IHIP News - MAGA Christians Are Waking Up to Trump's Evil Cult

Episode Date: December 28, 2025

Christianity and Trump have mixed to create a disturbing and powerful cult.Order our new book, join our Substack, shop our merch, and more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There are a lot of Americans that have a very normal spiritual relationship with their religion. It's private or familial, and it's something that brings light and serenity into their lives. If you have that type of relationship with your faith, I'm not talking about you. But we're about to start talking about our white, evangelical, megachurch, Christian. and the damage that they are doing to this country. And I have long felt that evangelical, white evangelical Christianity is, in fact, a cult. And I'm not alone in thinking this. Kylie, pop up the first slide.

Tim Whitaker says, I'm finally saying it. The evangelical world that raised me was a cult. Next slide. I grew up in a world where disagreeing with doctrine, met you were a heretic. who needed to be promptly scolded where your church was the only biblical one and everyone else was lukewarm at best, hellbound at worst. Next one. And now we're watching the end result unfold in real time, a religious political cult that sees Jesus as a mascot for their team, not a savior to be followed. Next. But they follow the Jesus of the basement,

the conquering strong man, the defender of their distorted vision of truth, the punisher of outsiders, the Jesus who kidnaps immigrants and separates them from their children, that's the Jesus they worship. Trump is their version of Christ incarnate. He's been sent by God to, quote, make America great again. That's why they excuse everything he does, the lies, the cruelty, the corruption, the authoritarianism, the hatred, of the other. In a cult, the leader must be defended at all costs.

If the leader is undermined, the entire identity of the group collapses. So they defend the end defensible. I grew up in the basement of Christianity, the dark, damp, musty place. That basement was a cult. After years of watching the evangelical world, I grew up in the Christian nationalism, the Trump Messiah Complex, the double standard around protect the children. I think it's time to stop softening the language and finally have my Come to Jesus moment. I grew up in a world where questioning the pastor was considered rebellion. I'm not saying Christianity is a cult. I am saying the basement

I was raised and acted like one. I didn't lose Jesus when I left the basement. I found him. So again, this is from Tim Whitaker. Pump, what's your take on what he experienced in the conclusion he came to? Well, you know, this is my lived experience. And when I look back and this whole Trump thing has caused me to look back a lot. And I realized the church I was raised in, evangelical, you know, Jesus was kind. Jesus washed the feet of other people, all that stuff. yet he had an affair on his wife and the whole church knew about him but he asked for forgiveness

and so it was fine who had an affair on his wife the pastor oh okay the pastor of this big megachurch and so it was i started excusing indefensible behavior at a very young age because it was immediately within my family and i apparently the church at large because he didn't step down it was i'm gonna you know i'm gonna get in front of the church i'm gonna say what i did wrong I'm going to ask for Jesus' forgiveness, and we're just going to keep going. And I think for me, that's where it started, where I was able to deny certain facts. And I was able to say, okay, well, you know, he's doing better now, an excuse, inexcusable behavior. And then when you were reading that, it reminded me of a conversation I had with a family member before the election, who is, you have to be a virgin before you get married.

You cannot have sex if you are not married. I mean, super purity culture. And I said, how do you reconcile Donald Trump having a new baby, having an affair with a playmate, and having sex with a porn star? If you're like your whole thing is controlling sex, it was immediately dismissed. And in my mind, there are really two reasons why it was dismissed. Obviously, misogyny, but that's not one of my two. because institutionalized misogyny in these evangelical churches is it's like breathing it's everywhere but it is i i want to talk the talk but when it comes down to it i like money and i want my money

to stay with me meaning tax breaks and racism trump hates everybody else they hate and it is easy for these people to excuse the behavior because they've been doing it For me, my entire lifetime, excusing indefensible behavior is a way of life and you're able to just disassociate with it and say, well, you know, God forgave them, so I have to too. That's what we did. Do you think a lot of these megachurches, when they focus so much on the tithing and the growth of the church, like I remember growing up in my friends, high school friends, if they took me to a megachurch, there was always a big emphasis on tithing and we're growing the church. We have a new location opening up, et cetera. It's this focus on money, and it's rarely ever a focus on really helping people.

You know, I told you pumps the other day in viewer. I told you, I was walking in New York, and I saw church in Oakland, in New York. There's not that many, obviously, but it had a trans flag, a pride flag, a Black Lives Matter flag, and then a banner that said refugees and immigrants welcome. And I thought, you know, if churches were more like that, I wonder if I would have joined, one, if they were more of a place where you went to have a moral centering to get outside of yourself. And I think there's something that capitalism and evangelical Christianity have in common, and it is the focus on me. It is this me, me, me, me, me. And a lot of white evangelical Christians have this component of Christian narcissism. And perhaps you describe it as, I think I'm better

than everybody else, which is that level of Christian narcissism. And sometimes I go and I look at these like big megachurch pastors Instagram posts because I find religion kind of fascinating that so many people would be a member of a church. And it's all about like in the throes of all of this injustice that we're seeing, you know, like immigrants being separated. I mean, just people being murdered for sport in the Caribbean, people being kidnapped for sport and sent to El Salvador for sport, having alligators surrounding them in a prison. All that's for sport.

These guys get off on it. The one thing that these churches, they never talk about any of that, which I think is really interesting, because that's what if Jesus were real and he were here right now, that's what he would be talking about. Instead, it's so hyper-focused on your personal relationship with God. And every little thing you do and this personal relationship. And for me, because everybody can be fucked up as a person. We all have those are like, oh, God, Jennifer, God damn it, you were so fucked up there.

When I'm the most fucked up as a person is when I'm too Jennifer centered, you know, like, you have to take care of yourself and have boundaries to protect yourself, but you also have to bear in mind, you're not the only person on the planet. And so I think that capitalism and the Republican version of capitalism, my pocket, my tax, my tax, taxpayer dollars, my dime. If it doesn't affect me, you hear that a lot. And it's the same thing from evangelicals to Christian Republicanism is that me, me, me. Well, and here's the thing. The demonizing of the poor, yes, that's a Republican. You know, I've, since Reagan, that's been what it is, but it starts in the churches in that. We're going to help the poor because we're better than the poor it's since a message that we're going to help the poor because we're better than the poor but we don't growing up it wasn't that we helped everybody because we were better we got to

pick and choose who we were going to help we didn't have to help everybody not everybody was on a same playing field and so it's kind of graduated in terms of who you're going to help sorry to cut you off but i want to ask you something i think is really important don't you think a lot of the mega churches Now, there are churches that genuinely do massive outreach and the whole mission to help marginalize and people suffering. We're not talking about those. The mega churches that do this, it's a big performative thing. It's a Bible Belt churches.

Right. We're going to help these poor people here. We're going to brag about it and we're going to post about it. And at the same time, we're going to go vote against anything that systemically could help these people in their trajectory. And that's what I always see is a complete hypocrisy in those two components that there is as well, oh yeah, we, you know, we gave gifts to a poor family for Christmas. And then we're not going to do anything when it comes to the ballot box because of our own personal tax dollars. We're not going to do anything to help. And then I just

want to leave you with this. Pimes did you see it's about a month ago, a month and a half ago, the governor of Oklahoma, our governor. Yeah. Kevin Stitt. He was talking about homeless people. Did you see this video? Yeah, I saw it. Listener, he was talking, and this is a really, really religious person, evangelical mega church, sends his kids to private Christian school, et cetera, dedicated every scrunch of the state to Jesus. He said that it wasn't the state's job to help homeless people, just very dismissively in a very dehumanizing manner, spoke about them. And this is just something I think that this Tim Whitaker that wrote that there. I think he's right. I think that this is a cold. Well, yeah. And you look at Fox News and

they're going to just kill homeless people. Like the empathy that you're taught in Sunday school or the empathy that I taught was taught in Sunday school is not acted out upon by the flock. That is not what we talked about and how we behaved and excused behavior. We're completely different. All right. That's all we have for this episode. Subscribe to our. our channel like this episode drop us a comment and we'll be back later with more news