I was raised & educated in a conservative evangelical home, & became heavily involved in conservative politics as a young adult. Trumpism troubles the core of my soul because it is a shameless mockery of every single one of the values that made me want to be a conservative. 1/10

Earlier this month, I made some comments about #BLM & police brutality on my FB & Instagram pages, & a few people reached out to educate me about basic conservative principles. What they don't know is that I spent my young adult years reading Frederic Bastiat, F.A. Hayek... 2/10

...Larry Schweikart, Thomas Sowell, Booker T. Washington, Francis Schaeffer, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Wiker, Gene Edward Veith, Henry Hazlitt, Ann Coulter(!) & many, many others. I was VP for a conservative club & was a delegate to the 2012 Texas Republican State Convention. 3/10

I BELIEVED in what I thought were the conservative values of integrity, universal truth, personal liberty & initiative, & the sanctity of life & marriage. But this president has co-opted those values I deeply loved & twisted them into an ugly, self-serving tribalism. 4/10

Trump lies brazenly on an almost daily basis, & his supporters don't even know it because they have been conditioned to disregard every source that speaks against him as "fake news" without even examining its claims. His behavior imperils the very concept of truth. 5/10

Trump is lauded by his supporters for championing business & industry, but his policies have primarily benefited corporate lobbyists, & the crony capitalism that is thriving under his watch is a direct threat to the free-market economy conservatives are supposed to support. 6/10

Trump's image & public persona has been inextricably linked to his exploitation & objectification of young women since before I was born; his string of failed marriages is just a piece of the pattern of infidelity & misogyny that has characterized his public & private life. 7/10

Trump is cowardly & cruel, a draft-dodger who uses the language of violence to stir up his base, & regularly demeans his political opponents with public name-calling, personal insults, & outright slander. His attitude & demeanor is anti-Christ in every conceivable way. 8/10

So yes, for many of us who grew up in conservative evangelical environments, it feels like a personal betrayal to see the Christian leaders we used to trust coming out on the side of this crooked & morally bankrupt administration, & covering for its horrifying iniquities. 9/10

In short, Trumpism has utterly dismantled my trust in American conservative leadership. But maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe we NEED to extricate our moral consciousness from the deceptive two-party system & plant it firmly in the soil of the ever-surprising gospel. 10/10