Labels are Confusing
Wrestling with My Evangelical History
After about two years out of active ministry, I’ve started investigating several potential part-time volunteer opportunities. It’s a bit of a weird process, especially because personally both 2022 and 2023 were incredibly difficult years and I’m still processing all of that. However, 2024 is new, things are looking up (yay!), and I miss having purposeful interactions with people/like to think that I can make a positive difference somewhere.
But at one potential opportunity, the speaker shared that their organization had a generally inclusive vision, one that was broadly “evangelical.” And for whatever reason, that struck a dissonant chord with me, and this thought entered my head: “Am I actually capable of going back to an evangelical organization?”
My more progressive readers are probably already confused at this, because culturally evangelicalism is a shorthand for traditional conservative values and positions, ones that seem counter to the ethos of Martin Luther King. Even in the short lifetime of this blog, I’ve criticized sola scriptura as a useful fiction, and that’s just one of many examples where I’ve bumped against more Reformed views.
That said, my own faith background is inextricably tied to evangelical spaces, and by and large I’ve had positive experiences in said areas. I came to faith in an evangelical church setting. True, I rewired a lot of my political perspectives in college, but I also did that work in other evangelical spaces that encouraged me to find God among such views and continued to welcome me. All of my past ministry opportunities are in said areas, and I’ve also attended various evangelical churches as a member and – at least to my face – have been uniformly welcomed. While my political views rarely felt mainstream, I still felt that similar communal bond of shared overall worldview and goal to glorify God in a broken world.
In the past I’ve tried to rationalize this divide through separating theology and politics. Theologically I like to think I lean more moderate than anything else, insisting on things like primacy of Scripture while allowing some room for the mystery of God. When it comes to the classic theological understanding of evangelicalism, Bebbington’s definition of conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism, I can assent to each of those points (a bit shaky on conversionism , but God is mysterious and beyond my understanding). My own specific interest in social justice movements dates back to a spiritual encounter reading Isaiah 58 at a youth retreat: I don’t know how it gets more evangelical than that.
And I’ve found that even in more conservative theological opinions, there’s room for concern for the poor, social justice, challenging racial discrimination, and even celebrating differences in gender as Scriptural and that work in all those areas is a blessing to God. I had also embraced that incremental approach of trying to create change one conversation at a time, recognizing that meeting people where they’re at is invaluable. I saw myself as an insider, one who understood that there’s more to church than mainstream media portrayals. And no less important, I like to espouse some level of intellectual humility: while I am guided by my convictions that’s no guarantee that you should be too.
Granted, ever since early college I’ve also had some difficulty embracing the label: while I appreciate my church upbringing, I was less fond of the political implications of such a term, one that reflexively supports outward Christian expressions while rarely analyzing the heart and intent of such policies. This is probably at least a little due to growing up in the Bush-era presidency: as a person Bush was okay, but I was not a fan of much of his presidency.
My attempt to sidestep this, especially in grad school, was to turn to the idea of an evangelical left: believing that there was a sizable minority of believers, even in evangelical spaces, that could recognize a similar story to my own; believers that would vote for progressive causes on election days, and drew as much if not more inspiration from Ronald Sider than from John Piper and C. S. Lewis. I sometimes even found inspiration in leaders like Barack Obama, whom I will still argue was the most persuasive twenty-first century president in articulating a genuine Christian vision and faith (for example, comparing this Prayer Breakfast statement with this one from his successor is almost unfair).
And back in 2015, I didn’t think this was an especially unique view. It was definitely a minority view in many of my church settings, but I genuinely felt that was okay and that, as I recognized others as trying to sincerely live out their callings from God, that they also saw that in me.
But it’s not 2015 anymore, and one of the things that’s been especially disheartening the past decade is seeing so many churches surrender to expediency and openly embrace a politicized vision swayed much more by culture than the Bible. Due to scholarly interest, I’ve tuned in to the livestreams of the past few Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meetings. And while I don’t have any special warmth toward the denomination, I will say that overall the adults in the room have won out and it has refused to bend to political expediency, making sure to emphasize its religious independence. But just because the convention has held firm doesn’t mean that there aren’t so many within who epitomize so much of what’s broken in the church today. At each of those meetings, I witnessed messengers strive to turn the SBC into the standard-bearing denomination for Republican talking points, even though they’ve been voted down… so far. For example, rather than recognize and begin to address the disturbing incidents of sexual abuse within the group, in 2022 many messengers rather sought to blame the third-party investigating agency because it tweeted a message in support of Pride Month, somehow making it an agent of a shadowy left-wing conspiracy seeking to take down Christianity through the Southern Baptist Convention. Whereas, at least from my outsider perspective, it seems like the real people making the SBC look bad are the abusers, who used to be able to float from church to church and do it all over again and maybe the denomination could use a larger database to alert hiring committees about past red flags in their candidates’ histories.
And more to the point, it’s disheartening as someone who desires to see the church care for the poor and model out radical inclusivity to see who the national church opens its pulpits to. A conservative like Mark Robinson can get into church spaces and demean female leadership, but his arguments are just silly when it comes to the Bible (God called Deborah, after all). Yet the generally accepted conservative worldviews that dominate evangelical spaces infect far beyond. A friend passed along Samuel James’s Digital Liturgies, which, in short, argues that our social media unconsciously shapes our cultures and, as Christians, we should be aware of and careful of such forces (somewhat akin to Jay Kim’s Analog Church, but more theological and less pastoral). Whereas Kim’s book, however, simply encourages us to consider more fruits of the spirit when interacting online (hard to do, but yes, I agree), I found James’s take more troubling, because (as I understood it) James contends that we act out an online persona that’s different from our real selves, then somehow links that to the rise of transgender-identifying individuals as if this is something that’s only become an issue today and labels that as a problem. But more to the point, his transphobic take is unnecessary. It doesn’t really help illustrate his point, it’s definitely not fleshed out to the degree that it needs to be in the book, and ultimately, it serves to establish his own political views rather than lay out what is the accurate Biblical prescription to address the challenges of today’s online world.
And that’s what’s ultimately frustrating: I don’t think, theologically, my own views have changed much over the past decade. I’m still generally left-leaning politically, slightly more conservative theologically, interested in seeing churches focus on actual Jesus and actual Bible rather than get bogged down in cultural trappings. I will even accept the logic that churches, ultimately, shouldn’t themselves be hyper-politicized: there’s always something that can clash between church and state, so the church should be in some ways insulated from what’s going on in the state. As much as I might personally disagree, I can even understand someone who, based off of their genuine reading of Scripture, finds same sex relationships counter to God’s plan, and I can find points of commonality with them, for example the idea that all people regardless of sexual orientation are deserving of love from God and therefore love from us. When doing church hunting, I’m rarely looking for a place that matches my political views, or even has “good” teaching (which usually means says things I agree with): I instead am considering whether I am welcomed and whether there’s a chance to be inspired (which usually means has some focus on Biblical wisdom). And core to all of this is that we serve an omnipotent, omnipresent, and ultimately good God, which means, in turn, that I can put myself out there and try things and God will still be present no matter where I go.
Rather, what feels like it’s changed is the evangelical church. Personally, theological differences were one of the reasons that caused me to resign from my past youth director, and as my own views stayed constant, that would then mean that the church itself moved in a different direction. That’s a common refrain dating much further back than the 2020s, but I do think that some part of it is a genuine shift in the past decade with Trumpism, reactions to covid, and the continuing polarization where even one’s faith has to reflect one’s politics. Ironically, I feel this dissonance most in churches: as much as it’s a Christian media trope, I have never had my faith ridiculed in an academic university setting. One reason for that is because it’s illegal and you can sue for that and no employee wants to bring that level of annoyance on themselves. But another reason is that, honestly, I think I’ve just been generally respectful, understand that other people’s religious values are important to them, and sought to dialogue moreso than anything else (I did note that conversionism is my weakest commitment to the Bebbington Quadrilateral).
But what was especially tiring in evangelical church spaces is addressing unspoken assumptions that, I would argue, aren’t really rooted in Biblical values. I’ve worked with youth who definitely had ministerial qualities, but due to their gender never received that affirmation. I’ve been subtly accused of heresy, and more generally been told that all that matters is the Bible when addressing power dynamics, which, honestly, is more a sign of power dynamics than anything else (after all, who determines what the Bible actually is saying? It’s more open and honest to admit that we bring in our own perspectives to the Bible, relying upon received church tradition, reasoning skills, and our experiences). And for all, all, all the handwringing that I’ve witnessed in these spaces over LGBTQ+ identity (including whether it’s wise for a leader to attend a same-sex marriage ceremony), the only sermon that I’ve heard in my recent years at evangelical spaces addressing sexual abuse is the one I gave.
I commented in an earlier post that I’m hesitant to embrace the exvangelical label, or even to call this deconstructionism. My own perspective feels a bit different than their typical account: I don’t think the things I’m levying accusations against are necessarily core to the evangelical experience, and whatever tatters that remain of an evangelical left I’m still willing to embrace. Even in my departure from my last ministry post, I just joined an affirming UMC (my wife’s faith tradition). I still have general fondness for the evangelical spaces I’ve attended (recognizing that they as well stretched to accept me). After all, on this side of heaven, it’s not like any of us actually have the definitive answer for any of these types of questions, on what Scripture truly means in our own day and age, beyond the simple call to love God with everything you have and to love others as oneself. So I am reluctant to jettison my past. But at the same time, it’s definitely been a struggle to remain in said spaces, and moreso in recent years.
So to answer the initial question that sparked all of this, I’m, honestly, not sure. Beggars can’t be choosers, and so neither should Christians resist where God is leading, guiding, and directing them – and I’d like to think I’d return to the evangelical fold far sooner than Jonah would go to Nineveh if that’s what God truly wanted. However, right now I don’t prefer to go back to an evangelical-led ministry, as I continue to sort through the recent baggage and the polarized religious/political climate of today.