Steven LaChance Blog

I want to start this quietly, because this is not a reaction piece. It is me trying to place a current moment inside a much longer human story.

When Donald Trump hosted a prayer breakfast, stood in front of cameras talking about faith and values, and then later that same night shared a racist video aimed at Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, a lot of people felt shock and anger. I understand that. But what I felt was something else. Recognition. That quiet drop in your stomach when you realize this moment did not come out of nowhere. It belongs to a pattern.

For me, this stopped being about politics a long time ago. Politics is just the surface layer. What we are really watching is power doing what power has always done, looking for cover, looking for permission, looking for something sacred enough to hide behind. Historically, religion has been one of its favorite places to go.

What we are witnessing is not simply offensive behavior from one man. It is the modern expression of a system that has existed in this country for generations. Racism wrapped in religion. Power protected by sacred language. Exclusion justified through scripture and symbolism.

In the early twentieth century, this structure was not subtle. The Ku Klux Klan did not operate on the fringes of religious life. They held prayer rallies. They distributed sermons and pamphlets. Ministers preached from pulpits framing white dominance as divine order. Cross burnings were treated as spiritual ritual. Hate was presented as holiness. Violence was reframed as protecting Christian civilization.

After Reconstruction, during Jim Crow, biblical passages were routinely used to justify segregation. Churches provided theological backing for racial hierarchy, and faith slowly became identity armor instead of moral grounding.

During the Cold War, Christian nationalism fused patriotism with belief, casting America as God’s chosen nation and dissent as spiritual threat. By the late twentieth century, movements like the Moral Majority formalized this alignment, turning Christianity into a political tool, shifting humility into confidence, and transforming the cross from a symbol of sacrifice into a badge of belonging. Faith became political identity. Belief became team loyalty. And religion, slowly and steadily, moved from moral compass to cultural weapon.

That shift never reversed. It just kept evolving.

What we now call MAGA did not appear out of thin air. It grew out of decades of religious nationalism, grievance politics, and racial hierarchy. It folded all of it into a single identity. Faith became branding. Patriotism became performance. Cruelty found permission through slogans. What had once been preached from pulpits now traveled through rallies, memes, and social media feeds. The message stayed the same. Only the delivery system changed.

Across every era, the same shape appears. Christianity gets reshaped to center whiteness. Jesus gets remade in the image of political power. History gets rewritten to protect hierarchy. Strongmen find religious cover. Cruelty gets softened with sacred language. The costumes change, but the structure stays intact.

This is why the prayer breakfast and the racist video cannot be separated. One creates moral cover. The other tests the boundaries. Together they send a signal. They tell people what is allowed. They reassure followers that hierarchy still matters more than compassion.

People ask why moments like this feel so familiar. The answer is simple. We have seen this before. We recognize the posture. We recognize the language. We recognize the mix of nationalism and religion, grievance and righteousness. It is hate against minorities wrapped in a flag while clutching a cross.

And this is where I slow down, because this is the part that matters to me as a human being who has spent a lifetime sitting with people in crisis. This is not about personalities. It is about systems. It is about how belief becomes armor instead of discipline. It is about how confidence replaces humility. It is about how symbols get worn while their meaning is quietly abandoned.

Real faith should make you more human, not less. It should widen who you care about. It should slow your judgment. It should pull you toward people who are hurting instead of giving you reasons to dismiss them. When religion starts hardening hearts, legitimizing mockery, or providing cover for racism, something fundamental has been lost.

So yes, people are angry about the video, and they should be. But history teaches us that outrage alone is never enough. These moments only feel shocking when we ignore the continuity behind them. This is how it always works, not through sudden violence, but through normalization, through permission, through repeated signals that dehumanization is acceptable when framed as righteousness.

We know these people because we have seen them before. History does not repeat because facts disappear. It repeats because empathy erodes. And after everything I have seen in my life, I still believe most of us are better than that.