In October 2016, when an audio recording surfaced of Donald Trump bragging to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that he could kiss and grope the genitals of any woman he pleased because he was a star, one of America’s most venerated evangelical scholars withdrew his endorsement of Trump’s presidential run. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Wayne Grudem’s reversal. Pastors, theologians, and academics revered the Harvard and Cambridge-educated ethicist, co-founder of The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and translator of the English Standard Version of the Bible.

Just three months before the tape was released, Grudem had penned an essay for the politically conservative publication Town Hall titled, “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice.” In it, he wrote, “I did not support Trump in the primary season. I even spoke against him at a pastors’ conference in February. But now I plan to vote for him. I do not think it is right to call him an ‘evil candidate.’ I think rather he is a good candidate with flaws.” His first reason justifying this support was what Clinton would do to the Supreme Court. Three months later, after the tapes were released, he told the same publication that Trump’s remarks were “morally evil.”

Fast forward to 2020, and Grudem would do another U-Turn and re-endorse Trump. This whipsaw would become a pattern for evangelical giants.

Still, way back in 2016, evangelicals did hold to certain standards. Those were the days before the president of the biggest evangelical institution of higher learning, Liberty University, was caught literally with his pants down (well, unzipped) aboard a yacht and next to a woman not his wife. It’s worth mentioning that the disgraced Jerry Falwell, Jr., was also an early religious adviser to Trump. Both Trump and Falwell would feel the heat of evangelical opprobrium—and then be subsequently reinstated.

Trump did face a day of reckoning immediately after the release of the Access Hollywood clip. Pastor James MacDonald, then of the enormous Harvest Bible Church in Elgin, Illinois, and a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Committee, condemned what he heard on the tape as “lecherous and worthless.” What’s more, he publicly resigned from his coveted role on the campaign. The next day, the hugely popular Christian Post would report that a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll revealed that Trump’s evangelical support had “plummeted” by 11 points. Clearly, this wasn’t the end. Both Grudem and MacDonald would return to the fold and applaud Trump’s accomplishments. In a post-election interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Pat Robertson, Evangelical publishing titan, Steven Strang, of Charisma Media, pointed out that “God intervened” and evangelicals voted for Trump in record numbers, even though Trump was a guy “we didn’t even necessarily like.”

And so it all began. One of the maddening—and seemingly unanswerable—questions for many concerned Americans is how deeply religious Christian voters have remained so loyal to President Donald Trump despite his many divorces, relentless vulgarity, flagrant dishonesty, and conviction for sexual assault. And now with the recent controversies around the Epstein files, Trump’s friendship with the convicted child trafficker, and the vast conspiracy theories surrounding it all, this question seems even more urgent and baffling. How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?

How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?

To understand this frustrating phenomenon, one must appreciate that for white American evangelicals, Trump’s MAGA movement is, at its core, religious, which is how deeply religious voters experience it. Religious commitments don’t die or even change quickly or easily.  What drives the MAGA-religious is passion, identity, and even something so transcendent that it elevates a believer’s consciousness to unshakable sublimation to the leader—there are no unforgivable transgressions, and that includes pedophilia and sexual violence. For them, the Epstein affair is a ruse ginned up by God-haters who want to bring down the man who embodies their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, and their country. I know because, for much too long, I helped lay the groundwork for what is taking place today.

For over 40 years, I’ve been an evangelical minister, educated in evangelical institutions, serving in evangelical churches and organizations, and occupying top posts in evangelical denominations. I know my people well. My life and profession were devoted to advancing the Christian Gospel, but for 30 of my 40 years of ministry, I was also convinced that conservative political activism was an essential part of my calling. I attacked “liberals” from the pulpit and worked tirelessly to end legal abortion in America. It was a matter of faith for me and my colleagues that we were engaged in nothing less than a religious war, pitting right against wrong, the righteous against the godless, the Republicans against the Democrats.

But a few years before Donald Trump became president, I recognized how mistaken my fellow Christian nationalists and I were in conflating our religion with our politics. Some deep research for my late-in-life doctoral dissertation about the role of the German Evangelical church in supporting Hitler was the catalyst for a new conversion. I found myself almost looking in the mirror when reading about the unholy marriage of faith and politics and the catastrophic results of these compromises. I broke with my religious tribe and co-conspirators. Since then, I have been part of two very different worlds. One is occupied by (lower case “o”) orthodox Christians who believe the Bible is God’s infallible revelation to humankind and holds the keys to temporal and eternal happiness. The other is dominated mainly by skeptical secularists, who see some positive elements in religion but have concluded that American Christianity has mostly damaged efforts for social justice and undermined fundamental human rights.

Nothing since Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released has underscored the deep hypocrisies within my community as its reaction to Bondi’s Epstein decision, defying her earlier promise to disclose the perpetrator’s client list and everything else about him in the government’s possession that had been a hallmark in conspiracy theories about the so-called deep state. She made that promise to none other than Fox News, the top news source for white American evangelicals. There was also FBI director Kash Patel’s assurance included in an official DOJ news release that “we will bring everything we find to the DOJ to be fully assessed and transparently disseminated to the American people as it should be.”

The files, of course, involve Epstein’s indefensible record of sex trafficking and pedophilia. Obviously, this is beyond the bounds of any acceptable behavior, and for members of faith communities, any level of sexual transgression constitutes a particularly grievous sin. While ministry celebrities can sometimes get away with sexual impropriety—see Jerry Falwell, Jr. above—pastors of smaller, evangelical churches are often summarily dismissed from their posts and defrocked, leaving them essentially unemployable.

And we have been just as rough on politicians. When then-President Bill Clinton’s hookups with a White House intern became known in 1998, my colleagues and I at the conservative National Clergy Council, representing a wide spectrum of conservative church leaders, organized a news conference to demand his immediate resignation. Similarly, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia and conservative icon, was denied what had previously been enthusiastic support from evangelicals when he came under fire from Democrats and Republicans for ethics violations.

We would have given him a pass on the 84 ethics complaints against him that focused mostly on financial improprieties, but evangelical House member (and former NFL star) Steve Largent of Oklahoma, among others, made sure we knew that Gingrich was an adulterer. (Something Gingrich admitted to years later in a radio interview with beloved ministry figure James Dobson.) Though we weren’t certain about him cheating on his wife—who also suffered from cancer—the fact that Gingrich was a convinced Darwinian evolutionist obsessed with dinosaurs made us suspicious enough to abandon him. After all, an adulterous Darwinian was twice unforgivable. He ended up resigning both his speakership and congressional seat.

But there is nothing in our political history to compare with the evangelicals’ devotion to Trump. No matter how the Epstein files controversy unfolds—and even what the files might reveal, if and when they are ever released—or the related backlash from right-wing podcasters, or the resulting tensions within the GOP, nothing will break their support. The reason goes to the heart of how Trump and his enablers have marketed MAGA to religious voters, how those voters now experience the movement, and the role that conspiracy theories circulating among evangelicals play in the drama. Most born-again types don’t embrace the wildest QAnon plots like elites kidnapping children to harvest youth serum from their bodies, or that JFK Jr. is still alive. But our culture club does harbor its own tall tales, including one about a secret Satanic government run by Freemasons. Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of evangelicals knows that we’ve always been susceptible to the sensational, spectacular, and, frankly, the simply unbelievable.

Trump knows how to use our collective gullibility for his benefit. He can read a room, and when he summoned some 1000 top ministry leaders to a Times Square hotel ballroom in June 2016, he immediately understood what it would take to woo them away from the other GOP presidential hopefuls, co-religionists Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. I declined the invitation, but a close colleague texted me throughout his time in that room.

Trump asked the assembled clerics what they cared about, and they told him Hillary Clinton’s anti-Christian elitism, ending Roe v. Wade, and stopping LGBTQ progress, especially reversing the Supreme Court’s Obergefell opinion legalizing same-sex marriage. My contact reported to me that as attendees made their comments into microphones set up for that purpose, Trump listened and nodded his head with interest. The impression I got from my friend’s texts was that Trump played to his audience’s fears and grievances. He assured them they were right about everything and that he’d do what was necessary to fix what was wrong, in particular, appoint anti-Roe justices. He said he would fight for Christians and defend Christianity. He received a standing ovation, and from then on, Trump had virtually every prominent evangelical influencer in his pocket.

Hats reading, “God, Guns and Trump,” and “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” are sold at a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio in 2024. Jessie Wardarski/AP

But what Trump didn’t know is that evangelicals have a long history of falling in line when presented with charlatans and manipulative, vainglorious narcissists masquerading as saviors. Since the 16th century, during the early days of the German Reformation, when the term Evangelisch first appeared, evangelicals have attracted flamboyant, extravagant, even vulgar hucksters and opportunistic divines. Consider Thomas Müntzer, the son of a wealthy burgher in the Harz Mountains, the land of the Grimms’ fairytales. A mystic and hypnotic speaker, he could also inspire hilarity in a crowd by calling his detractors “donkey-farting fools.” His apocalyptic call for the rout of anti-Christian earthly governments and his insistence that God would use the common folk to overthrow the elites eventually led to his role in the Peasants’ War, the greatest European insurrection until the French Revolution of 1789.

Two hundred years after Müntzer, the towering British evangelist George Whitefield arrived in the colonies, and no less than Benjamin Franklinwrote in his Autobiography, “The Multitudes of all Sects and Denominations that attended his Sermons were enormous,” observing “the extraordinary Influence of his Oratory on his Hearers, and how much they admired & respected him, notwithstanding his common Abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half Beasts and half Devils.” In the centuries after Whitefield, a host of mesmerizing pulpiteers emerged in the United States. During the Great Awakening in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the fierce Jonathan Edwards and fiery Charles Finney captivated the new nation, sought after as much for their entertainment value as out of religious conviction. In the late 1800s, the exotic tent revivalist Maria Woodworth-Etter gained notoriety for her showmanship by regularly falling into a trance while preaching. At the new century’s dawn, scores of colorful clerics crisscrossed the nation, filling halls and arenas, among them famed Philadelphia Phillies base-runner-turned-anti-liquor-crusader Billy Sunday. Credited with helping pass the 18th Amendment banning alcoholic beverages, Sunday is remembered for his eye-popping stage gymnastics, including jumping atop chairs and tables.

In the roaring twenties, at the mammoth Los Angeles megaphone-shaped mega church, Angelus Temple, the Reverend Amie Semple McPherson staged dramatic productions that rivaled Hollywood’s silent films and later talkies. In 1923, she launched a religious radio station, KSFG (for “Kall [sic] Foursquare Gospel), debuting its signal with an eye-catching float in the annual Los Angeles Rose Parade. McPherson was not only the first woman granted a federal broadcasting license, but she was also one of the first media ministers to be the subject of a sex scandal. In 1926, McPherson disappeared from a California beach, only to reappear on another beach in Mexico five weeks later, claiming she had been kidnapped and resuming her ministry. After her death from an overdose of unprescribed secobarbital in 1944, several biographers unearthed evidence that church staff and others had suspected she and her radio studio technician had enjoyed a tryst while sequestered in a cabin not far from where she went missing.

A more sober version of evangelical celebrities emerged in the 1940s, and with them came an impressively sophisticated and well-monied Christian entertainment industry that recruited hundreds of thousands of patrons.

Personalities like Charles Fuller of the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, Percy Crawford of the Young People’s Church of the Air, and Donald Grey Barnhouse of the Bible Study Hour won millions of converts, who also became a ready market for magazines, books, vinyl sermon records, and, with the arrival of Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures in 1951, full-length films with spiritual messages. By the 1970s, evangelicalism was on the cultural ascendency, with the largest churches in any given location becoming “mega-churches,” filling the airwaves with multiple AM, FM, VHF, and UHF stations, and routinely achieving capacity crowds for events held in sports stadiums, concert halls, and open-air music festivals. That set the stage, literally and figuratively, for politicians to exploit, which is just what Ronald Reagan did in 1980, winning the presidency by an electoral landslide.

Evangelicalism encompasses many styles and streams—fundamentalist, holiness, Bible churches—but none are as dynamic and fecund as the Pentecostal sects. Each has a singular approach to MAGA, Trump, and Epstein, but none are more ardent than the Pentecostals. Disparaged as Holy Rollers and Tongues-Talkers for their highly emotional worship and ecstatic prayers, even by fellow born-again believers, numbering approximately 600 million worldwide, with ten percent of them in the US, making them the dominant strain of evangelicals. A subset of Pentecostals, called Charismatics, form the core of MAGA’s religious adherents. Within that group is another theological variant often called the “prosperity gospel,” referring to a teaching that purports health and wealth as marks of divine approval. Its luminaries are usually the ones you see in those Oval Office prayer photos, placing their outstretched arms towards Trump, with the biggest winners having shoved their way close enough to lay their open hands on his shoulders, or, if especially lucky, the skin of his neck.

With origins at the turn of the last century in the New Thought Movement and its mind-over-matter theory of human improvement, the Christianized version of the Prosperity Gospel gained traction after the 1952 publication  of New York’s famed Marble Collegiate Church minister Norman Vincent Peale’s blockbuster book, The Power of Positive Thinking. (Trump claims Peale as his first and most influential pastor.) The concept was given a Pentecostal gloss in the late 1960s by Oklahoma celebrity preacher Kenneth Copeland, who started as a chauffeur for another health-wealth pioneer evangelist, Oral Roberts. Today, the 86-year-old Copeland is an evangelical oligarch with his own airport for his private jet fleet.

Which brings us to contemporary Florida megachurch pastor Paula White (who also owns a jet), one of the first evangelical backers of Trump in his quest for the presidency. He called her after seeing her on television in 2002, bringing her to his Atlantic City casino for private prayer and Bible studies. He has since twice appointed the thrice-married White, whose current husband is a former member of the rock band Journey, as one of his top White House religious liaisons.

White has taken Peale’s positive thinking theology into the 21st century with her perfectly coiffed blond hair, haute couture wardrobe, strutting on her church stage in gold stiletto sandals. During a January 2025 sermon, “How to Fight and Win in Spiritual Warfare”, an Elton John look-alike keyboardist provided syncopated background riffs while White, on this occasion, in skinny jeans, over-the-knee high-heeled boots, and a chic faux shooting jacket, warns listeners about a malevolent “league” of people who don’t even like each other coming together to “work treason against God’s people.” She repeats the word “treason” with added emphasis.

Like White, many lesser-known self-proclaimed prophets and visionaries produce massive “revelatory” content for numerous television and radio shows, websites and podcasts, social media posts and reels. Because these soothsayers are virtually all charismatic, they overwhelmingly endorse Trump’s politics. After his 2016 victory, Oklahoma-based “Messianic rabbi” (meaning a Jewish clergyman who believes in Jesus) Curt Landry wrote to his supporters that Trump was God’s “anointed.” He could prove this assertion with simple math: the 45th president would be “70 years, 7 months, and 7 days old on his first day in office,” alluding to a sequence of three numeral sevens, which many charismatic Christians believe symbolizes God’s perfect work on earth.

“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.”

One of the superstars in the prophetic circuit is Jonathan Cahn, another messianic rabbi, who tells of being converted to Christ after being hit by a train locomotive when he was a teenager. Cahn checks all the right boxes for evangelicals eager to receive messages from God: as a Jew by birth, his ethnicity places him closer to the flesh-and-blood Jesus; a bearded, short, and stocky dark-complexioned man, he conjures the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures (it doesn’t hurt that he almost always dresses exclusively in black, head to toe). As a prolific author of a string of best-selling books with titles like The Harbinger, The Book of Mysteries, The Dragon’s Prophecy, and the Oracle, he feeds readers a constant stream of dopamine hits, claiming God’s spirit directly delivers writings to him. Cahn has been the most explicit and detailed apologist for Trump’s divinely appointed role in God’s end-times plan for the salvation of souls and the restoration of divine order in the universe. He stresses the mystical connections between Trump’s last name, birthdate, election, and relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, vigorously defending Trump’s post of a meme declaring himself on a “mission from God.”

In Cahn’s video message, “The Mystery Behind The Trump Assassination Attempt,” he weaves an elaborate comparison between the Bible’s description of the consecration of the high priest in the Book of Leviticus, with blood being applied to the subject’s ear, thumb, and toe, to what happened on July 13, 2024. The significance of Trump’s damaged ear is obvious, but the absence of Trump’s shoes after the melee is also laden with power because “the priest was shoeless. So Trump was shoeless when the blood was touching at every point. In fact, based on the biblical evidence and the Levitical writings, the removal of the shoes was part of the ministering of the priest.” Among the 7300 comments garnered after some two million views was this one from@pattyfowler9987, “I also noticed. [sic] A change in the temperament of Trump after his near-death experience. That is when I became a supporter of Trump. There has been a transformation in him. Just the way his voice sounds, the words he says, and the way he cares for people. Praise God for mighty works. Amen! Pray for America!”

As a “prophet,” Cahn and hundreds like him are to be paid deference, if not obeisance, because even questioning or challenging them is considered to be a form of spiritual rebellion that risks defying God’s chosen instrument. To contain dissent, pastors often quote a verse from the Book of First Samuel, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.” The line of reasoning is obvious to any believer: Witchcraft and idolatry are associated with Satan, so anyone rebelling against God’s prophetic vessel is in league with the devil. No self-respecting evangelical wants that. So, to be an obedient child of God, you learn to suppress doubts, keep your mouth shut, and do what the divine emissary tells you to do.

Evangelical supporters of Donald Trump are being led in prayers inside the El Rey Jesus church in Miami in 2020.Adam Delgiudice/SOPA/Zuma

As more and more evangelicals joined the Trump train, his rallies took on features that looked and felt a lot like what evangelicals experience in church on Sunday morning or in a revival tent: fervent opening prayers, gospel and country music groups, and emotional testimonials of how patrons were once on the other side, but they came to see the light and get behind the only true patriot leader, Donald J. Trump.

Episcopal priest Nathal Empsall told the NBC News THINK site in 2022 that the final moments of a Youngstown, Ohio, Trump rally resembled what evangelicals know as an “altar call.” It’s a prayerful and reflective moment after a service when preachers or worship leaders admonish attendees to examine their hearts to see if they are right with God. Just as would be done in a church or evangelistic meeting, serene music played in the background.

For faith-centered voters, it was perfectly natural when spin-offs of main MAGA events took on explicitly religious characteristics. Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour, which added immersion baptisms to its program offerings, was reminiscent of America’s two Great Awakenings. Former multi-level marketing genius Jenny Donnelly’s 2024 “A Million Women” pro-Trump event on the Washington Mall recalled the epic 1997 Promise Keepers’ “Stand in the Gap Sacred Assembly,” which claimed to have assembled a million God-fearing men in the same location. Not only that, but the updated Trump event was decreed from its stage by Prophet Jonathan Cahn as a “mass exorcism revival.”

Employing Christian language, music, and “ordinances,” like baptisms and exorcisms, has not only been a clever marketing device for MAGA promoters, but it has also successfully laid out the explicit terms of the relationship for deeply spiritual but heretofore apolitical constituents. During my years circulating in Charismatic and prosperity gospel churches, I never fully felt comfortable with their more extreme expressions of spirituality, but I did respect the congregants’ needs and desires to do so. I came to know hundreds of Charismatic Christian leaders, lay and ordained, and shook the hands of thousands of attendees in church lobbies. Back then, my greatest frustration was how uninterested most of the people in the pews were in politics. They saw campaigns, elections, and policy as worldly distractions from the far more important spiritual realm. Trump’s devotees have solved that problem by sacralizing every step of the MAGA initiation process. Ministry Watch, a donor watchdog group, reports that while Trump addressed the February 2024 convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, “One vendor in the NRB exhibition hall turned a MAGA chant of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—meant to send an obscene message to President Biden—into ‘Let’s Go Jesus’ flags, hats and shirts.”

Over time, these techniques have helped MAGA followers engage in a momentous transfer of power: Moving their devotion from Jesus to Trump as the embodiment of God’s favor for America, shifting their respect for their pastors to MAGA celebrities as mouthpieces of truth, and channeling the heavenly exhilaration they feel during worship inside a sanctuary to the group high of belonging to a much larger movement on the ascendency of unrivaled earthly power.

“One vendor in the National Religious Broadcasters exhibition hall turned a MAGA chant of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—meant to send an obscene message to President Biden—into ‘Let’s Go Jesus’ flags, hats and shirts.”

The fusion is inseparable once the transition from God and church to Trump and MAGA is complete—and the 2024 election sanctioned that completeness. For these Christians, MAGA is their new denominational home. Like baptized Catholics, cradle Methodists, and multi-generational Pentecostals, what I now call *MAGA-*anity (as distinct from *Christi-*anity) forms a follower’s deepest, most meaningful, and resilient identity. And because it’s transcendent, the bond cannot be loosened by outside forces—not by reports of a souring economy, not by videos of shrieking moms being separated from their children by masked ICE agents, not even by the call of Christianity Today magazine to release the full Epstein files. About the possibility that Trump may be implicated in Epstein’s crimes, the Reverend Kenneth Johnson, a long-time friend of mine and widely-admired conservative evangelical leader in deep-red Adams County, Ohio, along the Kentucky border, said of the Trump voters he ministers to, “If Trump is accused, most of his followers still would not believe it.” Of course, for the few outside Adams County who might believe it, there is always the Bible’s King David, who committed both adultery and murder, but was forgiven and was called “a man after God’s own heart.”

For right-wing Catholics, politicized evangelicals, and socially frightened Pentecostal-Charismatics, MAGA is the new American religion. The experience believers have in their relationship to it is anything but rational. I have struggled to find a parallel phenomenon in American history. The closest I can get is the early days of Mormonism, a uniquely American religio-political-cultural movement. Today’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is a far cry from founder Joseph Smith’s early 19th-century millenarianism, characterized by euphoric visions and dreams, encounters with angelic apparitions, and magical glasses enabling the prophet to know and understand what really was going on in the world. Smith practiced plural marriage, taking upwards of 40 wives, many of them in their teens, while typical Mormon men of the era would keep two wives. And then there’s this: The Mormon founder’s last act on earth was running for president in 1844. Unlike MAGA’s founder, God did not spare Smith from an assassin’s bullet.

Defeating MAGA’s appeal to religious voters will not happen because of continued inflation, mistaken government abductions and deportations, nor will it happen because Donald Trump kept uncomfortably close company with a child molester. Even constitutional arguments will not emancipate them from the cult-like clutches of their new spiritual overlord. For those who see the Bible as the only authoritative rulebook for themselves, their country, and the people of the world—and who interpret the Bible only as the MAGA prophets instruct them to—the Constitution can be more of a problem than a solution. After all, the Bill of Rights applies to all Americans—believers, non-believers, every race and ethnicity, of any political stripe, or none at all—including those who don’t agree with Donald Trump. For MAGA devotees, this kind of equality is a recipe for our country’s failure, not success.

When you see the United States as a “Christian country,” as the MAGA religious do and are convinced that white people of European descent are best suited to rule it, you might think we’d be better off without the Constitution or even democracy in any form. True believers are convinced Christ will return to earth not to establish a constitutional democracy but an absolute theocratic monarchy in which the ruler can never be questioned. In the end, this both explains what we are witnessing in the evangelical dismissal of the Epstein scandal and encapsulates the gravest danger we face as Americans.

Defeating MAGA will only happen over time. It will require the passing of its charismatic, deified leader, either by term limit, dementia, or death, but only if that epochal event is preceded by a vigorous and unrelenting challenge to MAGA ideas, operations, and personalities using religious concepts, language, and biblical texts. Even with all of that, it will be at least a generation before MAGA is either socially domesticated or tamed into a marginal and largely inconsequential fringe group. Until then, we can mitigate MAGA’s damage to human lives, the social fabric, and public and private institutions by tirelessly exposing its nefarious intentions and actions to the light of day. As another favorite Bible verse of evangelicals reminds us, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

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