by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this rightingamerica interview. And check out Rod’s new webpage!
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, campaigns for the Nobel Peace Prize by claiming he has ended eight wars. Yet in the disguise of being an international peacemaker, Trump creates new wars on the domestic front. He has declared war on illegal immigrants, American cities, universities, drug lords, gangs, DEI/wokeness/CRT, science, history, liberals/socialists/Democrats, and any person who dares oppose him.
War is President Trump’s default setting. Trump is a creature requiring revenge and retaliation for all slights and grievances. His speeches reek of war. “We will protect American lives,” he yells. “Your family members will not have died in vain.” He asserts a superhuman ability to protect America: “I will fight for you with every breath of my body.” He has promised, “We will eradicate Radical Islamic Terrorism completely from the face of the earth. You got to knock the hell out of them. Boom! Boom! Boom!”
Trump’s Wars Have a Prequel in President Bush
Trumpism itself is rooted in an earlier turn by George W. Bush to a new understanding of war. Trump has amplified and expanded President Bush’s rhetoric of terrorism that characterized Arab and Muslim people as evil and violent.
Robert Ivie, in “The Rhetoric of Bush’s War on Evil,” says: “George W. Bush is a Burkean devil of rhetorical seduction. His demagoguery in the service of empire masquerades as a test of Christian faith and of faith in a Christian man, calling on Americans to make their nation right with God by exterminating an international devil. His ‘war’ is a bastardization of religious thought akin to Hitler’s ‘Battle.’”
President Bush taught us that Muslims hate us. In a joint session of Congress, Bush said, “They hate a democratically elected government – They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other …. These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.”
Issues of Race Always Present
Underlying Trump’s wars there is the explosive issue of race. He announced that the US was taking fewer immigrants from countries like Somalia and Haiti and more from countries like Norway, Sweden and Demark, which happen to be among the Whitest countries in the world.
He also unleashed a torrent of even uglier remarks. He called Somalia “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” He referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s headscarf as a “little turban” and encouraged the crowd to chant “send her back” to Somalia. Earlier he called Somalis “garbage” and said, “We don’t want them here.”
Trump’s Wars Fueled by Insecurity and Revenge
Trump responds violently to anyone who challenges his presumption that he is in control of everything, from the nuclear suitcase to the Kennedy Center awards. War has become the playground and prerogative of the president. We are at war with whomever President Trump says we are.
There’s a strange verse in Matthew’s Gospel that I believe flashes its warning lights in the face of Trump: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and violent people take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., in his commentary The Gospel of Matthew (Sacra Pagina), says the allusions to Herod in Matthew 11:7 – 8 “suggests the ‘violent’ refers to Herod.
The reality is that, when you have seen one Herod, you have seen them all. They all act the same way in their greedy, insecure, uncaring, violent insufficiency. The Herod we now face is President Trump in all his insecure, fearful, and paranoid glory.
Trump’s Axis of Evil: MAGA, Evangelicals, and White Supremacists
Wars require allies. Along with a partisan Supreme Court and a gutless Congress, Trump and MAGA share a single beating heart. Rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called this union “consubstantiality.” Trump and MAGA are both joined and separate. They are one in the spirit of war and violence. Trump’s mad war spirit twins with public shamelessness and evangelical certainty to fuel the ongoing wars spinning out of the White House at a dizzying rate.
So it is that Trump directs the US military to blow up boats in the Pacific off the coast of Venezuela, in the process mixing flag-waving patriotism and the fear of drugs. It apparently doesn’t matter that Trump has no such authority, that these actions violate the Constitution and constitute war crimes, and are immoral on every level. Too many Americans applaud the destruction.
How many wars must we fight to satiate the blood lust of our president? How many immigrants must we deport to win the war on immigrants? How many American cities must we invade to satisfy Trump’s need for control? How many professors and universities must we silence? How many voting rights must be shred? How many boats (allegedly drug-filled) must we blow out of the water? How many people must we kill? The president, my friend, will sell us all the wars he can.
We have our work cut out for us. James David Duncan, in The Brothers K, has an interesting reflection: “War is so damn interesting.” “The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery, and occasionally even heroism into a range of guys, who might, in times of peace, lead lives of unmitigated peace.”
An Alternative Story
Trump’s wars offend my human Christian sensibilities. As a follower of Jesus, I am not capable of being at peace with war. I am appalled at Trump’s war on immigrants because I believe it is a direct contradiction of God’s will. I am part of the church God has called into being to transgress the borders of the nations to provide for the welfare of the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden.
Isaiah 42, the first servant poem, connects mercy and justice, as our calling:
Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations . . . He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching. (verses 1, 4)
God gathers rather than disperses people. As Stanley Hauerwas has said, “the church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people.” Trump’s war on immigrants blasphemes God’s gathering activities. Displacement, deportation, dispersion, division – Devil’s work.
There are Christian values on which to build an alternative rhetoric: Truth, peace, empathy, hope.
The task before us is to make peace as interesting as war. I accept the seemingly insurmountable obstacle to weaning Americans from the thrill of combat, war, violence, and power.
Basic Democratic Values
Coupled with Christian virtues, there are also democratic values on which to build: diversity, complementarity, dissent, inclusion, fairness, community, justice, mutual benefit, deliberation and compromise.
I call special attention to dissent because democracy can’t thrive with the freedom of dissent. Those who would squelch dissent are not friends of democracy. In dissent, we have the chance to rebuild a shared symbolic space where words matter, reasons matter, and deliberation matters.
In this space, perhaps we can actually hear the voice of Stacey Abrams of Georgia: “From agriculture to health care to entrepreneurship, America is made stronger by immigration, not walls.”
Part of the dissent is insisting our president do right by all our people and to respect the extraordinary diversity that characterizes our nation. As Abrams implores, all of us must “confront racism” and Trump’s wars in word and deed; we must “come together and stand for and with one another” in a “renewed commitment to social and economic justice.”
All of these values are in short supply in our war-torn nation. Democracy is endangered by our refusal to give expression to the best angels of the American spirit. Trump’s wars and its enabling racism are not democratic; they are destructive.
One value captures the spirit of both Christianity and democracy: Empathy. It is no surprise how MAGA evangelicals have viciously attacked empathy as if it were now a vice.
As George Lakoff puts it, “Empathy is at the center of the progressive moral view.” And: “Behind every progressive policy lies a single moral value: empathy.”
An alternative rhetoric of peace requires a baptism by immersion in empathy. Ivie reminds us, “I think, rhetorically speaking, what we might find most useful is to articulate a humanizing discourse as a way of empathizing with people across lines of division, that is, with people that fall into the category of the dispersed majority. Empathy is the alternative to demonizing. The dispersed majority is the target audience, those that might be persuaded.”
Clear, rational thought knows that “War is hell.” I have a letter in my files from one of my ancestors, General Kennedy (his name not his rank). He was a private in the Confederate Army and his letter to his Mama came from his experience at the battle of Vicksburg. He told her of the soldier standing next to him having his head blown off by a cannon ball and other horrors of the hell that was war.
As attracted as President Trump is to war and as appealing as General Lee’s vision of men marching into combat under fire has always been to the American spirit, it is a lie.
At Gettysburg, General George Pickett marched the 4,500 men in his division into the withering Yankee fire. But that was the last mention of beauty. The truth was told by General George Pickett when Lee ordered him to gather his battalion for another frontal assault on Union lines.
Pickett, crying, said, “I have no division now. Armistead is down, Garnett is down, and Kemper is mortally wounded —.”
For all who love our country and care for our future, the time for Trump’s wars to end has come. The dogmatic certainty of Trump and MAGA evangelicals has left us in disarray. America’s use of force may be America’s final chapter.
Now the followers of the suffering, sacrificing Jesus arise with truth as our belt, righteousness as our breastplate, the gospel of peace as our shoes, along with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit as our single weapon. We rise with the glory of God on our lips and the Prince of Peace at our side. Here is our alternative to the rhetoric of war. Here we make our stand.