Stephania Messina kept birthing boys. In the Quiverfull conservative Christian church she belonged to outside Detroit, Michigan, that made her a community celebrity. Your quiver, as the church taught it, is your womb, meant to be filled with as many arrows – a metaphor for children – as you can shoot unto the Lord. She shot five. “They treated me like I was Mother Mary, like I was this gift to the church,” she said.
Life after Maga: the group offering an ‘exit ramp’ for rightwingers questioning Trumpism
Stephania Messina kept birthing boys. In the Quiverfull conservative Christian church she belonged to outside Detroit, Michigan, that made her a community celebrity. Your quiver, as the church taught it, is your womb, meant to be filled...
“They treated me like I was Mother Mary, like I was this gift to the church,” she said. But while she was quickly pushed into leading worship and Bible study groups for women and children, she wasn’t permitted to talk about politics.
- “It wasn’t my job to vote or to know who to vote for.
- I was just supposed to submit to my husband and do what he thought was necessary,” Messina said.
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But while she was quickly pushed into leading worship and Bible study groups for women and children, she wasn’t permitted to talk about politics.
“It wasn’t my job to vote or to know who to vote for. I was just supposed to submit to my husband and do what he thought was necessary,” Messina said. “I was being indoctrinated into Christian nationalism.”
Messina quit her job, yielded to household voting, and took on home schooling and homesteading in a farmhouse, as part of an early 2010s precursor to the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement. When Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign, he was suddenly “God’s chosen one” in the church, she said.
Though Messina was never a “red-hat wearing” Maga supporter, she didn’t start questioning the movement until the early days of the Covid pandemic. Trained as a respiratory therapist, she watched Trump reverse course daily – from claiming the Covid vaccine was good to questioning its effectiveness. Meanwhile, her pastor preached that Covid lockdowns were a “demonic deep-state attempt to keep people out of church”.
After a few other instances left her with doubts, she expanded her news sources beyond the church’s approved media, and then, she said: “The dam broke.” She sought mental health support and began to understand her years inside Maga as what she calls “a religious psychosis” built on fear, isolation and control. When she finally turned away from the church in 2021, she was casted as an outsider but felt the need to proclaim her Maga exit on social media: “I started speaking out to spread awareness. I was in so deep.” She felt alone. A few years later, she connected with the group Leaving Maga.
“Leaving Maga is about normalizing leaving,” said Messina. “And it’s especially important now, since I think the Maga [bubble] is bursting.”
Many Americans, like Messina, have drifted away from Trump in the past decade, but have done so quietly. Leaving Maga offers an exit ramp from Trump’s rightwing movement that has reshaped the Republican party and platformed political extremism. Launched in 2024, the movement turned non-profit is built on the premise that abandoning the Maga identity – and the community surrounding it – functions less like changing one’s mind and more like leaving a high-control religious group, fighting a disease or breaking an addiction. It requires not just rejecting a set of beliefs but rebuilding an entire structure of belonging and identity.
Leaving Maga has touched thousands, operating on multiple fronts: weekly support meetings for the friends and family of people still inside Maga, monthly in-person meet-ups for those who’ve already left, a nationwide billboard campaign built around invitation rather than confrontation and a budding media literacy program meant to help people recognize disinformation. The goal isn’t to start or win a debate – it’s to give people somewhere to land once they’re ready to leave on their own.
“There are more people than ever who are in Maga who are starting to have doubts and confusion,” said Rich Logis, who founded the group. “We’re trying to counter the toxicity of the Maga community by providing an exit ramp and a community where people can become what I call ‘a born-again human being’ and can reclaim their individuality, their empathy and their agency.”
How Leaving Maga works
Logis was drawn to Trump’s “burn it all down” energy in 2016, voting for him that year and in 2020. He spent nearly a decade as one of Maga’s most committed foot soldiers, writing the campaign’s call script for the first presidential election, helping register new voters for Trump, donating money and appearing on Fox News as a Maga pundit. But his decisive break from the movement came after the Uvalde school shooting in 2022 – he could no longer square his own values with the response he knew was coming from Trump supporters.
Months after the Texas shooting that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers, Logis published a public apology online for supporting Trump and hurting people with his actions and rhetoric. The response was overwhelming – people commended him and criticized him – leading him to start the movement. He figured others had also left Maga and wanted to repair the damage they caused.
“I had to go through a reckoning and acknowledge to myself that I had been culpable and complicit in assisting the president in dividing our country and amplifying conspiracy theories that resulted in unnecessary death, suffering and trauma,” Logis said.
He built Leaving Maga the way he poured into Maga years prior – by writing countless online posts, speaking out on social media and reaching out to others. On any given day, Logis is on Instagram Live explaining how and why he left and how others can do the same.
Maga leaders have defined the movement as one that calls for economic nationalism, secure borders, “America first” foreign policy and traditional conservative values, said Laura K Field, a political theorist and author of the book Furious Minds: The Making of the Maga New Right. “But an element of Maga that gets underestimated is its community-building dimension,” she said. “There’s a kind of appeal – a fascist and contrarian element, a deep religiosity to it – that unifies different parts of Maga, including the ordinary voters who aren’t DC beltway types, the elites, the high-powered Catholic intellectuals, or those in the manosphere, for example.”
Logis was one of those people who saw Maga as a community more than a political ideology. “I think that it’s where people find vindication and