Make American Think Again
He mocked a disabled reporter. The fever didn’t break.
He admitted to sexually assaulting women. The fever didn’t break.
He cheated on his porn star wife with another porn star. The fever didn’t break.
He paid a porn star hush money to hide his affair. The fever didn’t break.
He expressed a desire to date his daughter “if she weren’t my daughter.” The fever didn’t break.
In remarks about Nancy O’Dell he openly remarked, “I moved on her actually…I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her. She was married." The fever didn’t break.
About Steffi Graff he said, “You never get to the face because the body's so good." The fever didn’t break.
He was convicted of federal crimes. The fever didn’t break.
He was convicted as a sexual predator. The fever didn’t break.
He sexually harrassed a young White House staffer who had to be protected by other women from his predatorial behavior. The fever didn’t break.
He held a Neo-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden filled with racist tropes, jokes, and dehumanizing ideology. The fever didn’t break.
He threatened to kill a female political opponent. The fever didn’t break.
He echoed Hitler and Nazi propaganda by labeling his political opponents “vermin.” The fever didn’t break.
He accused Haitian Americans of eating pets. The fever didn’t break.
He is a pathological liar and malignant narcissist. The fever didn’t break.
He labeled the press, “The enemy of the people.” The fever didn’t break.
He cozied up to dictators and quoted Hitler. The fever didn’t break.
His wife went on stage to announce, “My husband is not Adolf Hitler.” The fever didn’t break.
He confessed his wish to become dictator on “day one” of his new presidency. The fever didn’t break.
He encouraged a treasonous insurrection of the United States government. The fever didn’t break.
He promised mass deportations. The fever didn’t break.
He undermined the validity of American elections. The fever didn’t break.
He denied the reality of Covid-19. The fever didn’t break.
He is the most craven, criminal, cruel, and heinous politician in American history and the fever has yet to break because Trumpism is a political cult within a religious cult.
82% of white evangelicals who will line up in goose-step tomorrow morning to vote for Donald Trump for the third consecutive time. These same people who confess “Jesus is Lord” on Sunday will bow down to their orange calf on Tuesday. I’ve spent the better part of the last eight years trying to make sense of this madness. I’ve had honest conversations with my family and friends about their unyielding loyalty to Trumpism. I’ve listed his litany of crimes and offenses. They don’t care. The needle never moves. The spell remains unbroken. Why? For starters, Donald Trump hates the very same people (women, People of Color, the LGBTQIA community) they hate. But there’s something even more sinister at work here.
As I watched Trump’s racist rally in Madison Square Garden last week, I kept asking myself how ordinary people could fall for such blatant dehumanization, cruelty, white supremacy, and hatred. It mirrored a Nuremberg Rally. Angry white people raging against a changing culture, holding fast to regressive policies that attempt to keep them on top of a social, gendered, and racial hierarchy of oppression. Like every good cult, Trump plays on isolation, ignorance, fear, an “us vs them” mentality, and a rigid ideology of unquestioned beliefs and loyalty to him as supreme leader. Sounds a lot like the majority of white, evangelical churches.
The term cult comes from the Latin cultus, meaning worship and it refers to a group of people sequestered either physically or mentally away from society who hold to atypical and outlandish beliefs due to their excessive zeal and unquestioning commitment to an authoritarian leader.
In most cults, leaders dictate what members wear (MAGA hat), what they think, who they are against, and what they are willing to do to keep the cult members pure from outside influence. Cults embody a polarizing worldview which leads to conflict with the outside world. They intuitively believe they are the few and the faithful, holding out against the onslaught of society. Cult leaders are not accountable to authority structures, and the leader ensures his exalted ends justify all evil means. Cults rob individuals of self-determination and agency, preaching submission and belonging as the highest of virtues. Most cults are male-driven and preoccupied with money, sex, and power. Cults are characterized by apocalyptic thinking, believing a future cataclysmic event will rescue them from their Oedipal-like persecution complex. Cult members engage in aggressive proselytizing, believing it their responsibility to force their beliefs on others. Cue the fragile, white male driving his oversized pick-up truck emblazoned with Trump flags waiving out the back or the white spiritual colonizer who preaches damnation to a captive audience on an airplane. Cult members believe it their duty to force their beliefs on others.
In political or religious cults, you get in by belief, and you get out by belief. Dissent or questioning is not allowed. Dogged certainty is their raison d’etre. And in the center of every cult is the leader, “separated by an inner circle who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery,” writes psychologist Alexandra Stein.
If you grew up in evangelical Christianity all of this sounds, well, normal. Which is why the needle never moves and the spell remains unbroken.
Once you see white evangelicalism through the lens of cult language and behavior, everything makes sense. “Evangelical Christianity is one big delusion, and nothing is what they say it is. I went into it looking for love, acceptance, and a family and found only disappointment,” writes Adam Becker. I not only found disappointment, but abject rejection and abandonment by my friends, family, and co-workers once I had the courage to get out.
Like any good cult, white evangelicalism also exists atop a cascading foundation of lies. Were you told at an early age you were special and a persecuted minority holding out against the secular world? Were you encouraged to remain pure from outside forces and people? That is cult-like thinking. Were you encouraged to openly proselytize sinners whether they wanted to be preached to or not? Cult behavior. Did your religious community caution you to only befriend “like-minded” believers and marry in the ranks? Again, cultish. What about the idolized male pastor who functioned in a system utterly void of checks and balances? If you are like me, you thought academia was the enemy, and the more you learned from credentialed professors the more likely you were to walk away from the faith. We went to Summer camps (Summit Ministries) where uncredentialled insiders groomed us to fear the outside world while playing on our emotions and manipulated our minds. We were the good guys. I learned early on to never trust my gut, making me easy prey for abusers.
We were groomed to fight the culture wars, bring our Bible to the flagpole, march in “pro-life” rallies, and stand watch outside abortion clinics. We were blind to the fact our little communities of faith were predominantly white and built on preserving white, male, heterosexual power. We went to Christian schools and Christian universities where the dissemination of information was highly selective and egregiously biased. We were trained in dualistic thinking, believing the world was easily divided into good and bad, right and wrong, gay and straight, saved and unsaved. The pay-off? This carefully curated community of forced conformity functioned as marriage factories where two young people groomed in group think married one another only to start the cycle all over again with their progeny.
Fear, fundamentalism, and the unflinching refusal to change are sure signs of a cult-like community. After all the scandals, sexual perversion, and white supremacy, white evangelicals will once again ‘ride or die’ with Trump. His cult isn’t a lot different from their church cult. Same lies, same ideas, same hatred of the very same outsiders. The spell remains unbroken. The needle is not going to move. On Holy Heretics, Dr. David Gushee remarked:
“It is going to be likely impossible to argue evangelicals away from their loyalty unless something cataclysmic happens…In other words, the Hitler spell stayed with a significant chunk of the Germany population all the way into 1945. Even after his death and the catastrophes that he brought on Germany and the world, there were still diehards who secretly gathered in their homes and expressed undying loyalty to him even after he was gone…Passions can grip people. Divisions can take hold and factions can become so hardened that it becomes a zone of excessive love and excessive hate and excessive loyalty and excessive irrationality. Such moments in any country are very dangerous and I really feel like we have, not a majority, but a substantial minority who are in the grip of something not healthy and not rational, not arguable, like a fever that has to break and it hasn’t broken yet.”
Because of their dominator theology and good old-fashioned white supremacy, evangelical Christians can be counted on as the primary supporters of dictatorial politics and cult behavior. Trump is merely the political manifestation of their theological and religious dreams. It seems the Apostle Paul’s prophecy is coming true. “God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting.” Will they ever wake up? Honestly, I’m not sure.
I stopped talking about politics and religion with my family because I believed it was the only way we could remain in a relationship. I’m now questioning that decision. Without talking about hard things, people never change. Without confronting lies, people remain programmed. Intervention is difficult, but it is necessary.
If your family and friends are still spellbound, here’s a few practical ways to help them wake up and get out of the MAGA movement.
Maintain Contact: Try to maintain positive lines of communication without shaming or belittling their behavior.
Be Curious: Ask questions about their beliefs and why they believe them. Ask questions about their group to help them put into words why they find this new community so appealing. The goal is to get them to begin thinking again for themselves.
Model Subversive Inclusion: Cults are fearful and exclusive by nature. Model radical hospitality and inclusive compassion, especially toward your friends and family who remain captivated in cult behavior.
Set Relational Boundaries and Stick To them: Cult dynamics erode personal boundaries. Establish clear boundaries and communicate why they are important for you and your loved ones.
Celebrate Progress: Acknowledge and celebrate every step your family takes towards breaking free. Positive reinforcement can strengthen their resolve and help them recognize how far they’ve come.
Few people ever leave a cult unless they want to. But we did. Millions of us have gotten out, educated ourselves, healed from the trauma, and found new communities. The first step toward freedom is helping your loved one’s wake up to the underlying motivations that led them here. Ask them why they are so afraid and who they are afraid of. I reminded my family that when Trump speaks of destroying the “enemy from within,” he is talking about me and my family. Do they wish to cause me harm?
If you’ve witnessed a friend or family member leave a political or religious cult, what was the turning point? “Under the right circumstances, even sane, rational, well-adjusted people can be deceived and persuaded to believe the most outrageous things,” writes Psychology Today writer Dr. Stephen Hassan.
Start with you. Get your facts straight, recognize your biases, control your desire to control them, and rebuild a relationship that can slowly, over a long period of time, lead toward freedom.
Gary Alan Taylor
The greatest danger to the future of American democracy is white, evangelical Christians.