In their article on the six-way fracturing of evangelicalism, Michael Graham and Skyler Flowers observed that there was a type of left wing exvangelical—a "five" in their schema—who had left the church, but still in some way tried to preserve their proximity to Jesus. This isn't a terribly surprising thing, of course: the attempt to adopt a kind of a la carte spirituality is quite old.
To take only one famous example, recall that Thomas Jefferson took a scalpel to his Bible in order to create a book that preserved the moral wisdom of the Bible and of Jesus (as judged by the slave-owning Jefferson) and removed all the "absurd" supernaturalistic content.
So with Graham and Flowers's "fives" something similar was happening: They wanted to preserve Jesus as a moral exemplar and happily affirmed the goodness of Jesus's moral teachings, even if they were likely to condemn his behavior in one or two places, as with the Syrophoenecian woman, for example. They also typically liked the Sermon on the Mount.
Church, however, could be dispensed with both because you don't really need an institutional church to do what the Sermon on the Mount says to do and because church came to be regarded with suspicion, fear, and even deep disdain—sometimes with good reason.
Effectively, they began by presupposing progressive politics as defined circa 2016 and worked backwards from there, finding that they could preserve some of Jesus but that church was, at best, unnecessary.
What is interesting about our current moment is two-fold:
First, the left exvangelical trend has tapered off, from what I can tell. The reasons why are too complex to get into here, but having been active in Christian media throughout the 2010s I can recall a time when publishers were snapping up every talented and kinda jaded evangelical they could find to write a memoir. That no longer seems to be happening.
Indeed, many of the critiques once being leveled at the church specifically now seem to be more about broader problems across social institutions of many types. Moreover, in a time of weakened associational life, some churches have seen surprising growth and resurgence precisely because they offer the sort of belonging and membership that so many people today are longing to experience.
Second, we are now seeing the emergence of what might be called "right exvangelicalism." If left exvangelicals sought to keep Jesus but dispense with the church, right exvangelicals are following a similar trajectory, but from the other side of the political spectrum. This causes the right exvangelical to end up mirroring the left exvangelical, as it were: Start with right-wing politics circa 2025 and then come to Christianity after you've already committed to the political vision of the American right. But whereas this move caused left exvangelicals to keep a proxy of Jesus and dispense with the church, it is causing right exvangelicals to keep a proxy of the church and dispense instead with Jesus. The church can stay as a vehicle for promoting civic religion, for insuring that Christian moral norms are given deference within the culture, and as a way of inculcating the kind of moral vision they seek to enact, particularly as it relates to sex and gender and "common culture." Jesus's place, however, is far more ambiguous.
Minimally, one can observe a pattern of behavior amongst right exvangelicals defined by a tendency to condemn many Christian moral norms. Humility and meekness is now "loser theology," it would seem, and the Sermon on the Mount is leftist drivel. The only Jesus preserved in their conception of the faith seems to be the Jesus of the Second Coming who returns in judgment. The Jesus of the Gospels, "strong and kind" in the words of a song my kids sang for their Christmas program once, is notably absent.
The process works something like this.
First, with the left exvangelicals: The beginning is an over-identification of "wokeness" with the moral teachings of Scripture concerning the preferential option for the poor, the place of women in redemptive history, the nature of property rights, and so on. Once "wokeness" is presupposed to basically be a shorthand for "Christian moral norms concerning the marginalized" the next several steps become fairly straightforward: The church itself is actually hostile to the teachings of Jesus and needs to be exposed for its corruption and abuse and rejected as an organ of social belonging. But once that move is made it is hard to keep Christianity around for very long. So the next step comes when what they say of "the church" is now applied to "Christianity."
The right exvangelical parallel follows a similar line: Begin with an absolutized condemnation of "wokeness" which also tacitly repudiates many Christian ideas about the vulnerable. Once that has happened, "the way of Jesus" begins to look rather dangerous and hostile to the agenda of greatness and personal exaltation now ascendant on the right. And, with time, what is said about specific Christian ideas will start to be applied to Christianity itself. Indeed, one of the surprising conclusions in The Great Dechurching is that there are more people who dechurch into a kind of right-wing political religion than into a left-wing political religion. If the left can attack Christianity for being an enemy of justice and equity, the right can just as easily attack Christianity as being slave morality that suppresses human innovation and excellence.
Where does this leave us?
First, just as I have said that there is a type of neo-evangelical who went about the world as if their purpose in life was to please post-evangelicals and those further to the left, there is also a kind of mainstream evangelical who does the same thing with those to their right. And just as neo-evangelicals needed to get comfortable punching left, mainstream evangelicals need to get more comfortable punching right. Some, to their great credit, already have.
Second, it would likely be helpful to take the time to understand anti-Christian forms of right-wing political thought. Toward that end, anyone in leadership roles who is being affected by these dynamics would do well to read A World After Liberalism by Matthew Rose. The book's final chapter, on "the Christian question," as it relates to far-right political thought, is worth the price of the book, but the entire thing is worth reading closely.
Third, C. S. Lewis wrote about what he called "Christianity and" in The Screwtape Letters. By it he meant the way that we can adopt Christianity as a kind of strengthener and modifier for interests we already have—which has the effect of cutting us off from other Christians and qualifying and relativizing our relationship to Christ:
The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in a state of mind I call 'Christianity And.' You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians, let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian coloring.
This is an apt description of both right and left exvangelicals. So, finally, the most important response we can have to these trends is to rededicate ourselves to the basics of Christian faith and piety. Adopt a rich habit of Bible reading and personal prayer. Deepen your understanding of the Apostle's Creed, Lord's Prayer, and the Decalogue. Go to church. Receive the Eucharist. Submit yourself to the teachings of Scripture and the loving guidance of the church. These are not simple times, but if we are not doing the (relatively) simple and obvious things I see little hope for us as we navigate the complex.