Confessions of an Almost-Exvangelical
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“What has been is what will be,” wrote Qoheleth, “and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9). The phenomenon of people leaving evangelicalism is no exception. There have always been those who have rejected evangelical faith and communities, having become disillusioned, disaffected, or downright angry with the traditions of their upbringing. Evangelicals are clearly not alone in this regard. It is not uncommon, for example, to come across former Catholics. Likewise the decline of the mainline traditions has meant there are many ex-mainliners (not a few of whom have become evangelicals). It has, however, become rather trendy to announce publicly one’s rejection of the evangelical faith. It is not an overstatement to say that in some online communities it is a mark of honor to identify as a “#exvangelical.”
Exactly what constitutes an “evangelical” is not always clear. The National Association of Evangelicals identifies evangelicalism according to four characteristics (the so-called “Bebbington Quadrilateral”):
Conversionism: the belief that lives need to be transformed through a “born-again” experience and a lifelong process of following Jesus;
Activism: the expression and demonstration of the gospel in missionary and social reform efforts;
Biblicism: a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority;
Crucicentrism: a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity.
This is a good working definition, but we should also acknowledge that the term “evangelical” often connotes more than this, particularly in the U.S. “Evangelical” has become far more than a religious term, but a cultural and political one. In the past four decades evangelicalism has become ever more closely associated with the Republican Party, and more recently with Donald Trump. To become a public exvangelical, then, is to reject not only a set of beliefs or leave a particular community, but in many cases to declare independence from a political identity.
I grew up in an evangelical family in an evangelical UMC in the 1990s. Our car rides were a steady diet of Focus on the Family, the EIB network, and old Buddy Green tapes. My father would get in the church van for his annual pilgrimage to the nearest Promise Keepers event. My mother taught in an Evangelical Lutheran elementary school. Much of our family schedule revolved around the programming of our local church. We were true believers.
When I was 16, I read the Beatitudes from Matthew 5, slammed the Bible shut, tossed it across the room and broke out in a cold sweat. This list of blessings that Jesus lays out while preaching the sermon on the mount: I had none of them. I was neither poor in spirit nor mourning. I wasn’t meek or hungry for righteousness or merciful. I sure as heck wasn’t pure in heart or a peacemaker. And any persecution I may have believed to be under was completely overblown.
How could I have been nurtured by my family and the local church, surrounded by the steadfast love of the saints, and still be nearing adulthood as an unrepentant spiritual degenerate?
At about the same time Zondervan had begun publishing “hip and edgy” content through the ‘Emergent’ house. A big theme that developed with these authors was an emphasis on orthopraxy. The basic idea was that the church in North America had done a pretty good job of believing the right things, but we had failed to emphasize doing the right things as well. And at seventeen years old with my limited knowledge and experience, this made a lot of sense to me. The “orthodoxy” of turn-of-the-millennium evangelicalism was a brand of therapeutic moral Jesusism that preached that the kingdom could be advanced through coercive moralism and political engagement. The problem for me was that I was a thoroughly orthodox evangelical, but I somehow didn’t care about these things that Jesus seemed to care about a whole lot.
So I rejected evangelicalism. It wasn’t bearing the fruit of the Spirit in my life. Maybe these emergent folks who are preaching orthopraxy over orthodoxy had it right.
I hadn’t rejected the gospel. To be honest with you, at the time I don’t think I could have articulated the gospel. But I rejected getting worked up about how long ago dinosaurs existed. I rejected the idea that American politics could create a more “Christian” society. I rejected that the true measure of a person's spiritual maturity was that they had kissed dating goodbye.
But then God in his grace extended opportunities for the renewal of my mind. The first was when Shawn Graves was hired at my college. Shawn was finishing his Ph. D. in Epistemology and over the course of three years I had him for 11 classes. As is often the case, his intense work on epistemology spilled into every other class I had with him. I took epistemological logic and epistemological ethics and epistemological philosophy of religion (you get the idea), not to mention two other classes that were formally about epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It seeks to answer how we know what we know. During this period, I developed a deep love of intellectual virtue and, importantly, studying epistemology gave me language and a framework for making sense of confidence and doubt. In an intellectually virtuous person, confidence is directly related to evidence and not just the evidence that one has first hand, but the charitable reception of the evidence of others.
The second experience was discovering Christian orthodoxy while in seminary at United. Unlike the worldview warmongering I had been led to believe was the heart of orthodoxy, at United I was introduced to the creeds and the Great Tradition and confronted with the reality that the evangelicalism I grew up with wasn’t a complete representation of Christian orthodoxy. Now, don’t get me wrong, much of the Christianity of my youth was life-giving and faithful. But there was also a bunch of extra stuff tacked on to fight a culture war that distorted and confused the message of the gospel.
What we learn in studying Church history is that faithful Christianity is always concerned with getting back to what John Wesley called ’primitive religion’. From the apostles writing in the first century to Athanasius writing treatises in the fourth century to Martin Luther writing theses in the sixteenth century to Wesley stripping down the Articles of Religion for the Methodists to our current task of relegating worldview to its proper place as a contextual response, faithful Christians are called to return to the content of the Great Tradition.
The true failure of evangelicalism is that we elevated the wrong things. We elevated a culture war over cultivating a culture of sacrifice. We elevated electing the right politicians over living the kind, honest lives that show our own election. We got worked up over the dates when dinosaurs were alive when we should have been shouting from the rooftops that Jesus is risen and is alive.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes,
Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
This is of first importance. This is the only hill we must be willing to die on. Other hills are worth fighting for and we should fight strategically. But how many hills do we as evangelicals fight and die on that are completely superfluous to the gospel? Sometime in the next several years, the UMC is going to split and in that period of chaos and transition, my prayer for every tradition that arises from the split is that they will take this opportunity to prune the branches that don’t bear fruit and get serious about the gospel.
My commitment to the faith we inherit from the saints compels me to still reject political evangelicalism. If we think we can coercively create a more “Christian” society through the snake-infested swamp that is the democratic process in twenty-first century America, we are delusional. But I am compelled to embrace the evangelicalism that began as a movement to prune the rotten fruit of fundamentalism by emphasizing the four essentials of (1) high Christology, (2) the authority of Scripture, (3) repentance and transformation, and (4) sacrificial service to one’s neighbor. This is the kind of evangelicalism that faithfully follows the Spirit into the church’s best future. This is the future that experiences the inbreaking of the kingdom.
Caleb Speicher is an ordained elder in the West Ohio Conference of The United Methodist Church. He serves as Senior Pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Grove City, Ohio.