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After living in Seattle for 12 years, we discerned whether or not to stay, and we discerned hard. Friends sat with us for several meetings in a Quaker-style Clearness Committee, asking open-ended questions like: What would you most like about living in the Midwest again?
We returned to Indiana a couple of times in 2017 to revisit the community we’d left 20 years before. We met with people and listened to their stories of life in Indiana. After nine months, we found repeated consolation in the decision to remain in Seattle. The day we decided to stay, I experienced an immense freedom.
A similar release happened one other time in my life, in my 20s. Drew and I dated for six years before we were married. After a lot of uncertainty, we decided to spend our lives together. My shoulders loosened when we made the choice. I felt my posture change.
I can see a similar path in a slower, steadier beat over the last decade in my Christian practice. When I decided to stay close to Jesus in 2018, around the same time we decided to stay in Seattle, I let go of the need to control how people might view me — be it too “woke” or too conservative, whatever — and that stale cookie crumbled. I just let it be, my belief. I let it morph and grow but did not question it as central. For better or worse, this shift happened in my own life while Trump came on the scene and deconstruction culture was gaining steam on social media.
Left Behind, Again
That left-behind feeling? It’s one I know well. The fear of being left behind in my rapture-ready childhood is similar to my real-life feelings of being left behind by friends who depart from the faith. I understand the precise interior alienation when you believe things your friends stopped believing or loosened their grip. These same waves of isolation came over me as the faith of friends changed decades before the church’s current deconstruction era. “Maybe they were an inoculation for now, when everything seems so broken?” Drew and I sometimes wonder.
Still, if I’m honest, few things irk me more than Christian-famous folks making declarations of leaving Christianity as a way to stay true to themselves — except for the media splash that follows.
The person may be more famous after the Instagram announcement because of the flurry of conversation, and the declaration is more deflating if you still believe. Those of us who have felt left behind before feel, yet again, like we may be the last holy fools in the room.
There’s another thing that happens when you are one of the few people you know who are still Christian, and I’ve found it to be dangerous: Judgment cloaked in compassion. We may say we saw the slippery slope of this or that person’s faith coming. It’s the bubble gum inside the blow pop, a sweet vindication in being correct in our prediction. It’s also gross, a power play to self-soothe.
Many of us have done a good job of making deconstruction an us vs them thing. Instead of care across difference, Christians fixated on this conversation might be just as siloed as folks at a Trump rally against the liberal elite. Or at a Biden rally, for that matter.
Deconstruction isn’t cool anymore. Everyone says it, blah blah blah, like a middle school mom sarcastic at the dinner table about the word suss. “These mashed potatoes are looking real suss, right Noah?” “I was going to make scalloped, but the recipe looks REALLY suss.” What an eye roll.
Maybe the word “deconstruction” has lost a sense of subversiveness. Maybe it did a while ago.
But the assumptions between one kind of Christian and another — the judgment — has not stopped. This is a human thing we do with our brains. We put people in buckets because we’re nervous, and it shows. For example, you can probably tell when somebody talks about deconstruction, but they’re conservative and trying to sound cool with it, no biggie. You can tell when ultra-right evangelicals use the word as political ammunition to pump a base of nationalists or sell books. You can also tell when others use the word deconstruct because they’re done and dusted with the church.
Some folks express their age-old dark night of the soul with the word deconstruction, which has always been a vital part of belief. I suppose I’ve tried to be in the middle and let it be neutral, to use terms like “spiritual desert” to be inclusive and literary, and you can probably tell that, too. Because my own experience happened a long time ago now, and it felt quiet, and I didn’t have the language to back up what was happening to me. I do now, thanks to the contemplative tradition: a long desolation. Not a dismantling, but a sort of faith identity exploration. Spoken like a true Gen X, enneagram 4.
I think that’s why I wanted to write Orphaned Believers. To get to the heart of that displaced feeling. After all, I started the book with all the reasons I’ve stayed close to Jesus:
Sometimes, in those years, I stayed a Christian by choice. Sometimes, I stayed because I realized being a Christian wasn’t contingent on my striving. It was, of course, about Jesus, and a small liberation came from removing myself from the center of the story. Sometimes I stayed a Christian by brute force. Because if I wasn’t a Christian, where would my identity drift? Who would I become?
I know why I’ve stayed a Christian: I’m hemmed into Jesus. It’s like my body has been sewn into his. It may seem gory, but I would crawl under his holy skin and call it a blanket. I am a Jesus person. I should have lived in the 60s.
I can tell you there is nothing I can do at this point to un-hem myself from Jesus. As much as I hide, deflect, get bored, get embarrassed, kick or scream, Jesus is the calm friend on the couch. “Do you want to get a coffee?” he asks. “Or a whisky. Let’s talk it out.” I pray a bit, sit in silence, and feel better right away. All my chaos around wanting to go is centered on the self, I’ve learned. The settling down is where I can get the freak over myself and rest.
That may be true about my life as a Christian. But what about the tradition in which a lot of us were raised? What about evangelicalism?
The Evangelical Question
I’ve been thinking about the question of evangelicalism, like many of you, for some years. I wrote an op-ed about the evangelical vote for The New York Times that ran the Sunday before the 2020 election. I wrote about the complexity of my feelings around American Evangelicalism in 2022, and it remains a most-read essay on my Substack: WILL THE LAST PERSON LEAVING EVANGELICALISM TURN OUT THE LIGHTS? At book talks, people often ask if I consider myself an evangelical. Not because they care particularly about my stance, but because we’re all trying to figure out what to call ourselves or not call ourselves — and what we gain or lose by association.
What brought me to this fresh round of considering whether to stay in evangelicalism or leave was not a personal matter. It was a cultural matter.
Because a couple of weeks ago, I read Ruth Graham’s New York Times piece “Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here” about the “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” calendar sponsored by a “woke free” beer company. I felt in my gut that evangelicalism may be beyond repair. The gut feel was similar to drinking a cherry slushie before riding a loopy roller coaster. There is only so much we can handle, I thought.
Graham writes:
is interviewed for the piece, noting that raunchy Christian culture is gaining acceptance, as Graham writes, “in a moment of deep conservative outrage, an often visceral disgust, at rising rates of nontraditional gender and sexual identities, particularly among young people. In that context, an indulgence in heterosexual lust, even if in poor taste, is becoming seen as not just benign, but maybe even healthy and noble.”“...a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture ... for some conservative Christians, the stakes of the moment are now high enough that a certain amount of vulgarity is not just tolerated but also required as a form of truth-telling worthy of the prophets.”
“Against that backdrop, it’s a wholesome thing for a boy to be lusting after a very sexy woman,” Du Mez says.
God, Can I Still Do This?
The message this calendar is telling, or rather selling, is not the Christian way. And I don’t know if there is anything to be done to stop the wave of white hot, angry, red-white-and-blue evangelicalism.
The beat went on. After Graham’s article, I read Michael C. Bender’s reporting on The Church of Trump: How He’s Infusing Christianity Into His Movement. Trump rallies used to feature frequent Q Anon finger raises, Bender reports, a signal to other voters in the stadium that you were in on the far-right conspiracy. Now, there are fewer Q Anon signals and more hands raised in worship. A video embedded in the article shows how the end of Trump’s rallies are like a church service. People get quiet, and listen to their prophet. And my God, look at these t-shirts and signs.
God, can I still do this? Is it a test of wills to call myself an evangelical because I don’t like jettisoning identifiers? Because I’ve never really “felt” like an evangelical as an arty teen onwards?
If we are into Jesus but not into Christian culture, but we live in America in an election year with the polls looking pre-tty good for Donald John Trump, what are we supposed to do? I could think of only three possibilities a reasonable person could take as a response to “the Trumpifcation of the Church” illustrated in these two articles, and countless others:
1. Check out and ignore it.
2. Distance yourself because you can no longer be associated with the racism-sexism-ableism-homophobia-misogyny-colonialism of white American evangelicalism.
3. Press into Christianity and push back.
I found Drew making coffee and told him about these articles, and the fresh waves of hopelessness I felt after reading them. Let me pause and say having a person to talk to, a person of relentless optimism and thoughtfulness who bears hope like Drew, is remarkable. Sometimes it pisses me off, his stubborn hope. I once thought that no one could be so clear-eyed unless they’re out of touch. Then I realized that Drew is as “in touch” as I’d like to think I am. He’s politically fluent, theologically trained, and culturally grounded. I came to him wearing thin, read him the articles, and told him my three working assumptions:
1. Check out and ignore it. As we talked, I realized that the act of ignoring the election and how Trump is masterfully coopting American Christianity is a signal that there is something that we might just need to face. It reminded me of a passage I read in Claire Dederer’s Monsters about Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law and friend of Hitler.
In the 1977 film The Confessions of Winifred Wagner, she explains that she does not care for politics, dismissively saying, “We used to laugh about all the fuss” with a knowing smile. Dederer explains that Wagner, “believes she and her kind are the ones who are free of politics, free of ‘fuss’”1 Here is the bigger danger of opting out: We risk not just complacency, but harm compounded by the power and privilege of dusting the “fuss” of dangerous political discourse under the rug. It’s a lot easier not to take politics and the danger of hate seriously when you have the privilege of averting your eyes.
2. Distance yourself because you can no longer be associated with the racism-sexism-ableism-homophobia-misogyny-colonialism of white American evangelicalism. Here’s a main personal pain point. I’ve thought about one question for years — how can I stop managing my Christian identity? I hid the most central part of my life for the first decade+ I lived in Seattle, and I know where that leads. I understand how keeping the candle lit under the bowl feels. Here is one thing I learned from that spiritual desert: If you distance yourself from Christianity because of the broken culture around it but still try to believe, your faith is in danger of becoming unanchored, and along the way, you may let go of a beautiful, life-giving thing.
3. Press into Christianity and push back. If you push back, things are eventually required of you. They are, and like a lot of you, I’m tired. If we choose this option, we need to be vocal and clear. Brave. Moral courage is required to claim a complicated identity. On top of it, a lot of the American evangelical church is broken and coopted, and we can’t fall on its soft bed.
“No,” Drew says, filling my mug. “I don’t think there are only three options for how Christians are supposed to live in “Trumpified America”. Most of the brokenness in the church is from those guys; soon, they realize they’re more interested in Trump than Jesus. Jesus will fall away; they don’t need Jesus; they have Trump. He’s their messiah; look at the t-shirts.”
I was dubious, because that hasn’t happened yet. Trump is only gaining more power over evangelicalism. But as we continue to talk, I begin to see how the “fourth option” — to keep living faithfully and care for us “remainders” — gives us all strength to push back. The 20% or 10% or 1% of those who stand against Trump? We stay true. We know how to lose because Jesus lost. “Because you either keep pressing on or lay down and die,” Drew says. This, I have always loved about him. I’m tired and feel like the holy fool, and he believes against the odds.
Then, I remember Isaiah 61: “He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives … to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”
If some of us are imperfect optimists, Isaiah reminds the rest of us we’re doing it for a reason. The steadfast love, loyal love, and unfailing love of God will make all things that are broken whole. God’s hesed is for all of us. The spirit of despair has an answer — beauty that comes from ashes.
People will always follow Jesus from all colors and creeds, ages, sexes, and geographies. And those are my people. Words for us Jesus people matter less in my heart, except I want a word to help me find my people.
You’re the only one walking around with the state of your own heart, and I’ve found a few good questions you can ask to better understand its current posture. Questions that are better to spend time thinking about than what we mean by “evangelical” or “deconstructed”. Questions like:
· Where am I motivated by anxiety, and where am I protecting myself instead of trusting God when it comes to my role in politics and the American church?
· Do I believe all things are being made new, even in the most broken parts of my life and culture?
· Are the words I speak about other people instruments of peace or tools to cut down, to protect and maintain my safety and power?
· Can I be gentle with myself and call myself loved, extending some of the compassion and lovingkindness that Christ modeled?
Because the names you carry within yourself are what form you. These names — forgiven, beloved, received — give you strength for the “fourth option” to hold fast and live faithfully. Which, I’m convinced, even in these dark and anxious days, is the only option that leads to true rest.
Now Available: Orphaned Believers: How A Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home (Baker Books)
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Claire Dederer, Monsters, page 122
Sara, if I could whistle through my teeth in wonder, I would. I am going to be carrying these words with me the next few days, marinating in them. Thank you so much, for time and again, putting words to the swirling angst I feel about being a Christian in this time and place.
Something I do now is differentiate between the words "Christian" and "Evangelical". Those are not synonyms, although those of us raised Evangelical learned them that way. It is becoming more and more clear to everyone that this particular flavor of Christianity is not reflective of Jesus. If it's not actual Good News, the actual message of Christ, it is a false gospel. And when even non-Christians can see and call out the difference, things have gotten bad. Great article. Have been sad lately about being a "refugee". It's lonely. But man. Jesus. He's just amazing. Thanks for your writing.