MAGA Jesus at the Capitol
Photo by Tyler Merbler, via Flickr. In a video taken inside the Capitol Rotunda during the siege on January 6, 2021, a man draped in a Trump flag breaks down weeping. RotundaRoundFace (RRF), as the internet later called him, falls to his knees, tears streaming while he smiles, joining his “Glory, glory, hallelujah” to the echoing chorus of other insurrectionists singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. A man asks RRF if he is okay and rallies a few others to pray together. RRF places his phone down, and above the men’s dark, huddled silhouettes, we see the fresco of the Apotheosis of Washington — George Washington raised into the heavens, becoming a god. The men join in a vague, banal prayer that ends with the request, “Guide us to do your will.”
Even today, that “will” remains ambiguous, perhaps even to its participants. On the morning of the joint Congressional session to certify the presidential vote, outgoing President Donald Trump spoke to hundreds of supporters in front of the White House, calling them to “show strength” and march to the Capitol. Over the next hours, rioters violently breached the building, hoping to stop the certification of what they alleged was a stolen election.
Though some rioters carried Confederate flags, the people singing Battle Hymn of the Republic likely didn’t know they were invoking a Union song set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” — the abolitionist John Brown, executed in 1859 for inciting a slave rebellion, of course being a very different kind of insurrectionist. The group was incongruous, but its members shared one characteristic: religious language and imagery.
As photos and videos streamed from this very digital siege, Peter Manseau noticed this pattern and created the hashtag #CapitolSiegeReligion. Manseau, the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the National Museum of American History, tweeted, “I’m convinced it is *the* story of what happened. Not everyone wore a Guns & God hoodie or carried a Jesus flag but they all shared the psychological safety net such symbols provided.”; the two were later joined by Jerome Copulsky, consulting scholar at the National Museum of American History’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History. Together, they built a database of the religious imagery, symbols, and language that permeated the riot and invited scholars of religion to analyze them.
