When Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — many of them carrying Christian symbols like crucifixes, statues of the Virgin Mary and even life-sized portraits of Jesus Christ — a terrible thought occurred to Bradley Onishi: “Could I have been there?”

For much of his young adult life, Onishi had been steeped in the very same mixture of religiosity and radical far-right politics that was on display at the Capitol. After growing up in a secular household in Orange County, California, Onishi joined an evangelical megachurch at age 14. During high school, he led prayer meetings during lunch break and handed out anti-abortion pamphlets to his classmates. By the time he was 20, he had married his high school sweetheart, taken a job as a full-time youth minister and made plans to enter the seminary.