Belief

Back in the early 20th Century, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) separated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)—the Mormon Church — to protest its 1904 manifesto renouncing polygamy. The FLDS is a marginal group that the vast majority of Mormons, from former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) to R&B star Gladys Knight, AKA The Empress of Soul, have zero connection to. But according to the Washington Post, the FLDS could endanger Rep. Andy Biggs' (R-Arizona) gubernatorial campaign in the Grand Canyon State.

Biggs is seeking the GOP nomination in Arizona's 2026 gubernatorial race. If he wins the nomination on Tuesday, he will take on Democratic incumbent Gov. Katie Hobbs in the general election. According to Washington Post reporter Hannah Knowles, however, a 2013 controversy involving the FLDS could come back to haunt the far-right Biggs.

"Momentum was growing in 2013 to crack down on a polygamist religious group accused of ... abusing girls in rural Arizona," Knowles reports in the Post. "The Justice Department was suing. The group's leader was in prison after a stint on the FBI's most-wanted list. Arizona's attorney general wanted to shut down the local police force, the Colorado City Marshal's Office, which he accused of doing the bidding of sect leaders. But a bill designed to strip authority from the marshal’s office never got a vote in the (Arizona) State Senate. "

Knowles continues, "Its Republican sponsor blamed then-Senate President Andy Biggs (R) for the bill's failure to advance in that chamber. Now, more than a decade later — as Biggs cruises toward an expected victory in Tuesday's primary for Arizona governor — the episode is likely to get renewed attention."

Democrats, Knowles reports, "expect to highlight the old fight over the marshal's office" — which, according to the Post reporter, is "one of many polarizing moments in Biggs' long legislative record that some Republicans worry could come back to haunt them in a hotly contested swing-state race."

One of those Republicans is Buster Johnson, a county supervisor in Arizona.

Johnson told the Post, "I would rather vote for somebody who has made a stand for women and children above religion."

Knowles notes that "scrutiny of" the FLDS "grew in the 2000s when officials charged its leader at the time, Warren Jeffs" with felonies and he was placed on the FBI's most-wanted list.

Salon guest writer Andrew Daugherty says President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission aims to turn churches into political action committee moneybags.

“The most efficient campaign finance vehicle in American history is tax-exempt, requires no donor disclosure and is available in virtually every zip code in the country. For 70 years, it has operated under one rule: It cannot endorse a political candidate,” said Daugherty. “The Religious Liberty Commission, which delivered its report to President Donald Trump on June 26, would like to remove that rule. They’re calling it religious freedom.”

But Daugherty, a Christian minister of an American Baptist congregation for more than 20 years, says he knows the difference between protecting a church and conscripting one: “A government that wants to free the church, to borrow Trump’s language, is usually trying to use it.”

The 1954 Johnson Amendment restricts churches, religious organizations and other tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing political candidates or funneling tax-deductible donations into partisan campaigns. Church leaders can preach hard and heavy on moral and social issue, but the tax-exempt status line stops at candidate endorsements.

“In other words, the amendment is the last structural barrier between the American church and full absorption into the machinery of partisan politics,” said Daugherty. “The claim that this constitutes religious suppression is the oldest con in the game. Every American pastor has the same First Amendment rights as any other citizen. What the Johnson Amendment restricts is tax-exempt dollars in partisan politics. Churches pay no federal taxes. In exchange, they stay out of the candidate-endorsement business. Void it, and that deal ends — and every church in America becomes a PAC with better branding and transparency requirements and endorsed by a divine mandate.”

Imagine a donor writing a federal tax-deductible check to their congregation. Then the church endorses the candidate of their choice, bundles those contributions and runs voter registration drives for one party. Plus, it does it all without a political action committees’ disclosure requirement.

“This is tax-exempt political spending, passed through the offering plate and invisible to the public record,” said Daugherty, and this is a mistake that could further destroy the American church.

“Church attendance has collapsed at a pace that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago,” he argued. “According to a 2024 Pew Research study, the fastest-growing religious identity in America is ‘none.’ The research on why people leave does not point to boredom or busyness. It points to disgust at what organized religion has become. The Christian right has spent five decades getting closer to power and losing the one thing it cannot buy back: The credibility to speak to anyone outside its own coalition.”

But Trump’s commission doesn’t appear discouraged by this information. And Daugherty said their plans go beyond just ending the Johnson Amendment. They propose putting an end to the separation of church and state.

“The separation has existed because both institutions require protection from each other. When such safeguards are removed, the bridge comes with a toll booth, and the commission is waving one side through,” said Daughtry. “This is state power reinforcing evangelical Christianity, and evangelical Christianity legitimizing state power. The commission calls it ‘partnership.’ History calls it a state church.”

Although U.S. President Donald Trump continues to suffer from weak approval ratings in poll after poll, one group that, on the whole, still holds him in high regard is white evangelical Christian fundamentalists — who view him as a staunch defender of Christianity. But Trump's support among Christians is far from universal, and according to i Paper reporter Daniel Bates, some Christians believe that evangelicals are doing their faith a huge disservice by exalting the president as a prophet.

Bates, in the UK-based i Paper, explains, "White evangelical Christians have been vital for Trump's presidential wins, backing him by margins of between 75 and 85 per cent in his presidential campaigns…. Despite his multiple marriages, rumored infidelities, vulgarity, use of profane language and felony conviction for falsifying business records, evangelical Christians have stuck with Trump in what has been described as a 'devil's bargain,' since it has brought victories for their position on issues like abortion and trans rights. The president's supporters have described him as their 'savior' who was 'anointed by God' to bring Christianity back to America."

Rihanna Teixeira, a former Trump supporter who was raised evangelical in Arizona, views evangelicals as cult-like when it comes to Trump.

Teixeira told the i Paper, "I wish I had a logical answer as to why I voted for him, but the truth is that the evangelical church is a cult. I started following historians and people who I felt could give neutral and honest reporting on what was happening. I also moved out of the small town that I was living in and moved to Los Angeles where I met and became friends with people who were being directly impacted by Trump and his policies. I also worked with a lot of DACA (immigrant) students who were having to give up their dreams of bettering their lives. Seeing first-hand how he was impacting people made me start to question everything I had been taught previously."

Another Christian fundamentalist who now refuses to support Trump is the Rev. Jared Stacy.

The Baptist minister told the i Paper, "The story I inherited was that if Democrats were in charge, it would mean the end of America and the persecution of Christians. I remember the rhetoric around the (Monica) Lewinsky scandal and the importance of character in the White House, which is ironic now. When I voted for Trump in 2016, it was a hold-my-nose kind of thing. My political compass back then was disoriented from the faith I confess today. Though I would have defended my decision back then as 'biblical,' it was entirely a gamble — one that emerged from anxious fear, not faith, hope, and love…. When you see widespread evangelical embrace of a political figure, it's not just political support, it's the permission that embrace gives to ways of operating that have historically permeated how white evangelicalism in this country operates."

Christian author Karen Prior explained why so many white evangelicals continue to support Trump.

Prior told the i Paper, "His court succeeded in overturning Roe vs. Wade, and many white evangelicals felt like he delivered on his campaign promise on abortion. Four years after the decision, however, the abortion rate has slightly risen, and the Trump administration is increasing access to medical abortions. It's just becoming harder and harder to deny that Trump's positions on the moral issues traditionally important to evangelicals are anything but inconsistent and incoherent."

According to the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and president of the Interfaith Alliance, more evangelicals are seeing the contradiction between supporting Trump and preaching a very strict form of Christianity.

Raushenbush told the i Paper, "There will always be true believers in Donald Trump but others are asking, 'Is he really the kind of leader that represents Christian values?' There's a large movable middle that’s beginning to say, 'Is this really the best we can do?'"

t recently emerged that tech billionaire Peter Thiel is running a secret society that brings together fellow CEOs and billionaires with political leaders. Members reportedly include figures like Nato supreme commander Alexus Grynkewich and son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner.

President Donald Trump’s supporters have long been accused of acting like they are in a cult and viciously turning on anyone who criticizes their leader. Now Corey Nathan,

“There is such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s not what you think,” wrote Corey Nathan, who was born Jewish and subsequently converted to Christianity, in an editorial for a conservative publication called The Dispatch. Instead of using it to describe people who criticize Trump, Nathan argued that it refers to people “who look upon the words and actions of Donald Trump and cannot see them for what they are. On any given day, his conduct exhibits the very antithesis of what Scripture—or anyone with the most basic sense of decency—calls virtue.”

He mentioned that, whenever he cites Trump’s numerous actions that would be described as sins according to the tenets of Christianity, he receives “now entirely predictable, seemingly reflexive comebacks. ‘Oh, well what about Biden? What about Ka-MAH-la? What about Obama? Nobody was more arrogant than Barack Hussein Obama.’ Or something like, ‘Doesn’t the Bible tell you not to judge?’ Or maybe simply, and this was said to me just last week, ‘The TDS is strong in you, man.’”

Nathan continued that these arguments tend to be self-serving and one-way, made by people who are putting out whatever they hope might help them defend Trump rather than because there is any internal consistency or moral logic to what they are propounding. In this expedient and irrational mindset, Nathan compared Trump supporters to individuals struggling with addiction issues.

“The dynamic feels familiar: the denial, the defensiveness, the way confrontation closes doors that patience might eventually open,” Nathan wrote. “The problem I keep wrestling with isn’t political. It’s human. What do we do when people we love become morally and epistemically unavailable to us?”

He added, “By that I mean, why do people I care about seem not even to know about example after example (and the volume is part of the MAGA strategy) of what should be disqualifying statements and actions Trump has made through the years? By the time you’ve cataloged everything, you’ve already forgotten Helsinki. You’ve forgotten his sanitization and deflections for people chanting ‘the Jews will not replace us.’ You’ve forgotten ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ Those moments now seem almost quaint.”

Describing this phenomenon as “a moral and epistemic disorder, a specific kind of blindness with a specific structure,” Nathan compared the attitudes of Trump supporters to those that facilitated the rise of fascists in the 20th century and were chronicled by writers of the time like George Orwell and Theodor Adorno.

“There are moments in history when one thing is happening that dwarfs everything else,” Nathan argued. “The people who miss it aren’t always wrong about their concerns; they’re just catastrophically misallocating their moral attention. My friend the pastor isn’t pro-Trump, exactly. He’s distracted. And distraction, at this historical moment, is its own form of complicity. But Trump promises to win the culture war this faith leader is losing. In exchange, he doesn’t have to look too hard at the man doing the winning.”

He continued, “There’s also the matter of incentives. Calling out Trump would cost him—empty pews, less tithing, the church across town gaining ground. Russell Moore was pressured out of his position with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission within the Southern Baptist Convention for less. I’ve seen how that goes firsthand. I’ve been asked to leave Bible studies for insisting on what Scripture actually says when it cuts against the room’s political preferences. The people who showed me the door didn’t say they disagreed with my politics. They said I was ‘getting political.’ The politics were always there, of course. Just not the right kind.”

Overall, Nathan ended by saying that people who oppose Trump but are close to people who support him must continue showing up and conversing with them, in an understanding and non-confrontational tone, even though he does not know beyond that how to deprogram them.

“These are not stupid men,” Nathan said. “My good friend is sharp and informed. My old pastor is educated and theologically serious. That’s the syndrome. The real one. Not the inability to tolerate Trump. The inability to see him clearly.”

He concluded, “I don’t know what cures it. But I’m not ready to stop trying to find out.”

Nathan is far from alone in comparing Trumpers’ behavior to that of a cult. Speaking with the conservative website The Bulwark in March, former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair bluntly said that the Trump movement “is a cult. And what you have to understand is that in any abusive relationship, your access to other people is cut off. You're isolated. Your access to information is cut off. Your access to people who might have rational perspectives on what you're involved in — that's cut off too.”

She added, “These people are told it's all fake news. The only things you can trust are Twitter and Truth Social. And for better or worse, they actually believe that. They believe that established outlets are lying to them, that nothing those outlets publish can be true."

President Donald Trump has provided “a stunning example of political pandering and exploiting religious faith for personal profit,” said a religious freedom advocate on Tuesday after financial disclosure forms revealed one of the latest ways in which the president has profited from the presidency: this time, by licensing his name to the “God Bless the USA” Bible sold by supporter and country music star Lee Greenwood.

The Bible bearing the president’s name is being sold for $99.99—as are the “First Lady Edition” and the “Vice Presidential Edition.”

According to his latest financial disclosures, the president has earned a total of $1,514,521 from placing his name on the religious text in a package that also includes copies of the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the handwritten chorus of Greenwood’s 1984 song “Good Bless the USA.”

About $1.3 million was earned while the president was campaigning ahead of the 2024 election, while about $208,000 flowed to the president in 2025.

Anna Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), said that “Trump wraps himself in Christianity, wraps the Constitution inside a Bible, and is persuading supporters to finance his political brand while enriching himself to the tune of more than $1.5 million.”

“As all things are with Trump, this has always been about money,” said Gaylor. “It is a stunning example of political pandering and exploiting religious faith for personal profit.”

Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist noted that the disclosure also showed about $1.4 billion that the president made last year from “crypto-related schemes” and $80 million from lawsuits against media companies including CBS and ABC.

Trump has suggested the Bible venture is closest to his heart, saying in a video promoting the basic version of the “God Bless the USA Bible”—which retails at $59.99—that the religious text is his “favorite book.”

“Christians are under siege,” he added in the video. “We must protect content that is pro-God. We love God, and we have to protect anything that is pro-God… Our Founding Fathers did a tremendous thing when they built America on Judeo-Christian values.”

The notion that the country was founded as a Christian nation has long been a fixation of the far right and has been deeply embedded in the president’s celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—but historians say there is no evidence for the claim.

“The only rules they wrote about religion were ones that keep religion at arm’s length,” Princeton University professor Kevin Kruse told The Washington Post as the White House planned an all-day prayer event on National Mall in May. “There’s a difference between saying America is a nation with many Christians in it and that America is a nation dedicated to Christianity and defined by it.”

Both Mehta and FFRF noted that Trump has “struggled to discuss even the most basic aspects of the Bible, declining on multiple occasions to identify a favorite verse or even express a preference between the Old and New Testaments.”

“Trump’s Bible enterprise demonstrates how easily religious symbolism can be weaponized to enrich politicians while undermining the constitutional principle of state/church separation that protects believers and nonbelievers alike,” said FFRF.

Gaylor added that “religion should never be a marketing strategy.”

“Nor should the office of the presidency become a platform for selling religious merchandise,” she said. “Americans deserve leaders who respect both religion and government enough to keep them separate—not presidents who see faith as another licensing opportunity.”

A Tennessee church thinks that it's fighting Satan when it's fighting the political culture war, and the modern crusade has turned a "charismatic" movement into politics.

Extreme churches and beliefs that trend toward the more bizarre are those that often get ignored by politicians who don't want to be associated with something far outside of the mainstream. But the Tennessee church is using its charisma to turn culture wars into a very real battlefield where Satan is active in public life and Christians are called to fight back through prayer, prophecy and political engagement.

An extensive report from The Atlantic details the journey of Andrea and Mike Brewer, the founders of the Well, where they promote their belief that the Earth is the battlefield on which Heaven and Hell fight. Mike Brewer tells a story about his addiction to adult videos and was leading an unhappy life. While praying, he heard voices calling to him and felt what he believes was a demon being removed by God and replaced with the Holy Spirit.

"He and Andrea came to believe that God was unleashing new signs and wonders and raising up modern-day apostles and prophets, including, it turned out, them," the report said.

The couple belongs to a group of ministries called "Global Awakening," and Andrea has begun "studying demon history and hierarchies." The couple then started a demon hunt, finding it in a local bookshop and cafe. The owner discovered that the Brewers were accusing her of demonic activity when a customer flagged it. It happens to be across the street from the Brewers' new church.

Mike Brewer released several videos of himself sitting behind a desk and "he explained in a calm and methodical manner that the bookstore had been identified as a 'regional demonic stronghold.' A high-ranking demon named Lilith was involved, [owner Lisa] Misosky would learn, and the bookstore was being targeted for something called 'strategic-level spiritual warfare,' the goal of which was to 'remove the enemy.'"

Misosky was born in the town, she's a Catholic, a Democrat and she's gay. It might be the reason that the Brewers didn't first approach her to offer help or conduct their own blessing. They simply went to war.

“This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Misosky.

These are the same phrases coming from President Donald Trump, however. His ally, far-right firebrand Steve Bannon called Lutheran and Catholic people helping immigrants "demonic." His vice president, JD Vance thinks that "aliens" and "UFOs" are actually demons. One FEMA official claimed that he was transported through time and space to a Waffle House.

"In that beginning moment, though, Misosky was simply wondering what the accusations meant for her bookstore and the people who went there. Why was she being targeted? What, precisely, was demonic about Southland? The mah-jongg? The romantasy section? A drag performer called Icky Stardust? Her? She wondered if she needed to worry about security," the story read.

Misosky looked up her own demonology for answers and to prepare for what she could expect. A group known as the New Apostolic Reformation has devised its own "end times" narrative where they believe the Bible's tales of an afterlife are wrong and they're supposed to build their own Heaven on Earth while they await the return of Jesus Christ.

The Atlantic story noted that the narrative follows the political goals of the MAGA movement. "The Kingdom would have limited government, free markets, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one kind of God." The movement is no longer a marginal one. There are now Tens of millions of American Christians drawn into these kinds of ideologies and the explicit goal is to "dismantle the secular state," the American government itself.

Churches are no longer a place of peace but a "war room" and services are rallying cries. There are maps and battle themes and prayers that constantly focus on "victory over evil" language, the latter of which is government, education, the media, and businesses.

Trump's political victories have become signs of divine triumph over those they consider to be not fellow citizens but enemies in some kind of cosmic struggle.

The group has become a politically potent force, and the conflict between the Tennessee church and the local bookshop is only the beginning.

For centuries, Christianity has been having ideological battles, with fundamentalists expressing very different views from the more moderate Protestants and Catholics. In 2026, these heated debates among Christians continue, and an article for the conservative website The Bulwark examines the intense conflict between far-right Christian nationalists and those with a more inclusive view of Christianity.

According to Philip D. Bunn (a political science professor at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia), Eli McGowan (a conservative Presbyterian), and Presbyterian professor Emily McGowan, "Christian nationalism" has "ballooned" in the MAGA movement.

"There's an irony here: Mainstream media accusations of the menace of Christian nationalism encouraged the hard right to own the moniker for themselves," Bunn, Eli McGowan and Emily McGowan explain in The Bulwark. "Advocates of the term range from evangelicals to Orthodox Christians, who never seem able to agree on an exact definition, leaving alarmed pundits struggling to hit a perpetually moving target. Gen-Z shock influencers like Nick Fuentes, a Catholic, have called themselves Christian nationalists as well. Hop online and ask ten people what Christian nationalism means, you'll get eleven answers — and maybe a death threat or two."

The writers note that Christian nationalism "has become a clickbait gold rush."

"The movement, heavily online but simultaneously entrenched in small groups and churches, has developed its own media ecosystem of influencers, podcasts, films, merchandise," Bunn, Eli McGowan and Emily McGowan observe. "It also has its own style of performative aesthetics. Beards, demonstrating patriarchal authority and hiding poor 'physiognomy,' are omnipresent. Christian nationalism has sometimes overlapped — in terms of adherents and imagery — with other rapidly evolving movements and subcultures, such as 'tradwives,' 'redpilled' online spaces, and the 'Manosphere.' For example, it's not unusual in Christian nationalist circles to encounter the slang term 'soy' as a pejorative for unmanliness, extrapolating from a semi-serious belief that soy-based foods are a testosterone-lowering marker of coastal liberalism. You can even compete in Christian nationalist athletic events."

But the writers stress that many Catholics and Mainline Protestants vehemently reject Christian nationalism. Presbyterian scholar Matthew D. Taylor, for example, was part of a study that included a passionate "defense of the values of liberal democracy."

"Blake Callens, a writer and early public critic of Christian nationalism, has noted that 'one can consider authoritarian Christian nationalism to be fringe enough that it will never gain traction within the broader American system while being keenly aware that it is a growing movement within the conservative church,'" according to Bunn, Eli McGowan and Emily McGowan. "As Christians, we find that Callens' warning speaks to us directly…. We feel a pressing duty to speak out about this malignant ideology."

President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission released a draft report on American religious history that, according to experts, gets a lot of basic facts wrong about its purported subject.

“A new draft report from a Trump administration task force presents a competing vision of America’s tradition of religious liberty — one that argues that the founders wanted as much religion, everywhere, as possible — and that makes the case that our understanding of religious freedom has been corrupted by 20th-century European secularists and radical progressives aiming to eliminate religion from public life,” Vox’s Christian Paz wrote on Sunday. The report also claims that the Founding Fathers’ seminal documents like the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights were based explicitly on religious concepts.

Paz spoke with experts who push back against that narrative.

“The First Amendment is also about a practical response to the fact that you have 13 colonies that you need to unify, and many of them have established churches, but they’re different churches,” historian Matthew A. Sutton told Vox. “The First Amendment is not this kind of high ideal about freedom of religion. It’s simply about how can we keep these people from killing each other when we know for the last 300 years, different groups of Christians have killed each other in Europe.”

This was ultimately why the 13 colonies forming a new nation settled on the statement that in America “there will be no establishment of religion.”

He also placed in context the fact that Benjamin Franklin asked to open one of the early Continental Conventions with a prayer.

“In 1774, it’s not clear there’s going to be a revolution,” Sutton told Vox. “They have not left, and the clergyman they chose for this prayer is a member of the Church of England. They were trying to signal to England that they did want to maintain their unity, that they wanted to keep their religious bonds together. It was very practical. But this is the selective cherry-picking that the Trump people do. They didn’t have a prayer at the Constitutional Convention. So you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to talk about when you do, you need to talk about when you don’t and see those as equally valid.”

University of Notre Dame politics and religion scholar Dave Campbell also pointed out that it is misleading to describe the “Founding Fathers” as a monolithic group, as they often had wildly varying opinions about what American religion should look like in a free society.

“It’s a misnomer to speak of the Founders as though they had one view,” Campbell told Vox. “They had different views, but they did agree, even though they had to compromise, on the wording of the First Amendment. Whatever this amorphous group that the Founders is, they disagreed, and yet they nonetheless could come to consensus that there should be no established religion, which was very novel at the time, and there should be as much latitude given to the free exercise of religion as possible.”

In contrast to this, he characterized the Trump administration’s attitude as being biased toward one particular approach to religion.

“To them, religious freedom means not respecting all religions equally, but instead ensuring that Christianity and particularly their flavor of Christianity has a favored place in the public square and in law,” Campbell said.

Sutton echoed that view.

“The Bremerton decision on the high school football coach being allowed to pray [at games], the recent debates about whether or not Christian charter schools are going to receive state financing, debates about the Ten Commandments on school grounds — we can see just a concerted effort by attorneys through these religious organizations that have made this kind of document essentially marching orders and used it to try to reestablish or bring us back to a world in which the Protestant majority can try to impose its will on everybody else,” Sutton told Vox. “The courts seem more open to that than they have been in a couple of generations.”

Back in May, Paz also drew attention to the Trump administration’s numerous mistakes when it comes to accurately representing the Christian faith it claims to propound.

“The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state,” Paz reported on Thursday. “Inside the White House, the secretary of defense has framed the war in Iran and American military action abroad as sanctioned and guided by God. Outside the government, this alliance between church and state often skirts near the edge of outright idolatry. Conservative pastors are erecting golden statues of Trump (but insisting it does not mirror the infamous golden calf of the Old Testament). They’re extending their hands over the president in prayer after comparing him to Jesus and standing by him, with some mild criticism, after he cast himself as an AI-slop Messiah.”

In April a former staffer for a different Republican president, Ronald Reagan, also argued that Trump’s behavior and that of his supporters is anti-Christian.

"The past few days have featured the vice president of the United States lecturing the pope on morality and church doctrine; Sean Hannity making it official that he worships at the Church of Trump; Pete Hegseth quoting made-up verses from Pulp Fiction as if they were actual scripture; and Trump styling himself as Jesus Christ," The Bulwark’s Charen wrote. "A few years ago, one might have wondered how these acts of contempt toward Christianity would go down with the religious right, but after 10 years of cultishness, it would be foolish to expect many defections."

President Donald Trump is increasingly making moves that even his subservient followers in the GOP cannot abide, and according to a new report from The i Paper, his latest blunder involves the detention of a beloved Catholic nun.

Republicans in Washington have largely gone along and supported Trump's mass deportation agenda, even as innocent immigrants and lawful U.S. citizens have gotten swept up in the process, souring public sentiment. Now, his ICE agents have detained a Catholic nun, Sister Leticia "Letty" Ugboaja, prompting even conservatives to lash out against the president's handling of his immigration agenda.

The i Paper detailed the arrest of the nun, described as a "well-known source of goodness," in a report from Saturday.

"Sister Leticia Ugboaja, known as Letty, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials while walking to a service at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in southern Texas, near the Mexican border," the outlet detailed. "The Washington Post reported that officers confiscated her rosary and put her into handcuffs. The church confirmed the Nigerian nun, who was dressed in her habit at the time, had been taken into custody before the story quickly spread beyond the local community after it was shared on social media."

The report continued: "The backlash was swift and unusually bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans, including South Texas Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, intervened directly with federal officials to secure her release. By Monday, following intervention from De La Cruz and other members of Congress, Sister Letty had returned home."

Church spokesperson Brenda Riojas confirmed to the media that she volunteers her time as an "extraordinary minister of holy communion" at Our Lady of Sorrows, and stressed that she had entered the U.S. legally. Bishop Daniel Flores also added in an official statement that Sister Letty “is a well-known source of goodness and hope in our community, and I am grateful she has been released”.

Trump's newly appointed DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, was quick to address the situation, saying in his own statement that "As I have repeatedly said, our immigration enforcement should target violent criminals. A Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat to our community." He was far from the only conservative voice to speak out.

"The arrest of a Catholic nun by US immigration agents has become the latest flashpoint exposing growing unease among Republican politicians, with several moving swiftly to distance themselves from an administration whose hardline immigration agenda they have long supported," The i Paper noted. "The backlash has fuelled a wider debate over whether Trump’s political grip on his own party is beginning to loosen."

It continued: "With midterm elections looming and primary contests now largely concluded across much of the country, political analysts say many Republicans are making increasingly pragmatic electoral calculations. Free from the immediate threat of being challenged by Trump-backed primary opponents, some lawmakers are becoming more willing to criticise the President publicly on issues where they believe he has drifted away from public opinion."

In Texas, MAGA Republicans and evangelical Christian fundamentalists have been pushing for Bible study to be mandatory in public schools — a move that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), violates the separation of church and state outlined in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. The GOP-controlled Texas State School Board, on June 26, added Bible stories to mandatory public school reading lists. But according to Salon's Amanda Marcotte, using public schools to promote evangelical fundamentalism will "likely backfire" for Texas Republicans.

Texas State School Board member Brandon Hall, at a news conference, told reporters, "Our nation was founded as a Christian nation." But that claim, Marcotte stresses, is a blatant "falsehood" — as the Founders "clearly forbade" an "establishment of religion" in the U.S. Constitution.

"The school board hired David Barton, a discredited writer who falsely claims to be a historian, as an adviser," Marcotte explains in her early July article for Salon. "Barton has no training and less than zero credibility, having been caught repeatedly peddling easily disproved lies. But because Republicans are pleased by his intellectually dishonest interpretation of America's past, they continue to choose his nonsense over actual history developed by real scholars. This is Christian nationalism in a nutshell."

Marcotte continues, "The use of Barton by the GOP and the Texas State School Board is not about faith or belief; it's about power. Specifically, it's about pushing their belief that certain people — white right-wing Christians — are the 'real' Americans. In practice, it means that everyone else deserves second-class status. Forcing kids to read Bible passages signals to anyone outside the white evangelical tribe that they don't belong, which is a grotesque violation of American values of equality and freedom."

The Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Marcotte emphasizes that the First Amendment "violation" in Texas Public Schools is "likely to backfire on the Religious Right."

"They better hope that the kids skip the assigned reading, much less actual discussion and debate about it in class," Marcotte argues. "As many an ex-evangelical can tell you, direct exposure to what the Bible actually says is often the first step to walking away from Christian fundamentalism altogether. There's a reason conservative Christians prefer quoting solitary Bible verses out of context: Not only does this allow them to twist the meaning for their own personal or political ends, but it also makes it much easier to avoid the critical thinking that engaging with longer passages can provoke…. It's also worth remembering that many students — and even some teachers — aren't Christian, which means that classroom discussions will not always been favorable to an evangelical interpretation of scripture."

Marcotte adds, "In short, Texas Republicans have likely created opportunities to expose Christian kids to other people’s points of view, which may not have happened otherwise."

Christian conservatives are cheering last week’s announcement by the Texas Board of Education mandating readings from the Bible in the state’s K-12 literature curriculum starting in 2030, but a curriculum studies scholar says they appear to be forgetting that this puts Bible myths under a microscope.

Kids will be dissecting it like a tadpole, and squaring that with the reality that snakes don’t, in fact, talk. Nor do they hand out apples.

“The decision might not be the victory they think it is,” Nicholas Mitchell tells MS NOW. “If such stories from the Bible are appropriately taught as literature, then students will be encouraged to question and challenge Christianity’s holy text, not accept it and believe it without question.”

“As a curriculum studies scholar, I can see that the education board’s decision will create a predicament for schools and teachers that they will not be able to avoid: the inevitable outrage from Christian fundamentalists when the Bible is taught as something other than truth, that is, something other than religious instruction.”

Mitchell said some parents and politicians may be cheering this mandate now and he said he’s doubtful they’ll be as “gleeful when classroom implementation begins and teachers are made to treat the Bible not as a divine text but as a book.” And teaching the Bible as literature, rather than settled fact, will open it up to being analyzed the way any other book gets analyzed — complete with hard scrutiny of its philosophy, contradictions and shortcomings.

“Consider the Texas teacher in 2030 who is teaching high school sophomores excerpts from the Book of Job,” said Mitchell. “According to that story from the Hebrew Scriptures, Satan bets God that if God lets him inflict immense suffering on an innocent man named Job, then Job will curse God. A person teaching Job as literature would prompt students to think about what accepting that wager say about God’s character and Satan’s character? How does the story attempt to make sense of human suffering? A good literature teacher would also push students to think about why this character, God, let such awful things happen to a person as good as Job and then scolded him when he complained. A teacher who does that is likely to offend some people’s religious sensibilities.”

Some fundamentalist students and parents will inevitably see critical analysis of the biblical text as “tantamount to blasphemy,” said Mitchell because such engagement would challenge their belief that the Bible is “a flawless sacred text that leads to salvation.”

“Thus, the people who seem to be clamoring the most to bring the Bible into schools may be the least pleased if it’s taught in accordance with the law,” Mitchell said.

President Donald Trump is firmly in decline as a "flailing lame-duck," and according to one Fox News analyst, his high-profile feud with Pope Leo XIV has contributed significantly to his loss of support from all but his most devoted base.

Juan Williams is a longtime political analyst for Fox News, serving as one of the highly conservative network's few Democratic voices, and one who is not shy about speaking out critically against Trump. In a Monday morning piece for The Hill, Williams wrote that Trump is "sinking deep into disapproval with voters outside his far-right base," with his numbers sinking into "negative territory on the war in Iran, on the economy, and on immigration."

Amid that decline, Williams argued that there has been "a surprise political player" contributing to Trump's lame-duck downfall: "Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV."

"With the midterms approaching, the first American pope’s defiant opposition to Trump is coming into view as contributing to Trump’s status as a flailing lame-duck," Williams wrote. "Pope Leo is clear in saying Trump is out of step with Christianity’s core teachings: concern for the poor, skepticism of the rich, embrace of the refugees, and love for thy neighbor. These teachings are diametrically opposed to Trump starting war with Iran."

Williams further highlighted an April social media post from the Pope's official X account: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

Despite initially attempting to celebrate and take credit for the first-ever American Pope, Trump has since been engaged in a bitter and often one-sided feud with the Catholic leader, taking personal offense to his remarks calling for immigrants to be treated with dignity and opposing war. In response, the Pope has continued to issue statements construed as direct attacks against Trump's rhetoric, while mostly avoiding ever directly referring to the president.

"While Trump slides in the polls, the pope has climbed to be the most popular leader among Americans with a 57 percent favorability, according to Gallup," Williams added. "The Economist-YouGov polling has the pope with a net favorability of plus 32 while Trump has a rating of negative 22. Most Catholics, regardless of religious observance or demographic group, view Pope Leo favorably. That includes Catholics who regularly attend Mass and those who seldom or never do, according to Pew."

He contined: "When asked about Trump’s approach to Pope Leo in a June survey by the Pew Research Center, far more Catholics say Trump has been too critical of Leo (51 percent) than say he hasn’t been critical enough (4 percent). Trump’s response to the pontiff is to share offensive memes on social media suggesting he should be pope. He also falsely claimed that Pope Leo wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. That’s not true, Mr. President."

Williams concluded with an argument that, in a political age "focused on the high cost of daily life, the rising power of super-rich autocrats and the dominance of artificial intelligence," voters in the U.S. are beginning to yearn for "the pope’s old-school Catholic teachings," as opposed to Trump's way of doing things.

"That hunger is far greater than support for Trump’s new wing on the White House, his bumbling renovation of the reflecting pool or building a golden archway entrance to Washington," he wrote. "Trump seems to have met his judgment day courtesy of the Chicago kid who became pope."

As education officials in Texas ban hundreds of books that run afoul of their interpretation of Christian morality, the State Board of Education on Friday approved a required reading list that forces the state’s more than 5 million public school students to read from the Bible.

The Republican-controlled SBOE voted 9-5 with one abstention to approve the list, which includes passages from the Book of Exodus as well as the Shepherd’s Psalm and the myths of Adam and Eve and David and Goliath.

“We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” Republican board member Brandon Hall—who is also a youth pastor at Cavalry Baptist Church in Springtown—said during a Thursday press conference in Austin.

That “truth” omits or marginalizes climate change, US imperialism, women’s history, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, and racism.

Evelyn Brooks, the only Republican SBOE member to vote against the required reading list, told CNN on Friday that she believes the board’s move is “unconstitutional.”

“Teachers need to have their autonomy,” she said. “They’ve been selecting books for decades.”

In 2023, Texas’ Republican-controlled Legislature passed HB 1605, which mandated the creation of a K-12 required reading list and directed the Texas Education Agency to develop state-owned textbooks. Those texts, called Bluebonnet Learning, contain lessons on Christianity starting in kindergarten. The SBOE approved Bluebonnet Learning as an optional curriculum in late 2024 and is currently working to correct thousands of errors in the curriculum at a cost of over $8 million to Texas taxpayers.

The SBOE action comes amid a legal battle over SB 10, a law signed last year by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that requires public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. US District Judge Fred Biery, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, subsequently issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law. Texas families also sued to block the legislation. However, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who is running for US Senate—demanded that schools comply with the law.

Public schools “exist to educate students with diverse faith backgrounds, as well as those who adhere to no faith doctrine,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) said Friday. “Public schools are not Sunday schools, and elected officials have no business using state power to elevate one religion above all others. A required reading list that overwhelmingly favors Christian texts while excluding the writings and literary traditions of other faiths, not to mention the perspectives of millions of nonreligious Americans, sends an unmistakable message about who belongs and who does not.”

FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor asserted that “a mandatory public school reading list should never function as a Bible lesson.”

“Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she added. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”

Rabbi Joshua Fixler at Congregation Emanu El in Houston told CNN Friday that “this list is full of Christian texts that are inappropriate for public school classrooms.”

“As a rabbi and a parent of Jewish kids, I think it is vital that this board make a distinction between teaching about religion and teaching religion,” he added. “This list will force teachers to cross that line.”

Fort Worth high school teacher Chanea Bond told The Associated Press on Friday that the SBOE’s required reading list is “very old and very white.”

“It is very narrow and does not represent what classrooms in Texas look like,” she said. “Going through most of high school without ever having much value put into voices that sound like yours kind of sends a message that your voices aren’t valuable.”

For more than two decades, the Supreme Court has issued a long series of wins for plaintiffs seeking to protect their religious practices. On June 23, 2026, though, the majority delivered an uncommon defeat in this contentious area.