The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
On grief, permission, and the Christ your family never actually met
There’s a specific kind of silence that happens when you realize it. Not the loud, dramatic exit moment people imagine when they hear the word “deconstruction” — the slammed door, the burned bridge. I mean the quiet one. The one that happens on an ordinary Tuesday, mid-scroll or mid-sermon or mid-argument with your mother, when you finally let yourself finish the sentence you’ve been avoiding for years:
The faith my parents raised me in is not the faith of Christ.
If you’re sitting in that silence right now, I want to say the thing out loud that almost no one says to you directly: you are allowed to leave it. Not just allowed — in some cases, following Jesus requires it.
Most of us didn’t choose our first Jesus. He was handed to us, fully formed, by people who loved us and were themselves handed a version they never got to question. And for a lot of us raised in American evangelicalism, that Jesus came armed.
He kept a list. He guarded a border between the saved and the damned with the zeal of a customs officer. He was suspicious of your queer cousin, your questions, your body, your grief. He backed the empire when the empire called itself Christian and turned his back on it the second it didn’t. He was, in practice if not in name, a warmonger — a fear-management system wearing a crown of thorns as a costume.
Here’s the thing survivors of high-control religion eventually have to sit with: that Jesus is not in the text. He’s not the one healing on the Sabbath and getting in trouble for it. He’s not the one eating with the people his own religious establishment called unclean. He’s not the one who, when handed the perfect opportunity to call down violence on his enemies, chose the cross instead.
The fear-mongering Christ isn’t a biblical figure. He’s an inherited coping mechanism — a way people who were themselves terrified learned to manage a chaotic, dangerous world, and then called it orthodoxy because God said so was easier to hand down than I was scared and didn’t know what else to do.
When Jesus was asked to name the whole point — the single commandment everything else hangs on — he didn’t reach for purity codes or nationalism or a list of who’s in and who’s out. He said love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Full stop. Everything else, he said, hangs on those two things (Matthew 22:37–40).
Not correct doctrine. Not denominational loyalty. Not your parents’ politics, dressed up in Sunday clothes and called biblical values. Love of neighbor.
This is the test I want to offer you, because it’s the one I’ve had to learn to apply to my own inheritance: if a theology cannot survive contact with does this love my neighbor well, it was never actually about Jesus. It was about control, and it borrowed his name because his name carried weight.
A Christ who harms your neighbor — who polices their body, their marriage, their gender, their right to exist safely in public — is not a difficult-but-defensible reading of scripture. He’s a different character altogether, wearing the original’s clothes.
Here is the permission I wish someone had given me plainly, years before I found it myself: you are allowed to follow Jesus out of the belief system that raised you.
I say this as someone ordained inside institutional Christianity who now does almost none of my work inside institutional structures. Leaving the system that harmed people in Jesus’ name is not the same thing as leaving faith. Sometimes it’s the most faithful thing available to you. Sometimes following him means walking out of a building your family spent generations constructing in his name — because if you read the Gospels closely, he was never all that comfortable staying inside religious buildings that had traded love of neighbor for control of the crowd. He kept getting thrown out of them, or walking out on his own.
You don’t owe your parents’ theology your obedience just because it arrived wrapped in the language of faith and family. A belief system that requires you to withhold love, safety, or dignity from your neighbor in order to remain “faithful” has confused faithfulness with compliance. Those are not the same thing, and you’re allowed to know the difference even when the people who raised you can’t yet see it.
I say this with as much conviction as I can put into a sentence: if you truly want to stand ten toes down on the actual principles of Jesus, you cannot simultaneously align yourself with a theology that harms your neighbor. Those two postures cannot coexist. You don’t get to claim the ground of “biblical” while your feet are planted on someone else’s body.
This isn’t a call to abandon conviction. It’s the opposite. It’s a call to hold the actual conviction — the one that was always structurally incompatible with domination — instead of the substitute your family’s tradition handed you and called the same thing.
Nobody prepares you for the grief. People prepare you for the arguments — how to hold your ground at Thanksgiving, how to answer when someone quotes a verse at you like a door slamming shut. Almost no one prepares you for the mourning.
Because this is a loss. Realizing that your parents’ faith is no longer the faith of Christ means losing a version of home, a version of belonging, a version of safe that you may have never actually had the way you needed it — but you grieve the wanting of it all the same. You’re allowed to mourn that. Grief and clarity are not opposites. You can know, with total certainty, that you’re walking the more faithful path, and still cry in the car about it.
You were not born broken. I believe that all the way down — it’s one of the truest things I know. You were born whole, and somewhere along the way you were handed a fear and told to carry it like it was faith. Setting that fear down, even when it costs you your parents’ approval, even when it costs you the community that raised you, is not defection.
It might be the most faithful thing you do this year.
This piece pairs with this week’s carousel — if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s up on the grid. And if this is the season you’re in, The Awakening Podcast has a whole back catalog of conversations with people who’ve walked this exact road. You’re not the first to leave, and you won’t be the last, and you are not doing it alone.
