This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I think a lot about how to change people’s minds. I don’t mean changing people’s minds about trivial things — like whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all-time (I’m team Jordan). I want to know how to change deeply held beliefs that negatively impact our world.
I held beliefs like this in high school, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I began to deconstruct these beliefs. I once believed, for example, that you could only be a Christian (and a good person) if you were heterosexual. I once believed that Jesus — or God — had given the U.S. a special blessing. And while I have never believed that Jesus was white or that he favored white people, it wasn’t until I got to college that I realized the tradition I grew up in portrayed Jesus as a straight, white, American cowboy.
Brad Onishi, who also grew up evangelical, is the co-host of a podcast titled Straight White American Jesus. With co-host Daniel Miller, Onishi examines and deconstructs evangelical politics, theology, and culture. Onishi, who has a doctorate in religious studies, told me that when they began the podcast in 2018, he wasn’t sure if anyone would listen. But now, almost 900 episodes later, they’ve “commented on every angle and every aspect of Christian nationalism, the Trump presidencies, the Biden presidency, and everything in between: from gender to race, sexuality, church politics, and so on.”
Onishi said something to me during our conversation that perfectly articulated the exact reason I began changing my own thoughts about Christian politics and theology. As he grew more zealous in his faith, he began reading everything he could about Christian history and theology. “What started to happen was that I realized there’s a lot more to Christianity than the very narrow view I’d been practicing,” Onishi told me. Similarly, the further I dove into Christianity, the more I realized that Jesus was not straight, white, or American. It was not atheism or Marxism or deconstruction that radicalized my thinking. It was Christianity itself.
In my conversation with Onishi, we talked about how to change people’s minds, extremism, comparisons between the U.S. and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, and where to find inspiration for fighting against fascism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: What led you out of conservative evangelicalism, and what led you to become more progressive in your theology and politics?
Brad Onishi: I have a strange story in the sense that I was pretty unchurched until eighth grade. But it’s a typical story in that you’re in eighth grade, you have a girlfriend who invites you to Wednesday night Bible study, and you’re like, “This is a perfect chance for me to get out of the house on a Wednesday night and see my girlfriend.” What I did not expect was that when you go to a megachurch, you meet the cool leaders with the guitars and tattoos. I thought everyone was gonna be Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. I was totally hooked. And so I converted in an extreme way, became totally into the faith in a very evangelical mode.
I led a Bible study at lunch at my public high school. I did See You at the Pole, but I did it every Friday by myself. I would just go to the flag by myself and pray, even though nobody would come with me. I would go to the movie theater and pass out tracts about the rapture. So by the time I was 18, I was in ministry at that church.
And then by the time I was 20, I was in charge of the youth group at that church, and I was married. I was like super-gold-star youth group kid. And I just went so hard that I wanted to go to the very ends of my faith system and my theological worldview. So I got to be in my 20s, and I was just reading everything I could about church history, about theology, from the first century church fathers to St. Augustine to medieval monasticism, the Reformation, the early American Methodists, and the Quakers.
And what started to happen was that I realized there’s a lot more to Christianity than the very narrow view I’d been practicing.
The center did not hold, and a lot of the worldview started to collapse. I ended up going over to England to Oxford to get a master’s degree, and as soon as I got there and was out of ministry — not being surveilled by the church that I worked at — I was able to dig into all those different theological traditions. I met all kinds of Christians whom I had been told to be afraid of. Some of them were gay, some of them had interpretations of the Bible that I was told were scary, etc. And that’s where the story unraveled in one sense and began in another.
What are some of the best strategies for helping people deprogram from extremism?
Zach Mack’s Alternate Realities series on NPR explores this. He goes through this journey with his father. I was somebody who contributed to that series. The thing that I told Zach, and the thing that I took away from that project, is that social trust and interpersonal bonds are really the very beginning. You’re just not going to get anywhere if you get on social media and you start arguing.
If you want to deprogram people on an interpersonal level, if you’re talking about not society, not the public square, but if you’re just talking about a family member or your colleague, somebody in your church, you’re gonna have to just hang out with them a lot.
It’s like incredibly inefficient, non-scalable work. There is no AI for this. There is no way to scale it quickly. There is no way to say, “I’m gonna do this with a thousand people at once.” This is gonna be one of those things where you’re gonna hang out with somebody who’s gonna say things that infuriate you, with whom you’re gonna have to find other means of conversation, of engagement, of bonding, of trust, such that when it comes to those really important conversations about faith and politics and so on, enough bonds are holding together the relationship so that even if one starts to fray, it will not destroy the entire fabric of that relationship.
And that’s really not the answer anybody wants. Because it’s really inefficient, and it’s not available to everyone because you might have a sexual identity, a gender identity, a racial identity, or an immigration story that makes it dangerous to hang out with that person. But I would say to those of us who have the privilege of engaging in those conversations, you have to do it in a way that’s determined. If you think that showing up with data from Pew or other places is gonna help, we all know it’s not. It’s not a 15-minute recipe for an easy dinner on a weekday night.
To what extent do you find it helpful or harmful to think of Trump supporters and the Make America Great Again movement as a cult?
So, as a religious studies professor, I generally shy away from the word “cult,” and I do so for a number of reasons. One is that it takes agency away from the people involved. It also tends to castigate religious communities that are minorities and new. It’s an easy shorthand for “bad religion” and “weirdos.”
Number two, I think when people say “MAGA is a cult,” what they’re saying is that after 10 years of Donald Trump as a political candidate, we have somehow arrived at a place where whatever he does is deemed good. Whatever he does is deemed right. So much so that he is selling Bibles. He is playing these tariff games and ruining people’s 401(k)s. He’s doing things that demonstrably seem to be harmful to many MAGA folks, seem to be hypocritical and blasphemous. Maybe people want to email me and tell me how selling Bibles isn’t blasphemy.
One of the things I noticed is that usually at a political rally, you would hear somebody pray that the leader, the senator, the mayor, the president, would be “a faithful servant of God and humbly serve their constituency in the ways that God would want.” But when people pray before a Trump rally, they pray that people will do right by Trump and they pray that God will do right by Trump. That is a fundamental difference with almost any political candidate in American history. Do you pray that a candidate will do what God wants, or do you pray that everybody will do what that candidate wants because they are the representative of God? That is where Trump is unique in American political history.
Do you think it is helpful to draw comparisons between what happened in 1930s Germany and what’s happening today in the United States?
I actually do and I wrote about this in Preparing for War, and I think that when we do it that way, instead of saying, “Hey, this is a cult where people are brainwashed and they’re mysteriously captivated by some kind of aura or some kind of power,” we can say instead, “Look, there are historical examples and there’s a process where we see people become enchanted with an authoritarian leader who promises to solve their lives.”
READ MORE: Should Christians Compare MAGA to the Nazis?
Trump is a leader who promises to solve every problem you have. “We’re gonna make America great. We’re gonna get rid of the people you think are ruining your life. We’re gonna get rid of those people that you think have destroyed your country. We’re gonna give you all the things you want.” And leaders can never deliver on such a promise. So, they always have to resort to violence and political backstabbing, to tearing down the country from within.
But when we make comparison to 1930s Germany — and I think we should go back even further to 1920s Germany — when looking at the ways that Adolf Hitler rose to power over the course of a decade, when we make the comparison to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, when we make the comparison to what happened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin becoming the autocrat that he is today, this is what I think it does: It takes the American exceptionalism away from us.
We have been trained to think that no matter what happens, it cannot happen here. That even if Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set up a concentration camp in Florida, it can’t happen here. Even if there’s a tank in MacArthur Park, it can’t happen here. Even if Congress seems to have no will to stand up to the president and whatever he wants, every Senator and every Congressperson in his party bending to his will, it can’t happen here. Even if the Supreme Court has said the president has immunity as long as he’s “acting as the president,” it can’t happen here. And when you start to make those comparisons with Germany, some people are always gonna say, “Oh, you’re being hyperbolic. This is fear mongering.”
And my response is that it would be fearmongering if the data and the evidence were not there. But it is.
Folks can disagree with any of these, but here’s how I see it: We have an executive branch that’s been given immunity. We have a president who has licensed and made it his priority for people to be deported or detained who are not criminals — and that includes people who have student visas and green cards. We have a president who’s deporting people to countries from which they did not come and claiming that he has no ability to get them back, when he does.
There is also the reality that, if you live in Los Angeles today, there are people who are wearing masks with no identification and unmarked cars who can come down your street at any point with weapons and drag you into a van and take you away. And we’ve seen numerous instances where this has happened with people who have American passports, but they’re being taken away because they’re brown, because they are identified as Latino or as Hispanic, because they may or may not have the “wrong” tattoos. And so if you lived in a reality where you go out of your house and people who are claiming to be law enforcement — but don’t have any ID and you can’t see their faces — can drag you away into an unmarked car with guns pointed at your head, it does seem like we have something like a secret police. Tell me where I’m wrong here.
READ MORE: The Confessing Church Failed. American Christians Can’t
I can just keep going from the ground up here to something that looks a lot like things we learned in school were not democracy and were certainly not freedom. Things are starting to look a lot more like they did in places we heard that America was trying to stand against or liberate.
My goal is not to be apocalyptic. My goal is to say history is contingent. We are in that period now where it is happening here. Just like it happened in Germany in the ’20s and ’30s, just like it happened in Cambodia and Laos, just like it happened in Hungary, just like it happened in what was known as Czechoslovakia.
Just because we are the United States and we’re supposedly “a city on a hill” doesn’t mean it can’t happen here. So, we’re gonna make the comparison to see what it shows us, and we’re going to see not only how far we’ve come down the authoritarian road — the fascist road, to be frank — but it also shows us one more thing: It allows us to dig into tactics and the strategies of resistance.
Just because we are the United States and we’re supposedly “a city on a hill” doesn’t mean it can’t happen here.
-Brad Onishi
We can look at the ways that non-white Americans have been doing this for going on 400 years. You can see the ways that enslaved people, or people living under Jim Crow, people who dealt with Chinese exclusion and being run out of Tacoma and L.A. because they were Chinese, Japanese incarceration and internment we can go on down the line — but all of those historical comparison points not only relieve us of our American exceptionalism, but they allow us to gain strategies and tactics for resistance.
Where are you finding the inspiration to fight back against this fascist tide that we find ourselves up against?
I have found myself drawn to stories of people who have migrated and made new lives for themselves unexpectedly.
And I know folks are like, that doesn’t seem like the right answer to this question, but I think I wanna say something that may not make sense at the start, but hopefully will eventually land.
As soon as the 2024 election was called for Trump, I told myself that from November 2024 to January 2025 was my time of mourning. And what I mean by mourning is this: It’s not just, “Oh, I was sad.” Most of us were sad, angry, hurt, afraid, the whole thing. To me, mourning means it’s a period of time when you transition from a world that was, to a world that is. The world that was had a set of expectations and stories and dreams; it had a set of possibilities. But mourning means that, when a loved one passes away, you let go of those possibilities. Mourning means you have to readjust your expectations and your understanding of what is real.
And it takes time. In most cultures, mourning is a [longer process]. So, November to January was my time of telling myself that the world, the possibilities, the dreams, the ideas you have for the next decades of your life and the decades of your kids’ lives, and everyone around you, those are gone. We are facing a climate crisis that’s not being addressed because we’re fighting fascism all the time. And we have the specter of AI and digital totalitarianism at our doorstep.
Mourning is one thing I wanna encourage everyone to do. You have to accept that the story you thought you were living in is no longer the story that’s available. And what that will do is allow you to ask, “What are the outcomes that I’m going to fight for? What are the battles that I’m gonna engage in? What are the scenarios for myself and my community, my country, my city, my people, my church, that I’m going to try to achieve in this readjusted reality?” And that is why I’m reading all of these novels and stories and histories of people who have totally had to upend their lives because of persecution, or a government that was oppressive, or a natural disaster. Because what those people did is they readjusted their expectations for their lives, and they found meaning and hope in what they could create in that adjusted story.
And if we do that, we will find the resources and the energy to fight the fascist forces that are at our doorstep. If we don’t do that, we’ll continue just to tell ourselves that if we can just get over this, life will go back to normal; life will be what it was. And that is just not available to us.
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