MAGAs are NOT Christians

If you support MAGA, you can't call yourself a Christian!

That seems like a bold statement to make, but it's absolutely true. You can proclaim your Christianity all you want, but the logic doesn't follow. Much of the posting below is taken from the substack published by John Pavlovitz, longtime pastor, author, speaker, and activist. We wish we could share it with every member of our ex-church, for their self-professed, Sunday-only, so-called "Christianity" is nothing like our Christ.

When faced with the teachings of Jesus, the venom the MAGA crowd responds with is like vampires to daylight. We truly feel sorry for them, as they're coming face to face with the sobering reality that their MAGA beliefs are completely inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus. They aren't hearing that news from us — they're hearing it right from Jesus. There are few things that confound and infuriate the Conservative Evangelical Christians quite like the simple, clear, unadorned words of Jesus as documented in the Bible — words that they so loudly and frequently claim to love, believe in, and live by. These religious right Conservative Evangelical Christians are not listening to Jesus' message, and are not the people of God that they profess to be.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." (Matthew 5:9)

When you're part of an antagonistic movement built almost exclusively on a self-righteous battle posture; on a theology and politics that require an enemy, an adversary, an encroaching danger, a culture war foe to be brutally defeated — the idea of being a peacemaker really pisses you off. MAGAs don't like peace. They refuse to coexist with it. Just watch their so-called "news" channels (e.g. Fake Fox News) or read their social media postings (e.g. UnTruth Social) for proof. Jesus said that whatever we do to the poor and the hurting and the hungry, we do to Him. That should be a terrifying proposition to MAGA Republicans who claim to be Christians.

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." (Matthew 25:45)

The poor, the outcast, the hurting, the hungry, the homeless, the lonely. Jesus said he literally inhabits the most vulnerable among us, and that the way we treat them is the way we treat Jesus himself. That's a really disturbing reality for the MAGA movement that spends so much of its time denying people healthcare, cutting social programs, assaulting voting rights, and legislatively attacking people for their sexuality or their nation of origin or their pigmentation. If you’re celebrating MAGA's elimination of reduced lunches, food stamp programs, and low-income housing, well, let’s just say your religion is short one Jesus. The very people who voted in the politicians currently dismantling healthcare, defunding public schools, and eliminating meal programs are the same people filling many of the country's Evangelical churches — "whited sepulchers of stench and corruption" (Matthew 23:27). The news that (according to Jesus) you’re devoting a great deal of your life to treating him like garbage — tends not to be received too well by the MAGA crowd. But, hey, if the shoe fits, wear it. The truth is, if the same people who call the Evangelical Church home had been following Jesus' example all along, we wouldn't need to be writing this at all. If these professed men and women of God were truly burdened to love their brothers and sisters as they would Jesus, this would be a non-issue.

"For God so loved the world…" (John 3:16)

The world. God loves the world. That includes the planet, the climate around it, the resources within it, the disparate humanity and expansive life upon it. No MAGA "America First" or "Make America Great Again" movements. No "Go back where you came from" nationalistic bluster. No "Don't Tread on Me" middle-finger defiance. If you so love the world as God does, you fight FOR diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), not against it. You welcome immigrants and foreigners (after all, our ancestors were all immigrants), you demand environmental responsibility, you want more people to have voices, not fewer. The MAGA movement, on the other hand, opposes God.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 22:37-39)

Loving your neighbor. Jesus says unequivocally that this is the priority and the point, and the way we show our love for God is the way we treat other human beings. When Conservative Evangelical Christians realize that this includes their Muslim neighbor, their transgender neighbor, their Jewish neighbor, their Liberal neighbor, their uninsured neighbor, their undocumented neighbor, their black neighbor — they usually don't react very well. There is no hate like Christian love. When you aren't able or willing to practically or tangibly extend love to such a vast portion of your neighbors in any meaningful way, that is a difficult theological pill to swallow.

Literally nothing is as MAGA as watching a bunch of self-righteous frauds who pretend to give a damn about Christianity viciously attacking a minister preaching about caring for the vulnerable (i.e. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde) at the national prayer service in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 21, 2025 while their rapist-felon "messiah" (i.e. Trump) condescendingly scoffs at her.

We feel sorry for people who claim to be both Christian and MAGA. MAGA and Christianity are diametrically opposed to one another — you can't be both. These phobic MAGA cultists and Christian Nationalists think they can be devoted to Jesus and to Trump simultaneously. They can't. They labor under the false assumption that their bastardized, territorial, self-centered white nationalist GOP version of Christianity is remotely of God. It isn't. Nearly every national sickness here in America, from the brazen parade of white nationalism, to the dehumanization of immigrants, to the violent persecution of the LGBTQ community, to the defiant anti-vax science deniers, to the suppressors of votes of people of color, to the legislative assaults on women, to the proliferation of guns, to the embrace of authoritarianism — is coming from professed Christians. You can deny it all you want, but deep down inside you know it's the truth. We know frauds when we see them.

So, MAGA followers out there, we're not saying this white Republican theocracy built on power, exclusion, and subjugation that your cult has brainwashed you into and tethered you to is anti-Jesus, and that you’re failing Him by worshipping someone like Trump, the unhinged dictator.

Bishop Budde isn’t saying that, either.

Jesus is saying that.

If you have a problem with that, take it up with Him. But in the meantime, click the following link to read how Jesus has been fired from MAGA Christianity.

Trump is trying to create a new religious right, fundamentally different and opposed to traditional religion as we’ve known it. The faith of the MAGA movement is not one in which the state conforms to the church, but one in which the church is bent to the will of what is now referred to as American nationalism or Christian Nationalism. It is a threat to democracy, and MAGA's Christian Nationalist wet dream is now well entrenched in the Evangelical Christian churches. The rot runs deep. Trump is creating a theology that fits his politics rather than his politics following the teachings of Jesus. Trump's hand-picked, white, evangelical faith advisors defend rather than challenge his moral and ethical decay. Trump is "whoring after other gods" (Hosea 9:1). Whenever a nation chose to hurt the poor, oppress the stranger, mistreat the weak and corrupt the courts in the Bible, the prophets accused such political leaders of public infidelity. Trump's actions and his public infidelity must be challenged and called out for all to see.

"And if a town refuses to welcome you, shake its dust from your feet as you leave to show that you have abandoned those people to their fate." (Luke 9:5 NLT)

Many of us have now spent a full decade of our finite lives trying unsuccessfully to understand and coexist with so-called friends and family members who’ve now tripled down on sticking with and kowtowing to Trump, the most vile, amoral, and repugnant person on the planet. At some point, and that point is now, we need to come to terms with the reality that Trump is not fooling these MAGA Maggots or manipulating them; Trump is actually representing them. The time we’re putting in attempting to appeal to the compassion of people whose reserves are empty and whose brains are fried and brainwashed beyond hope of recovery is time we’re wasting. We must cut the ties with people we're morally incompatible with.