Family, Faith, and the False Prophet …… What happens when faith turns into fandom and family becomes collateral damage.

Family, Faith, and the False Prophet

What happens when faith turns into fandom and family becomes collateral damage.

I’m from Texas, some might call it Trumpville, and a lot of my relatives still live there.

Some have built shrines to him in their hearts. They don’t just support him; they worship him. It’s the kind of devotion that makes people hang flags from their trucks and quote Fox News like it’s scripture. For them, it’s not politics anymore. It’s faith, loud, blind, and unshakable.

But I still have a few family members I can talk to, the ones who haven’t been fully baptized in the church of Trump. They still see the world as it is, complex, flawed, human. We can talk about vaccines, about history, about the real America, the one that’s still red, white, and blue, not just red and angry.

The others have created a new theology. They believe Trump is tall because God wanted leaders to look down on people. They believe being white makes them righteous, being male makes them right, and being straight makes them saved. They’ve replaced sermons with sound bites and Sunday school with Facebook memes.

You can hear it in their vocabulary. They say things like “The election was stolen,” “The media’s the devil,” and “God sent Trump to save America.” It’s a playlist of paranoia set to the rhythm of cable news.

Their Facebook feeds look like digital revival tents, glowing images of eagles, crosses, and Jesus hugging Trump like a quarterback who just threw a Hail Mary. There’s always a meme about “fake news,” one about how liberals are trying to erase Christmas, and another that warns, “Real Americans don’t apologize.”

It’s not faith. It’s marketing.

And somewhere in the scroll, they lost their ability to separate a headline from a hallucination.

Some of them worship him because, like him, they’ve declared bankruptcy more times than they’ve declared taxes. Others because their preachers told them to. And some just because it feels good to belong to something, even if that something divides their own family.

The irony is, they call themselves “patriots,” but the flag they wave has lost its blue. The part that stood for justice and unity got starched out somewhere between the rallies and the rage.

I love them. I do. Family’s complicated that way. You can love people and still grieve who they’ve become. You can miss conversations that don’t turn into campaigns.

But I still call. I still show up. I still talk to the ones who haven’t lost themselves completely. The ones who remember that America isn’t supposed to worship men; it’s supposed to hold them accountable.

Somewhere along the way, the line between religion and politics blurred. The church became a campaign office. The pulpit became a podium. And the cross was replaced by a gold-plated T.

The law didn’t really change. The hearts did.

And now the House of Worship has a new name,

the Church of Trump,

where truth is optional, doubt is sin,

and family is collateral damage.