Rodney Kennedy has been accused by MAGA followers of suffering from a demented fixation on every word and deed of Donald Trump.
The Baptist pastor and author in Louisiana acknowledged those claims will no doubt increase with the recent publication of his latest book, Dissenting from Donald Trump While Listening to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“My MAGA friends accuse me of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, and that’s just an ad hominem attack saying I’m not very smart and I’m easily emotionally led, which is a laugh since their entire argument is based upon nothing but emotion,” he said in an interview.
But there’s no doubt Kennedy has been intensely focused on Trump and his fundamentalist Christian supporters since the president’s first term. He has written prolifically on the topic for Baptist News Global.
“If I went through and copied and pasted every one of my BNG articles on Trump and evangelicals and I put them into one document it would have made a book of more than 900 pages,” he quipped.
Instead, Kennedy’s distilled his BNG writings into this 186-page book focused on Trump and the Christian nationalist movement he has energized. Topics range from “MAGA Contradictions on the Poor and the Immigrant” to “Evangelicals Standing by Their Man Come Hell or High Water” and “Trump’s Plan to Fight Antisemitism Is More Authoritarianism.”
Kennedy is the other of previous books, including The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump and Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.
The dogged determination to write about the 45th and 47th president stems in part from the ease with which supposedly truth-loving evangelicals have abandoned traditional morality for a shot at having power, he explained.
“I have been deeply interested for almost 10 years in this person who is not held responsible for not telling the truth.”
“In 2016, the thing that upset me the most was how casual and callous Trump and his followers were about him not telling the truth. So, while I would deny that I suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, I have been deeply interested for almost 10 years in this person who is not been held responsible for not telling the truth or for even killing the truth.”
As a former Southern Baptist himself, Kennedy said he was astonished to see how quickly conservative Christians jettisoned the importance they once placed on character to back a president clearly devoid of it.
“After we elected a man who has less character than any other person I’ve ever experienced, evangelicals no longer talk about character. Now they talk about him defending their Christian worldview. They talk about him being their strong man. They don’t care about his sexual exploits. Character is not important. Winning is important.”
Rodney Kennedy
Kennedy said he was prompted to publish Dissenting from Donald Trump by the persistence of that attitude and by the fact more than 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump in three elections despite his growing meanness, incoherence and dishonesty.
“I am more disturbed by Trump than ever,” Kennedy explains to readers of the book. “I put together this collection of my brief (BNG) essays about Trump as a way of continuing to dissent from his evil ways.”
Another goal was to get readers “to feel and recognize the danger Trump represents,” he adds.
The book also is intended to provide factual information to those who encounter the illogical and hyperbolic claims of Trump and his evangelical supporters, Kennedy said in the interview. “My audience is the general public that still believes in the power of democracy, and I am attempting to give solid arguments for like-minded people so they will not be overwhelmed by the emotionalism of their MAGA friends.”
The reference to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the title hints at his intention to highlight the connection between faith and honesty.
“The phrase in that song that matters to me is that God’s ‘truth is marching on,’ and I am offering a dissent in which I’m giving the truth of God and the language of the prophets, and to say that Donald Trump and his movement are wrong, immoral and dangerous.”
Just how dangerous Trump is cannot be overstated, Kennedy said, because Trump is analogous to the “man of lawlessness” referenced in 2 Thessalonians — a figure who “sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”
“Then you have allowed that argument to stand on its own without being rebutted.”
“And that’s not me being apocalyptic, and I’m not saying he is that character. But he acts like that and he thinks like that,” he said of the president he also described as “the personification of evil.”
The Sept. 10 assassination of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk sheds even more light on the hypocrisy of Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that supports him, Kennedy added.
“They are trying to make him (Kirk) a saint because he was like a mini-Trump, and in the process make Trump out to be someone who never tells a lie. But this is not about Charlie Kirk, really. It’s about MAGA. This is who they really are. And they can deny it all they want to, but they’re racist, and they’re sexist, and they are homophobic, and they are angry, and they are determined to rule the country and to control everything.”
And no, Kennedy added, he is not helping the MAGA cause by persistently writing about the moral failures of Trump because freedom of speech, freedom of religion and other freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution are at stake.
“If you’re in a debate and you decide the other side is making claims that are so stupid and incoherent that your best response is no response, then you have allowed that argument to stand on its own without being rebutted. So, I have decided to make it my personal mission to rebut every single awful argument I see in print from Trump and MAGA and all of his allies.”