I called two people very close to me last week to have one final conversation about their unflinching support of Donald Trump. Even after the murder of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the conversation went exactly as expected: deflection, whataboutism, FoxNews talking points, feigned ignorance, party propaganda, and a moral inversion that minimized harm while justifying cruelty. My judgmentalism was the problem, not the child rapist who sent a paramilitary occupation force to an American city.
Why did I even try?
Worse, my critique of Donald Trump was received as a personal attack. It felt like watching someone defend their own identity, not a distant political figure. Five minutes in and I realized my appraisal of Trump was an indictment on them. Any threat to his status became a threat to their status. So the defenses rose. The shouting began. The appeals to “just follow orders and you won’t get shot” rang out. Every scandal I brought up, every cruelty filmed, every lie exposed was metabolized as proof of persecution rather than evidence of fascism.
In the midst of the madness, something hit me: their loyalty had taken on a sacrificial quality. They were willing to give up relationships, reputations, and even their own morality to maintain allegiance to the most craven, criminal public figure in American history. None of this was rational. It was cultish.
For so many of our loved ones, Trump functions more like an orange calf than a politician—he is in almost every way worshipped and glorified. To walk away from him would require admitting that the story they’ve built their identity around is a lie, and that kind of self‑reflection is unbearable. So they cling tighter to their Fuhrer. And in that tightening, something tragic happens: the loyalty they give to MAGA eclipses the loyalty they once gave to loved ones. It’s as if their relationships became collateral damage—sacrificed to preserve the cult they cannot afford to question.
Before we got off the phone, I asked one final question in an attempt to break the spell.
“When ICE shows up at my door, what will be your response?”
Their answer?
“Well, I guess you will just have to go with them.”
The betrayal was complete.
Afterward, in the stunned silence that followed, it all made sense. The community that raised me would rather follow a tyrant than protect the people they claim to love. It was the kind of acquiescence Hannah Arendt warned about in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. I had just witnessed the kind of unthinking obedience that lets ordinary people mistake evil for righteous duty.
As Arendt warned, the greatest danger to human decency is not the fanatic but the joiner—the ordinary person who relinquishes their capacity for independent judgment in exchange for belonging. The horror of fascism, both in Germany then and America today, is that so many regular folk are willing to let their friends and family die out of moral abdication. That is exactly what I experience on that phone call: not hatred, but vacancy. A refusal to think for themselves and a willingness to outsource morality to a system, a story, and a supreme leader.
As I hung up the phone in tears, the words of Jesus came to mind, or at least my modernized interpretation of Matthew 10:
“Be careful! There are masked men who will arrest you and take you to be deported. They will shoot you in the streets. You will be taken to stand before Kristi Noem. People will do this to you because you follow me. You will tell about me to the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to white evangelicals. When you are arrested, don’t worry about what to say or how you should say it. At that time you will be given the words to say. It will not really be you speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking through you.
Brothers will turn against their own brothers and hand them over to be killed. Fathers will hand over their own children to be killed…Everyone will hate you because you follow me.”
I never knew those verses could become so real.
It’s bewildering to watch someone you love defend a political leader with more passion than they defend their own flesh and blood. The ground beneath you shifts. How can a bond this human break so easily over ideology and identity? How does such devotion feel so absolute while the love once given is revealed to have been so conditional? If you’ve been betrayed or cast aside by loved ones for resisting Trumpism, I bet you feel this in your bones.
If we are being honest, there is something(s) in white evangelical culture that make them unusually vulnerable to authoritarian power. They are more than willing to trade compassion for control, loyalty for fear, and even their own relationships for white power. How did a community that preaches so boldly about salvation lose its very soul? What is it about the white evangelical community that makes them so susceptible to authoritarianism? Why have evangelicals given themselves over to a reprobate mind?
To answer those questions, we need to name what is happening in American today.
When you look back at the world that shaped you, it becomes painfully clear how the internal logic of evangelicalism leaves people vulnerable to authoritarian power. It’s the pattern Arendt named so starkly: ordinary individuals, trained in unquestioned obedience, drifting into harm without ever seeing what they’ve become.
Here are three reasons why your white evangelical friends and family will turn you into ICE and not bat a damn eye.
Outsourced Authority
Evangelicals are formed from an early age to hand over their moral and intellectual authority to someone else. If you’re taught that you are sinful to the core — that your instincts are corrupt, your desires suspect, and your own judgment fundamentally untrustworthy — then trusting yourself isn’t just discouraged, it’s framed as rebellion against God. In that world, the safest thing you can do is defer to a perfect Bible that must never be questioned, to a pastor who speaks with absolute authority, and to a worldview that promises certainty in exchange for obedience. The message is clear from youth: “Your heart is deceitful. Your instincts are sinful. Trust the leader, trust the pastor, trust the system.”
This is not a community trained in discernment; it is a community trained in cuck-like submission.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Holy Heretics to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.