Large numbers of Americans are giving up on Christianity. The trendlines are unmistakable. Fewer people are going to church. The number of people who say they have no religious affiliation has risen. The “nones” are the biggest religious group now, outnumbering both evangelicals and Catholics. For some, walking away from religion is easy. But for a lot of people, especially those who once counted themselves in the ranks of the evangelicals, it can be a lot harder. The evangelical identity can be all-consuming, shaping not just how a person prays, but how they identify, how they vote and how they live their daily life. So it’s no surprise that an online community of ex-evangelicals — exvangelical— has formed, giving those who have walked away a space to process their experience, move into a new life, and, often, warn other Americans about the political threat looming from this subset of Christianity.
In his new book “Exvangelical and Beyond: How American Christianity Went Radical and the Movement That’s Fighting Back,” podcast host Blake Chastain goes beyond recounting his own journey out of the Christian right, and into the larger story of how that community even came to be. He chronicles how white evangelicalism is not an ancient tradition, as its proponents often assume, but an American phenomenon. The faith, he argues, exists as much to justify racism and unbridled capitalism as it does to praise Jesus.
Chastain spoke with Salon about his story and why evangelicalism needs to be understood more as an identity than a theology.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start with the most basic question: Why write about ex-evangelicals, and why at this point?
The last eight or 10 years have illustrated longer-term issues within American Christianity. One outcome is that many people are disaffiliating from their churches, their belief systems, and their communities. In particular, people are leaving white evangelicalism, due to the inherently political nature of those spaces. Exvangelicalism isn’t a complete belief system, like evangelicalism is. In many ways, though, it’s a mirror of it and is in dialogue with evangelicalism. People who use the term “exvangelical” or “ex-evangelical” to describe themselves had a formative experience within evangelicalism. They no longer identify with that belief or belong to those communities.
“You can see through different surveys that have been done, especially since 2016, that there’s a drift of what the word ‘evangelical’ means. Many people who have not participated in a local evangelical church or community self-describe as “evangelical.” It’s a desire to affiliate with Donald Trump, the GOP, or general conservatism.”
The thing that is distinct over the last decade or so is the maturation of social media. Far more people can share their individual experiences than ever before. Whereas in the past, to tell a story of deconstruction or de-conversion you had to write a book. Now you can start an Instagram page, a TikTok page, a podcast, or a YouTube channel.
What I hope to do with my book is show a history of people both trying to reform evangelicalism from within and people who have not been able to do that and have had to leave. They’re our predecessors to today’s online ex-evangelical movement.
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It feels to me that the rise of exvangelicals came out of the ashes of the New Atheist movement, which imploded because so many New Atheist leaders were replicating the racism, sexism, and reactionary politics of the white evangelical church. But that’s a rabbit hole. The larger question is how does being an exvangelical differ from being a critic of right-wing religion?
It’s distinct in that it’s a bit more specific. The thing that makes exvangelicalism is it’s specifically speaking about the evangelical traditions, the particular presentation and orientation of that faith and speaking directly to that. You can see examples of similar movements from other faith traditions. There is a very active “ex-mo” or ex-Mormon community online. You can see other spaces that are more broadly ex-Christian.
In this book, you don’t seem too interested in the theological discourse about what constitutes evangelicalism. Instead, you write about evangelicalism as a socio-political phenomenon. Why do you center the politics and white identity politics of evangelicals, and not so much their theological beliefs in things like the rapture?
Conservative evangelicals decry identity politics, but they also take part in them. You can see through different surveys that have been done, especially since 2016, that there’s a drift of what the word “evangelical” means. Many people who have not participated in a local evangelical church or community self-describe as “evangelical.” It’s a desire to affiliate with Donald Trump, the GOP, or general conservatism. It’s drifted for those theological markers.
But even before that, scholars for years have argued that theology is not necessarily the defining characteristic of evangelicalism. Whiteness, capitalism, and power helped to develop an evangelical industry. The theology takes a back seat. That may not be the case for every single person that uses the term “evangelical.” But conservative white evangelicals act in a particular way, and that deserves our attention. It deserves to be criticized within those terms, as much as whether they live up to their espoused theological beliefs.
Even after nine years of Trump’s non-stop campaign for president, I still see a lot of pundits who seem baffled by the fact that the vast majority of white evangelicals support Donald Trump. Why is it so hard for them to understand it?
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s still common to underestimate the degree to which political conservatism permeates mass evangelical culture. That is why, in my book, I look at prior attempts to moderate evangelical spaces, which evangelicals have rejected for the past 40 to 50 years. The groups that maintain the most power are on the conservative side, whether from a theological or political perspective.
There are progressive evangelical spaces and people. But they do have a difficult road. They’ve been steadfastly pushed out. With such an uphill battle, people burn out. That often means they leave evangelicalism and become, exvangelical or move on to another spiritual community. The entrenched conservativism has been built up for decades within evangelical spaces. It just seems de facto for evangelicals to align themselves with the GOP.
A lot of evangelicals talk about their faith as if it is this deep tradition going back thousands of years. But, as you detail, it’s relatively new and cannot be disassociated from the history of the United States.
Certainly, there’s an assumption that evangelicalism was this immutable thing passed down from the time of Jesus to today. That’s the result of beliefs in things like biblical inerrancy, this idea that the Bible had no textual errors. It created a rift between those more conservative communities and the more moderate and even liberal ones. That’s why a lot of more progressive forms of Christianity today don’t have much dialogue with evangelical partners. And evangelicals often aren’t in dialogue with people from other faith communities.
“It’s distressing to learn what motivated those initial leaders and subsequently influenced all these other people in your life was racism. It can make you curious about what else needs to be learned about evangelical history.”
Take the teaching of “the rapture.” That is a recent development. John Nelson Darby popularized that idea in the 19th century. That’s a blink of an eye, compared to the 2000-year history of Christianity. But it did train American Christians to feel dread about the future and this idea that Jesus is going to be coming back soon. It’s created a pessimism, a belief we should focus on converting people, not social welfare and reform. Its proponents in the 19th century opposed those who espoused the gospel of improving society for everyone. They emphasize just evangelism because Jesus is coming. We’re still living with the consequences.
In this book, you deal with the misconception that the Moral Majority and larger Christian right development in the late 20th century was due to abortion. You argue it was really more about race. Why is that?
This has been documented by a lot of scholars and journalists. One significant piece was a 2014 article by Randall Balmer, who is an evangelical historian. As a millennial who was raised in the eighties and nineties, I assumed that the politically active Christians that I saw were primarily motivated by restricting abortion access, and that was the animating issue that brought evangelicals into the political sphere.
But when you look at the historical record, you find that figures like Billy Graham called abortion a Catholic issue. After Roe v. Wade was initially announced, the Southern Baptist Convention affirmed it as a good development. What drew evangelicals into politics was actually a federal lawsuit against the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University. They threatened the tax-exempt status of the university for failing to integrate racially in the seventies. It was then that Paul Weyrich, who founded the Heritage Foundation, saw an opportunity to align with evangelicals. He was a conservative Catholic, but he saw an opportunity to generate animosity and motivate evangelicals to rally to conservative causes.
It’s distressing to learn what motivated those initial leaders and subsequently influenced all these other people in your life was racism. It can make you curious about what else needs to be learned about evangelical history.
Both the evangelical and exvangelical movements are very online. They often encounter each other. You write that, in your experience, most evangelicals can only deal with a strawman version of exvangelicals. Can you say more about what you mean by that?
Evangelical leaders could reach out to exvangelical commentators, who would happily accept a reasonable request for public conversations. Instead, they characterize ex-evangelicals as people who simply wanted to leave because they wanted to sin, or because there was some fleeting online social clout. That feels disingenuous. Instead of listening to what we have to say or speaking to us directly, they’d rather criticize a theoretical person. They don’t want the perspective of someone who can, with examples, explain why they left.
Ironically, we have insights they could benefit from. We can tell them why their beliefs are harmful. But they don’t wish to hear that. There’s not much you can do to encourage that dialogue any further. These dialogues have to happen at a remove.
I mean, didn’t you want to sin a little bit?
(Laughs) I didn’t believe that what they called a sin was a sin.
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