Abstract
In the 2016 election, a body of conservative Christian American voters claimed they voted for Donald J. Trump because of their Christian beliefs. But why, given that Trump would seem to represent the antithesis of conservative Christian theology? In Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie Martin—Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University— explores how political rhetoric reinforces social issues in conservative ideologies. Thus, Martin unpacks how these Christian American voters use narratives of intellectual agreement with Trump’s positions “to reconcile their political commitments with their faith” (p. 5).
From studying the sermons of evangelical leaders during the Great Recession and Recovery and the 2016 presidential campaign, Martin asserts that the evangelicals are “passively” led to vote for someone like Trump, who seems to embody their worldview but does not by a unique rhetorical process. This unique rhetorical process first involves pastors writing narratives of “emplotment” in their sermons. Emplotment is the writing of narratives that dramatize current events and episodes intentionally to mirror events and episodes in the life of Christ. This act of “emplotment” remakes Trump’s political life by paralleling it to the life of Christ. This is an act of agency that serves as a “great reawakening” of the story of the life of Christ (p. 36). However, that agency becomes passive because pastors so tightly interweaved the narratives of Trump and Christ in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Henceforth, evangelicals have supported Trump without question.
Martin uses a method she calls “digital rhetorical ethnography,” which involves, as she describes it, “going to church in my pajamas.” This method consisted of Martin watching live stream videos of church sermons preceding the 2016 election to note rhetorical narratives used (a) about the Obama-era economic recession and (b) the 2016 campaign. What sets this method apart from traditional rhetorical criticism is its hybrid utility of the researcher joining the community “whose stories and language they dare to decipher” (p. 44).
The first major theme in the book is Martin’s explanation of how Christian evangelicals justified their vote for Trump by describing how sermons about the Obama-era recession were later fundamental in intertwining Trump in evangelical storytelling. Martin uses Paul Ricoeur’s theory of emplotment to explicate how this constituency felt they were losing that power during Obama’s presidency and wanted to ensure their elevated status with the next president (p. 58). Ricouer’s theory states that we make associations to make sense of our realities. Thus, Martin explains that this is how Trump becomes interwoven into this constituency’s existing narrative of Christian faith as built by pastors in the years preceding Trump’s 2016 election bid. The constituency of Christian conservative voters wrote Trump into the narrative of the Christian faith to make sense of their experiences surrounding the 2016 election.
Second, Martin addresses the act of writing Trump into their religious narrative as agency. Martin relies on Campbell’s definition of agency, citing that agency is “the capacity to act in a way that members hear of your community” (p. 39). This is one of the most compelling observations the reader can draw from Martin’s book: the members of the Christian conservative constituency voted for Trump and wrote him into their narrative because they knew he spoke a language their fellow members would accept. In 2016, when this constituency felt aggrieved by the actions of the Obama administration, they feared the invalidation and exclusion of their community by the next president (p. 60). So, Martin concludes it was only natural for them to look for a new icon to ensure their survival.
Third, Martin unpacks this constituency’s passive acceptance of Trump. Martin says Christian evangelicals carried out a mantra of “give it to God but still vote as God would have you to.” Now that Trump was interwoven neatly into this constituency’s narrative, they could passively ignore his dissimilar faults and vote for him (p. 77). Particularly in Chapter 6, Martin exemplifies this passivism in how evangelicals overlooked the contradictions of faith presented by Trump’s sexual abuse allegations. From reviewing live digital video recordings, blogs, and social media posts of women pastors and evangelical leaders who were anti-Trump, Martin’s core argument emerges: that the hypocrisy of the narrative Trump has been written into is fallible and that women are the demographic to collapse this narrative.
The most significant contribution of this book is that it opens the door for future studies to examine the breaks in consubstantial rhetoric of Christian groups who have written Trump out of their narratives. We have seen in the 2022 midterms evidence of Martin’s claims given that women turned the tide against the red wave by disrupting the evangelical narrative surrounding Trumpism for its ad verrecundiam hypocrisy. By integrating ourselves through digital rhetorical ethnography, rhetoricians can uncover passive hegemonic forces in a digitized, polarized political environment.