VOICES FROM AMERICA: Breaking from MAGA and Christian nationalism: My journey – and how others can too
Raised a Southern Baptist and trained to vote a certain way, I broke from MAGA and Christian nationalism. Here's how – and why it matters.
byMelissa Slade, West England Bylines
Love was the command not the suggestion
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” – John 13:34 (NIV)
Jesus didn’t leave much room for interpretation. He didn’t say believe a certain way, or vote for the right party, or protect the culture from change. He said love one another. As he had loved: radically, inconveniently, and without condition.
That was the command not the suggestion.
Raised in a system built on obedience
I grew up Southern Baptist, the go-to-church-three-times-a-week version of evangelical Christianity. That verse was one of many I had to learn for Bible Drill. If you’re picturing kids lined up like they’re at attention for a drill sergeant with Bibles in hand, you aren’t far off.
I didn’t just memorize verses. I trained for it. Bible Drill wasn’t just about knowing the words. We had to find passages fast, too: The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5; The Ten Commandments in Exodus. They called them “key passages”, and we were expected to know where truth lived and how to get there with the flip of a page.
I was good at it, too. Memorization has always come easily to me, and I have a competitive edge, so I strove to be perfect every single time. But no one ever asked if we understood what any of it meant. I guess our understanding was never really the point. How could it be, when the entire system was built in direct opposition to the spirit of that verse?
I didn’t realize then that I was growing up inside a system of Christian nationalism. That wasn’t a phrase I had ever come across, but the fusion of faith and political power was everywhere. It was so normalized that I didn’t recognize it as ideology. It was just “the way things were”. And for far too long, I went along with it.
Doubt was always there even when I voted red
I can’t say I was ever fully sold. Even in high school, I was the one quietly reading through other parties’ platforms, questioning why we were supposed to believe certain policies were automatically Christian. I was a debater. My instinct was to analyze, to poke holes, to look for contradictions. And I found plenty, I just didn’t know what to do with them yet.
Outwardly, I played the part. Inwardly, I was already unraveling. Even when I voted Republican, it wasn’t with full conviction. It was more like inertia, habit, environment. To be honest, I probably voted Republican most of the time. The fear of choosing ‘wrong’ was powerful, and it was reinforced at every turn. There was always this underlying threat that to break away was to betray something: faith, family, even morality itself.
Trying to belong cost me my convictions
So in 2016, when Trump ran, I knew he wasn’t someone I could respect. I didn’t like how he spoke. I didn’t like what he represented but I voted for him anyway. Not because I believed in him, but because I was still trying to believe I belonged. By that time, I was no longer in the church and hadn’t been for over a decade. But somehow, the power of Christian nationalism remained.
Memory is a funny thing. Recently I’ve learned that it can be an unreliable witness to truth. I mention this because in 2020, I went into the voting booth with every intention not to vote for Trump, but I also wasn’t sold on Biden. I want to say I wrote in Big Bird for president that year, but I can’t say for sure that I didn’t cave.
What finally snapped the illusion
For me, it didn’t happen all at once. It was more like a slow unraveling, a quiet break under the surface that eventually gave way. I had watched what happened on 6 January 2021 with horror.
The attempt to overturn a fair election wasn’t just a riot, it was the boiling point of years of Christian nationalist rhetoric masquerading as patriotism. But Project 2025 showed me it wasn’t over. It was just beginning to formalize.
The final fracture came when I started pouring over the details of this project. The policies weren’t abstract anymore. They were concrete steps to dismantle rights, erase protections, and reshape the country into something unrecognizable.
I saw the targeting of LGBTQ+ people, the push to gut public education, the attempts to erase any framework that protected the vulnerable. And I recognized the language: it was the same tone I had been taught to trust. Only now it was being used to justify cruelty.
That was the moment I couldn’t explain it away. I couldn’t hide behind discomfort or doubt. This wasn’t about faith. It was about control. It was about building a theocracy, not a community. And I knew I could not stay quiet.
How we reach the ones still inside
I’ve been asked what changed me. The truth is it wasn’t someone yelling. It wasn’t being called a hypocrite or told I was brainwashed. It was seeing the cracks for myself. It was the quiet discomfort that grew louder over time. The inconsistencies that refused to settle. The small moments that didn’t make sense until they did.
If we want to reach others who are still caught in it, we have to stop trying to shame them out. People don’t leave because they are pushed, they leave because something no longer fits. Our job is not to drag them out. It is to be visible when they start looking for something real. It is to create something worth walking toward.
That’s why I’ve been writing. On Facebook, in letters, and in long posts I know some people will scroll past. I’m documenting everything I wish I had seen sooner in case someone else is just beginning to ask the questions I was once too afraid to say out loud.
I’m also tracking every executive order being signed right now, breaking them down, connecting them to authoritarian patterns, and making them accessible to the people who will be most affected.
If you’re feeling it too, that quiet crack in the story you were told, don’t wait for permission. Start asking questions. Start writing your own record. Find the others who see it. Because silence will not save us, but solidarity might.