I have been asked why I find it imperative to speak so openly about the political crisis facing our nation. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said as he opened his sermon against the war in Vietnam, “”A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for me in relation to the goals of MAGA evangelicals.
I am assisted in my mission by words from the most political of all the books in the Bible – Proverbs: “Guard your mind above all else, for the springs of life issue from it. Repeal perverse speech, and repulse devious words. Keep your eyes fixed ahead, and your glances straight in front of you. Do not deviate to right or left; keep your feet from evil.
The MAGA evangelicals have left their minds unguarded and allowed a spurious political message, riddled with the worst elements of zealotry and inquisition, to capture their hearts.
MAGA evangelicals have embraced lies by men whose speech is twisted, who forsake right paths, who delight in perversity, whose tracks are labyrinthine.” They have forsaken the teachers of their youth, forgotten the covenant of God, and now drags democracy towards death.
Hiding behind all the smooth words about “God’s anointed,” the Strong Man” sent to save America, the shouts of patriotism, is a monstrous force of destruction. Don’t be alarmed but be alert to a movement determined to wipe out every gain this nation has made in human rights over the last century. With the president as their battering ram, MAGA is determined to wreck and ruin and then control every aspect of American life.
Don’t be fooled. The anti-DEI epidemic is aimed directly at human rights gains for African Americans, women, LGBTQ+, immigrants, and Others. MAGA evangelicals are pissed because they feel they have been left out of everyone else’s rights movement. They want to reclaim the right to be the “masters of shame,” the right to be homophobic, the right to condemn all the supporters of transgenders, the right to refuse ordination to women, the right to run roughshod over the values of the majority of Americans.
It is odd that MAGA claims majority rule when they are not in the majority. And on every social issue contested in the culture war, MAGA is on the losing end as the minority. So they really have no interest in the majority. They only want to be in control. The majority of Americans favor Roe, support gay marriage, embrace civil rights, and endorse women’s rights. MAGA, the furious minority has managed to elect a president willing to do their bidding and to hell with the majority.
With one executive order after another, the idols of anti-DEI are being enshrined in every aspect of American life. The Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian are but the opening blasts of this demolition crew. African American and women leaders have been dismissed from the military. Trump has tried to have all transgender soldiers kicked out of the military.
This, apparently, is how they do it in Russia.
We need a new way beyond the darkness of this descending inquisition of judgment, this narrowing of the American spirit, and this darkening of the American mind.
The writer of Proverbs begs us to not make wrong turns. There are three lessons I have gleaned from our text.
God’s people can make wrong turns
Surely you know it is no accident that “Turn” thunders from the Hebrew prophets as they condemn Israel and Judah for turning away for God. In the New Testament ths word becomes “repent” – change your mind.
There is no greater temptation for God’s people than “turning back” – back to good old days, back to good times and no sense of responsibility. Historian John Fea says MAGA evangelicals are dominated by nostalgia. They dream of an American “golden age.” No one notes this is a mere figment of their imagination.
But MAGA dreams are filled with illusions of American being founded by Christians and as a Christian nation. Our founding fathers were a mixture of Christians, agnostics, Deists, and secularists. They came to America to escape a government that was “Christian.” The founding documents say nothing of the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but speak generically of a “divine providence.” Thomas Jefferson was no evangelical Christian. He took his scissors to the Bible and cut out all the supernatural events, including miracles and the resurrection. When Benjamin Franklin went to Paris as America’s first ambassador to France, the French said there were worried about Franklin’s religious proclivities. They soon announced they were delighted to discover that he had none. When President Washington was on his death bed he refused to have the Anglican priests there for last rites. It’s a pack of lies told by non-historians and evangelical preachers than America was founded as a Christian nation. But the desire to go back and make up a glorious righteous, flawless, perfect history is a constant temptation.
Nothing does more harm to God’s people than turning around and going back. In Exodus 16 we read of the children of Israel being exhausted from the rigors of freedom. And what did they want to do when the going got rough: “And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
And in Numbers 11 there’s the rest of the menu: “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” Slave food. Do you get it? Slave food.
Do you mind a bit of homiletical imagination. Tell me the human condition of the Israelites back in Egypt? They were slaves. Say it with me, “They were slaves.” I’m not sure we get it. Say it again. “They were slaves.”
Now, we’re preaching: “They remembered the food they “used to eat in Egypt for nothing.” Do you see what a screwed-up memory can do to the mind? Do you see how messed-up you can get when you are drowning in nostalgia.
They forget Pharaoh made slaves of them. In their addled, dream-drenched minds they forgot working from dawn to dark they forgot reality: “You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, “Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.” heavier work be laid on them; then they will labor at it and pay no attention to deceptive words.”
The people forgot how Pharoah stopped giving them straw. They had to gather straw and still meet the daily quota of bricks.
The people forget how Pharaoh mistreated them: “‘You are lazy, lazy; that is why you say, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.’ Go now, and work; for no straw shall be given you, but you shall still deliver the same number of bricks.”
Christopher Lasch says, “Nostalgia freezes the past in timeless, childlike innocence.” Instead of doing the hard work necessary for engaging in a more diverse society, rather than doing the intellectual homework to be more acceptable in a secular culture, MAGA evangelicals have become intellectually lazy. Rather than continuing to fight against the liberal values they detest, they turned to a “demolition expert” – President Trump to sign executive orders to give MAGA what they desire. This back-ass-ward approach to life is deadly. It makes a lie of the present, he condemns the present to chaos, and it turns the future into darkness. MAGA stands condemned of drinking to the dregs from the chalice of nostalgia.
If you have any concern for the integrity and life of democracy, you can’t ignore the cultural war. America’s soul is being poisoned by people who are willing to destroy everything to have their way. And if this effort succeeds, the autopsy report must read: MAGA.
God’s People Can Be Dominated by “Sad Passions”
Our nation can’t be saved by the horrible, tragic, sad emotions of MAGA. No nation ever becomes great when leaders make decisions on the basis of revenge, anger, hurt, perceived slights, a feeling of being left out, besieged, and conflicted. Angry people don’t make good government servants. Mistrust, misinformation, animosity, lies, and revenge are elements of a nation’s destruction. Even if I agreed with MAGA’s goals, I am sickened by MAGA’s emotions and methods.
The Christians among MAGA evangelicals know their Bibles. They know Paul warns them against depending on the “sad emotions,” what he calls the “works of the flesh.” In Galatians 5, Paul says, “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
MAGA evangelical will pick out fornication, impurity, licentiousness, sorcery, drunkenness, and carousing as liberal faults. As if they are also not guilty. What MAGA can’t avoid is the preponderance of the following practices driving their engine: enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, and envy. As MAGA keeps throwing more emotional gas onto the flames, I must warn you: those who do such things will not make America grat again. You will only make America small, stupid, selfish.
God’s People Can Reject Their Servant Mission
I am convinced that there is one overriding motivation for MAGA and Trump. It’s not make America great again. It’s “America first.” I accuse MAGA evangelicals of denying their own Christian calling to servanthood by endorsing “America first.”
President Trump will not make America great again. He is making America more despised in the world. Do you know that our response to the horrific earthquake in Myanmar has been slowed by the Trump administration’s attempt to shut down USAID. Do you know China has 400workers on site within 48 hours and has provided $14,000,000 in relief funds. How can the mind grasp the idea that Communist China shows more compassion and provides more human aid than America – the alleged Christian nation.
“Make America great again” is an emotional slogan. It has no saving grace. All it does is increase MAGA pride by allowing them to feel great as a result of Trump’s rhetoric.
So far MAGA is having “the time of their lives” cheering Trump’s unjust plan to deport 11,000,000 immigrants, Trump’s ripping apart our long relationships with allies, attempting to annex Greenland, Canda, and Panama. These are Trump’s big ideas for making America first. And he wants to make America first by imposing Taft like tariffs even on our allies.
MAGA evangelicals are a long way from any notion of America as a servant of God to the nations. The prophet Isaiah envisioned Israel/Judah as God’s servant nation. Long before Christians claimed the four servant songs as being about Jesus, the Jews knew the songs were for them – the people of God.
By rejecting the call to be God’s servant nation, MAGA evangelicals reject the gospel. God’s servant nation “will bring forth justice to the nations;” “a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth;” “sustain the weary with a word.”
And in the climactic poem of Isaiah 53, Isaiah makes the vision plain. God’s servant nation will bear the infirmities of the nations, carry their diseases and will be wounded for the transgressions of the world. By the bruises received God’s servant nation will be “great.”
“America first” has nothing to do with service or servants. Jesus, God’s suffering servant, makes clear our role is that of the servant, not the lord and master.
“Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the gentiles. Matthew 12:18
It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, Matthew 20:26
The greatest among you will be your servant. Matthew 23:11
He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Mark 9:35
I accuse MAGA evangelicals of lacking the love of God. And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Matthew 5:47
You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 26 It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave, 28 just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Matthew 20:25-28.
Trump and MAGA are acting like the “Gentiles” – lording it over people and being tyrants. If this continues, as it seems to be gaining steam, there will be no relationship between Jesus as servant and MAGA as “lords and masters.”
I have not found a better example of the MAGA love of being “lord of the manor” than MAGA Queen Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Georgia Republican told Martha Kelner of U.K. broadcaster Sky News that “we don’t give a crap about your opinion,” and urged the reporter to “go back to your country” during her unhinged rant on Wednesday.
So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.