Name: MAGA Isn’t Saving Christianity — It’s SPEEDRUNNING Collapse
Uploaded: 2026-01-28T16:55:27.000Z
Duration: 12 min 58 s
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Christian nationalists want us to believe that Christianity is booming in America right now.

Adverbs of manner

But what if MAGA is actively putting the final nail in the coffin of Christianity instead?

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We've seen how white conservative evangelicals continue to shill for Trump, no matter how utterly corrupt his approach becomes.

Surely this has an impact on how people view the God these people claim to be inspired by, right?

Well, it turns out that there's a clear pattern that MAGA Christianity sits within that gives us a good idea of what we can expect their impact to ultimately be.

My name's Heidi, and on this channel, we deconstruct holy ideas.

For most of modern American history, Christianity has been remarkably stable.

For decades, roughly 90% of Americans identified as Christian.

When you look at this longitudinal graph, two sharp declines stand out.

So the question becomes, what happened right before each of those drops?

In the years preceding that first drop in religiosity, a very clear pattern emerged in America.

Between the years of 1986 and 1991, there was a wave of nationally televised televangelist scandals, including fraud, sexual abuse, financial exploitation, and

hypocrisy exposed live on television year after year.

And right when that first wave of scandal had enough time to sink into culture.

That's when we see the first drop in religiosity in America come 1992.

That's when we see this sharp decline on our graph.

People didn't stop believing overnight, but they stopped trusting.

the Boston Globe drops a bombshell article exposing systematic abuse within the Catholic Church.

And the massive drop in religiosity that we see five years after this article was published, I believe was bolstered by a couple factors that hadn't been present before.

And these include the fact that broadband Internet had just recently started being widely available in America, starting around 2001, as well as between 2004 and 2006, the start of the New Atheist movement making a major splash in America for the first time.

There was widespread doubt of the moral authority of the institutions of Christianity and Catholicism, as well as this new ability to get out of your perspective and see the world at large in a way that had never been possible before.

But it wasn't just the decline of Christianity Christian affiliation that happened during these two pivotal points in modern US History.

We also have this indication that moral failings did in fact, contribute to both of these drop offs in religious affiliation.

This is a graph that reflects public trust in the religious institution in America compared to all institutions in America.

As you can see, there are three distinct Public trust toward the institution of religion starts out above the that of other institutions, then goes to be the same as that of other institutions to ending up being underwater compared to other institutions.

And the time that these changes happen is really important.

They happen right before affiliation starts to go down, just a couple years later.

Conservative evangelicals can claim that the world has gone to hell in the past number of years, but

it seems clear at the very least that Americans also have seen with their own eyes that the moral authority that Christians claim to have is at the very least highly suspect.

A recent viral TikTok series is a great example of the impact that the decay of moral authority among Christians has had on society.

Today there was a woman conducting a social experiment where she called around different churches asking them one simple question.

Do you have any spare formula for my starving baby?

I'm not sure cuz we don't have cash here.

We really don't have an estimated time just because we do receive a lot of requests here.

It can take a couple days, it could take a couple weeks.

Really just don't have a time right there.

But we don't have formula or anything like that.

You want, you want somebody to give you some money or something?

I have a two month old and she ran out last night.

So she's went all night and all day without formula.

Yeah, we don't have any formula here for now, baby.

No, we have a kitchen but we don't have milk.

Is there any way y' all could just get a can and I could pick it up?

We don't have time to do that because we don't.

She called megachurches mid sized churches, different denominations, Catholics, Mormons and she got the same response from almost everyone.

But the real reason why I think everyone was talking about this situation wasn't because they were surprised?

I think it was actually because they weren't surprised at all.

Am I surprised that the church is not taking accountability?

Am I continuously disappointed with them?

Quaverly Church in Tennessee is a beautiful example and demonstration of what we call Darvo, which is a known manipulation tactic that people who have narcissistic, abusive and manipulative behavior use when they are confronted with the truth and are being asked to be accountable for their bad behavior.

There was less shock and outrage in people's responses to watching this social experiment play out in real time, and

more so confirmation of the things that they already believed about how Christians would respond.

And the outcome of this social experiment seemed to be clear.

Christians are so much more likely to talk about morality rather than actually practice it.

And when confronted with the implications of this social experiment, some defenders of Christianity didn't even argue the facts.

They dismissed the relevance of this entire experiment to begin with.

Even if you called every single church around the world pretending that your child needed baby formula and every single one of those churches rejected you, it wouldn't change the fact that Jesus Christ still paid for your sins on the cross and then rose again on the third day, and

that the only way into heaven is by trusting in him for your salvation.

And it's responses like this from Christians that exposes the much deeper problem at play.

The holy idea present within these powerful sectors of Christianity is that morality is not an objective thing that we measure our leaders or role models against.

Instead, within these spaces, morality is defined by leadership because leaders talk to God and God is the ultimate arbiter of our reality of truth, of our sense of morality.

This idea is the foundation for leaders who evade accountability, followers who defend the system instead of recognizing that they're being manipulated by it, and

a watching world who sees morality being happily traded in for the real prize of the religious machine, which is power.

This is the pattern that continues to repeat within the conservative evangelical church in America.

Whether we're talking about televangelism in the 80s or megachurches in the 2010s or Christian nationalism today.

First, you have to create a high status environment that makes people feel chosen, elite and morally superior.

Next, offer a certainty based belief system that is controlled by unquestionable leaders.

Then you have to convince followers that they're under siege, victims of a hostile world.

And lastly, demand loyalty from them instead of accountability from yourself.

And this is how this segment of Christianity has created so such a loyal base that has kept pretty consistent numbers between 20 to 25% of the American population for decades.