Millions of American Christians attend church on Ash Wednesday, and the gesture of marking our foreheads with ashes is formally known as the imposition of ashes. An imposition is a burden or demand. Those ashes are meant not only to be a reminder of our own mortality but also of what faith demands of us in Lent. Among those things is repentance.
The followers of President Donald Trump are at a crossroads of repentance. The choices, as ever, are stark: to continue to belong to a cult of personality that has led to blood in the streets, or to choose change, and all the sacrifices that might entail. In the wake of violence in Minneapolis, the Epstein files, and escalating crudeness in the president’s social media posts, some polls show that even white evangelicals, always among Trump’s strongest supporters, have had enough. The percentage of white evangelicals who say Trump acts ethically is now the lowest it has ever been, dropping from 55% in February 2025 to just 40% this year. But what does repentance look like for the reformed supporter of Donald Trump? Is it even possible?
Lent offers a specific window for Christians to consider what it means to atone for beliefs and actions that have damaged other people. Those beliefs and actions can include voting choices that empower candidates who do damage, corporations we’ve given money to that are doing harm to the world, and ways we’ve spent time and energy that are uncharitable or ungenerous. The purpose of Lent is to examine your choices and actions that resulted in harm so that you can, through fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, celebrate Easter with a clear conscience.
The president and the majority of Trump’s followers and Cabinet members are self-described Christians for whom repentance is theoretically a theological bedrock. But for those who have had the Trump scales fall from their eyes, repentance is hardly spoken about.
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In a Reddit thread about people with friends and family who used to support Trump, very little is said about expressions of regret or remorse. The more common position seems to be shame. Shame, which can simply mean feeling bad about what you’ve done, may sometimes be a step in the journey to repentance, but it’s too often seen as the endgame, the only feeling a Trump defector deserves to experience.
Take, for example, a Trump voter whose father was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her emotional Instagram videos regretting her vote were filled with comments of judgment and irritation. One said that anyone who bought into the Make America Great Again movement can only be forgiven if “moving forward, both their actions and words are focused on correcting the harm they’ve caused.” As is sadly typical on social media, however, beyond shame or blame, little is said about what correcting that harm might actually look like. Lent, however, provides a practical way forward.
Because, in spite of the practice of walking around for a day with ashes on your forehead, shame is not the purpose of Lent. Lent is a time for prayer, but also for action, and the action should cost you something and require real sacrifice. It is not enough to give up sweets or coffee and claim you’ve been changed, particularly when you’ve enabled a person like Trump.
The words of the Ash Wednesday gospel reading provide some clues as to what Lent is really about. Take, for example, the prophet Joel’s instructions to “rend your hearts, not your garments!” (2:13). Public atonement has its uses, but oftentimes it is done for the sake of the harm-doer, and not for the people they’ve harmed. Performative requests for forgiveness can be just that: performance. Lent, instead, is a time for a more intimate reckoning with God. “When you pray,” Jesus tells us, don’t do it in public “like the hypocrites who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that others may see them” (Matthew 6:5). The same goes for giving alms: It should be something you do without thinking about it. “Do not let your left hand know what your right is doing” (Matthew 6:3).
Fasting, the first pillar of Lenten practice, usually takes the form of eating smaller meals one day a week and abstaining from meat, particularly for Catholics. But it can also mean fasting from harmful habits such as social media or gossip. Narcissists feed on attention, so fasting Trump from the time and attention people on both sides of the divide have given him for decades can be a way of draining some of his power. Prayer is, of course, something many Christians have already put into practice when it comes to the president, such as the prayers of the Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who prayed for him to have mercy at the inaugural prayer service in 2025.
But for those trying to repent for their time in the MAGA movement, the most important lesson from Lent may be almsgiving.
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Of course, charity can be an easy way to look like you’re sorry even if you are not. Putting your name on every GoFundMe you donate to just so people will see that you care is not actual charity. Real charity means investing both money and time in healing your communities and relationships. Some of the most charitable people I’ve ever met have the least money to spare. True charity means seeking to heal relationships, and that requires atonement and amends. As the author and minister Wayne Muller says, “As we serve others we are working on ourselves,” and “when we serve others with an open and generous heart, great healing comes to us.”
Making amends means demonstrating a commitment to sustained, actual change beyond ticking a different party box on your voter registration card or posting sobbing videos of regret on social media. It means meeting people face to face, hearing their pain, and understanding the role you may have played in it. It means doing what journalist Isabel Wilkerson describes at the end of her book Caste, which is “putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective” in order to “open your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.”
That doesn’t mean anyone who regrets throwing their support behind Trump should be forced to march through the streets in sackcloth (although many of us might confess to imagining just that), but repentance must involve a person facing up to the consequences of what they’ve done and committing to living differently, for good. We’ve all seen the clickbait videos of Christians who used to be homophobes offering hugs at Pride parades, but that is yet again a single gesture on a solitary day. To volunteer at a center for homeless LGBTQ+ kids, to give uncomfortable amounts of money to Trans Lifeline or The Trevor Project, or to staff a sexual health clinic are things that take time and effort. The more time you spend among people you once perceived as aberrant or wrong, the more you come to see them as human.
For those watching someone attempt to repent, there is far too often a finger-wagging condescension toward people who have made grave mistakes in their lives, including throwing their support behind Trump. This can sometimes lead to extreme reactions to a person who has changed their political positioning. On the one hand, some people will refuse to provide space for a person to repent at all, wanting them to live in shame forever, even if the person is trying to take actionable steps toward change. The other extreme is people who ask for no repentance at all, seeming to think that vocally disowning MAGA is enough. But words can be hollow, and Lent’s lessons are much more demanding. To reflect is useless if it is not followed by repentance, and repentance is useless if it doesn’t prod us to care for our neighbors, particularly the most vulnerable ones.
Restitution needs to be earned, and it can’t be rushed. The 40 days of Lent are really just the beginning of earning forgiveness for many people, a process that takes time and effort, sometimes a lifetime. Considering the scale of damage being done to our country and planet by this administration, it may indeed take a very long time to repair what is left behind. But if the first step toward repair is acknowledging you have done something wrong, now might be the appropriate time.
The followers of President Donald Trump are at a crossroads of repentance.
Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle. Her sixth book, on the limits of forgiveness, is forthcoming. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley.
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