So you hate the MAGA people

What you can do about that

The most remarkable act of pastoral generosity I ever experienced came from a source that surprised me.

There was an early Gay Pride parade on the television news. It was on the news because there was a confrontation between the parade people and a crowd of protesters.

The reporter was circulating with his microphone, and getting the thoughts of everyone involved. Yes, the people who spoke were flamboyant, and frankly for the most part were pretty obnoxious.

But one man said, and he said it from the top of a table, himself bedecked with purple hair and a pink dress and a lot of ostrich feathers, ‘Everyone, we need to remember one thing. These people who are against us today really, really do believe the things they believe. They are sincere, and they honestly think they’re right.’

He finished, ‘So, look, be nice. Remember that, and be nice.’

I was disarmed, and also impressed. It had not, to my embarrassment, occurred to me that we can allow our adversaries to be well-intentioned.

So it is, nowadays, with how I try to approach MAGA people. For people they are, distinct from a ‘movement’. They mean the things they say, and in their way they mean well. And they really – really – feel it.

Their leader does not. Donald Trump is a rotten little man. Grappling with him, mentally and emotionally, is an entirely different problem.

But his followers, at least the ones I’ve met, are sincere, and they think they’re doing right by following.

Never mind, that he denies them healthcare, defunds their schools, tells them what they can’t read, and tells them what babies to have, doesn’t secure their border, doesn’t build them roads or bridges, doesn’t bring their old jobs back, doesn’t keep crime down, lets them die in a pandemic and still suggests bleach, encourages them to carry guns, pisses off their friends overseas, gives rich people tax cuts, but not them, doesn’t support their troops, and doesn’t keep a lid on the national debt. It doesn’t matter that he keeps them down, and frightens them instead with Secret Jewish Space Lasers.

They still vote for him.

Why do they vote for him? Not because they’re evil. They vote because they’re siloed. And they’re siloed for two reasons.

One reason is that their leaders like them that way. They don’t defund schools and talk darkly about university Libtards for no reason. Siloed people – and this is striking in conversations I’ve had with MAGA people – simply don’t know very much about the non-MAGA world (even if they think they do). And they can be worked up to refuse anything that comes from outside, especially if it’s from professional thinkers, which is to say, Libtards. They would rather know about the Illuminati, Bill Gates tracker vaccines, a flat earth, and Democrat pedophiles. We have a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country, and Trump and his people, for votes, exploit that.

The other reason is that leaving siloes is Bad. Really bad. I had it explained to me by someone who left the MAGA world recently, and found the passage very difficult. More precisely, she found it frightening. This was eye-opening to me.

She said, ‘Look, when you grow up in the boondocks, and you’re almost certainly being raised in some kind of Evangelical environment, you’re told over and over that your way of life is under attack. And also, Christianity is under attack.’

She laid out what rural, mostly white, people go through in their dark nights of the soul, and now I can understand how it must horrify. She said they see on TV that cultural and demographic change is coming. They know that most people in the country live in cities anymore. They hear about jobs they don’t understand. They worry that their own jobs aren’t important these days. They see black people, and homosexuals, and foreigners. They hear about liberal overreach from the far, far left, and they galvanize around ‘traditional values’. They pick up guns, and turn their backs on education, and on city-led healthcare initiatives, and on real knowledge of what’s actually happening behind the TV. Christianity, a mature and breathing religion to many of them, becomes for others a bizarrely un-Christian ethno-political marker. Neither of these two phalanxes dares engage with the city hordes they imagine coming at them. The deep reason is that their very souls would be in danger. Loyalty to Jesus, as they define Him, and look to Him to repel the heathen, is a matter of guts and guns. This is holy culture war.

They’re not wrong about everything.

They have not done well in the present dispensation. They’re poorer than they used to be, and their access to medicine and education is abysmal. A physician I know just gave me a rundown on all the kinds of doctors that simply don’t exist in Wyoming. It was heartbreaking.

They are also ignored politically. That’s partly because they’re in the minority, and partly because, though they feed us, they aren’t contributing much economically. Nor will they, as their education erodes, and as they refuse help with schools and doctors and roads and all the rest. ‘Socialism’, they’ll cry! Liberalism! But remember when Hillary Clinton didn’t bother to campaign in their states? That must have really stung.

They are also – and here I come to my real point – despised. They are not wrong about that.

I myself have said insulting things to MAGA people, and about them. I am not proud of it.

Other times I’ve let them talk. And talk and talk. Or talk and yell, actually.

They’ve said things that are just plain wrong (‘the Covid vaccine has killed more people than Covid ever did), or blinkered (‘How can Trump be self-serving, if he donated his salary back to the country?), or scary.

They’ve also said things that surprised me. One was, ‘I think a lot of us would actually like a single-payer health system, honestly. Because what we have right now sucks.’ Another was, ‘Yeah, we call them terrorists, but hey, if there were Iraqi planes over my hills, I’d be up there shooting big-time. It’s kinda what we’ve been doing to them’.

I’ve called these people ‘stupid’. But the ones I know are not stupid. Nor would they be. The intelligence curve across a population doesn’t work like that. They’re not generally violent, either.

I’ve called them Neanderthals. But the ones I know are gentle, thoughtful people, who love their children like I do, and want to have good doctors, and go to college, and not worry about gunfire.

What they are is frustrated, humiliated, frightened, and dismally prepared for life in what the country has become. Compounding it all, they have an enormously vested interest in contortions that allow them to remain in the information silo that’s around them. In this respect, the MAGA way does function very much like a religious cult.

But they’re not fools about this either, even if their talkingheads on TV make them sound like that, or if you catch them at a rally, when they’re all wound up. Get them talking in person, and eventually – eventually – they talk like the rest of us. And they’re pretty reasonable about their pain. If you just hear them, in fact, you want to befriend them.

I believe the MAGA movement, and the realities that drive it, will die in time. Whatever dictator is in office then will have his head on a pike. (That’s how dictators end.) In the meantime, the MAGA people are suffering, if you watch closely, and they’re suffering even worse than we are. It’s because their suffering will continue to increase that I think the red-hat way will eventually, after a lot of blood on the sand, go the way of the old Confederacy. It cannot deliver its people.

Meanwhile, what we have now is – deep breath – a pastoral problem.

Want to know what to do for MAGA people? Let them talk, and really listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t correct. Don’t challenge.

Want to know what to do for yourself, when you’re revolted and afraid because they’re talking? Let them talk, and really listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t correct. Don’t challenge.

This is how pastoral care works. It’s why it works. The Franciscans, who have a lot of practice in pain and healing, have taught me this. ‘You make yourself an empty vessel,’ one of them counselled me. ‘You let the pain pour into you. Simple as that.’

Know what? It works.