Discerning the Spirits

By Michael Beck and Isaiah Park

Part II—Why MAGA Loyalty Does Not Break

You can smell the kingdom of God on Wednesday nights at the Family Table Community Dinner.

About a hundred people pack into the fellowship hall of St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Ocala, Florida. This church facility also doubles as an inpatient sober living community called Open Arms Village. You can smell the steam rising from hot food as it is scooped onto plates.

People from the recovery community drift in between the 5:30 p.m. AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting and the 8:00 p.m. NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meeting. Families from the surrounding neighborhood who are facing food insecurity join the banquet. A handful of faithful saints, the remnant of what was once a thriving congregation, gather around the tables.

Someone gets up and shares a “Jesus story” or a bit of “God talk.” We pass the microphone. There is live music. Then we pray.

After Family Table, we move into a community Bible study with an unlikely mix of people at every level of biblical knowledge. Lifelong churchgoers sit next to people who are trying not to shoot fentanyl. Others have never opened a Bible. Some of our friends experiencing homelessness have significant mental health challenges. At times, someone will speak for several minutes in what sounds like an incoherent, but Scripture-saturated, stream of consciousness.

This is the one place in their week where someone listens. We have learned to slow down, to pay attention, to listen for what the Spirit might be saying through them. Our lay leaders are incredible at this, honoring the dignity of every person in the circle, weaving even the most seemingly disjointed contributions into the conversation.

A couple of weeks ago, we were in the middle of a discussion about Palm Sunday. We were contrasting a homeless, peasant king—Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey, surrounded by the subjugated masses crying, “Save us!”—with the Caesars, who thundered into cities on warhorses, flanked by soldiers, swords, spears, and eagles in the air. The tension in this collision of kingdoms prompted a longtime church attender to speak up: “Well, we know the 2020 election was stolen…” The room went quiet. A few heads nodded. Others froze, unsure how to respond.

As local church leaders, we frequently find ourselves in conversations like these. People we care about, thoughtful, engaged, intelligent, look us in the eyes and repeat claims that have been publicly disproven for years. We often gently push back. We cite sources. We explain the court cases, the audits, and the bipartisan verification. And it doesn’t matter.

The responses aren’t based on curiosity. There is no real reconsideration. It is not even a disagreement in the normal sense. It is a kind of closure, a shifting of the conversation, a dismissal of the sources. It is a subtle but firm reassertion: this is what we believe.

These are not just moments of disagreement. They are signs of a deeper crisis of discipleship, of competing formations shaping what people believe, how they see the world, and whom they trust.

The Puzzle of Unbreakable Allegiance

In our previous article, we argued that MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) functions not merely as a political movement, but as a sectarian system with religious legitimation, one that now coheres around a single central figure: Donald Trump. This is not classical conservatism, historic Republicanism, or ordinary partisan politics; it is something fundamentally different.

Drawing again on Max Weber (Economy and Society, 1978), we assert that Donald Trump’s administration is best understood as a form of charismatic authority, where legitimacy is derived not from law or institutional norms, but from personal loyalty to a leader who claims unique insight and the ability to transcend established rules. This is best understood as a form of patrimonialism, in which bureaucratic structures are weakened or repurposed, and authority flows through the leader’s will rather than through stable, rational, legal systems (Economy and Society, 1978). The state is treated as a personal instrument of the leader, and loyalty replaces law as the organizing principle of governance.

You may find yourself genuinely baffled by the unwavering loyalty of MAGA adherents to Trump. By most conventional political, moral, and even religious standards, his record would be disqualifying many times over, yet his support remains remarkably durable.

Consider what does not break it.

Legal scandal does not break it. Even when those associated with the movement face serious legal judgment, public findings of wrongdoing, or credible ties to morally compromising realities, such developments rarely weaken commitment. They are absorbed, minimized, or reframed as persecution.

Moral transgression does not break it. Racist, sexist, demeaning, and openly cruel rhetoric has not disqualified the movement for its followers. Mocking the vulnerable, insulting opponents, stereotyping minorities, and treating entire groups with contempt would fracture most political communities. Here, such behavior is often excused, defended, or even admired as strength.

Economic contradiction does not break it. Even when the economic promises attached to the movement do not materially improve the lives of ordinary people, loyalty remains intact. In a society where wealth continues to concentrate at the top while many families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and daily necessities, disappointment does not necessarily produce disillusionment.

Public cruelty does not break it. Ridiculing victims, grieving families, vulnerable communities, and whole nations has not meaningfully diminished allegiance. Within the movement, such cruelty is frequently reinterpreted as boldness, authenticity, or the courage to say what others will not say.

Broken promises do not break it. Commitments once made with great confidence can be reversed, abandoned, or contradicted by real-world outcomes, yet the movement often remains unshaken. Contradictions are not treated as disqualifying. They are absorbed into the larger narrative and reframed as necessary, justified, or somehow part of the fight.

Most striking of all is the deep entanglement between MAGA and Christian nationalism, which functions as a form of religious legitimation. This is especially troubling on theological grounds. Christianity centers on care for immigrants, the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. Jesus commands love of enemies, humility, repentance, truthfulness, and mercy. MAGA often elevates patterns of exclusion, domination, contempt, and grievance. What stands in tension with the way of Jesus is not seen as a contradiction but is instead frequently couched in spiritual language and moral urgency.

This cannot be reduced to a lack of knowledge. MAGA loyalty crosses educational and economic lines. It is not confined to the uninformed or the materially desperate. College-educated, financially secure, socially established Americans participate fully in its logic and defense. What we are witnessing is not merely a lack of knowledge but a form of sectarian moral alignment in which contradictions can be absorbed, disconfirming evidence dismissed, and coherence maintained, even in the face of failure.

None of this easily causes adherents to walk away.

The Problem Isn’t a Lack of Evidence

Over the course of his public life, and especially during his presidency, Donald Trump has made thousands of false claims. The Washington Post documented more than 30,000 misleading statements during his first term alone, averaging more than twenty lies per day. These were not obscure technical errors. Many were repeated claims that had been publicly corrected about elections, the economy, immigration, public health, and foreign policy. Yet the claims continued to be asserted.

This pattern has not changed. Claims about a “stolen” 2020 election have been rejected in courts, audits, and by election officials from both parties. Assertions about immigrants as criminals or coordinated threats have been repeatedly debunked by data. Economic claims about “the greatest economy ever” or the absence of inflation have been consistently rated as exaggerated or false by independent fact-checkers. Promises made during campaigns, no new foreign wars, immediate economic improvement, restoring stability, have often collided with a far more complex and contradictory reality.

But none of this seems to matter. The usual assumption is that people believe false things because they lack access to the truth. But in this case, the truth is widely available, widely reported, and widely documented.

The issue is not that evidence is missing. It is that the evidence does not function as evidence for MAGA adherents.

Belief, Identity, and the Social Construction of Reality

William Isaac Thomas, an American sociologist, said, “If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This insight, often called the Thomas Theorem, is essential for understanding MAGA.

If millions of people believe the election was stolen, then that belief doesn’t need to be true to have consequences. It becomes socially real. It shapes behavior, justifies action, and reorganizes moral judgment.

This is exactly what we saw in the Panel Study of the MAGA Movement: nearly all self-identified MAGA respondents believed Trump’s claims of election fraud, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (Parker & Blum, 2021). The belief became the reality that mattered. Once a belief reaches that level, it no longer functions as a hypothesis to be tested. It becomes part of a moral world to be defended.

Classical sociology offers another helpful lens: false class consciousness. Originally developed in Marxist theory, this describes a condition in which people adopt beliefs that ultimately work against their own interests, often because those beliefs are shaped by powerful ideological systems.

In the modern context, false consciousness doesn’t emerge from a lack of information. It emerges from an overabundance of curated information. MAGA operates within a dense ecosystem of media, podcasts, influencers, and social networks that reinforce a single interpretive frame.

• Contradictory evidence is dismissed.
• Dissenting voices are discredited.
• Loyalty is rewarded.
• Doubt is punished.

This is not ignorance. It is ideological saturation, and it explains why simply “presenting the facts” often fails.

The deeper issue is identity. Research on affective polarization shows that political identity in the United States has become deeply intertwined with social identity, with whom we trust, whom we fear, and who we believe belongs.

When that happens, disagreement is no longer about ideas. It becomes about who we are.

False Defenses and Dangerous Dynamics: How MAGA Responds to Challenge

One of the clearest signs that MAGA functions as a sectarian ideology rather than a conventional political movement is how it responds to challenge.

When Trump is criticized, critics are routinely accused of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” This move does not engage with the substance of the critique; it dismisses it by attacking the mental or moral integrity of the critic.

Another defining pattern is deflection instead of evaluation. When Trump is implicated in wrongdoing, the response is rarely to examine the evidence on its own terms. Instead, attention is redirected.

Finally, MAGA enforces loyalty through exile and social punishment.

The Discipleship Crisis Beneath the Surface

What we are witnessing is not simply a political problem. It is a discipleship crisis.

You cannot simply argue someone out of a system that is forming their deepest loyalties.

It is to reclaim discipleship, to form communities where truth matters, where love is not conditional, where repentance is possible, and where identity is rooted not in grievance or power, but in the life and teachings of Jesus.

Where Do We Go from Here?

• Create spaces where people are listened to without surrendering their ideologies.
• Shift from debate to discipleship questions.
• Recover the slow work of Christian practices.
• Pay attention to belonging.

What’s Next?

This is where MAGA and Christian nationalism converge, and that will be our focus in Part III.

References

Beck, Michael Adam. Distortions: How to Recognize and Refute False Christian Claims in American Culture, Abingdon Press, 2026.

Bonikowski, Bart (2017), “Ethno-Nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment,” The British Journal of Sociology, 68(S1), S181–S213. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12325

Franks, Andrew S. and Hesami, Farhang (2021), “Seeking Evidence of the MAGA Cult and Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Societies, 11(3), 113.

Kahan, Dan M. (2017), “Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition.” Yale Law School. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2973067

Parker, Christopher S., and Blum, Rachel M. Panel Study of the MAGA Movement. University of Washington, 2021.

Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. University of California Press, 1978.

Wintemute, Garen J. et al. (2025), “The MAGA Movement and Political Violence in 2024.” Injury Epidemiology, 12.