As if the first “Signalgate” was not enough, this week revealed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared military plans on his private phone with his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. These high-level security breaches are only the latest example of a long string of Trump and Company’s “wrongs.” Something more is at stake. What concerns me is the seismic shift in the moral universe of right and wrong. This is not mere politics — this is how we are going to decide the values that determine the character of our nation.
Rodney Kennedy
My disappointment is that my commitments as a preacher and teacher of Christian faith are being threatened. Why? Because I preach and teach with the conviction that issues of right and wrong matter, telling the truth matters, and that national character should be central to how Americans make all decisions.
Part of my disenchantment relates to how evangelicals have consistently supported Trump in three elections. The moral center of the evangelical universe has shifted. Right and wrong have acquired new definitions. The politicization of evangelicals has resulted in a seemingly flawless ability to exchange right for wrong.
In a sort of weird reversal of how evangelicals normally read Romans 1:20-22, I have this growing sense that the evangelicals are being judged by the Scripture they use to condemn LGBTQ+ people: “So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”
Historian Randall Balmer first noticed the shifting of evangelical values. He identifies the “flexible” values of evangelicals:
- “Lying is all right as long as it serves a higher purpose.”
- “It’s no problem to be married more than, well, twice.”
- “Immigrants are scum.”
- “Vulgarity is a sign of strength and resolve.”
- “White lives matter (much more than others).”
- “There’s no harm in spending time with porn stars.”
- “It’s all right for adults to date children.”
- “The end justifies the means.”
I believe evangelicals, having started down the “slippery slide” of political pragmatism, have descended far lower even than Balmer suggested. They have bottomed out at the point where President Trump and MAGA can do no wrong. Here’s my hypothesis: Wrong has been removed from MAGA. It now only applies to Democrats, socialists, feminists, LGBTQ+ people, liberals, and all other non-MAGA groups and persons. There’s a MAGA cap for true believers that Elon Musk sported in the Oval Office: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”
They have no room for the ancient words of confession:
Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
Our culture now frames disagreements about right and wrong as all-or-nothing wars. Wrong has become the most partisan of theological concepts. Here’s the new moral equation: Winning is right; losing is wrong. I contend this is the only standard that counts for MAGA. What Trump and company say and do are irrelevant. This is not a commitment to Trump’s policies. This is not about policies (they are the whipped cream topping) — it is all about being on the winning side. Now, the words of James Russell Lowell appear as prophecy: “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.”
This is a new age when evangelicals are indifferent to the truth. If the reason MAGA evangelicals can see no wrong in Trump and crew is that they like it because getting away with everything is a sign of strength, then we are in more trouble than I have realized. If this is the MAGA position, we are quite close to a public kind of active despising of truth, of right and wrong — of the normal habit of truth-seeking and truth-telling.
Even when caught red-handed, Republicans scramble to turn every incident into a good. When you can turn a deadly insurrection, witnessed live on television by millions of eyewitnesses, into a “tour of the Capitol,” you can do no wrong. When convicted insurrectionists who seriously injured police and destroyed government property are pardoned and deemed patriots, you can do no wrong.
In this weird theological calculus of the MAGA mind, the security breaches are no big deal. Right becomes might and the will to impose it on the public. Words like “sin,” “trespasses,” transgressions,” and “iniquity” disappear from MAGA dictionaries. Fox News host Will Cain, for example, said: “The biggest takeaway on the Signal story … is how thoughtful, collaborative, and honest all of these people were in their deliberation.” And according to Gateway Pundit, a far-right news outlet, the entire affair was journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s fault. “Instead of simply excusing himself from the conversation, Goldberg did what elitist far-left journalists do best,” wrote Jim Hoft, founder of the outlet. “He took screenshots of the conversation and ran to his keyboard to try to leak the military operation.”
When one side sees all “wrong” as being on the other side, we are facing a long-brewing American-style authoritarianism, a people unable to see the log in their own eyes. Lately, I have wondered what it would have been like to live in the time of the judges in ancient Israel. Twice in the Old Testament, we are told “all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 17:6, 21:25). And it was a time of terror and confusion and disorientation.
Something has gone terribly wrong when one side no longer believes they are capable of being wrong. We are no longer able to recognize truth; we are immune to what is right and what is wrong. I believe we now inhabit an age like that of the Old Testament judges. And apparently, MAGA is content with this perverted sense of right and wrong.
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, Ohio — which is an American Baptist Church — for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is out now from Cascade Books.
