The MAGA movement, which has been known to adapt religious practices and devotions to their politics, is reviving but also refashioning the rosary, writes Matthew Walther in a critical article in the Wall Street Journal (January 8). “Social-media platforms are suddenly full of images of the rosary being treated with all the gravity of a fashion accessory and discussed in language that makes it sound like a cross between a MAGA hat and aromatherapy. Some call this evidence of a religious revival among younger Americans. To me, it suggests confusion about what religious devotion is,” Walther writes. It may have started with an online conversation about rosary beads between Megyn Kelly and the right-wing activist Jack Posobiec, who presented her with the rosary. Posobiec had just appeared at AmericaFest, a conservative political gathering in Phoenix, “brandishing a rosary above his head in defiance amid the strains of license-free hype music while KISS-style pyrotechnics exploded on stage behind him.” What one might call the “MAGA-fication of the rosary follows the logic of contemporary influencer culture. Instead of a quiet daily struggle carried on invisibly, what matters is the beads themselves and the emotions they supposedly generate. A devotional object is repurposed as ‘content’: a prop meant to signal political or cultural identity and vague attitudes such as defiance of one’s enemies. The rosary, in short, is becoming a brand,” Walther writes.
He argues that traditional rosary practices are different than the MAGA portrayal, demanding “patience and self-abnegation. Its consolations tend to be quiet. To acquire them is the work of a lifetime…It isn’t an inducement to action, much less an expression of collective political will, but an act of surrender.” Walther writes that the use of the rosary as a “brand is a new style of conservative Christian politics. This ‘based’ political Christianity is premised on a tawdry, sensationalized understanding of religion and the unmistakable decline of the Christian-inflected social conservatism that once found a home in the Republican Party. Its thrusting imperiousness isn’t confidence but an admission of defeat.” With Donald Trump and Republican leaders soft-peddling religious-right issues—from abortion to in vitro fertilization—Walther argues that as the movement has been losing “ its ability to shape events, it [has begun] to overrate the importance of symbols. What matters is no longer the possibility of influencing national political life in concrete ways but the repurposing of religious impulses into something that can feel relevant in a theatrical, attention-driven culture.”
