When Wild Trolls Roamed the Country

I woke with Woody Guthrie on my mind:

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island.

But my land is infested with trolls. Evangelicals, my own people, have a troll problem. Politicians, performers, preachers, bloggers, professors and the public are producing an epidemic of trolling. Jason Hannan, in Trolling Ourselves to Death sounds the alarm to the dangers. I feel a moral obligation to troll these trolls.

A troll is a person who intentionally uses outrageous, provocative, offensive, or off‑topic attacks against others. The goal is to anger others, avoid rational deliberation and to reduce all conversations to emotional proof, for their own amusement or cruelty.

Evangelical trolls have turned away from good faith participation in pursuit of truth to push a political/religious agenda. Evangelical trolling defines a movement unrestrained by Christian norms. They exude a nihilistic apocalypticism coupled with a destructive spirit of harsh judgmentalism. The provide evangelical pastors and conservative politicians fuel for an emotional religion of fear, nostalgia and toxic masculinity. Their outsized dependence on character assaults and vitriol is not a Christian habit. But when it comes to trolls, the evangelical “cup runneth over.”

A cluster of descriptors of trolls include antisocial, paranoid, combative, and violent. angry and sanctimonious culture warriors of various ideological stripes. In addition they produce frustration, anger and despair. Hannan adds the “‘dark tetrad’ of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism….Social parasites, digital delinquents…. Abusers of the collective trust of the community.”

Surprisingly, the ubiquitous word “troll” has never been named “word of the year” but 2025’s slop, 2024’s rawdog, 2023’s enshittification are part of the troll family.

According to Merriam Webster, slop  is “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

Rawdogging can mean speaking without filters, accepting no sense of accountability and ignoring all norms, traditions and decorum of public declarations.

Enshittification is the systematic decline in quality of online platforms over time, driven by profit motives and platform growth dynamics. The word can be aptly applied to President Trump taking his wrecking ball to Washington, D.C.

The most ancient meaning of troll refers to cave-dwelling, club-wielding and human-devouring monsters of mythology. Trolls have appeared in many works of modern fiction, classic examples being the portrayal of trolls in works such as in Tolkien’s Middle-earth or the Dungeons & Dragons game.

The other primary use of troll is a fishing metaphor, a technique in which a fishing line is pulled back and forth along the edge of a boat in the hopes that some unlucky fish will take the bait.

Words have a chameleonic ability to change meanings across eras, but original traces of a word are always visible. A troll now refers to a person using obnoxious, insulting language to hurt others. Hannan says, “One of the signature tactics of a troll is luring unsuspecting users into their noxious and fetid traps.” We are not far from “click bait,” misinformation, grooming and temptation.

Twenty-eight percent of Americans admit to participating in “malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know,” according to an online survey of 1,125 adults by YouGov. Over 80,000,000 Americans admit to using offensive, hurtful, insulting and cruel speech.

Trolls pull the trigger but culture is the gun. Trolls are both a symptom and promoter of outrage clothed in Christian language. They ravage Christian norms, undermine Christian witness and inhibit Christian acceptance in a secular culture. Trolling is a logical expression of a widespread cynicism, suspicion, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism rooted in excessive Christian reliance on individual salvation.

Trolls manifest a perverse form of glee and laughter enjoyed at the expense of others. Whitney Phillips, in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture explains, “Trolls are driven by the “lulz,” the peculiar and perverse form of glee and laughter enjoyed at the expense of others. The “lulz” signify that nothing is sacred, that everything, even the worst forms of human suffering, misery, violence, and tragedy, are potential objects of laughter and derision. In Southern-speak, trolls are “lower than a hog’s belly” (See “slop” and enshittification”).

Evangelical leadership has taken trolling mainstream. The “hogs at the trough” are now seated at the table of power. Political mudslinging has become click-baiting. The evangelical movement is troll driven. Hannan argues, “We are now arguably immersed in a new political language game, in which the speech act of trolling has become a normalized part of public discourse.”

I can’t decide if politicians taught preachers to troll or if preachers taught the politicians the dark art. Paraphrasing Walker Percy’s Lancelot, “Well, I found out who you are. Your profession, that is. A preacher-politician. Which is to say, a screwed-up preacher or a half-assed politician. Or both.”

From the mountain troll Doug Wilson (Moscow, Idaho), to the seminary troll Andrew Walker to the singing troll Sean Feucht, to the apostles and prophets of the independent pentecostal network, to the journalist Lance Wallnua, to the slick, fast talking Dallas Texas Baptist troll, Robeert Jeffress, the trolls are everywhere.

No troll expose can avoid mentioning President Donald Trump – the Troll-in-Chief. But Trump is not an evangelical. The best example I have found of the contradictory psyches of MAGA trolls – Vice President J. D. Vance.

Vice President Vance may be the best example of how MAGA Christians combine a version of Christian faith with their pagan trolling. Vance, the Christian has written Communion: Making My Way Back to Faith. Vance, the evangelical troll, has said of a conservative journalist who criticized him, “If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”

He routinely insults his opponents as “idiots” and “scumbags” including “limousine socialists” on the left to “disgraceful” conservatives on the right.

There’s nothing suggestive of “communion” in Vance’s profane attacks. For example, “I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit,” he wrote of a podcaster who called Trump supporters “very, very dumb.”  He declared a Wall Street Journal story reporting that Mr. Trump sent a bawdy letter to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be “complete and utter bullshit.” To Democratic senators grilling Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, he wrote, “You’re full of shit and everyone knows it.”

Somewhere in Louisville or Dallas, there must be a troll factory turning out trolls faster than Sauron produces Orcs in Middle Earth.

Evangelical trolls

The 1980’s gave us the proto trolls like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Sr. Next generation trolls like Robert Jeffress, Richard Land, Gary Bauer and Mike Huckabee have devoted their careers to trashing fellow Christians who are liberal. Representative of the trolling habits of evangelicals, Robert Jeffress has attacked fellow Christians as “worshipers of Moloch,” “liberal theologians who can’t find God if they tried,” “a bunch of atheists” and “the godless party.”

The young “Turks” among the evangelical trolls pose as spiritual gurus. They speak with certainty on any issue they think they have a right to discuss. Some of the more prominent evangelical trolls include Doug Wilson, Andrew Walker, Sean Feucht, Ted Cruz, Johnnie Moore, Tony Perkins, Eric Metaxas, Lance Wallnau, Todd Starnes, Megan Basham and Stephen Wolfe.

Why have evangelical preachers become trolls? Stanley Hauerwas muses preachers are “constantly tempted to imitate the false politics of the world.”

Much of what they are saying contradicts Christian truth, manners, integrity and basic decency and is often offensive at best and bigoted at worst. Evangelical preachers are producing more pathos than logos, to put it in traditional Aristotelian terms.

The goals of trolling have nothing to do with advancing Christian beliefs or practices but getting attention and winning elections. A preacher ranting about a social issue or crazy liberals is more likely to elicit the expected congregational “Amen” than if he preaches forgiveness, salvation or grace.

Hannan observes, “Our present historical moment—the plague of trolling, the loss of trust, the epidemic of paranoia and antisocial hostility, the deterioration of public reasoning, the mass contempt for truth, the spread of conspiracy theory—can be seen as the fulfillment of MacIntyre’s dark and foreboding warning forty years ago [of the loss of a common language of morality].”

Jesus did not say, “Go forth and troll.” Jesus said, “Go forth and teach.” To the evangelical trolls I say, “I hear you with all your inglorious “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions and envy” (Galatians 5:20 – 21). If I were trolling the trolls, I’d be tempted to say, “You are from your father the devil” (John 8:44), but such a charge is above my pay grade. I leave the trolls to the reward they have already received.