Behold the Cracked Cisterns: Donald Trump and his Evangelical Worshippers
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary. He is also putting the finishing touches on his sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – for which he has a contract with Wipf and Stock (Cascades).
After four years of Trump, evangelicals are just left with slogans. It turns out that the Trump ethos – which they baptized, anointed, and ordained – is more of a brand than a person, an image more than a flesh and blood human being.
Despite the evangelical anointing, Trump, as Robert Ivie observes in “Trump’s Unwitting Prophecy,” is “no prophet, not even a false prophet. His disruptive persona and dismantlement motif, however, convey a latent prophecy, symbolically exposing an underlying sense of crisis” (713). Trump is not guided by any apparent self-evident truths, no sacred canon; he did and does not offer wise judgment in time of crisis; all his cries of “fake” and “fraud” notwithstanding, the evidence is clear that, as president, Trump did not suffer the burden of his commitments but reaped the personal rewards of his message – more fame, more notoriety, more money, and more political power.
And reaps. Since the election Trump has raised more than 250 million dollars – most of it going directly to him. Evangelicals think nothing of such a scam. They are used to it. They have already helped their celebrity preachers purchase $80 million luxury jets. This is business as usual among the prosperity clan. Donald Trump is an honorary member – the Rev. Donald Trump, prosperity gospel preacher.
His only remaining game is to hold us in breathless hesitation. Trump’s favorite ploy has been to treat the next move in his presidency as if it were the advertisement that begins with the words, “Stay tuned for scenes from next week’s episode.” When asked if he would attend the inauguration of Biden, Trump has said, “We will see. I know already, but I will let you know later.” Trump’s evangelical acolytes see him as the radical outsider who does not operate as usual, saying things no one else would have dreamed of saying, not cowed by Washington’s ways, not allowing decorum and propriety to get in his way, getting things done (even if that means blowing up the democracy).
But contrary to the dreams of the evangelical faithful, Trump is no radical. He is a con artist, venting the hyperbolic, irrational rhetoric of the fantastic, parading as politics. But Trump has proven himself unable to be a great enough actor to actually believe in the sacredness of his own mission. Lacking all conviction, other than self-survival, it turns out that Trump lacks the courage to play the man.
In short, Trump is a politician bereft of the gods. The Christian god has been tacked onto his reputation by the evangelicals, but he remains a tragic figure; as James Darsey – in his discussion of Joe McCarthy – quotes Maurice Levy , Trump “participates in the epistemological chaos [created by evangelicals] to the point of psychosis” (82). Trump worships only himself, talks only of himself. To give but one example, in the middle of a pandemic update conference Trump moved seamlessly from the death count to musing about how many people had noticed that he was number one on Facebook that day.
Trump has never really caught the evangelical fervor of his followers. His faith lacks substance. His speeches are raw chaos, carnivalesque in character, lacking in historical references or apparent knowledge of the great traditions of the presidency. He has nothing to draw upon but the resources of his own profane experience. Trump is the slogans he has devised and the image he has created.
Trump and his evangelical disciples look for all the world like the fashion description of the prophet Isaiah:
All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away (Isaiah 64:6, KJV).
And they neatly fit the dire descriptions of Jeremiah:
They “went after worthless things and have become worthless themselves”; “for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:5, 13, NRSV).
Behold the cracked cisterns: Donald Trump and his evangelical worshippers.
Trump, I argue, is a sublime fantasist followed by a people particularly susceptible to the fantastic. I use the term “fantastic” as a moment of epistemological uncertainty, a moment of being suspended between whether we are hallucinating or witnessing a miracle. When we accept that the fantastic is a form of spiritual impoverishment, then we can properly understand what Trump has wrought. The evangelicals keep eating the “bread of this world” – creationism, rapture, anti-science, American nationalism, a fake golden age of America – and thus they keep starving because that is what the fantastic does. To quote Levy again, “The fantastic is a compensation that man provides for himself, at the level of imagination, for what he has lost at the level of faith” (82).
In short, the fantastic is hollow at its core. And that fits the shady world of Donald Trump, a man who wants to be known as a great builder, but who has constructed nothing. His fake world is empty, emptying, dissolving. In Trump’s dark, foreboding rhetoric he has destroyed hope while increasing hatred. His promises notwithstanding, he has never turned on the light. There is no salvation here, but only the articulation of anxiety, rage, resentment. He is just another faux evangelical screaming in the night at the invisible demons that haunt his personal emptiness.
Now, if Trump were alone in his alienation, his case would have been boring and uneventful and not even remotely dangerous – simply just an example of personal psychopathology. But behind Trump’s rhetoric are his creators, the evangelicals – a people with an anti-social motive, a people with a set of social patterns rooted in the 1950s and socially objectified as danger, ignorance, separateness. Employing Trump to the full, evangelicals have managed to increase doubt while ushering legions into the dark spaces where people are “without God and without hope.” They have provided the sound and the fury while signifying nothing.
For four years America played along at Donald Trump’s court. We waited outside. We wanted Trump to execute judgment, to provide us with a vision, to have a viable plan for the pandemic, a standard under which we could march. But as president Trump did none of these things. For a television star, an actor-of-sorts, he never provided a clear, stable dramatic structure for the nation to sing our songs, dance our dances, and reach for our better angels. Instead, he and his obsequious allies systematically subverted the rules for judgment, the media, the schools, the courts, and the legislatures. In the process, he has intensified our divisions, increased our mistrust, and led us astray from our national goodness.
Now, the play has ended, and the audience, as an audience, largely sits glued to their seats, unable to move, incredulous at the destruction. In the 1960s Will Campbell offered a prescient warning:
In a tragedy you really don’t take sides with any satisfaction. In classic tragedies, by the end of the drama, everyone is involved and may be lying dead on the stage. All are at some level innocent and guilty – none with an easy, clear, good choice.
On the stage that is America, all the dead – including all those who unnecessarily died in the pandemic — are strewn. And the empty persona of Trump, like a ghost, is preparing to slither away stage right, to lurk in the dark places of American politics and American religion for at least four more years.
Do his evangelical devotees now realize that the fantastic, the amazing, the beautiful Mr. Trump was but hyperbole, humbug, someone resembling P. T. Barnum? Do they now understand he was but a dark phantasm of their own making?
I don’t think so.
Behold the cracked cisterns: Donald Trump and his evangelical worshippers.
What Might Islamists Teach Americans About Democracy?
by Ahmed Khanani
Ahmed Khanani, author of All Politics are God’s Politics: Moroccan Islamism and the Sacralization of Democracy (Rutgers University Press, January 2021), is Plowshares Assistant Professor of Politics and co-director of the Center for Social Justice at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Ahmed’s research brings together thinkers and insights from a broad array of disciplines and fields in the hopes of centering historically marginalized peoples and, hopefully, asking a thoughtful question along the way.
At this moment, it is easy, almost comforting, to feel that the primary failure of American democracy is that there’s a guy who seemingly won’t leave office even though he’s rather clearly been voted out. And, to be fair, this certainly seems a low point in the reliability of the (rather bizarre, fully a function of slavery) American electoral system. And, to be fair, this year, well, mainly stinks.
Having said that, to the degree that Righting America encourages a more thoroughgoing, thoughtful encounter than the lowest hanging fruit (which would definitely begin with functional and legitimate elections), we might instead take this moment as an opportunity to think more globally and critically about the relationship between conservative religiosity and democratic politics.
In the American context, it is clear that conservative Christians support (worship?!) right-wing politics. But, globally, there is much more variance in how persons of faith imagine, encounter, and enact politics. I have spent the better part of the past decade studying how Muslims understand democracy (or, more precisely, how a subset of Muslims uses the Arabic loan-word dimuqratiyya), and I continue to find that there’s a profound and rich language of dimuqratiyya in the Arab Middle East.
In fact, in the place most Westerners least expect it (the Arab Muslim Middle East), conversations about democracy highlight foundational failures of American democracy, and the limitations of contemporary American politics. I’ll offer two examples of how we might broaden/deepen the idea of democracy that guides American politics. Before that, a quick history.
For the better part of several centuries, Western thinkers have characterized Muslims, Islam and the Arab Middle East as fundamentally anti-democratic. Canonical thinkers have mobilized the image of Oriental despotism in service of Western colonialism (including, Alexis de Tocqueville, Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill)—indeed, even Max Weber got in on the action, though without the call for colonial intervention.
(To be sure, there are Islamists who believe that violence is a reasonable primary response to Western colonialism and neocolonialsm. They like me as little as they like you. Violent Islamists are often deeply critical of democracy—and dimuqratiyya, too.)
At the same time, America has been (and continues to be) portrayed as the polar opposite. Recent works, from the American political right and left, have celebrated Western governance as deeply and fundamentally democratic.
So it stands to reason that, on the one hand, we understand the USA (in particular) as rather fully democratic, and, on the other hand, we think of Muslim-majority states, particularly in the Arab Middle East, as fully undemocratic.
A number of powerhouse thinkers have addressed the racism and Islamophobia that undergirds most Western observation. But this isn’t a post about how racist or terrible or schmuck-y or anything else Western intellectual idols are.
Instead, what I want to ask is this: What if Muslims in the Arab Middle East are better at democracy than you and I?
I spent the better part of two full years in Morocco doing interviews with socially conservative, politically active, nonviolent, Islamically inspired persons—who are often called Islamists. You might expect, based on folks like Montesquieu, JS Mill, or more recent “thinkers,” that Islamists would be deeply opposed to democracy—or, at least, to the Arabic word, dimuqratiyya. In what might feel surprising, Moroccan Islamists, and I think more broadly, Islamists in the Arab Middle East, consistently demonstrate pretty strong investment and success in elections. But, as I suggest in my book, more than just elections, Islamists also invest in dimuqratiyya as part of their faith tradition and thereby offer new possibilities for both Western democracy and also Islam.
Here, I want to explain two surprising claims that Moroccan Islamists make that might help us better understand both the potential of democracy and also how American democracy is coming up short.
First, Moroccan Islamists think of the primary goal of governance as tending to the souls of people. For example, Moroccan Islamists suggest that Western dimuqratiyya regularly fails because of its failures to embody justice, equity, or honor the rights of non-citizens. Given that Islamists care primarily for the souls of persons, the distinction between citizen and non-citizen becomes less significant than the chasm between justice-driven policies and unjust policies.
So, for example, a rights-driven foreign policy that honors all persons constitutes dimuqratiyya. That is to say, a foreign policy that doesn’t attend to the souls of all people (policies like Trump’s policies towards migrants), is fundamentally undemocratic. It is perhaps unsurprising that Islamists’ Western counterparts (something like socially-conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical Christians) also focus on the souls and rights of living things, but whereas (especially white) evangelical Christians limit concern for the soul to (often violently) curtailing reproductive rights, Moroccan Islamists instead invest in justice-driven policy that attends to the whole person—and for all persons.
(To be fair, there are also many American Christians who are invested in justice-oriented democracy.)
Second, Moroccan Islamists insist that democracy must care for minorities. A theme that regularly turned up in interviews with Moroccan Islamists was their understanding that a dramatic failure of Western democracy is its purported (and demonstrable) inability to attend to (racial and religious) minorities. Western democracies are grounded in the idea that pluralities (often majorities) of citizens make good decisions for themselves and their primary political communities (usually their home countries, but also neighborhoods, counties, and so on). Islamists, much like evangelical, socially-conservative Christians (including fundamentalists) often disagree with this premise, instead contending that “religious considerations” ought to bound the scope of decisions available to policy makers. In the American context this has led to the curtailment of the rights of minorities at the behest of the Christian right. In contrast, the (over 100) Islamists I spoke with contend that failures to honor the dignity of minorities was a significant impediment to the realization of true democracy.
If you are anywhere left of the far-right and live in the US, I can appreciate how you might read this essay and think “well I’d trade out fundamentalist Christians for Islamists any day.” I get it—and I sometimes think that, too (and, too, I live in the US and am far to the left of the far-right).
It is challenging to imagine a dramatic overhaul of Western political systems—e.g., even as there is broad support for abolishing the Electoral College, there’s little appetite for socialism. And, again, it’d be easy to draw on a litany of rather established and canonical thinkers were we to dismiss out-of-hand the ways in which dimuqratiyya highlights shortcomings of democracy.
But an alternative, one I find rather compelling, is to take at face value what Islamists say, and to ask ourselves: How can we benefit from their truths, their bedrock assumptions, their efforts to embody good lives? What can we learn about democracy, a purported national value, when we start taking Islamists seriously?
Killing as Many as They Can, as Long as They Can
by William Trollinger
Just when you imagine that the Trump Administration could not get any crueler, it does, even as it is heading out the door.
After a seventeen-year hiatus in federal executions, on July 14 the Trump Administration began killing federal death row inmates. In just four months eight individuals were put to death by the U. S. government. In the process, they tied the Eisenhower Administration for most executions in one presidency, although, of course, it took Ike eight years to do what Trump and company have accomplished since July.
Not satiated, not satisfied to tie the record, the lame-duck administration plans to execute five more individuals over the next two months:
- December 10: Brandon Bernard
- December 11: Alfred Bourgeois
- January 12: Lisa Montgomery
- January 14: Corey Johnson
- January 15: Dustin Higgs
Amazingly enough, administering thirteen executions in six months is simply not enough to slake this administration’s blood-thirst. Donald Trump and William Barr are also seeking to loosen regulations on federal executions so that the means of killing death-row inmates is not limited to lethal injection, but could include death by firing squad or electrocution.
What is particularly remarkable about all this is that this spate of executions is taking place at the same time that public support for the death penalty is at its lowest point in fifty years. What is also remarkable is that – in the past 45 years since the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment is constitutionally acceptable – we have a mountain of evidence that application of the death penalty is capricious, as poor and minority defendants are executed in grossly disproportionate numbers (if you are white and middle class, the chances of you being executed for murder are negligible), and the odds go up if the victim was white. More than this, innocent people are sentenced to die and are sometimes executed. And it turns out that most of the Western world can function without executions, and with lower rates of violent crime – and there is no conclusive or even substantive evidence that capital punishment serves as a deterrent.
95 criminal justice officials said all this and more in a December 03 statement calling on the Trump administration to stop the five executions it has scheduled over the next month. In this statement these prosecutors, police chiefs, and sheriffs noted that while “many have tried for over forty years to make America’s death penalty system just,” the “reality is that our nation’s use of this sanction cannot be repaired.” As the statement pointedly asserts,
We also now know that we have not executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky – the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken. Time and again, we have executed individuals with long histories of debilitating mental illness, childhoods marred by unspeakable physical and mental abuse, and intellectual disabilities that have prevented them from leading independent adult lives.
All of this definitely applies to the five individuals scheduled to be killed in the next few weeks. Brandon Bernard (who is scheduled to be put to death today, although there are ongoing efforts to have the death sentence commuted) was 18 at the time he was convicted of murder: not only will he be the youngest offender executed by the federal government in seven decades, but it turns out that the prosecution suppressed evidence that would have established that he had a reduced role in the killings, while at the same time Bernard’s defense counsel was essentially invisible. All these are reasons why five of the nine jurors that sentenced him to death have now asked for or are not opposed to the commutation of his death sentence.
As for the next four to be executed:
Alfred Bourgeois and Corey Johnson both have IQ scores in the clinically accepted range for intellectual disability. Lisa Montgomery was the victim of extraordinary physical and sexual abuse and is seriously mentally ill. Dustin Higgs did not kill anyone but was sentenced to death while his more culpable co-defendant received a life sentence.
The capricious nature of the death penalty certainly applied to my friend Samuel McDonald. Having grown up in a poor, African-American family in St. Louis, Sam enlisted in the Army and was sent to Vietnam. While he was an excellent soldier who was awarded a number of medals, the experience traumatized him – especially his killing of an infant and elderly woman in the “sweep” of a village – and he returned to the States deeply disturbed emotionally and mentally, and addicted to drugs. High on a heroin substitute, on May 16, 1981 he robbed and killed an off-duty police officer. That was bad enough, but he was assigned an inept public defender who saw fit to engage in shouting matches with the judge. More than this – and much more problematic – the trial judge refused to admit evidence regarding Sam’s emotional and mental instability, even though it was clear that Sam was suffering from combat-induced PTSD.
So 16 years later – September 24, 1997 – I was in the “friends and family” viewing booth in the Potosi Correctional Institute, where I watched the state of Missouri put Sam to death via lethal injection.
On August 02, 2018, the Catholic Church issued a formal revision of its catechism to establish that capital punishment is in all cases “inadmissible.” This was reinforced on October 03, 2020, when – in a papal encyclical letter entitled Fratelli Tutti – Pope Francis called for “the abolition of the death penalty, legal or illegal, in all its forms.”
But despite being a conservative Catholic, Attorney General William Barr has proven himself more than willing to flout Church teachings on capital punishment.
And for all their avowed “pro-life” passion, the silence from pro-Trump evangelicals regarding the government’s string of executions has been deafening.
Killing as many as they can, as long as they can.
Salvation is Not Forthcoming Any Time Soon: Trumpism and the Soul-Destroying Corruption of White Evangelicalism
by William Trollinger
“What does it profit a faith to gain a whole country and then lose it, along with its own soul?” (Sarah Jones)
Four years ago, just after the presidential election, I wrote a post entitled, “A Gift from White Evangelicals: President Trump,” which highlighted the fact that 81% of white evangelicals had voted for the reality show star and failed real estate magnate.
Now, in the fall of 2020 – after a year of presidential malfeasance regarding the coronavirus pandemic, after four years of epic corruption in the administration, after so many children at the border blithely separated from their parents and placed in cages, after a parade of women reporting on their experiences of Trump’s sexual assaults, after stories of Trump mocking both veterans and his evangelical supporters – the numbers are in. And the needle hasn’t moved, as approximately 80% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
Notwithstanding Trump’s epic immorality and incompetence, there is nothing surprising in white evangelical support of Trump at the ballot box. In fact, I would have been stunned if white evangelical support for Trump had dropped more than a few percentage points. And that is because the reality is that for the past half century white evangelicalism has been wedded to a Far Right politics that, in the end, has little or nothing to do with morality, character, or the teachings of Jesus.
One way to understand evangelical support for right-wing politics is to look closely at the network of institutions that buttress the Christian Right. These churches, megachurches, denominations, schools, media outlets, and more are – as I argue in a forthcoming article, “Religious Non-Affiliation: Expelled by the Right” (Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America, Oxford University Press, 2021) – firmly committed to the following:
- a virulent opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender accommodations, which is combined with a devotion to patriarchy;
- a fear of and antipathy toward all “others,” most particularly immigrants;
- a commitment to the hegemony of White America in the face of changing demographic realities;
- a deep-seated Christian nationalism;
- and, a culture-war mentality that sees all who disagree with their agenda and their commitments as the unChristian or antiChristian enemy.
All of this is on vivid display at the Creation Museum and in the various publications and media productions of Answers in Genesis. But as we also document in Righting America at the Creation Museum, these Christian Right commitments are fervently promoted by the “Creation Colleges” that support and are promoted by the museum. One of those schools is Cedarville University, about which we have written much this year (for two examples, see here and here).
In our book we discuss the fundamentalist takeover of Cedarville in 2012-2013, in which a large number of faculty and administrators were removed for insufficient theological and political conservatism, and for “having too much compassion for those ‘people struggling with gender identification’ (i.e., LGBTQ students)” (213). One result of the fundamentalist takeover at Cedarville was the implementation of a policy that, “in line with the ‘complementarian’ position that women are not to teach men in theological/biblical matters,” required that all theology and Bible classes taught by women were not to include any male students.
As we quote in the book, alumna Sarah Jones blogged in response to this new policy:
If this is the path Cedarville chooses to take, it won’t be a college any longer, it’ll be a glorified Sunday School. That’s fine if you want to produce graduates who can only function in fundamentalist echo chambers, but it certainly doesn’t prepare them for the real world. It doesn’t even encourage them to empathize with their fellow Christians. Here’s what it does do: train half the student body to disregard the other half and treat them as if they’re incapable of holding worthwhile opinions on the religious tradition that defines their entire lives. (213-214)
Jones has long since exited fundamentalism, and is now a staff writer at New York magazine. And yesterday she published one of the most insightful pieces I have read on Trump and white evangelicalism: White Evangelicals Made a Deal with the Devil. Now What? In this brilliant article Jones makes clear that Trumpism will continue after Trump, that white evangelicals will continue to support the worst excesses of the Right, and that the evangelical subculture (which includes Cedarville, Answers in Genesis, and more) will continue to produce “new acolytes, who embrace the worst elements of the [evangelical] tradition.” One example she gives is Madison Cawthorn, a newly-elected representative from North Carolina whose congressional campaign was blatantly racist, and who was condemned by a number of his former classmates at Patrick Henry College for his sexual predations while attending the school.
Sarah Jones is right: there will be more Cawthorns in our future. And that is very bad for America, but – as Jones argues – it is very bad for white evangelicalism (as I also argue in my aforementioned essay). To end with a quote from Jones:
Evangelicals bought power, and the bill is coming due. The price is their Christian witness, the credibility of their redemption by God. Evangelicalism won’t disappear after Trump, but its alliance with an unpopular and brutal president could alienate all but the most zealous.
George Bailey vs. Michael Corleone: Capra, Coppola, and the War on Christmas
by Earl Crown
Earl Crown is a doctoral student and graduate assistant in American Studies at Penn State Harrisburg, where he also teaches United States history. He holds degrees from Messiah University (B.A. in History, 1995) and McDaniel College (M.L.A., 2012). His scholarly interests include 20th century American social and intellectual history. He is currently researching the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace and its connection to progressive student activism in the Jim Crow south. Originally from Baltimore, he lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania with his wife Sarah and two children.
Every Thanksgiving, it seems that no sooner has the unfinished turkey on my plate cooled that I begin hearing stories about how the rising tide of secularism is again threatening the Christmas holiday and its true meaning. A 2013 article by former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly identified the origins of the apparent war on Christmas as having come “about ten years ago when creeping secularism and pressure groups like the ACLU began attacking the Christmas holiday.” O’Reilly is far from the only combatant. In 2018 for example, Fox host Sean Hannity took to Twitter to proclaim that “CHRISTMAS IS UNDER SIEGE.” President Trump recently warned that if Biden were elected, “the Christmas season will be cancelled.” Fortunately for them, former child star turned holiday militant Kirk Cameron is here to help, with his film Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, which currently boasts a rating of 0 on the website Rotten Tomatoes.
As scholars of cultural studies will tell you, however, establishing the true meaning of a socially constructed ritual is a fraught undertaking. Christmas, like all holidays, is an ever-evolving patchwork of symbols expressing various experiences and beliefs. There are no scriptural standards instructing how—or even if—the faithful should observe the birth of Christ. Even if we strip Christmas to the bare essence of Biblical text, it is still extraordinarily difficult to put it into an annually observed ritual that perpetually maintains a “true meaning.”
Often overlooked in these squabbles is the distinction between commemorating that Jesus was born and reflecting on why he was born. Christian culture warriors are often concerned with the former and point to explicitly religious content, or lack thereof, in film, television, and public festivities in defense of their cause. A movie that focuses too much on Santa Claus or a store clerk replacing “Christmas” wishes with the more neutral “holidays” can easily be used to indicate the nefarious handiwork of their culture war adversaries.
But what if Christmas is not defined by such externals? Could, for example, a film that fails to directly reference Jesus’s birth ironically serve as a better reminder of the reason for the season than one that does? After all, there is not much treatment of the nativity in Christian scriptures. In fact, much of the remainder of the Bible serves to contextualize why Christmas happened in the first place. In the process, it contains graphic portrayals of people violating God’s laws that would surely earn an NC-17 rating if ever translated literally to film. To separate the nativity story from the rest of the narrative would be to miss the point, and perhaps reduce it to the realm of ordinary.
I was reminded of this tension when I noticed characters passing movie houses that are playing The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) in two famous films, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). In other words, the Capra and Coppola films present America at the same time. In addition, each film considers the role of religion in American life, and each depicts Christmas.
The two films, of course, present these things quite differently, but in doing so they do invite reflection on exactly what a Christmas movie—as well as Christmas itself—is. At face value, the Capra film embodies what, to many culture warriors, Christmas is about and what is endangered in contemporary American society. It seems to me, however, that the world of The Godfather is more consistent with the overall narrative of Christian scripture, and that It’s a Wonderful Life fundamentally contradicts it.
Perhaps I should not be too surprised that Frank Capra’s imaginative Bedford Falls resonates with today’s religious conservatives. To those people who accept a narrative of moral declension that began in the 1960s, Bedford Falls must seem like a reminder of all they think has been lost. Citizens appear to be faithful church attendees and openly proclaim a belief in God, marital monogamy is celebrated, and profanity is non-existent. Even when behaviors that violate Christian standards are presented, such as drunkenness, they are clearly not idealized.
Of course, to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and presume that it accurately reflects a moral America in the late 1940s is enormously problematic. In addition to neglecting the codified misogyny and racism of the time, this view also overlooks the film’s creation under the auspices of the Hays Code. Following the denial of free speech to the motion picture industry by the Supreme Court in the 1915 Mutual Film Corporation case, the Code restricted the content of cinema from the 1930s until its replacement by the ratings system in the 1960s. Its restrictions are on full display in the Capra film when Mary Bailey (Donna Reed) informs husband George (Jimmy Stewart) that she is pregnant. Rather than use the word pregnant, which was one example of a long list of prohibited words, George instead finishes Mary’s sentence, saying instead that she was “on the nest.” The morality of Bedford Falls was therefore more a product of cultural and political hegemony than democratic virtue. It would be objectively false to proclaim that such a place as Bedford Falls ever existed, or that we should try to return to it.
More importantly, even if It’s a Wonderful Life were a documentary, it would still make a poor model for a Christmas movie. There is nothing Clarence the angel does to help George in his struggle to do the right thing that George could not have done for himself with a little self-reflection. George does not need the full complexity of the narrative of the Gospel of Luke. He does not need a baby to be born of a Virgin, publicly proclaim good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed, be crucified, resurrected, and ultimately ascend into Heaven. What he needs is a weekend away for some rest and relaxation. George’s character and self-contained goodness place him totally at odds with the New Testament narrative of why Christ came to earth. Were Jesus to be born and minister in Bedford Falls, he would be wasting his time.
Another character who, like George Bailey, faces an internal struggle between good and evil is Coppola’s Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). At first, Michael’s character seems much different than his father, mafia boss Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). Though Vito is depicted early in the film as gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, Coppola reveals through the fear and trepidation of those around him that this is a man whom many people fear. Michael, on the other hand, is anything but fearsome. When he first arrives with his girlfriend Kay (Diane Keaton), he looks like a typical cinematic hero. He is wearing an army uniform, is bathed in light, and is in love with a pretty American girl. After telling Kay about his father’s criminal involvement, Michael tells Kay, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Michael, by all appearances, has deliberately chosen a life that is vastly different than the violent, corrupt world of his family.
Michael’s determination to choose his own fate is complicated by a series of tragic events, including attempts on his father’s life and the murder of his brother by a rival crime family. When Michael shoots two men in a New York restaurant, his efforts to avoid his “family” business have failed. From there on out, his mannerisms are increasingly like those of his father, and his on-screen presentation is increasingly dark. As the movie ends, he has “settled all family business” by ordering the murders of his enemies, including his brother-in-law Carlo. Suspecting that Michael had Carlo killed, his now-wife Kay asks him “Is it true?,” to which Michael says, “Don’t ask me about my business.” As the film ends, Michael descends into the darkness of his office, having become the new Godfather. His best intentions could not help him overcome the darkness that apparently lay dormant inside of him.
So what does any of this have to do with Christmas? Despite the lack of even a mention of Jesus in It’s a Wonderful Life, Christian culture warriors love it. In his December 2015 newsletter, evangelical author and public figure Dr. James Dobson celebrated it as being “synonymous with the Christmas season,” and stated that it “gives viewers a tantalizing glimpse of values and beliefs that have been all but lost.” Jimmy Stewart is celebrated for having “faithfully attended church” and for “his homey, midwestern drawl.” “The film is noteworthy,” Dobson says, in contrast to the actual historical record, “for its depiction of a time when life was simpler.” Dobson seems to define synonymity with Christmas by broad morality and the presence of an angel. Apparently, so do many of his readers, as Dobson concludes his review by asking them if, after giving to their churches, they have “a little ‘extra’ left over that [they] might want to consider investing in our outreach.”
Regardless of what our constructed holiday symbols represent, The Godfather is a far better representation of a world in need of Jesus and therefore of Christmas. This may sound strange. It certainly lacks the trappings of Christmas nostalgia. Dobson says that prior to watching a Christmas movie with his family, he likes to “make some hot cocoa and popcorn, [and] throw a log on the fire.” The Godfather may not be the best choice for this type of family movie night. When the film aired on NBC in late November of 1974, a New York Times article criticized the network for its “association of…gruesome and sickening films with Christmas.” I am not suggesting that anyone replace nostalgic traditions with something as heavy as the story of the Corleone family. As singer Jackson Browne says in his song “Rebel Jesus,” “I’ve no wish to come between this day and your enjoyment.”
But if Christians want to seriously ponder the meaning of Christmas, we need to recognize that it is far more complicated than sprinkling cultural symbols with the perfume of spirituality. If the narrative of the Bible is to be taken seriously, then there must be a compelling reason for the son of God to have been born. Despite its arguably immoral content, explicit presentation of religious hypocrisy, and lack of many overt references to Christmas, The Godfather presents humanity as being in need to something outside of itself, and it is therefore far more reflective of the reason for Christmas.
Tom Cotton’s Thanksgiving, or, My Second-Grade Textbook Told the Truth and I Don’t Want Actual History to Get in the Way of My Feeling Good About Myself as a White Male
by William Trollinger
The masters of Twitter and the Blogosphere are once again dismantling Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas and Donald Trump wannabe. Cotton might have two Harvard degrees, but he is certainly proving himself capable of matching the willful ignorance of our soon-out-the-door president.
And I want to pile on with one particular observation. But first.
On November 18 Cotton delivered a 15-minute speech on the floor of the Senate. As one blogger described it:
On the same day that deaths from the coronavirus reached the quarter-million mark, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) . . . who’s on a mission to turn himself into an actual cartoon character . . . took to the floor of the US Senate to address a pressing issue: the disturbing lack of patriotic appreciation of the Pilgrims and their contributions to freedom and democracy in the USA.
According to Cotton, the lack of Thanksgiving celebrations this year – 401 years after the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 and 400 years after the alleged first Thanksgiving – has to do with the fact that “the Pilgrims have fallen out of favor in fashionable circles.” And why is that? Because of an apparent loss of “civilizational self-confidence,” evinced by the fact that the New York Times ran an article in the Food Section (the Senator from Arkansas has time to scour the Food Section for attacks on American pride?) that referred to the traditional Thanksgiving story as a “myth” and a “caricature.”
Cotton (whose last name seems so appropriate) would have to work hard to be less subtle in his racism, but then again, lack of subtlety is precisely the point. “Civilizational self-confidence” certainly does not refer to the Native Americans, who had been here for millennia when the Mayflower landed (but who were soon to die in great numbers). Nor does “civilizational self-confidence” refer to the millions of Africans brought to the Americas in chains, with North America receiving its first slaves one year before the Pilgrims’ arrival.
But for Cotton, focusing on American slavery is precisely the problem. He connects the lack of “commemorations, parades, or festivals to celebrate the Pilgrims this year” not to the pandemic, but instead to “revisionist charlatans of the radical left [who] have lately claimed the previous year [1619] as America’s true founding.” Here Cotton is continuing his campaign against the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a campaign which has included an effort to have this project banned from public schools, as this effort to educate Americans about slavery and its legacy misses the point that slavery was a “necessary evil” that allowed America to be the great nation that it is today.
But this was a point that was probably made in Cotton’s second-grade textbook.
As regards Cotton’s effort to restore white pride in the Pilgrim story, he informs us that the Pilgrims came here “seeking the freedom to practice their faith,” suggesting a commitment to religious freedom that they absolutely did not have. Instead, the Pilgrims wanted the freedom to establish a community where THEIR faith and only THEIR faith would be allowed – a point Cotton chooses to elide.
Cotton also mentions that the Pilgrims “had to conquer the desolate wilderness” without noting why the wilderness seemed desolate (the silence of the first winter in New England was rather terrifying for the Pilgrims). English traders had brought disease to the region for which the Indians had no immunities, and between 1616 and 1619 80% or more of all Indians in the region were killed. As two scholars coolly put it in the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases , this epidemic — these authors suggest chicken pox, trichinosis, or leptospirosis as the culprit – “may have been instrumental to the near annihilation of Native Americans, which facilitated successful colonization of the Massachusetts Bay area.”
Again, not a story that Cotton wants to tell.
But for me, the most remarkable omission in this story has to do with Squanto. As I tell my students, the Squanto story is true. As Cotton rightly explained, he did come out of the wilderness to help the Pilgrims, teaching them how to grow corn and other crops, giving suggestions as to where to hunt and fish, and so forth. As William Bradford put it, Squanto “was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”
When I ask my students how they imagined Squanto communicating with the Pilgrims, most suggest “sign language.” A reasonable guess, but wrong. And here Cotton is right again: “Squanto . . . spoke fluent English,” to the point that he served as “their interpreter” with other tribes.
But what is astonishing is that Cotton never explains WHY Squanto spoke fluent English.
Did Squanto stumble upon an English grammar book inadvertently dropped on the shore by one of the traders bringing disease to the region? Did one of those traders take the time to provide this Indian a crash course in the English language? Did Squanto’s role as a “special instrument sent of God” for the sake of the Pilgrims include receiving from the Holy Spirit the gift of speaking in English?
No.
The reason that Squanto spoke fluent English is that in 1614 an English trader named Thomas Hunt tricked Squanto and two dozen or so other Wampanoag Indians into boarding his ship. Then Hunt chained them below deck and set sail for Spain, the goal being to sell them into slavery.
We do not know how many Indians survived the voyage, or how many were actually enslaved in Spain. We do know that Squanto escaped – perhaps with the help of Catholic friars – and made his way to England, where he learned English.
In 1619 he was employed as a guide for a ship heading to New England. When he arrived, and disembarked near the village where he had grown up, he discovered that all his family and fellow villagers were dead, and that all that remained were bones and rotting corpses. Taken in but held in tight control by Wampanoag Indians, because they did not trust him, in the spring of 1621 Squanto was allowed to serve as an emissary to the struggling Pilgrims.
The Pilgrims must have freaked out when they heard Squanto speak English. But why he spoke English is not of interest to Sen. Cotton. He wants an American history whitewashed of the horrors of slavery, be it slavery of Africans or Native Americans. He wants an American history whitewashed of Protestant religious intolerance, whitewashed of the annihilation of the native inhabitants.
Sen. Cotton wants a grade-school history that inspires a “civilizational self-confidence” among white students.
That is to say, Sen. Cotton wants to cancel history. Which is further evidence that, when the Right accuses the Left of “cancel culture,” they are projecting.
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural: The Best Medicine is the Truth
by Rachael Griggs
Rachael Griggs is a science advocate and a Jesus advocate. Her awe of nature and appreciation for the sciences began with her first telescope at the age of twelve. As an adult, she participated in various evangelical congregations until she converted to Catholicism in 2011. She holds the harmony of faith, science, and reason within the Church in high esteem. She is a military Veteran and a former schoolteacher. Currently, she is pursuing a M.A. degree in Religious Studies at the University of Dayton.
In early November of 1864, Abraham Lincoln was elected for a second term as President of the United States of America. A few months later, on March 4, 1865, he gave his Second Inaugural Address to a nation wounded by war in every dimension.
Lincoln’s speech was on the shorter side, direct, to the point. It is likely that by this time, after four years of civil war, Americans needed truth as plain as they could get it, and Lincoln delivered.
The speech does not allow for false hope. It doesn’t promise a specific outcome or timeline to the end of the war. Lincoln instead pinpoints its cause in the following words:
One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.
Lincoln does not dance around the issue. He doesn’t embellish or euphemize. He names the sin: slavery. His words are not diluted by fear of the people’s displeasure. They are simply true. No pointing fingers, rhetorical distractions, flimflam, or smoke and mirrors. Slavery is the evil which caused the war.
Even as Commander in Chief, Lincoln stands with his people. He joins every American and shoulders the blame. He doesn’t elevate or separate himself from the nation he serves. The hopes he has for himself are the same for those of the United States – all of it.
Today, it is difficult to imagine a President looking squarely into the camera, and with eloquent simplicity and directness, tells the country where it went wrong: “America, we’ve elevated our wills over our better judgment during this pandemic. In our pride, we are failing each other and the world.”
Imagine the repercussions of such a statement! Imagine the pundits and the tweeters and the commentators, buzzing about in a frenzy of offense. God forbid the leader of our nation – and of the free world – publicly name something for what it is: a lack of moral courage, a shortfall among citizens in fortitude and resiliency, and most lamentable of all, the loss of authentic concern for one’s neighbor.
How many jaws would drop in American living rooms during the news hour, if our President compared us to the Cain of Genesis, who responded to God’s inquiry about Abel with a flagrant absence of contrition: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
And what if the President would be so bold as to take his judgment one step further and warn the nation of the consequences of such deficits? In this regard, over 150 years ago, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural brought into American consciousness the dire ramifications of the nation’s sins:
Yet, if God wills that it [the civil war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
While many Americans are making the sacrifices necessary to shoulder the burden of this pandemic, not enough are doing their part. This is not the time to cut corners, not the time to continue to reassure us that everything is just fine. Our President should stop telling us everything his (evangelical) base wants to hear. Lincoln’s truth – even if it was not fully heeded (especially given that he was assassinated a few short months after delivering this address) – was designed to enable this country to acknowledge its failures. In the context of history, this realization is always the best outcome, even if at the time it is a painful one.
What matters most of all is the perpetuation of this nation’s freedoms and democracy, as well as the preservation of the dignity and health of its citizens. For the continuation of each of these, what we need most of all from our President is the truth.
The Strange, Closed Cosmos of Evangelical Secularism
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary. He is also putting the finishing touches on his sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – for which he has a contract with Wipf and Stock (Cascades).
Charles Taylor, in A Secular World, makes the brilliant argument that we live in a secular age. There is, in my view, one exception to the secular world we inhabit – American evangelicals. In my view, evangelicals are a resistance movement pretending to be a restorationist movement – they are both secular and not secular. They have a Christian nationalism (with its own dubious historical origins) that is more rooted in patriotism than gospel. They utilize secular media technology as a defense shield against what they perceive as a liberal secularism. They preach a prosperity gospel that is more a religious con-man’s version of Wall Street – greed dressed in clerical robes. They bemoan the secular culture while buying Lear jets, living in gated communities, and depositing checks larger than most Americans can imagine. Most pointedly, they have an obsessive commitment to secular politics and to one secular politician in particular – Donald Trump.
Taylor argues that we all inhabit a “social imaginary,” which he defines as the way ordinary people imagine their surroundings; it is how they construct meaning as “imagined communities.” Most of the world has experienced a shift in the social imaginary – a move from a “cosmos” to a “universe” – the move of spontaneously imaging our cosmic environment as an ordered, layered, hierarchical, shepherded place to spontaneously imagining our cosmic environment as an infinite, cavernous, anonymous space, evangelicals stayed put in their little “cosmos.” While this shift might have been prompted and amplified by increasing empirical evidence (geological evidence pointing to an older earth; astronomical evidence pointing to an expanding universe; biological evidence pointing to a different origin of humankind; etc.), Taylor emphasizes the existential nature of this shift.
This is precisely the battlefield the evangelicals have chosen. They are fighting to maintain the “old cosmos.” The displacement has been too much cognitive dissonance for them to process. They are pushing back by insisting that the entire Bible must be true, every word of it, or the entire book is false. They insist that Genesis 1 has to be a literal six-day creation or the entire faith crumbles into the abyss. A contingent, debatable, diverse, contestable universe is not a friendly space in the evangelical mind. It generates enormous fear because the “universe outlook” is deep and wide, a “dark abyss of time.” Evangelicals seem like ancient mariners, afraid of what is beyond the observable horizon, staring at a map that reads, “Beyond here, Dragons.” For evangelicals, the really, really large universe or multi-verse is just too damned scary for occupation.
John Fea, in Believe Me, argues that fear is a dominant factor in the evangelical world. I agree, but I push beyond that to ask what is it that makes them so afraid. And as I see it, it’s just about everything that exists in the world that they have found too large and too intimidating, a world of contingency, probability, a world lacking in certainty.
Rather than thinking it a good thing that Christians now live in a world with various options in relation to God, evangelicals have turned to coercion in the attempt to force everyone back into the little circle of their protected world. Evangelicals seem wed to the “ancient regime” (the ancient and medieval ordering that tied religious identity to political identity: the king is divinely appointed). The hold that this social imaginary has on evangelicals is almost impossible to break. They still insist on the habits of a faith that longs to be a civilizational order. This is the “spin” evangelicals have placed on culture – a construal of life that does not recognize itself as a construal and has no room to grant possibility to any other alternatives.
This helps understand why evangelicals find evolution so unacceptable. The very notion of evolution produced a “nova effect” among evangelicals – an explosion of different options for belief and meaning, and this evangelicals could not allow. Evolution implies movement, shifting paradigms, change, difference, diversity – all enemies of the closed little cosmos of the evangelicals. Nothing is more frightening to an evangelical than the “fragilization” that occurs with different options and people believing something different. This creates a state of fragility in some evangelical minds and this can’t be allowed. “This might also explain the new design-fixation as a response in this era: ‘What makes for the heat at this neuralgic point is that there is a strong sense of deficit in a world where people couldn’t help feeling the lack of support as undermining their whole faith; and very much needed to be reassured that it oughtn’t to” (Taylor 329-330).
As a result, evangelicals remain terribly frightened by the “cross-pressures” of our evolving world and its explosion of knowledges. Their malady really is an epistemological fear. Back in 1921, Harry Fosdick alerted us to the fundamentalist/evangelical fear of knowledge:
“The Fundamentalists see that in this last generation there have been strange new movements in Christian thought. A great mass of new knowledge has come into man’s possession—new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new knowledge about human history” (“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”)
This anxiety remains constant, but it is now suffused with more resentment and anger and the potential for coercion. Evangelicals know that they are losing, but they wrongly blame this losing on liberals, so they are lashing out. They seem as if they are on the road to Damascus, with signed orders from the President, to arrest and imprison all the liberals, socialists, Democrats, and sundry other enemies of the state. At Trump rallies (church for secular evangelicals) they shout, “Lock her up!” and “Send her back!”
Taylor calls this “the great disembedding.” This disembedded view of the self seeps into their social imaginary well before thinking reflectively about it. They absorb it from childhood, and to that extent it’s very difficult for them to imagine the world otherwise; “once installed in the evangelical social imaginary, it seems the only possible one” (Taylor 168). It’s as if Clarence Darrow is still asking, “What do you think?”, and evangelicals are still answering, “We do not think about things we do not think about.”
In Taylor’s estimation this means evangelicals still inhabit a small world – a self-contained “cosmos” rather than the “universe” of all others. Evangelicals have a religion of subtraction, resistance, and reduction. The rest of the Christian world embraces a religion of multiplication, diversity, and transformation. It is this sense of epistemological smallness that serves to make all of the evangelical movement appear so petty, so uptight, so out-of-step, so little.
I find Benedict Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community” instructive here. Evangelicals have “imagined” the United States in unhistorical ways. It is odd that they wish to maintain that certain vestigial rituals or prayer in certain civic arenas are absolutely essential to being a Christian nation. Never have so many literalists been so fired up about images, symbols, and pictures. Their tribal symbols teach us more than their diatribes.
For example, here are a few of the visual metaphors that warm evangelical hearts while giving other Christians a serious case of disgust:
Evangelicals have successfully, it seems created a “social imaginary,” a little “cosmos” different from the rest of the world. The framework of the evangelical world is “naïve” as opposed to “reflective.” The reflective framework is dangerous, in the evangelical mind, because it opens questions that are foreclosed in the naïve state by the unacknowledged shape of the background. In contrast, evangelical beliefs are held within a framework of the taken-for-granted as well as often unacknowledged.
In Taylor’s terms, evangelicals are caught between their existing “naïve” framework and the constant attempted intrusions of a “reflective” one. They are facing the crosswinds in a giant valley of dry bones – suspended between their “cosmos” and the expanding “universe.” Their “cross-pressured” existence has created a raging against the night, a groaning into the abyss, a crying of persecution and mistreatment while enjoying the benefits of secularity. Paul’s desperate cry in Romans 7 catches the agony of the evangelical predicament: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
This is a description of the evangelical mind – naïve, enchanted, porous, disconnected from the universe, hunkering down in a little closed “cosmos,” but secretly yearning for more. This is the root anger of evangelicals, a people trapped in two worlds, one imaginary, mythological, impossible, the other buffered, secular, disenchanted. This marks the evangelical world as being about affects/feelings/emotions/pathos. This is not a matter of a carefully constructed epistemology; it’s about feeling good without thinking much. While the rest of the world has shifted from a naïve understanding – what we take for granted – evangelicals have not moved.
As a case study in this small, enchanted world let us consider the recent prayer meeting conducted in Orlando, Florida by televangelist Paula White. She was pumping up the crowd for a Trump victory. “I hear a sound of victory, the Lord says it is done,” she said. “For angels have even been dispatched from Africa right now . . . In the name of Jesus from South America, they’re coming here.” How is this possible?
Paula White and her rant about African angels to the rescue is possible because evangelicals attempt to live in two worlds at once – “cosmos” and “universe.” It is possible because they are secular and not secular at the same time on a pick-and-choose basis. It is possible because they live in a mythological “social imaginary” fighting against the “cross-pressures” of a diverse universe. It is possible because they have “imagined” an America not rooted in history but in a false mythology. It is possible because evangelicals are so desperately afraid of openness to a diverse world riddled with possibilities of transformation. While we tend to make jokes and remind Paula that the angels never arrived, that misses the point of the alternative world that evangelicals inhabit and their steadfast desire to turn us into “droids” of evangelical nonsense.
Of course, all of us who are people of faith have our own challenges with the emerging power of exclusive humanism, have our own challenges with finding a way to make transformation possible through incarnational and sacramental faith.
But the answer is not the small, self-contained, closed, nonsensical cosmos of the evangelicals.
Getting Beyond the Culture War: One Inspiring Example
by Susan Trollinger
Just about a week ago, Qasim Rashid (a Democrat running for Congress in Virginia’s first district) was speaking at an outdoor campaign event to about 30 supporters in the beautiful setting of Aquia Harbor in Stafford, Virginia. As you would expect, it was obvious to all in attendance and passers-by that this was a campaign event as the candidate was holding forth with a microphone while standing in front of a campaign banner.
Shortly after the event got underway, Mr. Rashid noticed (as did his supporters) a small gathering of folks nearby who were energetically waving Trump flags. Mr. Rashid reported that he wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Should he just ignore them? A reasonable response, to be sure. As he pointed out in his account of the event, they were exercising their first amendment rights. That is good for all of us.
But then he got an idea. How about inviting them to join his event? What might that look like? Would they accept his invitation? How would they react?
To their credit, it turns out that they did! Standing among Mr. Rashid’s supporters, they asked questions and posed challenges to Mr. Rashid.
One of their concerns was that if Biden was elected he would pack the Supreme Court. In response, Mr. Rashid reviewed the history of court appointments over the last 6 or so years and how it was actually the Republicans who have been packing the court. He reviewed the facts—that it was Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate who denied President Obama his constitutional responsibility to appoint a replacement on the court when Justice Scalia died. They did so on the grounds that it was an election year and voters should decide who got to replace the Justice.
One man from the Trump flag-waving group admitted (to his credit) that Mr. Rashid had a point. More than that, he admitted that what the Republicans were doing to force the confirmation of (now Justice) Amy Comey Barrett just days before the 2020 election was hypocritical.
What is so interesting about this whole encounter is that it exposes the lie of culture war discourse. In my estimation, the crucial rhetorical work that cultural warriors are obliged to do is prop up the notion that the enemy is so other as not to be worth engaging.
That may be putting it too lightly. It may be that the enemy is so horrible just on the face of it (in the sense of a prima facie case) as to not only not warrant a hearing but to be understood as evil.
What is truly remarkable about this story of Mr. Rashid (a Muslim—which only makes the story richer) and a group of Trump supporters is that he actually managed, by way of a gesture of hospitality and his humble and informed manner of engaging them, to give them pause.
This blog post is not firstly about a Democratic candidate enticing a Trump supporter to think otherwise. That’s impressive, to be sure! But that is not my point.
My point is about the reckless animosity that we are all invited (strongly urged by some folks) to partake in. Through such reckless animosity, we are encouraged to demonize the other to the point that Mr. Rashid’s decision to extend an invitation to his apparent adversaries can seem to be nonsensical.
It turns out, despite the incessant claims to the contrary, that the binaries don’t hold. Sure, we can all point to folks who simply can’t hear. William has had the patience to remain engaged with an AiG apologist (for a total of 68 emails) who can’t seem to get beyond AiG talking points. I don’t know how William does it.
But there are others. William has also had surprisingly productive conversations recently with fundamentalists who wanted to let him know that he has it all wrong. And then, after some dialogue over email, had to take a step back and think about things they had been taught. Two of his interlocutors even apologized for making unwarranted assumptions about his religious commitments.
I don’t know what the answer is to the terribly divisive place that cultural warriors have worked so hard to get us into. And I must say that Mr. Rashid is definitely onto something.
On this eve of the election, when Trump supporters in pick-up trucks displaying Trump flags and American flags endeavor to block traffic and force a Biden campaign bus traveling down an interstate in Texas to slow to 20 miles per hour before trying to force it off the road, Mr. Rashid’s intervention into the culture wars seems not nonsensical, but downright miraculous!
Perhaps folks in the Christian Right could learn something from this Muslim.
Two Peas in a Pod: The Insecurities and Shame of Donald Trump and White Evangelicals
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary. His sixth book – The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump – will come out next year from Wipf and Stock (Cascades).
Evangelicals have always fancied themselves as representing the scientific mindset. In the 19th century, captured by the “Common Sense” Scottish school of philosophy and the inductive scientific method of Francis Bacon, they insisted they were the true scientists – a conviction that they have never quite been able to surrender.
When in the early twentieth century evangelicals chose evolution as their primary enemy, they created a fracture in their relationship with science. The 1925 Scopes Trial – which brought evangelicals an avalanche of media ridicule – created a loss from which they have never recovered. In response to their national humiliation they retreated into an alternate universe, They created their own schools, their own organizations, their own visions of truth. They clung to an inerrant, literal Bible, and continued what they considered the true scientific approach to Scripture. But they were not able to escape the sense of shame created by the “fall” of their White Warrior – William Jennings Bryan. Even then, it was really about affect – rage, anger, disgust, insecurity, shame.
For almost one hundred years, the evangelicals have attempted to return to the mainstream – they have longed for acceptance, for credibility, for membership in the culture of accepted knowledge and wisdom. Like biblical children lost in a desolate wilderness, they have gone in circles attempting to enter the Promised Land of an establishment that they curse in one breath and idolize in the next. They have envied science and the elite academic institutions of higher learning, but they have felt denied, discarded, dismissed. In response, they embarked on prodigious attempts to convince the world that they, too, were real intellectuals and real scientists. But in spite of these efforts, as late as 1995, Mark Noll pronounced the same verdict on evangelicals that had prevailed since 1925: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind” (Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind).
See, for example, the efforts to create a “science” to confirm a literal six-day creation of the universe, best exemplified by Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG). A protégé of Henry Morris, Ham engages in the attempt to teach the Bible as literal truth, including when it speaks on science. But his “young Earth creationism” finds absolutely no support in the scientific community (Stephens & Giberson, The Anointed). In spite of all the investment, all the “research,” all the efforts, no evidence of “scientific creationism” has been produced – a point that is blindingly obvious at the Creation Museum (Trollinger and Trollinger, Righting America).
Against mountains of evidence from geology, physics, biology, astronomy, and other sciences, Ham and his creationist band keep insisting that they are real scientists (Miller, Only a Theory). He has a Creation “Theme Park” Museum to help make his case. He employs a handful of “scientists” to make his case. He has debated the “science guy,” Bill Nye. And in conservative evangelical primary schools, secondary schools, and colleges, “creation science” is taught. In fact, at Cedarville University (a.k.a., AiG University) a student can major in creation science.
The theological/scientific dilemma turns Ham into a pretzel stick, with his tortured attempts to be the antievolution guy and the science guy at the same time, with his repeated cries for mainstream scientists and intellectuals to “Look, look at us here at AiG: we are scientists too!”
But the scientific community rejects this claim, for the simple reason that, as science, “there’s just no there there.” The legal community rejects the claim as well. There have been at least ten major court cases attempting to get legal approval to declare intelligent design (the stalking horse for creation science) a real science and include its teachings in public school biology textbooks. The Cobb County (GA) Board of Education affixed a sticker to the inside of public school science textbooks: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” Sounding more like a warning label on a package of cigarettes or a canister of poison, this three-sentence disclaimer was found by the court to be a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.
In the scientific and legal communities, evangelicals are in the wilderness, still longing for the Promised Land of intellectual respectability, still trying so hard to be accepted. But in the arena of public opinion, evangelicals are having more success, with almost half of the population of the USA believing that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form only.”
Popular support, however, is not the goal of evangelicals. They are weary of being a populist movement. They want to be part of the Ivy League. They want their theories taught in the public schools. They want to have the credentials of leading scientists like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.
And the current political environment forces creationists into an even more twisted pretzel-like exercise. By supporting President Trump’s anti-science rants, evangelicals are abandoning all their efforts to be seen and accepted as scientific. They are back where they started in denying evolution. Once again, science is the devil. Once again, evangelicals face the dismal prospects of being dismissed, mocked, and sent back to the woods for denying actual science. Being against an institution that you want to belong to is more than a rhetorical bind.
Any attempt at understanding the Trump/evangelical mind requires attention to the dynamics of affect and shame. There is a coupling of Trump and evangelicals at precisely this emotional intersection. Rhetorical scholar Donovan Schaefer argues that the success of Trump’s rhetoric emerges in part through his mastery of a circuit of shame and dignity, in which supporters who feel ashamed find, in his verbal and visual style, a repudiation of that shame and so mobilize behind him (Schaefer, “Whiteness and civilization: shame, race, and the rhetoric of Donald Trump,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies).
Evangelicals, feeling shame at the intellectual disdain in which they have for so long labored, are like Trump, and the resulting insecurity affects everything they say and do. As Lauren Berlant has proposed, “[t]he Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free.” (Berlant, “Trump, or Political Emotions,” New Inquiry). Trump gives evangelicals the validation they are seeking, but he does it by embracing the anti-science movement, and this is not helpful to evangelical desires to be perceived as scientific. Trump was supposed to deliver evangelicals to the seat of power and glory. He was their strong man; he has turned out to be Goliath or Samson instead of David or Solomon. Evangelicals are back where they started – in the wilderness of shame and loss. They can’t abandon Trump even as he calls Dr. Fauci “an idiot.”
Why does this matter? It matters because the evangelical experience was replicated in the early life of Donald Trump. Trump, in The Art of the Deal, shines a light on his personal insecurity, his need for acceptance. He writes (or his ghostwriter writes), “I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to live – the center of the world,” Trump wrote. He was desperate to expand his father’s huge but exclusively outer-borough real estate business into the hub of the city: “I gotta go into Manhattan. I gotta build those big buildings. I gotta do it, Dad. I’ve gotta do it,” Trump recalled telling his father, Fred Trump.
Nothing was as important to Trump as being accepted by the New York elite – high society. He made numerous attempts to become a member of Le Club, a prestigious gathering place for socialites, actors, and sports stars. He wanted to make it in the city that never sleeps. But that has not happened, at least not in Manhattan.
Communication scholar Joshua Gunn has worked out a theory of how Trump’s rhetoric marshals affect, but along a different axis—he emphasizes what he calls Trump’s political perversion. Gunn starts from psychoanalysis, and particularly Jacques Lacan’s typology of psychotic, neurotic, and perverse psychic formations—all of which are present in all of us in varying degrees. Gunn suggests that Trump’s perversion—his contagious obsession with flouting conventions and transgressing taboos—is the motor that drives his rhetorical success (Gunn, “On Political Perversion,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly ). Trump wants the very establishment he joined as president to feel his pain.
In other words, it is all about affect. Affect theory scholars have documented the emotional power of the Trump movement. It is one he totally shares with the evangelicals.
Religion and politics, when submerged in a spoiled sea of emotions (shame, resentment, revenge), are always affectively organized. Evangelicals identify with Trump’s anger and outrage, his insecurity and desire, and so they have fallen for him, hook, line, and sinker. They are “two peas in a pod”: desperate to be accepted, desperate to be allowed membership in the exclusive club, and yet rejected. Perhaps it is hard to imagine that an entire presidential election comes down to feelings, a triumph of pathos over logos, to put it in traditional Aristotelian terms, but it’s all about feelings (here feelings and affect are used interchangeably).
So we have evangelicals, wanting to be part of the scientific establishment, and yet at the same time belittling science. So we have Trump, wanting to be part of the political establishment, and yet at the same time attacking, denigrating, and demolishing the anchor institutions of democracy.
Evangelicals and Trump remind me of two gay characters in an old Saturday Night skit, peering at the audience with deep longing in their eyes and opining, “We just want to be loved. Is that so wrong?”
