Why I'm Not An "Exvangelical"

The socio-theological phenomenon of "deconstruction" is riddled with Whiteness, mirroring the very thing it seeks to separate itself from.

A modern evangelical church. Photographer unknown.

For quite some time now, give or take the last two years, I have self-identified as an “exvangelical”. To be quite honest, I liked the term. It had a sense of rebellion and uproot that I take to quite naturally and it was a nice way to distinguish myself from a faith tradition that I believe is fundamentally evil and irredeemable. Being an “exvangelical” gave me a sense of rebellious pride and helped clarify to others that no, in fact, I was not one of “those Christians”.

Nowadays, though, I resent the term as a descriptor of myself. The self-identified “exvangelical” community has become, like the evangelical community before it, just one of those communities that I found myself once enamored with, and now can no longer stomach to be a part of.

In both communities, I have realized that the root cause of their problems lies not in their aesthetical appearances, but in their theological roots.

Sanctimony Permeates the Waters

When I was an evangelical, part of what made me feel as though I really "belonged” at my church was my pastor’s constant insistence that we were “not like those other ‘American Christians’”.

Those “American Christians” were the spiritually absent, consumeristic, habitual church-goers who had made Christianity more of a mirror to their own set of cultural values than a lifelong commitment to following Jesus.

At Chicago Hope Church (CHC), we were different. Our Christianity wasn’t about what we could get out of it, what we particularly liked or felt comfortable doing; it wasn’t about us at all. It was always, as Pastor Jason would put it, “less of me and more of God”.

We were supposed to be “better” Christians, those who talked openly about our faith, who really devoted time to prayer, who really followed the “Biblical” worldview, who did things that made us uncomfortable if it meant being a better disciple.

There was nothing egregiously incorrect (though it was reductionist and caricatured) about our church’s presumption of the typical American Christian. Many Christians are indeed, churchgoers by habit and don’t feel much connection to faith. Many Christians who leave Christianity, rather than feel like their whole world has changed, don’t feel much of anything. This, indeed, was the mindset Jason and his church wanted us to avoid.

What was egregious about this characterization was its “otherization” of American Christians as if we weren’t American Christians as well, as if we were uniquely set apart because we attended a tiny church with only a handful of attendees, unlike those bigger mega-churches, and because we actually followed the Bible.

The assumption was our distinctiveness, our set-apartness, our novelty. No one else was doing what we were doing, and that’s why our church was preferable.

Indeed, everyone who ended up leaving CHC (and there were many) was framed in horridly condescending terms; they were unserious Christians who didn’t like the emphasis on professing their faith, and they weren’t ready for “real discipleship”, the works.

Joining exvangelical groups and immersing myself in those spaces, I had hoped to divorce myself from the kind of moral self-righteousness and superiority complex I had come to despise about my former church.

It would turn out to be a fool’s errand. I found that many exvangelicals had the same sense of sanctimonious novelty and uniqueness that had defined my former church’s spiritual and evangelistic posture. They, too weren’t like those “other Christians” or “other religious people” at all, because they were LGBTQIA-affirming, they voted Democratic, they had Black Lives Matter signs on their front lawns, and they “didn’t leave their brains at the doors” of their churches.

Of course, all of these things were good in their own right. Just like there was something incredibly meaningful in setting aside time for prayer, so too was being an outspoken advocate for freedom from oppression for marginalized communities.

However, just like CHC taught me that most American Christians were spiritually unserious, much of the exvangelical culture I was a part of told me that most American Christians were a bunch of fundamentalist idiots who took the Bible literally and voted for Trump. Where my CHC church experience had taught me spiritual superiority, my exvangelical experience taught me intellectual and moral superiority. It was always about condemning the “other”, and whatever strategies used to do so, whether it was manipulation and spiritual abuse at CHC or bullying a group of worshipping teenagers online with the Christian Nightmares social media account, was a just means to a just end.

The Black Problem & The Queer Problem

What did both of these circles of mostly White people totally ignore? The Black Church, the church that had introduced me to Jesus, that had anchored my faith in the community of people that raised and formed me, that had celebrated my calling to ministry, and that had, throughout the ages, radically demonstrated the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit to transform the hearts of worshippers and burn the fire of liberation so brightly.

This Church, this Black theology that had saved me from years of self-loathing both my Blackness and my Queerness, and that had kept my people whole and intact through even the worst human atrocities, went ignored by my former church’s insistence on its distinctive ability to save and by my exvangelical community’s insistence on its distinctive ability to heal and resist.

I came to this realization reluctantly, just as I reluctantly had decided to leave my evangelical church behind even after my former pastor had spiritually abused me.

I wanted to believe that this group of people, as traumatized as I was, could understand why they were so wrong to quickly dismiss metaphysical theological claims as universally harmful and anti-intellectual, or why it was grossly ahistorical and racist to suggest that they were starting some newer, better more “progressive Christianity” when Black churches had been bombed and parishioners strung on lynching trees for their radically liberative faith.

But, I was wrong. I was as wrong as I’d been when I came out as Queer to Pastor Jason, assuming he’d lend me a listening ear despite his neo-fundamentalist theological views, and instead ended up in his van for nearly an hour as he interrogated me, made gross assumptions about my personal romantic life, said he wouldn’t let me preach if I didn’t believe that homosexuality was a “temptation”, and insisted that I let the Holy Spirit “change me”.

These events were not equally harmful to me. What Pastor Jason did traumatized me and almost sent me into a suicidal depressive episode. What the exvangelicals I interacted with did made me angry and feel ignored and marginalized. Both were harmful, one much more than the other.

However, what both situations revealed to me was that I was neither an evangelical nor an exvangelical. I was simply someone who interacted, and for a time was even celebrated, in pockets of both communities, was disillusioned by both, and sought to keep my Christian faith grounded and rooted in God’s self-disclosure to me and my ancestors.

To do so and to stay loyal to my vocational calling, I had to distance myself from both groups. I had to reject my former church’s claim that my Queerness was a temptation and a distortion to be rooted out, rather than something to be held and embraced just like every other integral part of any human being should be. I had to reject my exvangelical friends’ claim that belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ was somehow an immature or naïve thing for someone to believe, rather than something that most of the Black Church have held as non-negotiable for centuries.

After all, what is Queerness but the unique expression of God’s radical intimacy and His otherworldliness? And what is a bodily resurrection for those who face the daily reality of brutal death at the hands of white racists?

Neither community understood either point, or even really tried to, and sticking around any longer wasn’t right for my soul.

This is not to say, as the centrist Christians say often, that both the exvangelicals and the evangelicals are simply too harmful extremes, with one side being extremely conservative and the other extremely liberal. This is to say that both exvangelicals and evangelicals are both fundamentally White and that it is their whiteness that prevents them both from truly understanding who God is, what the church is, and ultimately, who they are.

As Dr. Cone said,

…for it is only through the destruction of whiteness that the wholeness of humanity may be realized (A Black Theology of Liberation)