Damned Christians

[Fake Messiah]

People Who Left 'MAGA Christianity' Share What It Really Took To Step Away

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.”

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.’”

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.

Anna Rollins, author of “Famished: On Food, Sex, 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.”

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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, 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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/maga-chri...31edf8/amp