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This Is Your Brain on MAGA

This Is Your Brain on MAGA

Last updated on: April 9, 2025 at 9:23 am by Stuart Delony

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This Is Your Brain on MAGA 2025-04-09T09:23:29-04:00 Stuart Delony

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Or: How to Turn a Soul into Glass in Three Easy Steps

In 79 AD, a man’s brain turned to glass.

No, seriously. When Mount Vesuvius exploded, it unleashed a surge of volcanic ash so hot it flash-fried everything in its path. A young man, likely caught mid-scroll on whatever the Roman equivalent of TikTok, had his brain vitrified—literally turned into glass. The heat was so intense and the cooling so rapid that his grey matter became shiny, hardened, and utterly useless. Sound familiar?

What was once a scientific anomaly is now a spiritual epidemic.

Modern-day evangelicalism has somehow managed to replicate the process—without the volcano. Swap out pyroclastic flows for cable news and Facebook memes; suddenly, vitrified brains are everywhere. MAGA Jesus followers have taken the rare and tragic and made it disturbingly common.

This Is Your Brain

Remember those old anti-drug commercials from the ’80s?

“This is your brain.” (holds up an egg)
“This is your brain on drugs.” (cracks it into a frying pan)
“Any questions?”

We should update it.

“This is your brain.” (egg)
“This is your brain after a steady diet of Fox News, Facebook conspiracy groups, and prosperity gospel.” (crack… sizzle… then encase it in black glass)

Any questions? Of course not. Questions are the enemy of the faith now.

How to Vitrify a Believer:

It turns out you only need three steps:

Apply extreme heat – manufactured outrage, persecution complexes, culture wars.
Seal in with a cult of personality – preferably one with a spray tan and thirty-four felonies.
Cool rapidly in an echo chamber – Facebook groups, Talk Radio, church bulletins that read more like GOP talking points than gospel.

Voila. A perfectly hardened brain. No longer soft, no longer growing. No longer capable of compassion, empathy, or remembering what the hell Jesus was about in the first place.

The Faith of Not

MAGA Christianity has turned belief into a boundary. It’s no longer about what you believe—it’s about what you oppose.

It’s a religion of nots.

Not liberal.
Not progressive.
Not Catholic, Mormon, or—God forbid—nuanced.
Not that kind of Christian.

Ask them what they are, and you’ll get slogans, maybe a Bible verse pulled out of context, and a weird amount of rage about drag queens.

This is faith as negation. It’s all fences and no pasture. It’s not about transformation, it’s about tribalism.

Their gospel isn’t “come to me all who are weary,” it’s “don’t sit next to me if you wear a mask, think racism exists, or use someone’s pronouns.”

And when you define your entire faith by what you’re not, it’s no wonder your soul calcifies. Love, grace, humility—those require vulnerability.
Being against everything is easy. Being like Jesus? That takes actual work.

The Death of Common Sense

Let’s be honest: we’re not talking about people who just disagree. We’re talking about folks who will scream “fake news” at the Sermon on the Mount if it doesn’t align with their worldview. People who read “love your enemies” and immediately add an asterisk. Followers who wave “Jesus is Lord” flags while storming the Capitol, blissfully unaware of the irony.

Common sense? Gone.
Decency? Vaporized.
Empathy? A distant memory.
Civility? That’s for libs.

If MAGA Christians loved Jesus the way they love Trump, maybe the church wouldn’t be hemorrhaging people under 40. Maybe we wouldn’t have a spiritual movement that sounds more like a militia manifesto than a gospel of grace. Maybe we wouldn’t have pastors talking more about Hunter Biden’s laptop than the Beatitudes.

The Real Tragedy

What happened in Pompeii was a natural disaster. What’s happening in American Christianity is a choice. These aren’t brains caught off guard by volcanic ash. These are souls willingly encased in a hardened, heat-blasted shell of certainty and fear.

And the worst part? They think it’s faith.
They think they’ve preserved the truth.
But all they’ve really done… is turned to glass.

Beautiful. Useless. And utterly incapable of love.

For more Snarky Faith, check out the podcast and more:

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Snarky Faith on Instagram: @stuartdelony
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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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