KINGDOM OF RAGE

What would Jesus do? Not submit to the poisonous MAGA agenda, for one, as this book of faith and fire argues.

Former assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security, Neumann was effectively frozen out during the last days of the Trump administration, when a key test for continued employment was “to gauge the depth of loyalty” to the president. Republican, conservative, and Christian, the author regarded Trump as a danger to national security and democracy—an assessment shared by far too few of her fellow Dallas churchgoers. Neumann’s approach in this description of the various shades of Christian extremism seems to jump from audience to audience. Some of it exhorts Christians to “[walk] the Way of Jesus—loving and empathizing with those in pain and in the darkness—[which] can point to where true light and hope can be found”); some of it warns students of extremist politics, as when she cites statistics indicating that 8 million Americans believe that political violence is justified, to which she asks: “If tomorrow the director of the National Counterterrorism Center announced that there were 8 million ISIS or Al-Qaeda followers in the United States, how would the country respond?” Neumann charts the MAGA movement’s enlistment of Christian churches, and especially megachurches, with conservative pastors impugned as moderates “and moderate pastors as Marxists.” As to what to do with true believers, Neumann suggests, “if you are friends with someone who has a radicalized loved one, they need your support. Some people may experience deep shame from having a loved one go off the deep end to traffic in hate.” As a guidebook for how to handle the deranged uncle at the Thanksgiving table, Neumann’s book is useful.

A Christian-to-Christian approach to defusing the rage of the far-right evangelical set.