A Former Charismatic Christian Nationalist Tells How She Left MAGA

Stephania Messina is now a "more authentic Christian" after she rejected the "bigotry and hate" of her church and MAGA.

I published this post back in November. I’m re-publishing it because it deserves a wider audience than it got the first time around. It opens a window on the thinking of the Christian Nationalists who so fervently back MAGA and Trump.

In 2014, when Stephania Messina was in her late 30s, she became a born-again Christian. A couple years later she and her husband started attending Calvary Chapel, a charismatic church near where they lived in Michigan.

In her testimonial on the Leaving MAGA website (I’m Editor-in-Chief), Stephania says she became “extremely fundamentalist” while attending Calvary. “The pastor was preaching an interpretation of the Bible that I realized much later was Christian Nationalist,” she writes.

She came to believe “the US is a Christian nation, and it was always meant to be.” The pastor preached that '“the world belongs to Satan, so there would always be people trying to make the US less Christian. We were most worked up about Roe v. Wade and gay marriage. We believed we wouldn’t have blessings on our land until we got rid of those things.”

Stephania became a fan of then-President Donald Trump, since she believed he was carrying out the Christian Nationalist agenda. “We were thrilled about Trump’s Supreme Court picks, since the plan was to overturn Roe v. Wade…We thought he was amazing, standing for Christian values.”

None of Trump’s controversial remarks or actions troubled Stephania and her fellow congregants. “We were told Trump had been chosen by God, that he was a disheveled man like David, who also was an adulterer,” she says. “Trump was a ‘baby Christian,’ meaning he had just gotten saved, so we should give him grace because we’re all sinners. Since he was a new creature in Christ, you couldn’t hold anything against him.”

To Stephania, “Trump’s critics were just blinded by Satan. We saw him as the persecuted white savior, fighting for us. I was MAGA all the way, although to us, MAGA meant Make America Godly Again.”

She relied “almost entirely” on conservative Christian pastors for her news and information. She also watched Fox, One America News and NewsMax, and read Focus on the Family’s publication. “I bounced around other news stations to convince myself I was informed,” she adds.

But below the surface, “I was suppressing major internal turmoil. On the outside, I was this sage Christian, the meek and quiet wife who homeschooled the kids and stood behind her man, never calling attention to myself. But having been a feminist since forever, there was so much cognitive dissonance created by my lifestyle that I was in constant mental anguish.” It nearly tore her marriage apart.

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, Stephania fully embraced the conspiracy theory “that Covid was a left-wing Democrat demonic ploy to shut down churches…We were convinced the pandemic was the sign of the end times, that it would bring about the second coming of Christ. We were consumed with that, with making sure Trump’s agendas were going through.”

At the same time, “I started to see hypocrisy,” she writes. As a professional respiratory therapist, she understood “the devastating effects of upper respiratory illness.” It became clear to her that masks — shunned by her church — stopped transmission of the disease. “We were Christians and supposedly loving people, striving to protect those around us. But people were dying.”

In Stephania’s church, “[t]he thinking was, in a Christian nation, you can’t force people to get vaccinated, we have free will. I saw it was a convoluted position that was neither Christian nor patriotic.”

She also realized that “when it came to the vaccine, Trump was talking out of both sides of his mouth: “he praised it and took credit for it, while at the same time he downplayed the effects of Covid and said, ‘Don’t get vaccinated.’ But you couldn’t criticize him.”

Stephania nevertheless stuck with her MAGA beliefs. And on the recommendation of some friends, “I did a deep dive into QAnon around the time of the 2020 election.” When Trump claimed the election had been stolen from him, she “wholeheartedly” believed him. “It was thrilling to think he was going to single-handedly save the nation,” she writes.

Stephania believed Q’s prediction that on Jan. 6, 2021 “Trump would claim his rightful place as president and expose the evil cabal of child-eating, adrenochrome-taking Democrats operating under a pizza place in Washington.”

After that and a series of other Q predictions failed to come true over the next couple of months, she realized she was “getting played again.”

The event that led to Stephania breaking away from MAGA was the death of her oldest son’s father. Her pastor’s wife told her son “it was probably a good thing his dad had died, that he was probably better off because [his dad] wasn’t a Christian and he wasn’t around to influence him.” She heard a similar message from her best friend.

“These people I considered close family, brothers and sisters in Christ, were telling my son he was better off without his dad,” Stephania says. “I was reaching the end of my rope.”

She and her husband stopped attending their church (they were called “apostates, heretics” and “fakes”). Then in the fall of 2021 “I was finally diagnosed with ADHD,” Stephania says, adding, “the diagnosis helped bring my time in MAGA into perspective. I finally realized I wasn’t crazy.”

The couple started “our deconstruction” of their religion. Stephanie discovered the ex-evangelical movement. She started to read books other than the Bible.

“That was when I left MAGA,” Stephania recalls. “When the veil dropped, it dropped hard.” She read a lot about psychology and trauma. She stopped watching right-wing networks and switched to NPR.

“I started doing real research,” Stephania writes. “I started to think critically again. In the church and MAGA I was not thinking for myself.”

As she did more research, her opinion about Covid “completely changed…I realized what a fiasco the pandemic had been. So many people focus on Jan. 6 as Trump’s worst moment, but I think his lack of leadership during Covid was one of the most egregious acts of any president.”

Stephania talks about having “internalized misogyny reinforced by Trump and the church. Trying to come back out of that, navigating that dynamic, was a lot. It was another important piece in the deconstruction puzzle.” 

She marvels at how she had become “vehemently anti-choice” while in her church and MAGA, even though she had previously been pro-choice. “It’s amazing the things you will believe to conform to group think,” Stephania says.

“Today I feel more spiritually fulfilled than ever,” she writes. “I’m seeing Jesus clearly, and seeing the way fundamentalism has destroyed the good news of the gospel: that God loves us all, understands our suffering, and wants us to love and support one another with empathy and without prideful judgment.” 

Seeing Jesus “through sober eyes free from the intoxication of the church has led me to be a more authentic Christian,” Stephania concludes, “as I seek to love and support others without the bigotry and hate that fundamentalists in MAGA falsely believe is God’s way, and that they use to justify their support of Trump.”

While MAGA’s critics often paint its followers with a broad brush, Stephania’s tale — along with the others on our website — illustrates that everyone follows their own unique path into, and out of, MAGA.

Trump and MAGA are ascendant for now, but that just bolsters our desire to demonstrate that it is possible to remove the blinders and see how the movement is based on lies, hatred and fear.