I was perusing Daily Kos a few mornings ago when I ran into an essay about Jennie Gage—and I recommend you read it before going any further. It stopped me in my tracks. Here was a story told plainly, without melodrama or self-aggrandizement, about a woman who walked away from devout Mormonism and, along that same path, walked away from MAGA. The piece, titled “Breaking With Her Devout Mormonism Led Her Out of MAGA,” sketches the arc from a strict Latter-day Saint upbringing, to seeing Donald Trump as divinely chosen, to eventually standing in the public square as an advocate against both authoritarian religion and authoritarian politics.
Gage grew up in what she calls a “very traditional Mormon family” with pioneer-era lineage and deep church expectations baked right into childhood. She remembers being identified early as a naturally curious child, the sort who delighted in questions and in thinking itself. She recalls being placed into a gifted program and feeling, as she puts it, like her brain was “being tickled.” That phrase—half-whimsical, half-poignant—says a great deal. The delight of learning. The thrill of curiosity. The sense of human possibility that comes when knowledge feels like oxygen.
Then came the second part: learning that curiosity was dangerous. Learning that asking questions about history, gender, authority, or doctrine was “worldly” and, therefore, spiritually unsafe. Learning, in other words, what many raised inside high-control systems eventually discover—that curiosity is permitted only so long as it does not cross the boundaries of obedience.
There is a moment in her story when she explains this in simplest terms: she loved thinking, but she was taught that independent thinking was a threat. This is where her story begins to connect not just to Mormonism, but to something much larger: the psychic architecture of high-demand religion, where obedience is sanctified, complexity is suspect, and doubt can feel like betrayal.
Gage later entered adulthood with that same capacity for loyalty, the same longing for clarity, the same learned instinct to vest ultimate trust in a single authority. And like many Americans raised in tightly bounded religious systems, she found a familiar emotional structure in performative patriotism and Christian-coded nationalism. Trump did not arrive to her as a politician, but as a figure of devotion—a chosen one, a defender of righteousness, someone battling the forces of evil. At one point, she even used his picture as her social-media profile image. She fell in love with the story she had been given: that America was under attack, that only one man could save it, that political loyalty was a form of spiritual protection.
But slowly, painfully, the cracks appeared. She describes a moment during a Sunday lesson on the Holocaust when something inside her “snapped.” The cruelty, the inhumanity, the history—that unbearable history—collided with the simplistic righteousness narrative she’d been taught. Then there were her LGBTQ friends, whose dignity and humanity contradicted the dogma she was told to accept. The moral world she inhabited no longer aligned with the world in front of her eyes. And like many who leave high-demand systems, her exit was not an intellectual debate—it was an existential recognition. What she had been told to believe could not survive what she knew in her bones.
She speaks plainly about trauma, silence, obedience, and the cost of leaving. She speaks of losing community and gaining a conscience. And she speaks of the moment she saw Trump not as a savior, but as, in her words, “the Grand Wizard of every Christian Nationalist group in the United States.” She says, “It’s the ultimate political/religious merger,” meaning that MAGA had turned politics into theology and dissent into sin.
If you want to hear Gage in her own voice—and you should—she appears on programs such as Speaking of Cults, and in a video titled Why I Left the Mormon Church & MAGA Movement, where she openly describes herself as “Ex-Mormon and Ex-MAGA.” She also collaborates with LeavingMAGA.org, a site founded by former MAGA activist Rich Logis, which collects personal exit stories and provides guidance for families trying to reach loved ones caught in authoritarian political identity.
That phrase is important: authoritarian political identity. Because at the heart of Gage’s story is not just religion and not just politics—it is the psychological structure built when unquestioned authority becomes a moral command.
A Wave Bigger Than One Story
Gage is not an outlier. Former MAGA believers are emerging across America, telling their stories and examining how they were drawn in, what they once believed, and why they left. These are not the comfortable critics who never bought in—these are insiders, loyalists, evangelists of the cause who eventually saw the machinery behind the banners.
There are Trump loyalists-turned-truth-tellers like Michael Cohen, who once called himself Trump’s “fixer” and then wrote a book about the culture of deception he helped construct. There is Anthony Scaramucci, who spent only eleven days as Trump’s communications director but has spent years since warning his fellow conservatives that the danger was not exaggeration, but insufficiently understood. There are former senior officials like Alyssa Farah Griffin, Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troye, and Sarah Matthews, each of whom lived inside the West Wing and left appalled at what they witnessed. And there are whistleblowers like Miles Taylor, once anonymous and now openly organizing others who saw the corrosion from the inside.
These individuals come from different backgrounds, ideologies, and professional histories. Some were raised in religion; some were raised in secular environments. Some still identify as conservative; some do not. But each recognized a pattern: the centralization of authority around a single leader, the demand for loyalty over truth, the moralization of dissent, and the insistence that the ends justify the means. Or perhaps more accurately, that the leader justifies the means, especially when those means involve punishing the unbeliever.
Only one person on that list—Jennie Gage herself—has publicly mapped the journey from high-control religion to high-control politics in one continuous narrative. That may be simply because many high-demand religious exits remain private, or because those who make both departures simultaneously are still gathering the language to describe it. But the resonance of her story suggests more of these voices will emerge as American religious and political landscapes continue to shift.
Measuring the Invisible: Who Is Leaving MAGA?
Counting “former MAGA believers” is not as simple as counting church resignations. Movements rooted in identity rarely hand out membership cards, and leaving is less a public act than a quiet interior shift. Polling gives imperfect but useful windows. YouGov and Economist surveys have shown that self-identified “MAGA Republicans” peaked around early 2025 at roughly sixty percent of the GOP and have since shown signs of softening. The Vanderbilt Project on Unity found that over half of Republicans identified more with MAGA than the broader party label in early 2025, up sharply from mid-2023.
Meanwhile, public opinion of Trump has hardened among non-supporters. A PRRI survey shows a majority of Americans now describing Trump as a “dangerous dictator,” a language shift that once would have seemed unimaginable. These patterns do not mean mass de-MAGA-fication, but they do suggest fluid commitment at the movement’s edges—and a growing willingness among ordinary voters to consider exit narratives credible rather than traitorous.
And exit narratives matter. Authoritarian systems are built as much on imagination as on rules. When a neighbor leaves, when a cousin stops forwarding conspiracy memes, when a former believer posts a video explaining why they changed—social permission expands. Identity loosens. The unthinkable becomes possible.
Are People Really Leaving High-Demand Religion? Yes.
Religious disaffiliation across the democratic world is one of the most robust social trends of the past fifty years. But the detail worth noticing is not simply that religion is in decline. It is that the steepest declines are in high-control forms of religion—systems with rigid authority, gender hierarchy, doctrinal absolutism, and heavy communal policing.
People are not rejecting spirituality so much as rejecting control. They are not abandoning transcendence so much as rejecting authoritarian intermediaries. A significant share of ex-believers describe their departures not as loss of faith but as reclaiming autonomy.
The reasons repeat with uncanny consistency: exhaustion with shame and fear; the emotional toll of exclusion; the social violence faced by LGBTQ congregants; conflicts between scientific knowledge and inherited dogma; a felt need for psychological space; and, increasingly, the availability of online communities offering support, validation, and—perhaps most radical of all—a sense of normalcy.
When one can see others leaving and thriving, one begins to consider leaving oneself.
What About Mormonism?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains a global institution with sustained growth in Africa, Latin America, and parts of the Pacific. But inside the United States—the church’s historical center—the picture looks different: slow or flat growth, declining retention among younger members, gender-based attrition, and a visible, often vibrant ex-Mormon culture on YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and local community networks.
This does not mean Mormonism is collapsing. It means Mormonism is experiencing what many high-demand religions are: a generational renegotiation of authority. Institutions designed for obedience are confronting generations raised in the information age, where secrecy is impossible, where independent inquiry is instinctive, and where spiritual identity need not be tied to institutional loyalty.
We should be careful here. Not all high-demand religions are abusive. Many people find community, purpose, and deep moral meaning inside structured religious frameworks. The issue is not belief—it is the demand for submission. The moment faith requires the surrender of conscience, questions, and selfhood, it moves from devotion to domination.
Why These Stories Matter
Leaving a high-control religion and leaving a high-control political movement are not identical events, but they share striking psychological mechanics. Both operate by sanctifying loyalty, punishing dissent, and defining identity against an enemy. Both carry social reward for belonging and social danger for questioning. Both insist that meaning comes from obedience. And both collapse when individuals reclaim the right to think and feel without permission.
One of the most important functions of people like Jennie Gage is that they turn private struggle into public possibility. They say, in essence: you can leave. You can think again. You do not have to be alone. What you feel is not betrayal—it is awakening. And they say something else, just as important: you do not have to hate the person you once were. You do not have to replace belief with bitterness. You can simply walk toward air.
For Those Wondering How To Help Someone Leave
If someone you love is entangled in a high-control political or religious system, it is tempting to argue, correct, debate, shame, or fact-check them into the light. This rarely works. Identity does not crumble under argument. It softens under empathy, curiosity, shared humanity, and safe space to question. Ask questions. Listen. Offer stories, not demands. Say, “Can we explore this together?” instead of “How can you believe that?”
There are places to begin. LeavingMAGA.org provides practical guidance for families and friends who want to maintain connection while opening conversational doors. For those leaving high-demand religion, organizations such as Recovering From Religion, Mormon Stories, Mormon Spectrum, and THRIVE Beyond Religion offer community, resources, and non-coercive spaces for healing. There are also individual creators like Alyssa Grenfell, whose materials speak directly to those taking first steps out of the LDS Church. Not all these spaces will fit everyone; exits are personal. But knowing that doors exist can be a lifeline.
The Final Truth About Exits
Exits are never merely ideological events. They are emotional, relational, and deeply human. They are not triumphal marches; they are trembling steps in the dark, guided by some fragile conviction that there must be something better than fear disguised as faith or rage disguised as patriotism. And the moment someone leaves, they do not just change themselves—they change the field around them. They show that freedom is possible. They loosen the spell.
If you read nothing else, read the Daily Kos article about Jennie Gage. Then watch her speak. There is nothing rehearsed about her. She is not running for anything. There is no branding. She is simply telling the truth she earned the hard way. The kind of truth that can only be spoken by someone who once believed everything she now questions.
Movements rise. Institutions solidify. Leaders build cults of personality. And yet, always, someone begins to ask a question they are told not to ask. Then another. And somewhere in that slow, private, ordinary act of conscience is the real engine of change—not in the rallies or the slogans, but in the quiet rebellion of the human mind refusing to surrender its dignity.
Exits begin, almost always, with a whisper:
“What if they’re wrong?”
And if we are lucky, they end with a life larger than the walls that once held it.
