People Who Left 'MAGA Christianity' Share What It Really Took To Step Away
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.
Growing up Southern Baptist, Anna 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.”
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.
“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.”
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.”
“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.
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.
According to Levings, 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.
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.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leaving-m...a4c3879fa2
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.
Growing up Southern Baptist, Anna 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.”
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.
“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.”
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.”
“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.
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.
According to Levings, 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.
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.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leaving-m...a4c3879fa2
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
