Faith-based politics is an oxymoron. Faith is the suspension of reason. Faith is to exclude all others who don't share it with you. Regadless of who the hero of the myth is (Jesus, Mohamed, Moses...), to draw a nationalist agenda based on the myth is stupid and leads to hatred and wars. Just go over the history of the three monotheistic cults and discover for yourself how many genocides, wars and mass murders were committed in the name of each of them.
There are other religions of course and they should not feel inferior to the three monotheistic barbarians because they too have partaken in hateful ideologies (Japan), wars and mass murders.
The fact that all these religions cannot all be simultaneously right means one thing only: NONE is right. But be that as it may, I am not discussing which is correct and which is wrong. THEY ARE ALL WRONG because they claim an exclusive cozy relationship with a non-existent zombie in the sky.
But turning one's personal faith into a political platform with which to access power and persecute the other faiths is a crime.
What I find absolutely mind-boggling is that each religion writes its own book, then starts quoting from it as if it were the word of God and ignoring the undeniable fact that it was written by a frail, biased and often self-serving human. Do you really believe that God-Yahweh opened the Red Sea? Do you really believe that Jesus was conceived without sex? Do you really believe that Mohammad flew to Heaven on a winged horse?
One thing I'll concede to Islam is that Mohammad made it a point to claim that what he wrote in the Koran is actually God's own words whispered in his ears. In His omniscience, God-Yahweh-Allah must have spoken many, if not all, languages, including Arabic.
Mohammad grew up in a Hebraic culture of Arab tribes whose beliefs were a melting pot of Animist and Jewish practices and beliefs. Later, Christianity erupted on the scene with the newly Christianized Roman empire. Now the Judaic and Christian texts were written in many different languages (Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin...) and were therefore liable to interpretations because of the requirement of translation. Furthermore, the Torah and the Gospels are not the direct words of God, but are reported by others as being the words of God. In claiming that the Koran is the literal words of God whispered in his ears, Mohammad left no room for interpretation: Islam is the most dogmatic and simplistic religion of all three. No mysteries, no miracles, no convoluted explanations, one text in one language.... Just perform the 5 requirements (the shahada profession of faith, fasting, the pilgrimage, the prayer and almsgiving) and you got yourself a one-way express ticket to heaven.
In that sense, Islam is closer to protestantism: You don't need a mediator (e.g. the Church) between you and God, nor do you include superstitions, statues, icons, etc. Your relationship is directly with God. As these two religions (protestantism and Islam) evolve, they are likely to become more like codes of ethics - like Buddhism or confucianism - as they gradually shed all the fantastic and fictional accoutrements of their faiths.
In fact, Islam is already closer to Judaism than it is to Christianity. As he developed Islam as a religion, Mohammad's primary concern was to reject and rebel against the newly established Christian religion of the Byzantine Eastern Roman empire that was slowly moving from the Greco-Roman Levant into the Arabian peninsula. He grew up in a Hebraic environment where people shared common practices and beliefs without a clear distinction between what was Jewish and what was animist, and later what was Muslim. He rejected Christianity's claims of the trinity (he called it polytheism, Sharaka), its claims to miracles, its claims to the immaculate conception and virginal birth... He thought they were all superstitions. And he demanded a return to the Hebraic roots of his culture. He was some 900 years ahead of the Protestant Reform. Islam rejected Christianity and retained virtually all of what Judaism had: Strict monotheism, circumcision, memoring the holy texts while bobbing one's head back and forth, a two-text scripture (Torah and Talmud in Judaism cloned as Koran and Hadith in Islam), only prophets (no sons of God), etc....
So when MAGA makes Christianity a pillar of its hateful political agenda, I am gald in a way because this is such an asinine primitive ideology that fails in rejecting 400 years of western evolution (The Enlightement, the Age of Reason, the rise of Science in the Renaissance.....). MAGA evangelicals want to take us a few centuries backward, the poor idiots. It's no more than a desperate nostalgia similar to what children feel when they change homes: They miss certain things that they know will never come back. But children outgrow this nostalgia, so will the MAGA morons of the Evangelical brand.
Think about it. The Catholic Church is no longer a political empire with territories and armies. Most Protestant cults have too left the political stage. The Orthodox neanderthals still have more influence on politics but they too have been restricted to their dusty churches. For the dumb Evangelicals of the United States, to try and become the dominant political force makes them closer to Islam and to Judaism, both of which still place religious identity over any other identity. Both Islam and Judaism, and potentially the dumb American evangelicals, continue to have (or try to have) substantial influence in politics. They do not tolerate separation of religion from matters of state.
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People Who Left 'MAGA Christianity' Share What It Really Took To Step Away
Molly Wadzeck
Updated Mon, December 15, 2025
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For many Americans raised in conservative Christian environments, faith once felt like a matter of personal conviction and community — not overt political allegiance. But over the past decade, the boundary between belief and ideology has blurred.
As religious leaders increasingly endorse candidates from the pulpit and worship music shares space with patriotic anthems, congregations have since fractured over public health measures, immigration, race, and the policing of cultural “morality. A viral video by nurse and content creator Jen Hamilton, in which she reads Matthew 25 alongside a critique of MAGA politics, crystallized a conversation that had been percolating for years: When faith and ideology clash, some believers choose to walk away because of their convictions — even if it costs them the communities that raised them.
One commenter, reflecting on their own experience, wrote, “I grew up Catholic but left the church because of the toxic views and opinions on ‘morality.’ If most Christians were like you, I reckon I’d go back.”
For many, the shift toward political entanglement has been disorienting, and for some, spiritually devastating. What once felt like a moral home can suddenly feel like a battleground.
HuffPost spoke with former followers of “MAGA Christianity” about their experiences being a part of these communities — and why they made the decision to step away from them.
“Leaving costs nearly everything,” said author Tia Levings. “The twist is that there’s so much hope and determination to live an authentic life that you realize you’re worth the fight.” Getty Images/Huffpost
Early Lessons On Religion And Nationalism
Anna Rollins, author of “Famished: On Food, ***, and Growing Up as a Good Girl,” recalled a childhood steeped in rules and expectations. “Faith was the most important part of my life,” she said. “Being a good Christian, to me, meant following a lot of written and unwritten rules.”
Growing up Southern Baptist, Rollins said that Christianity was presented as nearly inseparable from Republican identity, with patriotic symbols and language woven throughout church life. “Faith and freedom were often talked about in the same breath,” she said. “We often sang patriotic songs in church services, in addition to hymns. Nationalism was tightly woven in with Christianity.”
While Rollins’ experience highlights how easily politics and faith can become intertwined, Deirdre Sugiuchi’s reveals a darker edge of that overlap, where those same forces become controlling and even abusive, shaping a person’s sense of safety and survival.
Sugiuchi, a Georgia-based writer whose upcoming memoir “Unreformed” recounts her experience in a white evangelical reform school, illuminates how these pressures can escalate: “MAGA Christianity is a cult. I know because I was in it,” she said.
Leaving isn’t easy; it can take everything to break free. In her experience, she had to escape to survive, reflecting that many believers are effectively brainwashed and may not even recognize the influence shaping them.
“I’m terrified about the merging of politics and Christianity,” said Sugiuchi. Over the years, she’s spoken about these concerns and fears in essays and interviews. She warns that if people of faith remain silent, others risk being swept into systems of control, citing the rapid expansion of unregulated faith-based organizations and the use of religious freedom claims to undermine civil rights.
“And now, as an adult, we have a president whom many equate with God… and surprise — the White House, and the country, is literally being torn to pieces,” she said.
MAGA Christianity is a cult. I know because I was in it. Deirdre Sugiuchi, author of upcoming memoir "Unreformed".
“If there was one message I received in my formative years when it came to the intersection of faith and politics, it was simply this: Vote Republican. There was no other option,” Cara Meredith, author of ”Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation,” told HuffPost.
“If you identified as Christian, you voted for the Republican Party; it was a matter of good and evil, of the side God clearly stood on and the side God clearly did not stand.”
Many people of faith and the non-religious alike note that what’s often called “MAGA Christianity” isn’t simply a political stance; it represents a distinct moral framework — one that elevates obedience to authority and nationalism over the traditional Christian values of love, service and community.
Critics say this shift subordinates Jesus’ teachings about caring for the poor, welcoming strangers and standing with the marginalized to a political-tribal agenda.
Amy Hawk, author of “The Judas Effect: How Evangelicals Betrayed Jesus for Power” and a self-described “ex-vangelical” Christ-follower, said Trump’s treatment of women “went against the ministry I was heading up at the time. I was praying for women who had been assaulted. It made no sense for me to support Trump.”
For Hawk, the embrace of Trumpism among white evangelicals became “too great to ignore,” ultimately pushing her family out of the church. Her experience reflects a wider dynamic within evangelical culture, in which political allegiance is often framed as a matter of spiritual fidelity.
Life: ‘Vertical Morality’ Might Describe Why MAGA Christians Seem So Unchristian
How The Cracks Started To Form
The same structures that fused faith and politics also created the conditions for deeper questioning, especially for those who turned to their religious texts and lifelong teachings in an attempt to reconcile contradictions.
“I really started questioning my church’s adherence to nationalism because I read the Bible,” Rollins said. “Reading Scripture made me see that Christianity was not about aligning oneself with a nation-state. Jesus was killed, in part, because people wanted him to act in [the] service of political movements.”
For many former Christian nationalists, the thing that influenced them most to leave the movement was, in fact, the Bible. krisanapong detraphiphat via Getty Images
For Sugiuchi, the turning point came after years of trauma rooted in white evangelical extremism. At 15, she was sent to Escuela Caribe, an evangelical reform school, for failing to be a “subservient adolescent female.” There, she and her peers endured what she describes as near-unimaginable oppression, all justified as being “for our own good, in the name of Jesus.”
That perception shattered in 2005, when she read Julia Scheeres’ memoir, “Jesus Land,” which recounted a similar experience at the same school. Horrified, Sugiuchi visited the campus and witnessed attempts to whitewash the abuse. Meeting a parent of a current student, she realized that her silence had contributed to continued harm.
“By keeping silent, other people were being abused in the name of religion,” she says. “As a survivor, it’s the cruelest way to abuse a child. It completely destroys your faith in humanity.”
With Scheeres’ help and that of others, Sugiuchi ultimately helped shut the school down. Today, she maintains her own faith practice but has no connection to organized religion.
Even as Sugiuchi reclaimed a private, personal faith, the public face of American Christianity continued to evolve in troubling ways — an evolution Tia Levings says can be traced directly to political influence.
Levings, author of the New York Times bestseller “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy,” describes MAGA Christianity as the overlap between authoritarian Christianity and Christian nationalism.
“Right now that’s close to a perfect circle,” she tells HuffPost.
Levings calls it a malformation of the word “Christianity,” since Jesus was neither nationalist nor authoritarian. According to Levings, this distortion has persisted because many modern churches have done little to protect their congregations from nationalist influence, and because authoritarian parenting has shaped family life for over 50 years. The result, she explains, is that the meaning of being a Christian in America has fundamentally changed.
Some people identify as MAGA because they have been taught that hyper-individualism, nationalism and white supremacy are the same as Christianity — and I think this is tragic. But I also think that many people identify as MAGA because they do not feel compelled by the alternative.Anna Rollins, author of "Famished: On Food, ***, and Growing Up as a Good Girl"
Levings argues that MAGA Christianity is “faith-based and built around a narrow evangelical worldview.” She points to trauma bonding within churches, unaccountable pastors who accelerated the nationalist turn, generations raised without robust critical thinking skills, and a steady stream of misinformation that reinforces groupthink.
Reflecting on why many Americans remain tied to these communities, Rollins said the pull is both ideological and emotional: “Some people identify as MAGA because they have been taught that hyper-individualism, nationalism and white supremacy are the same as Christianity — and I think this is tragic. But I also think that many people identify as MAGA because they do not feel compelled by the alternative.”
What Finally Made Them Leave
For many, leaving their faith community wasn’t a decision made lightly; they wrestled for years with what it meant to remain faithful in a culture where religion and nationalism had become inseparably fused.
“Leaving costs nearly everything,” said Levings. “Although that loss may come as a gradual spiral, step by step. The twist is that there’s so much hope and determination to live an authentic life that you realize you’re worth the fight.”
Stepping away was not a rejection of Jesus, but a reclaiming of a faith that felt morally and spiritually coherent.
Some experienced a sudden jolt of clarity: A sermon, a social media post, or a heated conversation that forced them to confront their dissonance. For others, the process was a slow erosion: a growing unease with the language of “us versus them,” a quiet question that eventually became impossible to ignore.
“My faith was forced to remain static, which made God very finite and small,” Levings said. “Life, by its very nature, requires growth — and so did leaving.”
Hawk describes the shift as gradual. She never stopped loving Jesus — she stopped recognizing him in the spaces that claimed his name.
“It started to feel like the church wasn’t about faith anymore,” she said. “It was about fear and control, about who was in and who was out.”
“For white evangelicals, I believe part of the waking up often happens to waking up to bigger issues of justice and privilege — i.e., when white folks realize that theirs (which is to say mine) isn’t the only story and perspective,” Meredith said. Her process of disentanglement took 20 years.
Meredith said some people choose to leave over “monumental” cultural events — like the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the insurrection at the Capitol, or the government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis in Trump’s first term and its current treatment of immigrants.
“But to me, it doesn’t tend to be one big thing,” she said, “as much as it tends to be a series of lots of little things that make you realize, ‘Hey, something’s not right.’”
It started to feel like the church wasn’t about faith anymore. It was about fear and control, about who was in and who was out.Amy Hawk, author of ″The Judas Effect: How Evangelicals Betrayed Jesus for Power”
Meredith, who is also the author of “The Color of Life: A Journey Toward Love and Racial Justice,” explained how MAGA-aligned Christianity often reinforces systems that benefit white communities — even as many congregants remain unaware of its racial and political implications.
“While some white evangelicals are beginning to reckon with both racial injustice and the influence of nationalist ideology in their churches, others turn a blind eye, trusting pastors unquestioningly.”
Meredith’s journey toward seeing the “image of God in everyone” underscores how ignoring racial realities, or dismissing progressive “woke” values from the pulpit, can perpetuate harm and marginalize voices seeking justice within the faith community. “They’re not questioning the influence of tyranny from the pulpit because how or why could a pastor lead them astray?”
Those who spoke to HuffPost cited common triggers for their disengagement: moral dissonance between Gospel ethics and political messaging, political trauma within congregations, concerns about racial and immigrant justice, and a growing loss of trust in church leadership.
Hawk observes, “In the ten years since Trump came on the scene, I have learned that white evangelical spaces don’t follow Jesus as closely as they pretend to. In fact, there has been a mass indoctrination into the Republican Party that looks absolutely nothing like the Christ they claim to serve. I have learned that political power means more to many of them than actual truth.”
The Exit Costs Of Leaving MAGA Christianity
Meredith reflects on the consequences of leaving: “When you’re in, you’re in. But when you’re out, you’re out. You’re cast to the side.”
She described the loss when the community that once supported you, praying for you, celebrating milestones, dropping off casseroles, watching your kids, just disappears: “When that place, and perhaps even more, those people are gone, well, then there’s a deep void that happens just not in your soul, but in your calendar and your text messages and your social media apps, too.”
Some have redefined their faith entirely, keeping what feels authentic and leaving behind what felt performative. “Evangelical culture can be wonderful, when it’s led by truth, by mutual respect and by humility,” said Hawk. Others have sought new ways to practice their faith, building communities outside politicized churches.
“I’m still a Christian,” Rollins said. “I think that Christianity is a beautiful religion that speaks to the problem of evil but also offers hope and grace. I still hold on to a lot of what I learned about Christianity as a child, but I’ve certainly deconstructed the prosperity gospel, the perfectionism, the white supremacy and nationalism, and the hyper-individualism that permeates so much of the Western church.”
Hawk said her faith now, outside of those spaces, is much freer. “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me,” she said. “My favorite verse now is Galatians 5:1, which I believe is an indictment against religious structures, rules, and conformance.”
Rollins hopes the broader church will confront its contradictions: “I wish very much that the church would deconstruct nationalism, and would preach not just about personal morality, but about Jesus’ teachings regarding caring for the poor, the orphans and the foreigners.”
The exit costs of leaving a high-control faith group include isolation and feeling rejected by the communities that raised you. RUNSTUDIO via Getty Images
For those who have left or are thinking about leaving their churches, the question of belonging looms large. Meredith says that the fear of losing that sense of belonging often keeps people tethered to spaces that no longer align with their beliefs.
“God, the power of belonging is so real,” she said. “There are two words I write in every copy of ‘Church Camp’ that I sign: ‘You belong.’ I desperately want people to believe that they belong — not because of membership or participation in a religious institution — but simply because they’re human. You belong, because you’re human. That’s it.”
At the same time, Meredith encourages those questioning their faith to explore boldly: “Don’t be afraid to ask the big questions, to figure out what you really believe, to see if you might find or experience belonging outside of the circle of influence you’ve always called home.”
“There are other places for you, both in and out of the church,” Sugiuchi said. “If you need to be part of a church, find a progressive church. Read up on religious trauma. Reach out to people who will support you. Read books like ’Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church.’ Know you are not alone. You can be free.”
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