Former Pastor Exposes the Dark Truth About MAGA Christianity and Trump

0:04All right, we're in for a real treat today, IHIP News. I am joined by writer, activist, and former pastor named John Pavlovitz. He is an author of eight books and confronts the ridiculous hypocrisy of MAGA evangelicals in his best-selling substack, The Beautiful Mess. John, welcome. Thank you so much. So good to be with you. Yes. Okay. So why did you leave the church? Well, I had been a pastor for about 17 years and started to see the church change, my particular church, but the larger church as Obama was elected, going through his terms. And then in the 2016 presidential campaign specifically, I started to watch Trump ascend in this process.

0:48And I started to realize if I'm going to be a spiritual leader of any kind, I need to speak explicitly into what's happening because Christians were softening their convictions. They were suddenly moving the goalposts, which they've done for 10 years now. And I started writing more explicitly, but I could nudge my congregation because I'd been there a while, had an equity of trust. But I got to a new church. And I always say after five months, I heard God calling me to leave that church. And it came in the form of my pastor voice saying, you're fired. And my words on equality and gender and sexuality and race were uncomfortable for them.

1:25So I found myself outside of the system. So would you say that your inspiration is more based on Jesus Christ and what he says than Old Testament? For sure. I think what Republicans have done, what MAGA has done, it's astounding. They've essentially created a Jesus-less Christianity. They totally have. And so it's really convenient when you can do that. And I started to realize all the things I grew up believing and all the things I was taught I was supposed to believe in as a spiritual leader were absent from this movement. And you started to see 81 % of Christians putting in with this man who was antithetical to everything Jesus stood for.

2:07And so that's always been, it's lifting up those words and challenging Magus. Why do you think that is? Why do you think they were so gullible and susceptible to this? Well, I think there's an authoritarian feeling that runs through all of Christianity. They They want an authority figure. They want a strong leader to tell them what to think. But there's also a shorthand religion that most Christians have. They really haven't read the Bible. They're Bible-believing but not Bible-reading. So it's really easy to throw around a few buzzwords and a couple of scripture passages, and you can convince them that's enough.

2:41That's all they really need. And when Trump spoke at Liberty University when the campaign was going on in 2016, I said, well, it's over now because he's legitimized himself in the eyes of Christians because that's all they really needed. And so this evangelical Christians, I grew up around, and I didn't grow up with religion. And I found them to be some of the meanest people, the most judgmental, elitist, racist, moral degenerates, truly. I always knew with my friends that were on my cheerleading squad or that I went to school with, the more overtly religious their parents were, the more fucked up they were.

3:21And it was just true every single time. And I look to a lot of, a lot of people say, well, they're not real Christians. But is that a mistake to say they're not real Christians? Because in the Bible itself, there's a lot of cruelty. I mean, God himself commits genocide in the flood. And I believe there's a passage where even Jesus talks about, you know, his authority figure. And it seems to me like it creates what you said about the authoritarianism through line. Authoritarian parenting primes you for authoritarian religion, which primes you for an authoritarian leader. What do you make of this crisis that Christianity is going through?

4:04And this idea that some people say, well, they're not real Christians. We're the real Christians. Because I kind of make that akin to when people say, you're not a real American. It's like, well, actually I am. You just disagree with me. So how do you sort through all of that? Yeah, I can remember being online around the 2016 election and talking to a queer woman of color, and I'm trying to convince her to stay in the faith that she was losing. And I said, this isn't Christianity. And she said, actually, this is the Christianity that I've grown up experiencing. She said, you're the outlier. Your heresy is why I love you.

4:37But for me, it's fear is the engine on which that whole system runs. And that fear needs an encroaching enemy and an adversary and a threat, or it doesn't work. And so people have been conditioned to find danger everywhere. And that danger is always in a marginalized, vulnerable group of people. And so that makes them perpetually hateful toward the world, sadly. Yeah. And then do you think, how much do you think like the marriage of the 1980s megachurch boom before Trump ever came and this fusion of capitalism with Christianity, like a lot of the megachurches in Oklahoma, they have like gift shops, coffee shops, they're like a mall, a rock band and all of this stuff.

5:24Did the churches start worshiping money that also primed them for this worship of capitalism, where Jesus speaks implicitly about the accumulation of wealth. He opposes the accumulation of wealth. Yeah. Well, there are no megachurches in the Bible. And that's for a reason, because authentic Christian community should be about relationships between people. And the early church was about interdependence and people making sure that their neighbor had enough. And so what the megachurch did was say, we're going to give you a consumerist version of Christianity that allows you to feel morally superior to everyone else.

5:58And you don't have to do anything to alter your life in any way, your spending habits or your voting habits. Well, and don't they also, there's also this implied trickle down economics, if you will, that if you give to the church and you tithe no matter what, and you pray, then God is going to reward you financially. It's the prosperity gospel. That's there's kind of a racket involved in that, like a lottery style pyramid scheme. Yeah, it is. And it's antithetical to everything in the scriptures, because most of the, you know, Jesus was an degenerate street preacher. There was there was a sharing of resources, and that was a necessity because they weren't rich.

6:39And it's just when you have America and Christianity molded together the way the Republican Party has done so brilliantly, you're only going to get opulence, power and discrimination, sadly. Do you think the majority of white evangelical Christianities, Christians know that Jesus wasn't white? They do a good job of denying it because I think evangelicalism, white evangelicalism is sort of built on this fraudulent premise that God was a white cisgender heterosexual man who was born in America, raised Christian and votes Republican. And I think if they can try and believe that, then they can allow discrimination against vulnerable, oppressed minority communities without feeling like they're losing their faith.

7:22So they really have a Jesus that's made in their image. And I think something that disturbs me is, especially when you talk about evangelical Christians, they didn't just start being moral degenerates. They used their faith to justify slavery. And in fact, in the Bible, there are instructions about how to treat your slave. And when I think about the black experience in America and the way black people were enslaved and then treated and still continue to be treated, I think that is where a lot of the answers as to why we're in a fascist state exist. And slave masters weaponize their faith against black people to make them more obedient.

8:08Yeah. And what you see is the religious right really grew out of this idea that, hey, you know what, guys, we're trying to use this segregation thing, but it's actually not playing well any longer. Open racism isn't as popular as we were hoping. So that's when they sort of pivoted to abortion and homosexuality, right? So it was trying to find the most acceptable version of discrimination that they could perpetuate with their people and have them take a stand on that. So that's kind of how we ended up here. Do you still go to church? I go to churches when I speak, but it's not part of my normal daily pattern.

8:43But I also have this odd virtual congregation that I get to be a part of all the time. And is it a lot of people that feel orphaned, spiritually orphaned? Yeah. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that. You know, we can even look at the Democratic Party for years. They didn't really want to speak the language of faith. So a lot of moderate believers and progressive believers who have a strong faith inclination really haven't found a home. And so I get to speak to a lot of people who are humanists, atheists, agnostic, former Christians. And we just get to talk about things like empathy, which is really the root of all good life systems.

9:20Right. And so that's where we hang out. And the Christian right has latched on to exactly what you just said, empathy being a problem. And there's this Christian Republican influencer, and she wrote a book called Toxic Empathy. I just, I cannot, it's so unbelievable. But the right has a Jesus problem, do they not? Yeah, because when you look at Jesus' teachings, where it's loving your neighbor, caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, welcoming the stranger, those things do not exist in evangelical MAGA Christianity. And so to remove the empathy from Christianity, there is nothing left of the teachings of Jesus, right?

10:05So they just have this hollow, empty husk of a religion. And they just want the hellfire damnation part. Yeah. And which is why they never mention, they'll talk about faith in general, or they'll talk about God. God's very nebulous because God is sort of an avatar they can just superimpose all their hatred and discrimination on. And so they never really talk about Jesus. So they just kind of hold them off to the side. They talk about faith, God, and the Bible, which again, they're Bible believing, but not Bible reading, at least not the New Testament. Right. Okay. So Pete Hexeth is one, aside from the Speaker of the House, Pete Hexeth is one of the most overtly religious members of the Trump regime.

10:46And he has been married three times and has a bunch of different kids, multiple affairs. I don't really give a shit about that because I'm not, you know, whatever, live your life. It's hard being an adult. Relationships are hard. But what I have a problem with is hypocrisy. And Pete Hegseth has this crazy pastor, a nut job pastor. And here is a video of Pete Hegseth's pastor talking about James Tallarico, who has made his faith a central part of his senatorial campaign in Texas. Play the clip. That God kills him. Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ.

11:26That's the first thing. We want him crucified with Christ. That's exactly right. I want him to be, I think, Saul of Tarsus, Tallarico of Tarsus. Yes. That's what I want. Who would say, I was holding the garments while they stoned Stephen. And now I'm the, yeah, that's what we want. Yes. We want death and new life. Is this a different pastor? Remember he had that old pastor. Is this a younger one in the same group? The family pastor. Because then there's Doug Wilson who oversees the whole system. He's got a lot of pastors to be that fucked up. Yeah, exactly right. It takes a village. Well, I think you see there, the irony is that the namesake of their faith was supposedly crucified for teaching about loving your neighbor and caring for the poor.

12:07So when they say something like that, they're actually exposing themselves because they are hostile to the very teachings that they're supposed to believe in, which is why they hate the Pope. It's why they hate James Tallarico or Bishop Buddy or Reverend Barber. Yeah. So they're really going after Tallarico. At first, it was, oh my God, he follows girls on OnlyFans. And then it was like, oh, he's trans. And Stephen Miller made like a six-figure AI video trying to transvestigate Tallarico. And then now they're saying, well, he dated these other women. But the through line here with that is that he could remind people in Texas, which is a very, very religious state.

12:46I was born there. Of the central character of their religion, the Christ part of it. And he speaks about that. And another person in the South that did this very well, and I had him on my podcast, is Governor Andy Brashear of Kentucky. And he won two terms as governor. And they ran a lot of anti-trans garbage against him. And he said, my faith instructs me not to bully these kids. You might not understand it, but I am not going to participate in bullying these kids. It's hard enough to be a kid as is. How much, how broken do you think, having been in this form of church, how broken do you think the culture is in white evangelical Christians that when they hear reminders from a Tallarico or from you or from the governor of Kentucky, do you think their impulse is to cave to their worst impulses?

13:51that's what I think Trumpism at the root of it is. He gives you a permission structure to listen to the devil and not the angel. And then they just keep doing it over and over and over again. So what do you think that culture is? Do you think they're savable? I think some people ask me, are people unreachable? And I say, well, some people are unreachable right now, but there are people who have their awakenings slowly but surely. But the thing is they're in that place where their identity has been shaped around the people that they hate. And their whole identity has been built around fear. And so it's hard to pull someone out of there.

14:26No one is at their best when they're terrified. And Republican politicians and theologists, they keep people in a perpetual state of fear. And so I think there's a self preservation at play here. If I admit this, I have to not only cop to the fact that I have placed all my identity in this traitorous serial rapist. But then there's also a grieving and a change that has to come. How much do you think, as a non-believer, me, and I was never indoctrinated in it, when I hear the story about, I can't remember the characters, but it's a dad and a son. And God's like, you need to kill your son. Yes, Abraham and Isaac.

15:07Abraham and Isaac. And the guy's like, no. And he's like, you've got to show me how much you love me and you've got to kill your kid. And so he's like, okay, I'll do it. And then God's like, just kidding. When I first heard that, I was in like junior high. My friends told me that. And I remember thinking, oh my God, do my friends think their parents will kill them? It was such a weird thing for me. Never been in darkness. It was such a cruel thing. And it struck me and I felt empathy and sadness for my friend who was trying to convert me because they're so neurotic about trying to convert everybody.

15:42And I remember thinking, God, she must really think that her parents would do that to her. How much is cooked into the system, this cruelty, into the teachings of Christianity, not the Jesus part, but there's a lot of shit in the Bible that's mean. And a lot of these sects focus on that. And how much of that is cooked in? Because what I see in MAGA Christians specifically is they enjoy recreational cruelty. They enjoy it. When you hear Stephen Miller or Pete Hexeth or some of these MAGA pastors, you can tell they enjoy that shit. They get off on it. So is there something cooked into that where they preach cruelty, this weird kind of conditional worship and love, and then it has manifested itself in this, going deeper?

16:36Well, when you believe that you are righteous and your cause is just, there is nothing that you won't do to be victorious. And so you see all this imagery of soldiers in God's army, and they play into this because, again, they want to overcome something. They want to overcome an evil world. And so that is baked into the system, this depravity, this idea that everyone's sinful, that everyone needs to be saved. And it's just an arrogant posture. And that I think I've just tried to push against because for me, the Bible was always this historical document of a people in a certain place in time in the history of the planet, just trying to figure out life.

17:16I don't think it was dictated divinely and dropped out of the sky leather bound. And so when you talk to Christians who are MAGA, they don't even understand the text at all to say, I need to look at this more objectively. I can't just look at this literally because I'm going to do a lot of harm if I do that. Do you think it's abusive emotionally and spiritually to tell kids that they're born bad? Oh, I mean, I spend most of my time and I have for a couple of decades now undoing the damage that that causes you. Because when you believe that you're depraved and that God loves you, but is always out to squash you, right?

17:59If you do the wrong thing, that's just such an existential weight to put on someone. And that is, again, what MAGA does so well is make sure that you always feel less human. And I think Jesus for me was always about humanizing the person in front of them. And so that's where these two things clash. I love the Jesus guy, like the Jesus part of it. It sounds more like a Bernie Sanders or a Zoran, you know, not overtly religious, not a super, much better like person, obviously, than all of us around here. It's interesting how the evangelical Christians, as bad as I thought they were before Trump, because I lived around them, they've gotten worse.

18:47Yes. It's with an assist from like Fox News. And do you think after Trump dies, this cult is going to be fissured? I mean, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Because he's the authoritarian, like connective tissue. As people start to have kind of an existential freak out, I feel like there's going to be a need for like deprogramming, especially in the Bible Belt. of people that have been severely abused by their parents, not intentionally, their parents earnestly thought, well, this is the way I was raised and this is the way I'm going to be raised or I'm going to go to hell. It's a very serious thing in their mind.

19:27Do you think there's going to be a need for the next therapy trend to be kind of deconstruction? I think certainly that there's two things at play. There's the deconstruction from the damage of toxic religion, but then there's also the reckoning of, I have been a part of this really inhumane movement for a decade. And I look at something like what's happening with the Epstein files, right? You can look and you can see, here are these men who've never shut up for decades, that I'm a leader, I'm a protector of women and of children. And then you have the largest pedophile ring in history, and they're silent and invisible because they can't face the fact that they have placed their identity into this horrible human being.

20:10And that's going to take a lot of processing for them if they're going to be honest enough to deal with it. Do you think all of the child sex abuse scandals in churches that everybody knows about, the Nazarene, Southern Baptists, Catholics, Pentecostals, and on and on and on, it seems like every time you hear of a church or every time you hear of one of those Christian summer camps, Jesus camps, there's always some sort of child sex abuse going on there. Do you think that has primed this particular portion of the electorate to kind of accept that Trump is in this? Because other people they admire or look up to their pastor or their uncle or somebody themselves has been up to this and their parents didn't make that big of a deal up and the pastor snot slung cry one day.

20:58And then it's forgiveness, no accountability, and everybody just moves on like it didn't happen. I think that's more about a culture where you don't question authority and you will believe the authority over your own eyes. So you can look at those Epstein files and you can tell yourself a story. You can do some sort of theological gymnastics that says, no, this is a man being used by God, so I can discount those things. But they're not able to intellectualize that. They really can't think about it in that way. It's just what it does to them internally because they're so incapable of critical thinking.

21:34Yeah. And I read once that for people that were really deeply indoctrinated, critical thinking is painful. It's really a painful process for them to go up against because they have been taught this whole binary world, right, wrong, black, white, good, bad. And I remember growing up, this friend of mine, she was really, really religious, like Pentecostal tongue talking, like really, really, really big time Bible thumper. And she was always talking about spiritual warfare and the mark of the beast. She was like, you know, their Antichrist is coming and everybody's going to get this mark. And I'd go home to my mother, who's an atheist.

22:14She's like, oh, that's ridiculous. Jennifer, please. That poor girl. She's just getting abused by her church and her parents. You know, how much of all of that fear inside evangelical Christianity do you think is linked to this MAGA movement? Well, I think that's the only reason that you can convince someone that a human being like Donald Trump is remotely someone you want to be associated with. Because even most Republicans in Congress or people running in the Republican Party during 2016, they would have told you, this man is abhorrent. This man is against everything we stand for. But slowly, when they started to read the room and realize he's ascending, well, we're going to start to make little concessions and our theology is going to soften.

23:04And so you do that enough times, there's nothing left there. So last question. Um, the United States is one of the most religious first world countries. We're far more religious than our, um, allies in Europe and around the world. And you mentioned earlier that Democrats erred in not talking to people about faith. Personally, do you think religion being at the center of so much of America has also been a accelerant to the fascist coup that we're in the throes of now? Yeah, sadly, there's no question because everyone starts off thinking, well, I have this belief and it may be compassionate in its genesis, but then as you get more power or your church gets larger or the thing gets systematized, then there's a danger in that you have to hold on to that.

23:58And so this accruing of power is exactly what's happened. And religion has been the tool to do that. And so we have to get back to something that is more a horizontal relationship between people where we're caring for our neighbors. It's not about leadership. Christianity was never meant to be a top-down thing. It was the people of the street. It was an authentic community of interdependent people. Okay. One more question. I'm going to do one more. It's Pride Month. And for my listeners, you need to follow – John, what is your Instagram? It's so good. It's John Pavlovitz. Okay. Yeah. Kylie will put that on the chyron.

24:32It's one of my favorite Instagram follows. And you really do a good, a beautiful job, actually, advocating for the LGBTQ plus community and directly, directly calling out the hypocrisy in the Christian faith that wishes to demean, bully, and ostracize these people. Can you speak to my listeners? We have a huge LGBTQ plus audience during this Pride Month. because for so many of them, their first bullies were their parents and their churches. Yeah. I will just say to everyone out there who has been told, especially by organized religion, that you're unloved, that you're sinful. You are beautiful and you do not need to be saved or changed or renovated.

25:18You can accept who you are as you are. And that is a beautiful thing. And if you choose to believe that God made you, then God made you purposefully. And I hope that you feel free to be exactly who you are and to know that there are people out there like myself who will not stand by and let you be erased or discriminated against. That is so beautiful. I love that. Thank you so, so much for coming on. It's such a pleasure to meet you and keep staying after him on Instagram. I love it so much. Yes, thank you so much. Go follow John. Go buy his books. Go follow his sub stack, The Beautiful Mess, and follow him on social media.

25:53He's fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jennifer. Thank you.