I was born in Milwaukee, but I mainly grew up in Monett, a small town in southwestern Missouri. When I was small, my mom was a bit of a 1960s hippie. She got involved in the American Indian movement and the ecology movement. 

My dad was a hard-core Republican, and he persuaded my mom to become one too. But it was religion that played by far the largest role in forming me – and in shaping my later embrace of MAGA.

When my mom was young, she went to Sunday school at a Southern Baptist church, although it was mainly to escape an abusive home environment. My dad was raised Methodist, but he had stopped going to church at some point. Then when I was around 10, he diagnosed the problems of early 1970s America as resulting from the country’s moral decline. So he started with what he knew, the Methodist Church. 

But he wasn’t spiritually satisfied. My parents embarked on a wide-ranging church search: Mormons, Baptists, you name it – we checked out everything. One night we went to a prayer meeting in a park led by an African Assemblies of God preacher who was touring the US. At one point he walked past my mother and abruptly stuck his finger in her ear. She decided she had been healed, and that was the selling point that God was real – at least the God preached in Assemblies of God churches.

The Assemblies of God’s main focus was on the coming end times. We were all about the Book of Revelation. We would attend two to three-hour Bible study sessions dedicated to it. Hal Lindsay’s book Late Great Planet Earth and the movie based on it were very popular in our church. Its prophecy that the world was ending dovetailed with what the pastor preached. We engaged in a lot of intercessory prayer for the salvation of the world. 

Meanwhile, from the time I was 8 until I was 11 or 12, my mom’s father – unbeknownst to my parents – sexually abused me and four of my cousins. We were taught in church that sex between men was an abomination against God. As I grew into my teenage years, we were raised in Purity Culture, where one’s “value for marriage” was based on one’s virginity, while those who had sinned faced a future of hellfire and eternal damnation. I coped with that cognitive dissonance by blocking the abuse out of my mind for many years, so much so that I had no memories of those two-week visits every summer with my maternal grandparents.

I was very devout. I believed demons and angels were real and the anti-Christ was coming. I dogmatically studied Scripture. We were taught that it was more important to understand what the Bible (only the King James version) said about the world than to really know the world. We were in the world but not of the world.

By the time I was in 6th grade, I carried the Bible to school every day. In high school, I would wear the uniform of my church youth group, the Royal Rangers. It was like the Boy Scouts, but focused on spiritual, rather than social, growth. It taught us skills for surviving Doomsday, like how to build a campsite out of little more than a ball of twine.

My parents listened to James Dobson of Focus on the Family. They were also big fans of Pat Roberston, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. We had to go to a neighbor’s house to watch the Bakkers’ PTL and Robertson’s 700 Club, because we didn’t have cable. The adults would watch TV and us kids would play in the basement.

Our religion was deeply entangled with politics; in the eyes of our church, they were the same thing. 

I was a strong-willed kid when I was in high school. I often wouldn’t listen to my parents, which would earn me a beating. I had been intent on going to college to become an electrical engineer. But after speaking to an Air Force recruiter when I was 17, I dropped that idea and decided I wanted to sign up after graduation. Kill a Commie for mommy, that sort of thing. Besides, soldier was one of the four professions we were taught in church to aspire to, along with pastor, politician, and businessman.

Once I joined the Air Force, I worked for 19 months at the Air Force Weapons Lab at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. Then I spent 2 ½ years with the 819th Red Horse civil engineering squadron. “Red Horse” was short for “Rapid Engineers Deployable Heavy Operations Repair Squadron.” We were basically airborne Seabees.

I got married while I was stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base. I had just turned 20. We got divorced three years later, when I left the military in 1987.

Two years later, I married a woman who had a child from a previous relationship. We had a son together. I ended up working as an automotive electrician in the limousine industry. I worked on and off as a chauffeur, and eventually rose to be chief operations officer of a small factory that built secondary control systems for limos, like for the TV’s and stereos.

Unfortunately, during my entire 27-year marriage my wife and I were heavy meth users. That led us into some risky sexual behavior. For me, I was rebelling against the Purity Culture I was raised in. Also, growing up as a charismatic evangelical, I knew that if I sinned I could ask for forgiveness and the slate would be wiped clean. I considered it a “Get out of Jail Free” card. That let me justify doing a lot of really dumb stuff. 

My spiritual path had shifted after I joined the military. Moving away from home gave me the opportunity to explore the world for myself. I looked into a lot of faith systems: paganism, natural magic, natural magnetism, Solomonic magic, and Wicca. 

I found myself closer to “green” or “kitchen” witches, people who work with herbs and plants. I came to believe that a kitchen witch doing an incantation over a cough potion had a lot in common with a Christian saying a prayer for someone’s healing. They were both putting out positive energy to a higher power in hopes of getting a beneficial return. It hit me that just because someone isn’t a Christian, it doesn’t mean they’re headed to Hell.

I concluded that my religion was too harsh against sinners. And I no longer believed in the end of days prophecy.

But I held true to my hard-core conservative political ideology. I bought into a lot of conspiracy theories. I believed there was a cabal of globalists in a shadow Communist government working to take over the world and enslave us all. I also thought the US government was going to set up a dictatorship. I was a devout NRA and Charlton Heston fan.

I even joined a militia in the early 90s. That lasted for about two years. The militia dissolved after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. 

After the 9/11 attacks, my head went to the Red Dawn scenario (the 1984 film about a Soviet/Cuban/Nicaraguan invasion and occupation of the US). I felt we were getting ready to go to war. I remember sitting on my living room floor watching coverage while I cleaned every gun I had. 

I didn’t pay much attention to politics in the ensuing years. I was building my career in the limo industry, smoking meth most nights, and enduring a lot of emotional and physical abuse from my wife. She poisoned me twice and stabbed me once, which earned her some time behind bars. I finally left her for good in March of 2016, after she told me I should kill myself. She’s the reason I eventually became an advocate against domestic violence.

After I left my wife, I started paying much more attention to politics. I supported Donald Trump for a few reasons. For one thing, he talked about the Epstein list and the need to protect children. That meant a lot to me as someone who was sexually assaulted as a child and was taught growing up that it was my duty as a good Christian soldier to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves. 

I loved that Trump used a lot of the rhetoric I heard from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. As a Reaganite Cold War veteran, the “Make America Great Again” slogan really resonated with me, as did his talk about American exceptionalism being under threat. Finally, I considered America to be a corporatocracy, so why not have a businessman as president?

I conveniently ignored all the women accusing him of sexual abuse. I couldn’t handle that cognitive dissonance. Fox was saying it wasn’t what it looked like. I discounted anything CNN reported, because I was told it was corrupt, owned by villainous globalists (which for a lot of us in MAGA was code for Jews). 

I rode the bandwagon, and when Trump was elected, I believed whatever he said. I was in the echo chamber and did not ask questions. I learned that from my church upbringing, which robbed me of my rational thinking skills. When Trump had to bail out the farmers the first time I believed he’d gotten the money to do it from China. When he imposed the Muslim ban, I believed Muslims were definitely a threat, so I supported it. I thought it was harsh, but I could see where he was coming from.

Trump’s comment about there being “fine people on both sides” after the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally didn’t quite sit right with me. That was the first pinprick, but my MAGA bubble was strong. 

When the pandemic hit, I became much more extreme. I shifted to more far-right platforms, like Rumble, Odysee, and Pilled. I read a lot of articles from the Gateway Pundit, which does a lot of rage baiting. I stopped watching Fox — my new favorites called it “woke” because they didn’t consider it right wing enough. I even thought Hannity was a CIA operative. 

The influencers I followed said Trump was a genius, smarter than the scientists. That turned me against Dr. Fauci. When Trump launched Operation Warp Speed, it was easy to deflect because the influencers said he had just gotten bad advice from his inner circle. However, I didn’t buy into all the fear mongering and conspiracy theories about how the vaccine was weaponized to kill people. 

I didn’t have a problem with Trump’s hyperbolic suggestions, such as injecting bleach. I believed he didn’t really mean it, that he was just trolling his enemies. At the same time, I was watching the numbers of people infected skyrocket, and when Trump suggested the numbers would stop rising if we stopped testing people, I thought, “That’s just dumb.” That was another chip in the MAGA armor.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, I was all in on Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign. I spent all my time online, interacting with my compatriots in our alt-right echo chambers. I believed all the conspiracy theories, such as the ones about rigged voting machines. I ruined the relationship I was in at the time because I was ignoring my girlfriend.

After the January 6 attack, I accepted all the conspiracy theories that it was Antifa, not Trump supporters, who had stormed the Capitol. I ignored certain details, like Trump waiting three hours to tell people to leave.

People in my echo chambers amplified my social media content and tried to recruit me into Kekistan (a digital environment that’s as far right as it can get). When I looked around in that space, I found things that were outright offensive. Some content was straight up disgusting. More than one character in there openly admits to being a National Socialist. But they would say, “We’re not Nazis, we’re National Socialists.” It was all beyond the pale for me.

Later on in 2021, I came across a video that started me down the path of deconstructing my religion and my politics. It was from Nov. 5, 2020, two days after the presidential election. Biden was on the verge of securing enough electoral votes to win. The Rev. Paula White — now head of the White House Faith Office — led a marathon prayer service in Orlando, Florida calling for divine intervention to defeat the “demonic confederacies” aligned against Trump’s reelection. She said “angelic forces” had been dispatched from Africa and South America to make sure Trump won. Remember, I had moved pretty far away from my old Assemblies of God beliefs, so I found her rhetoric dangerous. That was the big crack in my MAGA bubble that ended up shattering my illusions.

I started doing some intensive research, wanting to know more about how we had gotten to that point. That’s when I started my deconstruction, really questioning what I was taught in the Assemblies of God. I investigated Paula White, and found her affiliation with Kenneth Copeland, another big figure in the Prosperity Gospel movement who my dad would drive an hour to hear preach when I was a kid. I had already turned my back on Copeland. I checked out Flashpoint, a program started by Copeland’s ministries in 2020 to help Trump win reelection. There’s a whole gaggle of Christian nationalists there.

I was asking a lot of questions, even questioning the answers I was finding. I started conducting comparative cult studies. I did a ton of research on the history of Scientology. I discovered Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Mike Flynn, is a Christian Nationalist and a prime amplifier of QAnon mythology. I dug into the history of the Assemblies of God church. I learned about the racist pasts of other prominent evangelicals.  

All my illusions were shattered. Everything I learned explained why I had found myself Nazi-adjacent in the underbelly of the MAGA movement. I had come across truths I had to defend or walk away from.

My religious deconstruction led to my political deconstruction. I looked back at the “stop the steal” campaign and Jan. 6, and I recognized the whole thing for the psyop that it was. 

I spent thousands of hours on my research and deconstruction over a couple of years. I was angry I had wasted a good chunk of my life on my old religious beliefs and on MAGA.  

I broke for good from MAGA when Trump put out a campaign video in 2023 in which he talked about cleaning up city streets by moving homeless people into camps. I was homeless for about two months in 2016, so that hit really close to my heart. That was my hard stop.

On July 31, 2023, I made a meme out of a photo of a house stripped down to its joists, studs, and rafters. I posted it on my social media platforms as a symbol of how I had stripped myself down to the bare essentials, ready to be rebuilt into a new man. Once I publicly renounced MAGA, I got lots of death threats, including from the far-right internet trolls who used to be my comrades.

For a while I had a hard time explaining to people why I left MAGA. It took me a while to boil it down to this: I have morals.

I no longer live in the MAGA information bubble. I rely on commentators like Jesse Dollemore (a former Republican political operative who is now a progressive), who calls out MAGA-centric preachers. I also follow Kyle Kulinski, Adam Mockler, and April Ajoy (a former Christian Nationalist who has written a book on the movement). 

I now attend Gethsemane Lutheran, a member of the progressive Evangelical Lutheran Churches of America. I’m on the church’s social action committee. We do a lot of work advocating for the homeless in St. Louis. We’re starting a new project, Respite Harbor, designed to be a homeless outreach and trauma recovery haven at the church. In addition, I’m close to being certified as a Peer Support Specialist. 

I’m also off meth, which I gave up in early 2019.

I find everything about the second Trump administration absolutely repugnant. I have a strong passion for protecting immigrants, and I’m repulsed by Trump’s mass deportation campaign. I believe it lines up with the history of the fascist movement in the US, going back to the German American Bund and the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. 

I’m planning to write a couple of books. One will focus on my deconstruction. Part of the working title is: “A journey from ‘Submit to God and Dominate the World’ to ‘Consent is my Love Language.’

                                                                                                                                                                                    —December 2025