Name: What the Epstein Crisis Reveals About the Evangelical Mind
Uploaded: 2025-08-30T23:16:31.000Z
Duration: 11 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you're anything like me, you've stood back mouth wide agape as you watched a surprising group of Americans become the loudest voice in the room.

Adverbs of degree

Louder than reason or science, certainly louder than love.

Participle clauses

Maybe like me, you felt helpless as their views, once considered fringe, became mainstream.

And you just can't help but ask yourself, why do so many people seem to agree with these ideas?

Conservative evangelicals have become the unwitting mainstream of America, but how did it happen?

And why does it seem like Jeffrey Epstein, not felony convictions, threatening to deport full on citizens or a slew of other crimes, might actually be the thing that breaks their loyalty to Donald Trump?

Okay, so in order to understand why Epstein specifically is so important to conservative evangelicals, we need to go all the way back to the basic tenets of this belief system, which is the Christian faith.

Whether you're a conservative evangelical, or a progressive Christian, or practice no religion whatsoever, most people understand that Christianity is based on two core tenets.

Belief in God and living out biblical ideas, and sharing that belief with others.

But those two pillars can look completely different in execution depending on what version of Christianity you were taught.

I was raised in a more moderately conservative church.

For us, belief in God meant a relationship with him.

We were encouraged to pray, read the Bible, and come to our own conclusions through discernment, with humility and self-reflection.

But in my research into conservative Christian media, especially from the 1990s, I discovered something very different.

In those evangelical spaces, the relationship with God wasn't viewed as the center, although it was typically professed to be the center.

According to my research, conservative evangelicals were taught that your leader, your pastor, your parents, your elder, were God's voice on earth.

And your job was not to reflect or use your own discernment to develop a Christian practice, but to obey them in order to do so.

But in an interpretation of religion based on a removal of personal agency, obedience isn't enough to guarantee loyalty.

You need to ensure that your people don't flip and become loyal to someone else.

So you need to make sure you build in protection from allowing your people to be led astray.

To ensure loyalty to your version of the truth, these communities taught people to fear all other versions of truth.

Without your power supply, you won't be able to recharge yourself.

And then, slowly, slowly, you'll lose all your memory.

Just think of all the money I could make if I use your musical abilities to write hit songs.

I could make millions of records, even movies.

But wait, my programs were created to help boys and girls understand God's word, not to help write hit songs and make lots of money.

Now there's the beauty of it, my little computer.

You were raised to believe that evil was lurking behind every book, behind every news story, every liberal idea defined as someone using critical thinking or being open-minded.

Evangelism became less about loving others into freedom and more about fighting evil, wherever it's hiding.

A generation grew up not just believing in God, but believing it was their sacred duty to identify and destroy the enemy.

Okay, if you weren't raised this way, this is hard to do, but I just want you to imagine what it would be like if this was actually the mindset you were taught to believe.

Maybe from the time you were a small child.

Your whole life you've been told there is an enemy.

To this mindset, liberals aren't just people with different views.

So by the time Barack Obama was elected and gay marriage passed through, conservative evangelicals believed that not only was there a war, they were losing it real bad.

And worst of all, a lot of them felt like they were losing God's favor as all it took was a look around their own church to see that people were leaving in droves.

During this time period, Christianity did in fact see a steep decline among many denominations.

But then, just when they thought they were going to lose the battle for good, then came Trump.

He promised to make America great again, which they heard as make America Christian again.

And I've already told you how they fill in the blanks of what that actually means to them.

It meant defeating the territories that were enemies of God.

And expanding the territory of God to be all of America.

They didn't need Trump to live a holy life.

They needed him to do what they believed he was going to do.

Finally validate and vindicate the work that they had been dedicating their lives to for decades at this point.

Fighting every enemy that came their way in the name of God.

He declared their enemies as his enemies.

And he made them feel powerful again, after decades of feeling like they might just be on the losing team.

Already primed to be devoted to a symbol of authority, they became loyal to Donald Trump no matter what he did.

Because now this same group, MAGA evangelicals, are facing a crisis of cognitive dissonance in real time.

See, Epstein was, for many of them, the ultimate manifestation of evil.

He was somehow this intersection of all the people who were the enemies of God and who needed to be defeated by MAGA, by Trump, by this Christian nation, in order to truly win it over for God.

After all, what did Epstein really represent?

A hidden cabal of elites, abusing children, just lurking in the shadows, waiting to corrupt everyone.

It sounds a lot like the plot of Colby's Clubhouse, something that was put out there in the 90s.

For anyone around my age, this is all they would have ever known if they were growing up in these circles.

So Jeffrey Epstein, he really confirms everything they've been taught to fear.

But now Donald Trump, their savior, instead of following through on a promise that MAGA was basing their life on, is telling his committed followers that they should just forget about it.

They actually wanted what they felt like was justice, and they still do.

But maybe, after all, Trump didn't actually want what they wanted.

Maybe it was just another campaign promise.

What if Trump didn't actually carry their burden at all?

What if he never actually cared about bringing people like Jeffrey Epstein, enemies of God, to justice?

And as soon as that shiny facade begins to tarnish, it's not too hard to see that Trump actually has a reason to hide the truth about Epstein.

The unfortunate reality is that Trump might actually be just like Jeffrey Epstein, the very symbol that conservative evangelicals have maybe been taught their entire lives to fear and hate, to seek out, to destroy.

And now what might, in any other circumstance, just be seen as yet another campaign promise that goes undelivered when the candidate gets into office, something that has disillusioned many an American for many, many years at this point, is seen as so much more than that by his base.

I feel really betrayed and I feel really, really angry.

We have a president who tells us to move on from Epstein because it doesn't matter.

And yet he still talks about the 2020 election fraud.

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What the Epstein Crisis Reveals About the Evangelical Mind

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