Interview with April Ajoy
April Ajoy grew up singing before her father preached. She was 18 when the whole family appeared on the Jim Bakker show — her dad promoting his book America Say Jesus, an open letter to George W. Bush demanding he publicly declare Jesus Christ as America’s God, and April performing the song she had written to go along with it. Her grandfather was a pastor. Her father was a pastor and an evangelist. They were, she now says, Christian nationalists — though nobody called it that at the time.
These days Ajoy makes comedy videos dissecting the movement she was raised inside, co-hosts The Tim and April Show on YouTube with fellow deconstruction survivor Tim Whitaker, and has written Star Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding a True Faith — a first-person account of what it looks like from the inside, and what it takes to get out.
The book grew out of a crisis she didn’t expect. When Trump emerged in 2016, Ajoy was still a diehard Republican, still attending evangelical church, and watching something she couldn’t reconcile.
“I could not understand why so many of my fellow Christians were seemingly okay with him as a potential president,” she said. “When the Access Hollywood tape came out, I thought for sure Trump was done. There’s no way he’s going to get Christian support after that.”
She had been raised on the Clinton era argument that character was everything — that a man who would cheat on his wife would lie to the country. Trump, to her, was disqualifying on those exact terms. But when she said so, the response from her community shocked her.
“The way that I just got berated by my fellow Christians — I was told my late father would be disappointed in me. That I was being led astray by Satan. That I was thwarting the will of God. And I suddenly started realizing the culty aspect of Republicanism and Christianity.”
The theological pivot she watched happen in real time was dizzying. Trump went from lesser-of-two-evils to something closer to divine instrument.
“It went from he was a lesser of two evils to he’s God’s chosen to save Christianity and to save America. There were Trump prophets that came on the scene, people saying that Trump was basically like the second coming of Christ’s fulfillment. I felt like I was constantly being gaslit because I felt so sure in my spirit and being that Trump was a terrible human — never deviated from that — but I was still going to church with all the people that loved him.”
The breaking point wasn’t political. It was personal. Her brother came out to her as gay in 2015.
“I knew immediately that my brother, who grew up in the same homophobic world that I did, did not choose to be gay. I didn’t know what the right answer was theologically yet, but I knew what I had been taught was wrong.”
What followed was a close look at how the doctrine she’d been handed actually worked — which verses got enforced, and which got quietly set aside.
“They were just very much cherry-picking, despite the fact that they said they took it literally. They did not take it literally. They 100% cherry-picked based on who they did and did not like.”
The structural mechanism that makes evangelical communities so resistant to this kind of questioning, Ajoy argues, is a specific theological concept weaponized far beyond its original context.
“When you grow up evangelical in the church, you are constantly taught to not touch God’s anointed. Basically meaning that if God has called someone anointed — usually it’s used in terms of a pastor — you don’t criticize that pastor. And that verse is used to silence people that speak out. Donald Trump just became God’s new anointed that you could not touch. You’ve already been trained to bend over backwards to find ways to justify men doing terrible things. It was easily just applied to Trump.”
White evangelicals remain, she notes, the only demographic group where a majority still supports Trump. She doesn’t think that’s an accident.
The fear that keeps people from questioning runs deeper than politics. For many, pulling one thread risks the entire structure.
“When you are a white evangelical, your political beliefs and your theological beliefs become completely intertwined. So questioning one is questioning the other. They’re one and the same. A lot of people have a fear of hell — that if they start to have doubts, they would eventually wake up and become an atheist and go to hell. I mean, that’s literally a fear tactic that’s been used on me.”
Ajoy is now watching a slow turn among some in her former world, accelerated by figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens going public with their own disillusionment. She’s cautious about what that actually means.
“There’s a lot of people still doubling down — I think because it’s easier than admitting they were wrong about Trump, because they’d have to admit a lot of things at this point. Admitting you were wrong about one thing opens the door to realizing you’ve actually harmed a lot of people. And I just think that’s too big a pill to swallow for a lot of them.”
For those who do find their way out, she draws a distinction between two kinds of distance.
“I saw a lot of people condemning Trump posting that blasphemous Jesus picture — and then in the aftermath just saying, well, I only voted for him because he was the lesser of the two evils. They’re trying to distance themselves from the responsibility. I don’t have grace for that. But people that can actually come out and say I was wrong and I’m sorry and actually take ownership — I can have a ton of grace for that because I used to be in that camp.”
Her own exit took time, and she’s clear-eyed about it.
“Part of me writing my book and the work I do now is my form of repentance. When you know better, you do better. And now that you know better, I will give you the space to actually learn more, unlearn, and do better. But the ‘do better’ is a key part — if there are people that are turning on Trump now but they’re still going to vote for Republicans that would basically put up those exact same policies, that’s not change.”
The comedy, she says, is not a detour from the serious work. It’s part of the method.
“Humor can disarm people. It can have them maybe receive a message that otherwise they would have their guard up for. Especially when you’re dealing with authoritarian figures — they don’t like being laughed at. You might be controlling these certain aspects of life, but you’re not going to take my joy.”
And why, she was asked, are conservatives so reliably bad at it?
“Because they don’t believe in nuance. Really good comedy is nuanced and it recognizes multiple things at once. Their belief system is based on a black and white ideology — you either have good people or evil people. Conservative humor punches down. Good humor punches up.”
HERE’S the link, but if you get it anywhere, get a new copy, so the author can write more.
