Sunday Morning in MAGA Country: “Praise Jesus and Deport Them All.”

Inside the white grievance churches worshipping walls over welfare, ICE over insulin, and cruelty over Christ.

It’s Sunday morning in MAGA Country. A few days after Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill passed. Come go with me to a church. Pentecostal. Holiness. Baptist, maybe. It doesn’t fucking matter.

It’s already hell degrees outside. Picture us, pulling up to the parking lot.

It’s a carnival of rusted-out pickup trucks on bald tires with sun-faded Trump 2024 decals curling off in the heat. American flags, still stinking of gunpowder and Fourth of July firecrackers, are tied to the beds flap like surrender rags. Hell, half of these vehicles wouldn’t pass inspection in any state, including Texas and Florida. The people piling into the church like it’s a revival of the Confederacy, can barely afford to fill them with gas.

Inside, it’s standing room only. But only half the congregation can’t actually stand up without a walker.

Breathe in with me.

You smell that? Mothballs. Old fried bologna grease. Despair masked in drugstore floral perfume.

Look at Cathy waddling down the aisle with her ankles spilling over white orthopedic sneakers like rising dough. She shifts her weight off her bunions and praises Jesus while her oxygen tank hisses in tow.

Earl lumbers in behind her. He’s breathing hard like a snowplow before he even sits down. Sweat soaks through the armpits of his “Jesus is My Border Patrol” T-shirt. He’s red in the face. Cholesterol and rage fight for supremacy. Every “Amen” is punctuated by a phlegmy cough that says COPD is the way, the truth, and the light.

In the front row, Deacon Taylor’s on oxygen too. His lips are blue, but he manages a croaky “Amen” whenever the pastor says immigrant.

Carol’s got her wild-eyed grandkids with her. Their teeth look like they’ve never met a toothbrush. When they giggle you can see the sugar-rotted stumps peeking through Kool-Aid stains on their lips. They’re restless, scratching bug bites, and picking their noses.

A chorus of “HALLELUJAH” rises. The sanctuary’s breath smells like coffee, malt liquor, Skoal, and ash trays. One woman is laid out under the holy ghost. The varicose veins in her legs look like Google Maps traffic jams.

Now, here comes Pastor Matthews.

He steps up to the pulpit dabbing his face with a damp hand towel. His hair is slicked back with gel, he’s red-faced and already winded. He slams a meaty fist down.

“THIS. BIG. BEAUTIFUL. BILL. IS. GOD’S. WILL!” he hollers.

The congregation loses it. They clap and sway. Big bellies bounce with applause. Tambourines set off metallic ch-ch-ch sounds.

“This bill,” Pastor Matthews roars, “protects CHRISTIAN FAMILIES! It funds ICE! It defunds Satan’s welfare state!”

Meanwhile, Carol is doing mental math on whether she can make a single box of mac and cheese last two nights for her grandkids if the bill slashes her benefits.

But she shouts HALLELUJAH anyway.

Pastor Matthew’s voice cracks from the strain. He dabs his forehead again with that rag. “Thank you, LORD, for leaders who will BUILD THE CAMPS AT THE BORDER! DEPORT THESE CRIMINALS! Take AWAY the lazy man’s check!”

Earl gives a standing ovation, except he can’t really stand. He sort of lurches halfway up, wheezes, and collapses back down, clutching his knee brace.

The offering plate makes the rounds. Everybody is broke as shit. The offering plate jingles with coins. Crumpled one-dollar bills that should be used on groceries. But they’ll give it all to keep Pastor Matthews ranting.

Outside, the church sign reads: “ALL ARE WELCOME.” That ain’t true.

And when service ends they crowd into the fellowship hall for potluck. Unseasoned green bean casserole. Soggy sheet cake from Walmart. Sweet tea so strong it’ll give you sugar diabetes the first sip. You gotta cut it with water.

They eat like it is communion. They gossip about the border. They complain about crime in cities they’ve never visited. They talk about the bill. A broke, rotting, gasping congregation praising a bill that will let them die faster while blaming everyone else for their suffering.

That’s Sunday service in MAGA country this week. And Pastor Matthews is taking up one more offering just to make sure his congregants are good and broke for Jesus.

Now, this isn’t a real church. And none of these characters are real people.

But they are all real.

Church is where politics get sanctified, and cruelty gets turned into a sacrament. Legislation like the Big Beautiful Bill don’t pass in a vacuum. They need moral cover, and white evangelical churches have often provided it.

This fictive scene is a composite of perhaps a thousand or more churches across America where the congregation is broke, sick, and furious but still shouts hallelujah for policies designed to kill them slowly. They dance in the aisles for the machinery of their own destruction. It’s a portrait of how the very people cheering for cruelty, including self-proclaimed Christians, are the ones most wrecked by it. These people will vote to starve themselves if it means someone poorer, browner, or more desperate suffers worse.

These people are not just victims. They are agents of their own ruin. And white grievance churches have weaponized faith into a death cult of spite, offering spiritual anesthesia while bleeding their congregations dry financially and morally.

This is American pathology in real time, Y’all. Because it’s not enough to say that people like this are poor. You have to say they’re poor and they are being taught to hate so fiercely they will die for it. They would rather see America burn than share it. They would rather pray for concentration camps than for health. They would rather pass the plate for ICE than for insulin.

And if nobody calls it out, if no one describes it plainly, viscerally, brutally, then we’re all just playing church and shouting Amen while they shovel dirt over us.

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