The hurting (and horny) ex-vangelicals and the perfect theology idol

By guest contributor Brian F. Marks

The continued rise of the “nones” has been a recurring theme in the last decade in the world of religion, particularly in the United States which has grown notably more secular. It’s affecting attitudes about many things in society, especially toward faith. 

These “nones” are those who no longer identify with any particular faith and they continue to grow in number. Whereas in years past, people may have identified themselves by the religious tradition they were raised in even if they were not practicing, they no longer feel the need to self-label in that way or acknowledge any such religious affiliation. And given that this is America, a sizable swath of these religious “nones” are what are called “exvangelicals,” former evangelical Christians. 

Who are these people, what are they saying, and how do they act?

While there’s a variety of them, in my experience, these are some Gen Xers, a considerable swath of millennials and many Gen Zers who have traveled the road of what’s called “deconstruction” – a loaded postmodern term, yes – and for the exvangelicals it usually means picking apart their faith, critical theory-style. It’s a never-ending process that results in deconverting where they reject their faith entirely. Some might still believe that God exists, and that’s not so remarkable because most Americans still say they believe in God but they nevertheless become “nones.” Others might explore New Age spirituality. And some do become agnostics or atheists. 

Some exvangelicals are rather hostile toward contemporary evangelical Christian faith and its institutions. If they take to blogging or social media to voice their disdain, they are often aggressive, bitingly sarcastic, and surly. But most importantly, they’re hurt. 

If a sincere, theologically orthodox Christian dares to challenge them at all, even very gently (ask me how I know), it is a typical experience that some will be quick to call you “toxic” or “abusive.” And it’s uncanny how their claws will really come out if you dare to challenge their views on sexual ethics which, as if on cue, is almost always full-throated support of anything and everything represented under the ever-morphing rainbow flag. Some will even frame any pushback, no matter how graciously it is expressed, on sex and gender issues with emotionally-laden psychological terms such as “trauma.” Another critical-theory feature of this deconstruction process is the hastiness to which they label things they disagree with as being rooted in “whiteness” or “white supremacy” and thus permanently terrible. 

Not all deconstructionists are the same, of course; there are degrees and differences. The most charitable view is that some of them are just asking really tough, heart-searching questions after great disappointment and trying to make their faith their own. If that’s all it is, it’s arguable whether or not it can even be called “deconstruction.” Searching the big questions deeply can be very good and healthy. Done well it can deepen and nourish faith. 

Memoirs by former evangelicals are increasingly appearing on the landscape. From Joshua Harris’s ex-wife Shannon’s The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife' to the latest The Ex-vangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, by Sarah McCammon, the exvangelicals are ready and willing to tell you why they spurn the faith in which they were raised. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read either of them). 

And I must say, because I know people personally for whom I know it’s the reality, the stereotype of this crowd actually is true in some cases. Some exvangelicals who are “deconstructing” just want to screw around sexually and they do not want to hear about any Scriptural standard that contests it. Deconstruction, or to say “I’m deconstructing,” gives them a sophisticated-sounding cover for horny hedonism. But at base, it’s plain ole idolatry. They simply want consequence-free sex and no one is going to tell them otherwise. I even know non-Christians who can see this dynamic in former Christians and they observe how all kinds of sex and sexuality is the idol of our culture. I mean, have you seen the average American city street during the month of June? It’s not exactly hidden. 

For many, it seems that the evangelical church (broadly defined) in several ways held out a certain set of promises to them, and when those promises didn’t materialize and their lives didn’t turn out the way they were led to believe they would, they felt betrayed and wounded. Worst of all, they were damaged in God’s name. “Church hurt,” as some people call it, really really hurt them. 

In a poignant line in a Religion News Service article about McCammon’s The Exvangelicals these people are “hurting because we followed the rules,” not because they didn’t follow them. They didn’t receive what they thought following those rules would yield, such as happy marriages and a flourishing, healthy life.

In response to these broken promises, they’ve ditched their faith. 

What’s grimly ironic though is that some of them, particularly if they were part of a church that may have indeed been more fundamentalist and narrow (or even truly abusive), they become every bit as fundamentalist and narrow in their deconstructed none-ness as they were as a Christian. Many exvangelicals are notoriously evangelistic for deconstructionism with all the declarative verve and vigor of the fundamentalist religionists they now stridently oppose. They may have exchanged their beliefs, but not their fundie-ish tactics. Old habits die hard, it seems. 

Some of their church wounds are deep. There is actual, documented abuse that has happened in churches and it’s my opinion that abuse that happens in God’s name – especially if it’s sexual – is the worst kind of all because of how it co-opts Jesus Christ into the violation. That’s a layer of psychological torment that is placed upon the victim that can take years to disentangle. Abuse victims wrongly but understandably start to think that the Lord was somehow the sponsor of the evil deeds that were done against them. It’s a truly horrible mental torment that I believe that only Jesus, in his patience and tenderness, can heal. 

But even if exvangelicals haven’t undergone something as awful as abuse in a church, I want to touch on something that I think has contributed to the problem that doesn’t receive near enough attention. I haven’t read the aforementioned memoirs and perhaps they also touch on what I’m about to here – and that is what I call the evangelical idol of perfect theology. 

I detailed at length in a previous blog about what it was like for me, as a sincere Christian who wanted to deepen my faith, to wade through the sludge of theological liberalism only to find how disorienting it was to land among the vituperative contentiousness of theological orthodoxy. The search for the real Jesus was dizzying and confusing. He is the Person of truth, and the Christian faith is not an academic enterprise but a way of life, of knowing and following Him. Academic pursuits can enhance and inform the journey and, to be sure, part of that journey does include learning to love Him with our minds. But an overly cerebral faith chokes the heart. There is more to being human than being a brain on a stick. Yet in light of certain trends, evangelical leaders in recent decades seemed to become convinced that we needed a more heady type of Christianity. 

Generationally speaking, many evangelicals in the 1990s and early 2000s were more than ready to start studying hard and packing their heads full of doctrine and theological knowledge, particularly after reeling in utter humiliation from Mark Noll’s famous book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Some might say I’m giving him too much credit, and maybe I am, but it’s still fair to say that the book rocked the evangelical world, and not in a good way. Being a stupid dim bulb Jesus freak became the worst thing ever. It was time, many decided, for evangelicals to be the smarty pants people in the room and, by George, they were gonna get it right this time. We just can’t be the scorn-worthy stupid anti-intellectuals anymore. 

The Young Restless Reformed movement soon took off training up a generation to be brainy Christian thinkers. A new-fangled and slick-branded form of neo-Calvinism seemed to supply an antidote to a real need and there was a resurgence, especially among Southern Baptists, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination in America. So prominent this movement became it landed on Christianity Today’s September 2006 magazine cover alongside a photo of the famous Reformed Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards. Again, in 2009, CT ran another cover story, calling Calvin the “comeback kid”. Now, I’m not picking on Calvin or Reformed theologians per se as though it's only Calvinist churches that evangelicals are abandoning but we cannot deny the huge influence this neo-Calvinistic push had in shaping this generation of minds of sincere Christians. 

Unfortunately, in pursuit of the smartypants-ness they craved, evangelical Christians, particularly in the Reformed traditions, ran into another problem. They wound up chasing an idol of perfection – that of having their intellectually robust theology so watertight, sophisticated, nailed down and figured out. They’ll never openly admit to this but many seem to think they have the Bible down pat and that, for all intents and purposes, they’ve theologically arrived, so much so that they basically possess the term “biblical.” It’s almost as if they think they own theological orthodoxy down to the letter. Many of these evangelicals read and pore over their Bibles obsessively. These are the “Bible study” people. They think they mostly understand it accurately and interpret it objectively, just as the text says. Unlike the largely apostate mainline denominations, they value the truth, even that which was culturally unpopular, so in their minds they are the “real” Christians. 

This is not to say that exposing genuinely false teachings when they emerge is bad. To the contrary, it’s necessary! That’s a perennial challenge in every era as there are destructive forces and insidious wickedness aimed at twisting the faith. No matter how and where they manifest, false teaching should be resisted. Shoot, even the apostles fought amongst themselves and many of them walked with Jesus in the flesh. On this side of eternity, a certain amount of conflict among fallen human beings is unavoidable. 

But while there is a natural law and remarkable structure and order to the cosmos, life is full of unpredictable heartache and sorrow. As much as we might hate to admit it, there are simply things that we, as fallible and finite creatures, cannot control. And Christians who value theological orthodoxy often latch on to paradigms that purport to have an answer for all of life’s hard questions and then offer prescriptive fixes as though life can be controlled. 

Therein lies the false promises that have left so many people disaffected. It’s soul-killing and exhausting. Exvangelicals see the in-fighting among theological tribes and denominations and it is horrific at times. There’s little peace, not much contentment, no rest in Him, despite sermons that say otherwise. The cognitive dissonance becomes overwhelming and it contributes to if not creates hordes of hurting and spiritually discontented people who turn their back on God. Constant contentiousness is hard on the psyche, you see. It damages the soul. 

They think, and they’re not entirely wrong: “You people who purport to be oh so biblical, you claim you know what it says and yet you’re constantly squabbling. You’re “biblical”, you say? Ha! If so, you’d have it all figured out by now but you clearly don’t because the fights never stop. I want OUT of this dysfunctional relational mess.”

Is it really any wonder why many young people are heading for the exits? If I’m honest, some days I myself want to high-tail it out of church contexts where I see this religious dynamic and ugliness and I’m still an observant Christian. 

Many sincere Christians who have not deconstructed are watching this in sadness, bewilderment, and confusion. They pray for and desire that the church be “of one heart and mind” as it was in Acts 4:32. Like Jesus, they yearn for his prayer in John 17 to be answered “that they be one just as you and I are one”. They want unity! 

But as long as the churches are at each other's throats, convinced of the perfection of their doctrine, unwilling to budge on the finer particulars as though they are primary, there will be many things in the Church but spiritual togetherness over the things that matter (the good news of the GOSPEL, namely) is not one of them.

I want to conclude with a final thought. I’ve heard some say that you can often tell what’s going on in the church at large by looking at going outside it, that the dysfunction outside is, in a way, indicative of what spiritually ailing God’s people. I got to thinking about this in light of some of the cultural insanity of the day. 

Despite small-o orthodox Christianity’s resistance to the plague of gender ideology on theological grounds, the uncomfortable truth of the matter is the Church is doing to itself what some doctors are doing to people. This isn’t an exact analogy but hear me out. 

As supposed medical professionals chemically and surgically tearing apart the bodies of children, teens, and vulnerable young adults, and irreversibly maiming their secondary sex characteristics and rendering them unable to reproduce, the perfect theology idol-worshiping church is tearing the Body of Christ apart. It, too, is unable to thrive and reproduce. The Church, with its cancerous, Pharisaical narcissism and pet doctrine and ism worshiping have elevated ideas about the Person over the Person himself, Jesus Christ.

They’ve chopped up Scripture, reduced it to neat and tidy suppositions and coherent paradigms and doctrinal statements and position papers (none of which are bad in and of themselves), all while thinking they are being “biblical.” But they are missing a critical piece. 

In his masterpiece work, Let’s Start With Jesus: A New Way of Doing Theology, Dennis Kinlaw, who died in 2017 after a long career as a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, wrote: 

Christ died to do more than get us past the judgment and help us escape hell. He became incarnate and died on Calvary's cross to remove any impediments that would hinder us from being comfortable in his presence and to change us so we can enjoy him in self-giving love now and forever. Any understanding of the atonement that does not make provision to get us ready for that intimacy with him is inadequate, incomplete, and only partially biblical.

Dare I suggest that many of the exvangelicals were fed such a truncated, or as Kinlaw puts it, “inadequate, incomplete, and only partially biblical” diet by people who claimed to be “biblical”? Maybe, just maybe, the contentiousness of theological orthodoxy exhausted them and frustrated them didn’t provide communion with the Lord? Ask any faithful Christian knows in the depths of their being, it’s that that is the only sustenance, the intimate presence of the Lord lived out in daily life that enables them to keep going. In much of the evangelical world, people settled for packing their brains full of information and doctrine and neglecting the heart of all things: knowing Him. 

While it certainly can happen, those who have known the intimate communion of the Spirit are far less likely to abandon faith in Jesus, who himself IS perfect theology. 

Personally, I have faith God is about to surprise many exvangelicals, particularly those who have been hurt or, for whatever reason, have become disaffected and disillusioned, where they will taste and see His goodness in a way they never expected. 

The Hound of Heaven loves them and He’ll go out of His way to demonstrate it, and he has a reputation for doing things no human mind – particularly those who think they’ve got it all figured out – can comprehend.