Those Americans who leave behind MAGA loyalty are going through a form of deconstruction, according to Nadine Smith, CEO of Color of Change.
Smith, who was founding executive director of Equality Florida, was a keynote speaker at the Summit for Religious Freedom sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C., April 26-27.
She told of meeting a man at a previous speaking engagement who told her he had left behind his MAGA ideology not because of one moment of awareness but because of a series of smaller awakenings.
Nadine Smith (AU photo)
“There were moments where there was a line where I said, ‘This doesn’t sit right with me, but maybe there’s things I don’t understand,’” he told her. “And then he said, ‘The next one, I thought to myself, “This isn’t OK with me, but I’m serving a greater purpose.”’ He said, ‘By the third one, I thought, “I have made a terrible mistake, but I’ve also burned all my bridges and where am I to go?”’”
The journey this man described was like the deconstruction process many ex-evangelicals have gone through, said Smith, who was raised in a conservative evangelical church she has since left behind.
This man called his first year after MAGA “my year of heaven and hell,” she recalled. “He said the heaven of it was that this huge pressure was finally relieved because he had made a choice.”
However, the hell, came because he had “burned every bridge with anyone who was not part of MAGA, because if you weren’t with us, you were against us. And I knew the moment I stopped posting, that I stopped showing up, that they could feel the quiet quitting.”
He wasn’t merely a Trump voter; he was active in advocacy work for Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, he said. “I wrote speeches. I had a podcast, a MAGA podcast.”
And he knew once he went quiet, he would be excommunicated. “I knew there would come a moment where I would put myself irreparably out of the ability to come back.”
Smith spoke the morning after the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner just a few miles away from the Americans United meeting space in another hotel ballroom.
Reaction to that event and the president’s immediate spin on it was “fascinating” she said, “because of how the attitudes have shifted, the level of skepticism around that, coming from people who’d been part of his base, people who are interrogating Butler, (Pa.) the events of Butler, it’s just a different energy in the country.”
“The fact that you have put down the flamethrower doesn’t mean you get a hug, right?”
Today, “you can see sort of that MAGA coalition flinging apart, but the question is, ‘What do we do as people leave and where do they go?’ … I can make the argument that if you set my house on fire and cause injury to me and the people I love, the fact that you have put down the flamethrower doesn’t mean you get a hug, right? And at the same time, there is no country that has engaged in civil war that has not had to find some path to reconciliation, quite literally reconciliation between people who did grievous harm to part of the population.”
As MAGA appears to crack, “How do we begin to build something out of the rubble of this plunder economy? How do we begin to imagine what the world might actually look like if freedom was real?”
Further, “How do we address this idea that people, because of their deeply held religious beliefs, get to impose those through force of law and the state on the rest of us? How do we navigate these?”
These are questions those concerned about democracy and church-state separation must ask, Smith said. “We are going to have to shape the architecture of true freedom in this country, and it’s going to mean we have to push for policies that undo the forced religious ideas that are baked into so much of what our laws currently are. … We have to be the ones to speak up, and we need more people of faith to sound like this in more places, that there must be a complete rejection of the idea that we are a nation driven by a particular religious philosophy.”
She called this a “tipping point moment. … It’s an interesting moment where populism can swing to the right or it can swing to the left. And in this moment, I think we have to start talking about not just what we are pushing back against, but the world as we envision it, the possibilities as we envision it, because I believe that window is going to open.”
Christian nationalists were prepared with Project 2025 and ready to act, “and they have executed it with relentless cruelty,” she said.
Those with a different vision now need to be ready to counter Project 2025, she continued. “We have to actually have a vision of what our country could be that includes us all, because we can’t simply be against things, we have to be for things. But we also have to be ready because when that window opens, we can squander it or we can seize it and be ready with the policies that stop us from being slaves to algorithms, trapped beneath a propaganda dome that is being hermetically sealed around us.”
The “way back,” she said, is following the example of residents of Minnesota.
“The same circumstances in which (Christian nationalists) are doing all this harm is producing the kind of resistance and a belief in a vision that doesn’t simply say, ‘We’ll make tiny reforms to broken systems that aren’t really solving things for us,’ but instead we are having grander ideas of what the world and what our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our nation can actually be.
“And we cannot get there if we continue to allow white Christian nationalism, the racism that is baked into it, the sexism that is baked into it, the hatred of the stranger that is baked into it, to guide our political life.”