The Threefold Gaze
A Spiritual Lens for a Flourishing Life
Ex-vangelicals:
Disaffiliated and Deconstructed...
Exvangelical began as a hashtag in 2016, and it has grown into what some would call a social movement, a protest, perhaps a call to reform. Most of all, I think the term's value in its early days was to let individuals who were leaving the evangelical church know that they were not alone. Others were "feeling it" too.
Major catalysts for the exodus from evangelicalism included the younger generation's concern over evangelical church's exclusion of LGBTQ+ persons, their placement of women in a subservient role, and the revelation of widespread cover-up of sexual abuse by church leaders (specifically within the Southern Baptist Convention).
The hashtag's appearance in 2016 is no coincidence. The "last straw" for many exvangelicals was the church's embrace of Trump, which is largely responsible for his election both in 2016 and again in 2024.
All this to say, ironically, many fled evangelicalism for moral and ethical reasons, as a matter of conscience, not explicitly as a rejection of evangelical doctrine or Christianity itself. But now, those individuals find themselves spiritually homeless. Some experience this with relief, as a liberation. Others experience it with grief as a profound personal loss. Speaking for myself, I swung back and forth on a spectrum between those two experiences for several years before finding my new spiritual "home."
... now what?
I cannot speak to every strand of exvangelical experience; I can only share what I learned from my own process of transitioning out of evangelicalism after living within it for over 40 years. What I offer below is just a starting point -- a few books I found helpful in the early days.
-
Losing Your Faith, Finding Your Soul was the first book I read after leaving the church. It is a compassionate, thoughtful book, and it helped me to realize I was not doing anything wrong. In fact, to leave the church is not to leave one's deity or one's spirituality. It is just to leave one particular interpretation of it that is no longer helpful or life-giving.
-
Inspired was the next step on my journey, and its function was to put some cracks in the mortar of biblical literalism that formed a wall around my thinking, blocking me from exploring so many possibilities!
-
Educated helped me to recognize the "cult like" aspects of some particular "brands" of evangelicalism. It also introduced me to a concept which I would not have a word for until a few years later: "Epistemic injustice." Epistemic injustice happens when one's ability to "know" things is blocked by being indoctrinated from an early age, or by being denied access to "outside" knowledge. This is discussed further on the SPIRITUAL TRAUMA page.
-
Jesus and John Wayne put the historical picture together for me, providing explanation for so many things I had observed over my lifetime but had not understood as part of a larger picture or strategy. This knowledge was clarifying and empowering, and it further cemented my confidence that I had made the right decision in breaking from the context that had defined my world for so long.
