I grew up in Dallas in the 90s, in a very religiously conservative household. We attended conservative fundamentalist evangelical Baptist churches. We were Independent Fundamental Baptists.

Our church was very critical of both political parties, although it was more opposed to Democrats than Republicans. In the end, the church would not support any government official who didn’t bend the knee to Christ in every way possible.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, I heard a lot of comments in church about him being the anti-Christ. I was just 13, and I was ready for the rapture to happen at any moment. That was very much ingrained in me.

A lot of the opposition had to do with Obama’s criticisms of Israel and his attempts to negotiate peace in the Middle East. I think there was also an element of racism involved. The argument that Obama was the anti-Christ stemmed from the belief that his skin color was the mark of Cain — there was a lot of that going around in fundamentalist baptist circles.

So we were taught that America was going to be the center of all sorts of conflict and turmoil, and our president was the anti-Christ.

My parents didn’t care about any of that. They put us in church to learn the values it taught. We were very pro-life; we wanted to see Roe v. Wade overturned. Our church community was very tight-knit; everyone knew everyone. We were quiverfull adherents, so lots of families had six, seven, eight kids. You saw a lot of stay-at-home moms, most homeschooling their kids.

Our value system also included a belief in the strong masculine father. We saw things organized under the umbrella of headship: Jesus at the top overseeing the world, then the husband overseeing the family, then the wife overseeing the children.

As I came of age, I knew I was conservative, but I was very critical of politicians in general. After high school, I went to Kilgore College for two years, studying philosophy and world religion. I got married in 2016.

When Trump ran for president the first time, I was definitely more of a Ted Cruz guy. He was like a good-old-boy Republican, very much in the vein of George Bush, Sr., advocating for fiscal responsibility. I looked at Trump’s running as a joke.

I didn’t think Trump had a chance. The Republican Party had always been the party of the “moral majority,” but Trump was not moral. He’d been married three times, and there were all those allegations of sexual abuse. That’s not moral. I thought, “If we run this guy we’re going to be called hypocrites.”

When Trump got the nomination, I held my nose and voted for him because I did not want Hillary Clinton in the White House, and because of my pro-life values.

I didn’t think Trump would rule as a conservative, but when he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court right after taking office, I was happy. I saw it as a sign that he was serious about governing like a conservative.

When Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and said he would move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I considered that a good thing, a sign he was pro-Israel.

Around that time, I left the Baptish church and joined the Orthodox Prebyterian Church. Then I moved into the theonomic Christian nationalist space. Theonomy is a grassroots movement that seeks to codify the Bible as the foundation of our government. Everyone would have to swear allegiance to the Bible. I got into it after reading a lot of theologians from 400-500 years ago who argued that the church needs to inform the state about what its morals and laws should be. I started to think that’s how it should be today.

I was very happy that Trump was mirroring a lot of Christian Nationalist rhetoric. I started listening to right-wing influencers, like Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Tucker Carlson. You hear something enough, you start to believe it.

That’s how I ended up in MAGA for about a year.

I was very involved in pro-life circles. I would protest outside abortion clinics; sometimes I would even take my 2-year-old son with me.

I participated in a lot of online conversations, and I did some podcasting. I would go on conservative Christian podcasts, sometimes guest hosting, to defend Trump’s policies on biblical grounds (along with a lot of conversations about theology).

I started to believe the Muslim travel ban was a good thing, on the grounds that we were keeping out terrorists. I adopted very conservative positions on taxation; I backed tax cuts for the rich. If someone called for raising taxes on the 1%, I would call it socialism. I thought whatever Trump did was the Christian thing to do, and anything else was socialism.

I dismissed the investigations into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia as politically motivated. I didn’t take his comments about Vladimir Putin that seriously, either. I excused them by saying, “Oh he just said that because Putin said nice things about him.”

The one thing that troubled me was Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants. I overlooked it for a long time, but as we got into 2019, I started to look into what he was saying and doing on immigration. I went back to the Bible.

I re-read Malachi 3:5 (“So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against…those who…deprive the foreigners among you of justice…”); Matthew 25:40 (whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’) and 25:45 (“…whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”); and Leviticus 19:33-34 (“‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”)

I realized that from a biblical standpoint, Trump’s policies towards immigrants were antithetical to what the Bible says we should do. I researched the things Trump said about immigrants, like when he called them vermin, murderers, and rapists, and claimed other countries were emptying their asylums and sending those people here. I also educated myself about his accusation that immigrants commit an outrageous number of crimes in our country. I found none of it was true.

I found Trump’s attempt to overturn DACA particularly abhorrent. Many of those people were 2, 3, 6 years old when they were brought to the US. They know nothing of their countries of origin. You’d be sending them back to a life of poverty and death.

So I left MAGA. I started doing research in other areas beyond immigration. Eventually, I abandoned my absolutist position against abortion. I realized overturning Roe was not the best way to stop abortion. We need to find other ways to give women reasons not to have abortions, like providing affordable child care and health care.

When news broke in September 2019 that Trump had tried to extort Ukraine in exchange for false information about corruption among the Bidens, I was angry. After Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, the last thing we needed was a president who threatened the safety of Ukraine. (His siding with Putin over Ukraine now is the logical consequence of what came before.)

I was completely opposed to how Trump handled the Covid pandemic. After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, I lost all faith in the Republican Party. I expected Trump to do something stupid; what I didn’t expect is for nearly the entire Republican party to line up behind him and defend him.

I went through a political identity crisis. Republican Trump critics like Mitt Romney were retiring. There were no sane Republicans left. It made me think there’s something in the water in conservatism that allowed Trump to come in and poison everything.

After I left MAGA and the GOP, I realized I no longer believed a lot of Christian Nationalism thought, so I dropped it completely.

Of course, not all conservatives are like that. Many are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Those are the types of conservatives we need back.

The GOP has made it its job to be everyone’s moral police. That’s a problem for those of us who see our morality as being private between us and God and between us and our spouses. I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do with my body, or in my bedroom. Why would I want to tell someone else what to do with their body or in their bedroom?

The evangelical church has been backing the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, but it didn’t happen to the extent that it is now. The first time Trump ran, evangelical leaders said he was the lesser of two evils. The second time around, they said he was God’s candidate. The third time around, they said he’s the new Messiah.

I took a step back from politics throughout the Biden years; I didn’t have much of an issue with how he was running the country. When Trump ran again, I started to be more vocal. After he took office in January and I saw his immigration policies, I became politically active. I started holding “know your rights” talks with communities in east Texas.

The struggle continues against Trump, one of the most divisive people we’ve ever had in American politics.

                                                                                                                                                               — January 2025