11 Former Evangelicals Talk About What They Left Behind
You can’t reject the dogma without losing the community
During election seasons in my childhood, people at my evangelical church would joke they’d write in Jesus because neither candidate was good enough. That isn’t the case for vocal evangelical leaders who have supported President Trump through his election and term. The Pew Research Center found 7 in 10 white evangelical Protestants approve of Trump’s job performance as president.
Evangelicals are a category of Christians defined in a couple of ways, including, as the name suggests, a commitment to evangelism, or proselytizing.
For some evangelicals, especially millennials, the recent confluence of religion and politics has reached a tipping point. The need to distance themselves from Republican views gave rise to a new term: exvangelical.
The term — now a hashtag, podcast, and community — brings together people who seemingly want to identify by what they are not.
Some still claim their Christian identity, but reject headlining Republican policies on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Others left religion completely, but the exvangelical identity creates a common bond with others who escaped a particular type of trauma, perhaps as one might attend a support group for…
