thus allowing the government to deport them despite the reality that it is not safe for them to return. The result for Haitian families in Springfield has been rampant fear, the application of ankle monitors, and the possibility of deportation to a place that is frighteningly dangerous. More than this, “Haitians have lost their jobs, with employers forced to fire them . . . With no income, it’s almost impossible to pay for housing and food, and they are afraid to come to the grocery store.”
And then there is the heartbreaking story of Pierre Damas Bel. As a student at Springfield High School he was on the soccer team, and was a happy member of the U.S. military-sponsored JROTC program. Off he went to Wright State University, where he was planning to study neuroscience.
But in late July ICE forced him to wear an ankle monitor. He now could not play soccer, and some of his university classmates began to bully him. He posted the following on Instagram:
I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience. I came here to study, to build my future, and to live a better (life), not to be treated like [a] criminal. So now, how am I supposed [to] play college sports with a GPS monitor on my leg?
Soon thereafter, he killed himself by stepping in front of a truck on I-70.
In response, Springfield’s Central Christian Church pastor Carl Ruby called on ICE to quit issuing ankle monitors: “Pierre died as a result of policy. And it’s our immigration policy that took his life.” Ruby and other faith leaders – including Haitian Support Center’s Viles Dorsainvil – have continued their work in behalf of their immigrant neighbors and parishioners in Springfield. As Ruby has proclaimed, “I think there needs to a revival in the American church of a prophetic spirit, of a willingness to call out evil even if it may cost us.”
Amen.
And here’s what I had to say about Carl Ruby in 2024:
As most Americans know, it has been a hellish two weeks in Springfield, Ohio. And they have Donald Trump and J. D. Vance to blame. Despite all factual evidence to the contrary, the Republican presidential/vice-presidential candidates have continued to repeat the lies – started on Facebook and amplified by the KKK and other Far Right groups – that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating the dogs, cats, and other animals of “legitimate” Springfield residents.
The result has been a Haitian community on edge, and a spate of bomb threats, forcing the closure of schools, hospitals, and government offices. Despite all this, Trump and Vance are doubling down on their false claims; appallingly, Vance says it does not matter if these stories are actually true, as they help make his political point. And he has expanded his invented story of immigrants eating pets to include the nearby city of Dayton.
But there is also some heartwarming news. Many non-Haitian residents have made it a point to show their support by, for example, patronizing Haitian-run restaurants. More than this, “many of Springfield’s churches are giving support by way of English classes, correcting misinformation, and displaying solidarity” with their Haitian brothers and sisters. One of the leaders in this effort is Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, a church that states on its website that “the Bible is very clear that God loves immigrants and refugees, and expects us to as well.” Ruby has welcomed Haitian community leaders to Central Christian – telling them that “We love you [and] we are glad you’re here” – and has called on Trump and Vance to stop the pet-eating stories (while also imploring President Biden to send resources to his embattled city).
More than any other Springfield faith leader, Ruby has been thrust into the national spotlight for his efforts. But what most news reports leave out is that Ruby has been working with immigrants in Springfield not for two weeks, but for twelve years. More than this, he started this work after having been summarily forced out of an administrative position at a nearby fundamentalist university, forced out for being the sort of Christian leader he has proven himself to be in Springfield, forced out for being the sort of Christian who, as a former trustee at that fundamentalist school put it, actually cares for “people on the margins.”
And for the rest of the story, here’s what I wrote about Carl in 2018:
Evangelical colleges are always having to prove – to parents, donors, and evangelical leaders such as James Dobson or Ken Ham – that they are, to quote Adam Laats, “guardians and teachers of a necessarily vague dream of eternal and unchanging orthodoxy.” Sometimes the only way for an evangelical school to reassure doubters is to purge its ranks of supposedly “unsafe” faculty and administrators.
As we describe in Righting America at the Creation Museum, this is precisely what happened at Cedarville University between 2012-2014. One of those forced out of Cedarville was Carl Ruby, vice president for student life. His departure was a shock to many students, one of whom told The New York Times that Ruby “made Cedarville feel more like Heaven. If you thought someone would be untouchable, it would be Carl.” But as a former Cedarville trustee noted in the same article, Ruby was pushed out because conservative trustees “were threatened by Carl’s . . . ministry to people struggling with gender identification [i.e., LGBTQ students], [and] how he ministers to people on the margins.”
As we noted in our book, Ruby was but one of 43 administrators, faculty, and staff members who departed Cedarville between the fall of 2012 and the summer of 2014, “some of whom [having been] forced out (having signed nondisclosure statements) while others quit and moved on to less hostile professional and religious climes.” This does not include the exodus of 15 members of the Board of Trustees, many of whom left in displeasure over the fundamentalist crackdown.
In our book, that is where the Cedarville tale ends. But it turns out there is more to the story. Take, for example, Carl Ruby.
Departing Cedarville, Ruby founded Welcome Springfield (OH) a non-profit organization that serves immigrants while also encouraging community members to sign a “Statement of Support for Immigrants in Clark County” that says in part:
While I recognize and support reasonable steps to ensure our national security, I also stand opposed to all forms of communication and policy that fail to recognize the human dignity and innate value of our global neighbors, especially those fleeing hardship, violence, poverty, and persecution.
While maintaining his position with Welcome Springfield, in the fall of 2014 he accepted the position as pastor of Central Christian Church in Springfield, which describes itself as a church where “we strive to keep Jesus at the center” and where “we care about justice” and “love our neighbors.”
In Springfield, where there are two mosques, “neighbors” includes Muslims. In an effort to build bridges between the Muslim and Christian communities (and as featured in a CBS Faith in America documentary) in May 2017 Central Christian members attended Friday prayers at one of the mosques and Muslims attended Sunday worship at Central Christian. As Ruby reflected on his Red Letter Christians blog,
I was overwhelmed by the strong sense of human connection. [Emphasis Ruby’s.] The events did not feel like an awkward mingling of strangers who were working hard at being polite and finding things to talk about. It felt like a reunion of longtime friends. There was an eagerness on both sides to connect and to love one another.
On the Central Christian website Ruby does not mention Cedarville or the purge, but he does describe – in winsome and gracious fashion – the journey he has been on:
I grew up in churches that tended to be pretty conservative. I met many beautiful people and learned lots about scripture, but I also encountered a tendency to neglect certain areas of the gospel such as our mandate to care for the poor and to commit ourselves to issues of social justice. I also experienced a church culture that added many rules and expectations that are not found in scripture . . . God didn’t save us just so that we could go to heaven. He saved us so that we could go to work trying to help bits of heaven to break through into our world through the sacrificial service of the body of Christ.
Life after fundamentalism, indeed.
Here’s the original 2018 blog post, and the original 2024 blog post. And here’s a link to a powerful Jim Wallis article, “The Parable of Springfield”, which includes reference to Carl Ruby.
Reflections and Projections on American Feminism and Culture: An Interview with Gloria Steinem
by Susan Trollinger
In the spring of 1995, I received my PhD in rhetoric and communication from the University of Pittsburgh. That summer, I moved to Iowa City to teach a couple of courses while I looked for a more permanent teaching position. There, I met Melissa Friedling, who was finishing up her dissertation in rhetoric. She invited me to join her in an interview with Gloria Steinem that would appear in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. Steinem was going to be in Iowa City to give a series of talks at the University and made herself available for a couple of young women to talk with her. When Melissa asked me to join her for this interview, I was thrilled! I had written my dissertation on what was being called the Third Wave of Feminism, and one of my chapters focused on Steinem’s Revolution from Within. What was so striking about Steinem in that interview was not only her thoughtful articulation of the challenges related to achieving gender equality and how to respond to them, but also her grace, generosity, and peace. Unlike so many angry voices we hear today, Steinem was calm, reflective, and thoughtful. She struck me as something like “feminism grown up.” She knew the history. She had lived the struggle. And she was full of kindness toward everyone—even her so-called enemies. I learned a lot from her in that interview—about a movement that made my life choices possible and about how to work hard for change and love the other at the same time.
Q. In your Playboy bunny expose as re-released in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions you reveal that the well-paid, glamorous, on-her-way-to-stardom bunny was really an underpaid and sexually harassed cocktail waitress, squeezed into a corset. From this article we learned that the Hugh Hefners of this world lie, and that the women who work for them, do so out of necessity. Thus, you helped us to understand that duped bunnies are really exploited waitresses. In Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem you expanded our understanding further by showing us how education, religion, the fashion industry, etc., seduce women into wanting to think linearly, or worship god-the-father, or sport a miniskirt. Thus, you inspired us to call ‘sister’ not only the bunny who is really a waitress, but also the waitress who really wants to be a bunny. This expanded analysis seems terribly important because it helps us to have grace for the masculinist mistakes we all make, and to have empathy for even the most ‘duped’ among us. Yet, if we say that our desires are culturally produced, in order to have empathy for one another, on what grounds can we fight for, or even know, what it is women want?
A. I think we begin to suspect that our choices may be political when we see that we are following an existing pattern in society. That doesn’t per se mean that it’s not a personal choice, but the alarms go off when we see that we are impelled toward or there seems to be no choice other than what is the predominant one, two, or three. When we’re faced with more subtle choices, as women are now more likely to be (compared to, say, 25 years ago), I think we have more opportunity to examine what we really as individuals want to do or should do or “what’s right for the individual.” The interplay between culture and individuality and between community and person is always going to be very complicated and very subtle, because we are both unique human beings and communal creatures.
So the question becomes, “What are we impelled toward?” Now, this is a hard argument to make in a materialist-rationalist society that in education, even at its best, tends to treat kids like blank slates on which you can write anything and, at its worst, treats them like little animals whose spirits have to be broken. But I think it’s true. You know, I think that anyone who’s ever met a baby knows that there’s a person in that baby already. There’s the seed of what can become. If we flout too much what is already in the baby, that baby will grow up thinking there’s something wrong with a portion of herself or himself and that feeling that there’s something wrong seems to be the source of most future problems. It’s the source of addictions, the source of violence, the source of feeling you must be in a hierarchy in order to be better than others or worse than others or dependent.
So while we both respect each other’s choices and the pressure under which we make those choices, I think there are unmistakable signs in us of what is more suited to us as a unique person. The signs are joy. The signs are interest. The signs are forgetting everything that’s around you because you’re doing, whether it’s making a bookcase, or solving a computer problem, or talking to another person, whatever it may be. It’s a kind of forgetfulness of all that’s around you and a feeling of satisfaction that means that you might continue to do it whether you get paid or not. I don’t mean to be romantic about it, because that isn’t a feeling that happens all the time, but it happens in moments of unity with the task at hand. And if we allow ourselves to be guided by those moments, I think we will continue to make progress and support each other in our search for those moments.
The Melancholy, Outrage, Resentment, and Shame of MAGA Historians
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 20th 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).
