Midterms 2026: The former neo-Nazi pastor speaking out against Trump

I was accused of being an atheist, secretly trying to make everyone a communist. I was told that I was possessed by a demon. Evangelical Christians have long been a bedrock of support for U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But one pastor in Phoenix, Arizona, is bucking the trend. I think that the president has become more brazen, more authoritarian. Caleb Campbell may not have seemed a likely candidate for the church as a young man. In my high school years, so late teenage years. I was part of the skinhead movement, so the idea is white supremacy, you'd shave your head, you'd wear a certain uniform. But after disavowing the skinhead movement, he joined Desert Springs Bible Church, initially as a drummer for the choir, before rising to the position of lead pastor and becoming one of the few white evangelicals to speak out against the president. I think it was 2017. The Trump administration was talking about putting children in cages who came across the border as a deterrent. And I remember saying something from the pulpit that it's never righteous to put kids in cages. And that was met with resistance in my own congregation. I was accused of being an atheist, secretly trying to make everyone a communist. I was told that I was possessed by a demon. Right around January 6th, 2021. When a lot of Christians tried to storm the Capitol and built a gallows to hang Mike Pence with a cross next to it saying Jesus is King, I remember speaking out against that. And for many people, that was the final straw. So that early part of 2021, about 80% of the people in the church who were here in 2015, when I became the lead pastor, had left. Campbell's Church has since regained its following, he says. But as the midterms approach, he sees U.S. politics as more distant than ever from the Bible's teachings. So you take like the ice raids, people being gunned down in the streets, the violent and dehumanizing rhetoric coming out of the mouth of public officials, being met with applause from Christians. That hard-heartedness, that callousness, I think that's increased exponentially over the last 10 years. Our political rhetoric is combative and derisive. It's further fracturing our communities. And usually the people who get hurt the most when we take on that posture are the widow, the poor, the immigrant, and the orphan. The very people that the Bible tells us to pay attention to the most and to protect.