Take that mask off, I wanna see what’s under them achievements

Why believe you? You never gave us nothing to believe in

’Cause you lied about religious views, you lied about your surgery

You lied about your accent and your past tense — all is perjury.

Shoutout to Kendrick Lamar for giving us all some Pulitzer-worthy words we can use to condemn blatant hypocrisy. I thought about these bars over the weekend as I read about MAGA megachurch pastor Robert Morris’ sexual abuse scandal.

Morris, who has served as a religious adviser to Donald Trump, is the founding pastor of Gateway Church in the Dallas area. And as a true MAGA movement acolyte, he has used his platform to support the right-wing assault on school learning plans that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people and classroom discussions about social inequality.

Morris has railed against “what Satan has been trying to do even in our school systems,” and the NBC News podcast Grapevine has detailed how his church is aligned with the bigoted portrayal of LGBTQ people as being part of societal decay.

On Saturday, The Christian Post reported that Morris had a confession to make. According to the outlet:

According to the report, Gateway Church elders agreed that Morris is on the straight and narrow now, citing a “two-year restoration process” he went through after “a moral failure.”

The elders said in a statement:

I’m not so sure that a two-year hiatus settles it.

Morris is far from the only church leader to be exposed for such predation. In 2022, it was revealed that the ultraconservative Southern Baptist Conference had been keeping a secret list of hundreds of church figures who had been accused of sexual abuse. A similar report out of Illinois detailed rampant sexual abuse of children within the conservative-leaning Catholic Church.

I’m including the Morris story in my ongoing series on “MAGA masculinity” because he — and other faith leaders like him — are a prime example of the fraudulence I see in the conservative movement’s hypermasculine projections. (Read my previous “This Week in MAGA masculinity” posts here and here.)

Despite lacking evidence, Trump and his followers would have you believe that perhaps the greatest threats to human decency — and children’s innocence, in particular — are drag performers or LGBTQ people as a whole.

But too often, it’s right-wing Christian men who are the ones being exposed as a true danger.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com