Here's Why MAGA Doesn't Care Fascism is Rising
We need to protect our First Amendment rights now more than ever
Democrats and centrists keep ringing alarm bells over authoritarianism and fascism, and I can tell you from experience that evangelical Christian Republicans don’t see either as a bad thing.
Our First Amendment rights are under more fire now than our Second Amendment rights ever were, and yet where are the armed masses backed by the NRA fighting against tyranny? As predicted, many of them are not actually against tyranny—they’ve sided with it, joining ICE and terrorizing law-abiding citizens.
There’s no free speech in Christian Fundamentalism. Authoritarianism is preached as God’s design. The conservative right has been groomed their whole lives to accept what their leadership taught from the top down.
Evangelical pastors had a real opportunity to spread the love of God and mercy throughout the globe, and they missed it. Traded it, rather, for power. The people would’ve done whatever they taught. Their critical thinking had long ago been swapped for obedience and following. So much of where we are today weighs on the shoulders of evangelical leadership and their filthy lust for power and control.
Once they started, they just kept going, drilling down on hate. Empathy, the emotion that allows you to relate to another’s experience and feel compassion that moves you to make changes that relieve pain and suffering, is vilified in American Christianity today.
And before you Not All Christians me, I know. Christianity is not a monolithic system. For years, I said I wasn’t talking about the ones “doing it right,” because my work is to expose abuse, not cheerlead. But I missed a chance, too.
The “not all Christians” argument is right, not to defend a system of belief, but to hold believers responsible for not cleaning their house, protecting their name, and being bolder to defend their faith. So often, I hear from mainline or cultural Christians who have no idea what’s been going on in Christian Fundamentalism, and since whistleblowers and survivors have been warning America for over a decade, I think that ignorance is increasingly on them. Why would it be on secular society to hold any kind of Christian accountable for faith-based abuse?
So while the rest of us are cultivating ulcers, bald spots, high anxiety, and nausea over the rising tide of authoritarianism, Christian Nationalists are thinking, “Yippee! Daddy’s in control!”
While fascism increases, with illegal searches in journalists' homes and suppression tactics on every platform, Christian Nationalists are thinking, “Good! We don’t have to tolerate what they say anymore!”
They aren’t worried about billionaires taking over: in church, billionaires and other wealthy folks are respected and adored as the richly blessed. You can’t fight people who believe in a prosperity gospel by suggesting that being a billionaire is a bad thing. They disagree.
I, like so many content creators and thought leaders who’ve deconstructed and healed from religious trauma, spend every day educating the “not alls” and secular folks on what authoritarianism in Christian Fundamentalism looks like, because they’re the ones who don’t know and care to learn. But Christian Nationalists are not alarmed by what we see, because it makes them feel safe and rewarded for the trade they made.
Here’s where survivor-turned-educator is supposed to come in with a hot solution that will really work to break a cult spell and make Christians care about people, rights, and freedom again. But you know what? I can’t do that. The world is fucking upside down, and we’re treading water in front of people who literally believe their God was right when he burned cities, flooded the planet, and rained fire. From their earliest childhood, they’ve been immersed in stories where a select few who love the big, scary God threatening ruin and violence will save them while killing off every other ordinary citizen going about their day. They also think this is literal history.
What the survivor-turned-educator is doing is finding solace in statistics.
There are 348 million Americans.
77,302,580 dubious votes were cast for Trump in 2024.
The difference: 270,679,742
Today’s Newsweek numbers reported that 53.7 percent of people disapproved of Trump.
I remember sitting in church in the late 1980s while the pastors warned that soon, sometime after 2020, which sounded so preposterously far in the future, the racial demographics of the country would change. White people would become the minority unless something happened to change that. The heat was on to make more babies, especially white Christian babies.
As of 2020, 57.8% of the U.S. population was White, 18.7% was Hispanic, 12.1% was Black, and 5.9% was Asian. Another 4.1% were people of two or more races, and all other groups* were under 1%. Fear of losing the racial majority is why evangelical pastors like mine followed the census so carefully. Rather than grow their tolerance, capacity, and flexibility, they doubled down on the past: white antebellum values and fear.
Ironically, we are a minority ruled country at the moment. The majority of our country isn’t evangelical Christian Nationalists. They aren’t even the same kind of Christian. While 62% of Americans identify in polls as some variety of Christian, and church attendance has steadily plunged, MAGAs who want to see people suffer are only 3/10.
I mean, 3/10 from a faith group that claims to be about love and righteousness is still gross. But it’s not a majority. All they did was succeed in getting their perverted anti-Christ into office, their fundamentalist architecture in place, our institutions pillaged, and the rest of us plunged into despair and outrage. It’s not small, but it’s also not everything.
They created a self-fulfilling prophecy where people who’ve experienced their behavior won’t go near their faith system with a ten-foot pole. It didn’t used to be a stain to be an evangelical Christian, but it sure is now. Their accountability will be the loss of their buildings, choirs, classes, and congregations. Of course, none of that is needed to be a real Christian anyway; Jesus spread his ministry in open-air fields, on the water, and in homes.
But today’s modern evangelical is in for a wake-up call, no matter what happens in politics. I hope it ends in taxing churches, standards applied for sexual misconduct, and familial abuses, expansive theology that includes science, community care, research, progress, and inclusivity and diversity. In other words, the church today, completely transformed.
How? By the verse that has haunted me since Donald Trump first celebrated that he could grab women by the pussy, and Franklin Graham said, “I believe (God's, rather than Russia’s) hand was at work, and I think he's given Christians an opportunity.”
I was shocked that day, disgusted by the acceptance of this standard-bearer in exchange for power. This verse came to mind, and I don’t think there’s been a day since that I haven’t thought about it. I was once one of those earnest followers who would’ve done whatever leadership told me to do. I took their teaching seriously.
“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” II Chronicles 7:14
The 7/10 who don’t claim to be MAGA, and the 40% or so of Americans who don’t claim to be Christian, don’t face the same call to repentance. We know authoritarianism and fascism are dangerous and against our constitution and the spirit our country was founded to pursue. As a whole, we’ve been a nation learning from our mistakes, albeit often slowly and unevenly, and we knew enough to be sure we didn’t want to “make America great again,” because back then, we weren’t as great as we could be tomorrow. We know the Nazi’s learned from Jim Crow. The lesson was supposed to be to move on from all that, remember? We know better; we’re supposed to do better.
What I can tell you as a survivor-turned-educator is that I’m leaning into the future irrelevance of Christian Nationalism. I believe they will fall through their own mismanagement, lack of training, and beyond-their-depth blunders. Their father figure is dying. The heirs apparent will slap wrestle their way into the corner. I learned a long, long time ago that narcissists often undo themselves when given enough leeway, and this administration certainly has that in spades. Mar-a-lago-face will melt. Trials will come. But more than that…
…the way I crawled out of a cult the first time was to no longer allow them to have any relevance in my life. Obviously, we’re still in the action and advocacy season of this hellscape. But not for long. Morning is going to come. Our prize is enduring freedom, and WE are in control of keeping our eyes on it. I’ll never be an evangelical Christian again, a reality that is the fruit of their making, and that means what they want for me isn’t relevant to my life.
Go do the next right thing, friends. One foot in front of the other. We have bigger lives to live and a brighter future than this small-minded circle.
Comments of love, courage, and support welcome below.
What people keep missing is that this isn’t a bug in MAGA Christianity. It’s the feature. If you’ve been trained your whole life that obedience equals righteousness, then authoritarianism doesn’t look like fascism. It looks like order. Freedom of speech only matters when you believe dissent has value. If you believe God already settled the argument, silence feels holy.
Thank you. I badly needed to hear this today.