In the aftermath of the Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party, evangelicals of all sorts have reevaluated their political commitments and the relationship of politics to the church and religion broadly. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this reevaluation is the entrance of a particular type of book, the exvangelical memoir, into the lexicon of popular religious publishing. Accompanying these exvangelical memoirs are a similar group of works, usually committed to arguing against so-called Christian nationalism, which have become fashionable as well. There are similarities between the works, but for this article's purpose I've chosen to focus on exvangelical memoirs. I'm defining these as works from people who historically identified as evangelical or who grew up in evangelical circles that have publicly disclaimed the movement.
Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important. The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors.
Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture. In many ways, these evangelical churches proved a prominent anti-Protestant polemic correct; unmoored from the historic creeds and Protestant confessions, from church history, from any socio-cultural habits, or ecclesiastical institutional memory, ministers became little popes, and the culture they swam in created a clericalist order that squelched dissent or inquisitive dispositions among the laity. That clericalist order was not merely a religious one. It made common cause with the Republican Party through institutions like the Moral Majority and bred a theopolitical order that was post-Protestant.
The idea of “Evangelical pastor as guru” is good evidence of how deep-seated this clericalism was. In Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals she describes the materials she was given to address teen sexuality. It was generally written by ministers, and often by men. There is nothing wrong with a book about human sexuality by a male pastor, but McCammon can be forgiven for retroactively wincing at the graphic depictions of copulation in a book written by Tim Lahaye and his wife Beverly. The fact that evangelicals believe—and many still believe—that advice on the sex act is the prerogative of the pastoral office is evidence of a clericalist culture run amok.
Take for example two other figures McCammon mentions: Bill Gothard and Josh Harris. Gothard’s ministry—Institute in Basic Life Principles—pushed an ideologically driven brand of chastity and purity that anathematized dating and kicked off the modern courtship movement. Gothard’s influence—he was ordained, which seems to have given him greater leverage—earned him friends in high places and massive sway in particularly homeschooled Evangelical families in the 1980s. Even if we grant the value of some of Gothard’s relatively innocuous propositions—that fathers should play a role in their children’s high school relationship lives, for example—it is worth asking how an unmarried man ever became a guru on Christian relationships.
A similar question might be worth asking about Josh Harris. Harris’ book I Kissed Dating Goodbye mainstreamed some of Gothard’s views. Churches like Sovereign Grace Ministries wedded homeschoolers with legacy Evangelical institutions. Gothard’s fundamentalist socio-cultural commitments were replaced with the lights and sounds of evangelical mega churches and the gentle and whimsical tones of mainstream Evangelical pastors who could claim the more intellectual mantle of “Calvinist” while holding syncretic understandings of the church and charismatic spirituality.
Still, there weren’t—and aren’t—time-tested historic confessional or creedal theological commitments or ecclesiastical commitments in Sovereign Grace churches. All they ultimately have are personalities and the Bible, so when charming Josh Harris started teaching with de-facto authority—without a shred of ecclesiastical credentialing or confessional sanction—all in the name of finally showing the laity the true biblical way of pursuing relationships, no one questioned him. Jon Ward’s Testimony makes it clear that personality and a sort of low-grade demagoguery paved the way for Harris’ influence. Why did adults listen to a 22-year-old on how to raise their children? Because he was “a talented speaker who already had years of experience addressing large gatherings,” and because “his father was a minor celebrity among homeschool families” who gave Harris speaking gigs as a teenager.
The Sovereign Grace religiosity Jon Ward experienced maintained an ecumenical relationship with the Pentecostal Bethel Church. The prevalence of charismatic beliefs in 1990s and 2000s so-called Evangelicalism was such that charismatic commitments were ubiquitous. Mike Cosper, director of podcasting for Christianity Today and the author of Land of My Sojourn, noted that when he entered ministry circa 2000 “we were all kinda charismatic-adjacent then (and maybe still are) because of experiences we’d had as worship leaders.”
Given the lack of confessional ecclesiastical structures in Evangelical churches, there was no way of meaningfully testing prophetic pulpit pronunciations by the laity, so they continued to follow leaders simply because they were leaders. This proved particularly concerning for Jon Ward because of Bethel Church’s approach to politics. “Bethel leaders,” writes Ward, “viewed the world in Manichean terms, as a war between spiritual forces of good and evil.” There was no middle ground. “People were on one side or the other, and this meant their side was noble and righteous and the other side was evil and damned.” Bethel’s “war mentality came from their theology. They rejected the idea that the line between good and evil runs through the human heart. Rather, they saw the dividing line as running through an invisible world of angels and demons.” Bethel’s language of “’taking dominion’ and ‘tearing down strongholds’ had a deeper meaning. It made their political involvement more aggressive and harmful.” Bethel’s “certainty that they were doing the Lord’s work discouraged introspection or nuance.”
The January 6 riots at the US Capitol proved to be the final straw for Ward’s evangelical beliefs. Like many exvangelicals, he believes that evangelicals are uniquely responsible for Trump’s election and the violence associated with January 6th. My hunch is that most so-called evangelicals vote for Republicans, and voted for Trump because he’s a Republican, and that the normal so-called evangelical Republican voter is not an insurgent. Nonetheless, it would be hasty to dismiss Ward. There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.
It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement. In their Washington Post piece Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne rightly note that while the “Pentecostal-Charismatic movement overlaps with evangelical traditions in many ways, especially in their conservative ideas about political issues such as abortion, marriage and prayer in schools,” evangelicals and Pentecostals are “historically distinct — until the mid-20th century, Pentecostals and their Charismatic descendants weren’t routinely grouped with their evangelical counterparts.”
The conflation of Evangelicals with Pentecostals—and it is no fault of charismatic adjacent exvangelicals that they grew up in this syncretic tradition—has led them to blame evangelicals en masse for the political rhetoric of Pentecostals. Trumpist Pentecostal political rhetoric unhesitatingly mixes clericalist and theocratic pronunciation. On January 6th one Pentecostal Trumpist called the US capitol a “sacred place” and offered a prayer thanking God for “allowing the United States to be reborn! Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. In Christ’s holy name we pray! Amen!”
Too many conservative so-called evangelicals have been quick to censure exvangelicals for leaving the faith. John MacArthur describes them as antichrists.
People had some personal crisis of faith, or somebody abused them, or, more commonly, they reject biblical morality. And you can find a welcoming community of bloggers and podcasters and books and conferences. And you can meet, once you’re out and you’re among the Christian defectors and the exvangelicals, you can find some of your favorite pastors there, and some of your favorite Christian musicians there, and some of your—guess what?—favorite church leaders there. And you can find feminists there, and homosexuals there, and anti-church critics. They’re all there, and they’ll declare you a hero, and you’ll be elevated; and you will also join aggressive enemies of God and Christ and Scripture.
MacArthur’s argument is simple: If you leave evangelicalism and become a social liberal, you’re an enemy of God.
In the aftermath of January 6th, Tennessee pastor Greg Locke, who pastors the Charismatic leaning Global Vision Bible Church, made a claim to theocratic power that the Reformers themselves would have rejected. “There’s no reason,” argued Locke, “why the church of the living God and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ should not rule this nation…” Given the Reformers commitment to removing the church’s political power, Locke’s hope is hardly Protestant, much less “evangelical.”
The focus on where Exvangelicals end up—heterodoxy, theological liberalism, or leaving the faith altogether—is a matter of interest, but it might be worth asking about the commitments of the churches where they came from. We sometimes accuse exvangelicals of leaving “Protestant churches.”
I’m not so sure they did.