I spent most of my Evangelical life in a small church with a big ego. In 1980 while I was off at the University, the small Southern Baptist Church I had been a part of split in two. The man who led me to the Evangelical decision of accepting Christ as my personal savior, had determined that his study of the Bible’s ideal for church structure was the right one and the men studying with him agreed. After several contentious congregational meetings these men won over enough people in the congregation to join them in starting an entirely new church. When I returned home the following year to attend the community college, I went to the Baptist Church with my parents but was always intrigued by the ministry of those who left. I was a devout follower of the pastor who left and I really missed him and his followers. Three years later my new husband and I after getting reacquainted with the man and those in his new church, determined that we too believed that his vision was the right one. Against both of our parent’s wishes, we abandoned all of our initial post college plans and moved home to join the church. We stayed there for 15 years before the trajectory of our personal lives led us to question the reality of what we had signed up for. It took at least a decade to understand that we had been in a cult built around the personality of one man. A man that was a wonderful person but also one who believed that loyalty to him and his vision was loyalty to God.

The main issue of contention for both my husband and I, and the thing that eventually caused us to depart the church, was the expectation that as well educated and relatively mature adults, we were only able to access the will of God to the degree that we were willing to embrace the will of the church’s leadership. At the time, that meant the will of the original pastor and two other elders the church had chosen. It was, for us, a toxic situation but one that we didn’t grasp as such until many years later. We did our best to communicate concerns with these men and others in lower levels of leadership alongside us but most often it was to no avail. Things would change a bit here and there and we would hang on, trying to make sense of our being there because by that time we were well established in the community at large and living near both of our families was a huge incentive to stay put. We had two children who loved growing up near their grandparents.

As we look back we would both concur that we stayed in the church a lot longer than we should have. Later when we were at another church and from a distance watched the congregation implode when they ousted the man who started it all, we were devastated. Our friends scattered all over the place trying to find a way to make sense of their spiritual lives. It was embarrassing and difficult on many levels to experience it all. It wasn’t long before we discovered how much our children missed their friends wanted us to attend one of the churches that had split off from the original one. By this time, I was barely attending church so I didn’t really care and agreed to make the move. I had very little trust in anyone from the original church preaching or teaching anything and I was absolutely done with subjecting myself to church authorities in any way that would overrule my own wise mind.

Shortly after joining the newer church, our daughter became very ill with an eating disorder and clinical depression. We sought care in the community for eighteen months before realizing that she had to leave town if she was ever going to recover. We took her to Omaha and then to residential treatment in Omaha. We did our best to stay connected to other Evangelical Christians around us but it became impossible. Finally we determined that the only way to continue to have a chance at healthy lives we would have to leave the community altogether. We moved to where she had been in residential treatment. Utah. To a place with a high demand religion built around one man and those who came after him. The thing that made it work for us is that we were not a part of it. We attended a Presbyterian church there because we still needed church and because it was where other non-Mormons gathered. We left Utah after five years and landed in Minnesota where we ended up at a Methodist Church called Common Ground. We would still be going there if we hadn’t moved to Texas.

When our current POTUS came on the scene and we were Methodists, we enjoyed good friends, church activity and incredible adult conversations in a class they called Living the Questions. As Evangelicals, we had never experienced adult conversations like we had in that room and it had a direct impact on our human lives. We listened to people asked authentic questions and others who authentically shared their thoughts in return. Being left to conclude for ourselves what we thought and believed was amazingly refreshing. We both found it redemptive to experience that kind of safety among others of different backgrounds, education and social standing who had no expectation that we would find one right answer to anything. The discussions in the class helped us decide for ourselves what we believed in a way we had not experienced before.

I share this brief synopsis of our spiritual journey because upon moving back to Utah in 2016, my husband and I stopped going to church altogether. We simply had no social currency left to re-engage in yet another congregation. In addition to that we found ourselves continually processing the reality that our nation had actually elected a man with a diagnosable psychological condition that to us meant he should never have authority over people like he would have as president. It was very clear to me that the man was a malignant narcissist and I had always assumed that most sane people knew that too. In the early 90’s when I was a young mom and would wait in line at the grocery store check out, tabloids were often portraying the extremes of his hedonistic and self centered life. His liaisons with women, the suspicions of his involvement with underage girls, his bankruptcies etc. were all right there on display. I suppose because I’m the type of person who when faced with idle time and print right in front of me will absorb whatever is there, I knew more than the average person. I still couldn’t imagine how someone of his character had won over the religious right. It made no sense at first. We were genuinely devastated as the reality kept slapping us in the face. Rejoining our lovely open minded and thinking friends in Utah was very helpful for us as we sought to make sense of life during Trump 101 but any conversation with family or friends still in the Evangelical or Conservative churches and we would flounder again. Thankfully there we always had someone to process it all with.

If you know us, you know how much we love children and were as surprised as anyone when our son told us he and his wife were becoming parents. It was such a boost for us to have something like a grandson to think about and soon we discovered that we could not be FaceTime parents. We again picked up everything and moved, this time to an Austin, Texas, suburb in the fall of 2019.

Here in Cedar Park we hoped to find other like-minded people who also had no love for the reality of a Trump presidency. Instead we landed in a red suburban area with some of the most devoted MAGA people I have ever been in close contact with. Ironically it is also a bastion of Evangelicalism with people everywhere telling me to “Have a Blessed Day”. It was just days and a neighbor approached me to let me know that if I ever needed protection while my husband was away, to give him a call because he was former military and had several guns in his house. One day on a walk as we passed and greeted a beautiful Christian family, the father turned around and on his shirt was an outline of Texas with assault rifles filling the inner space of the state. Then Covid hit and we were all separated for months on end. We had a blessed 18 months just getting to spend time with our grandkids and their parents. As time has gone on, I have loved living here near my son and his family and making yearly trips to be with my daughter and her family. My adult kids see things more clearly than I ever did at their ages. When Joe Biden won in 2020 life returned to a some kind of balanced state for us but living in Trumpandia, the nonsense never ended. When Trump was re-elected, I went into a deep dark hole. I was just devastated that his pathology was so unrecognized and it made me really doubt the sanity of most of the people in this country.

What has become clearer to me throughout this last decade is that the Evangelical Church, especially in the South, is locked into a relationship with Trump that can only be likened to that of a marriage where one of the people is a malignant narcissist entirely controls the other. No one who marries a narcissist realizes that they have done so. For a plethora of reasons they originally found the person attractive and if or when the red flags appeared, the narcissist helped them determine that those flags were actually white and nothing to worry about. The powerful, charming personality of the narcissist, his/her certainty of what is right and a lifelong skill of manipulation well planted in their way of being in the world easily wins the other over. It is often only when the marriage is complete and the cost to leave it becomes insurmountable that the reality of the personality disorder surfaces to the partner. Others can see it, children can feel it but the one in the relationship has become so used to it they don’t even see its effects.

The Evangelical church in all its factions still believes that they are in possession of the one and only truth. In order for Donald Trump to have broken into their ideological room captured their collective souls, he had to convince them that he had become one of them. And he acted the part every time he was in their immediate presence. It mattered little who he had been or who he was outside of their immediate spaces. He could simply tell them that the others didn’t know him like they did or the others didn’t have their best interests in mind like he did. A narcissist controls others first and foremost by enticing them to believe that they exist on the same special plane. Once the other believes that, the narcissist can control them. When they hear that he believes something else, the narcissist will say something like, “You know me. Am I like that?” Of course they must say no because in their known world, he really is nothing like that. Then one day, he is.

I don’t know when that one day will be for these people in his current orbit but like anyone in a marriage with such a person, I can guarantee that every day is utterly miserable. Every day, the abuse, the neglect, the manipulation and control hits and hits and hits but we all know that some courageous souls do find the strength to do whatever it takes to leave the relationship and get help to heal. I write this because I think that Evangelicals are beginning to see the reality of who they are married to. The diatribe uttered by the madman at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast has to have felt a lot like being in the way of someone’s vomit trajectory. I know that even now there are those at The Heritage Foundation and Turning Point scraping up the floor and cleaning the carpets to pretend that didn’t happen but here’s the thing. It did.

As he ages and deals with dementia, his filters are coming off. His ability to contain his vile in one place and spew it in another without consequence is diminishing rapidly. We are in for the most filth we have ever imagined finding its way into our homes and lives as a result of this marriage. And we who have left and we who see and know it need to dig deep and help the people out of it when they seek our help. Not all will. We all know someone who stays and goes down with the ship – there will be many of those too.

I just pray we have a home when it is all over.