As MAGA pastors gain influence, let’s talk about peace instead of power

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on January 19, 2024.

“Kind of disturbing” is how journalist Katie Couric described an Axios piece about how Donald Trump built an insurmountable lead in Monday’s Iowa caucus by catering to evangelical MAGA pastors.

“They say obviously they embrace Trump because of the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade,” she explained on Tik-Tok. “But then they say MAGA pastors who in speeches and podcasts cast Democrats as demonic, promote Christian nationalism, and tout Trump as chosen by God to save Christianity.”

At this, Couric stared awkwardly at her copy of the article while the words “lol WHAT” with a spiral eyes emoji flashed across the screen.

She continued, “One pastor, who’s a 27-year-old Iowan says, ‘You cannot be Christian and vote for a Democrat.”

Then taking off her glasses, she looked into the camera and asked, “What the heck? What do you think of this? Tell me. I don’t know. It feels pretty apocalyptic to me.”

Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take It By Force and who has done extensive research on how the New Apostolic Reformation fueled the January 6 insurrection attempt, told Axios, “It’s a tectonic shift in power. … You have all these pastors who would have been laughed out of the room 20 years ago.” But today, Taylor says these same pastors are “driving the dynamics.”

We were terrified

It’s true that evangelical MAGA pastors are more in the limelight today, especially thanks to social media. Of course, many mainstream media personalities would have laughed at what these pastors claimed 20 to 30 years ago. But those of us who sat under their teaching weren’t laughing them out of the room. Instead, we were terrified.

My high school independent Baptist pastors and school teachers told me in the 1990s that Bill Clinton and the Democrats were planning to hand the United States over to the United Nations and usher in a one-world government with stockpiles of guillotines all around the world to decapitate evangelicals.

If we masturbated that week, we risked finding out that we were never truly saved and would miss the rapture. So then for the next seven years, we would experience earthquakes, world wars, famines and even the bites of human-sized locust creatures, assuming we escaped the Democrats’ guillotines prior to experiencing eternal conscious torment.

When the rapture didn’t happen at Y2K, some of us began to settle down. But then the attacks of 9/11 happened, and the apocalyptic-sounding calls for war heated up.

George W. Bush visits East Literature Magnet School, where he participates in a the Pledge Across America Event with school children. (Photo by Brooks Kraft/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

You can’t get fooled again

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.’” These were the jumbled words of former President George W. Bush at the East Literature Magnet School in Nashville, Tenn., in September 2002 that were mercilessly mocked on late night television and cable news everywhere.

Many of us who were fooled by the apocalyptic language of our evangelical pastors in the 1990s went on to deconstruct the theology that fueled our fear. But as it turned out, there were many others who doubled down.

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