"Rod Kennedy's powerful book attempts to solve one of our deepest American political mysteries. How did Donald Trump, the embodiment of farcically empty materialism, capture the hearts of America's ninety million evangelicals? Kennedy shows how Trump crafted a secular version of evangelical rhetoric, logic, and poetic, and argues that Trump celebrated a common sense of victimage that spoke to the fears of whites losing majority status. With incredible daring, Kennedy shows how Trump posing as outsider identified a set of common enemies: secular liberals and political progressives, gays and minorities. Kennedy's brilliant analysis concludes that Trump spoke by ventriloquism and that his success reveals a crisis in the moral order of American evangelism." --Andrew King, Louisiana State University "I strongly endorse Rod Kennedy's book The Immaculate Mistake . This text will make major contributions both to the practice of Christian homiletics and to the academic disciplines of communication and religious studies. It also serves as an important critique of conservative evangelical rhetoric, as well as the misuse of civil religious terms in American politics--and a warning about how easily both can be corrupted by a charismatic but profane political agent like Donald Trump." --Kenneth Zagacki, North Carolina State University "If the political phenomenon of Donald Trump is in large part a product of a corrupted hermeneutics and rhetoric, and Rodney Kennedy argues convincingly that it is, then the response must come in the mode of a renewed hermeneutics and rhetoric.

This book is not a historical analysis but an extended homily by a widely regarded preacher offering searing diagnosis and hopeful prescription as he seeks revival within American Christianity." --Philip E. Thompson, Sioux Falls Seminary.