It is 1994, and I am thirteen years old. My family is living in Mill Valley, California, where my father is attending Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. It's an island of conservative evangelicalism surrounded by a sea of sin. San Francisco is just across the bridge, and we are very careful when we venture out …
"The Global Center for Religious Research (GCRR) has established the world's first and most comprehensive psychiatric research group to study the causes, manifestations, and treatment options for those suffering from religious trauma (RT). GCRR has built a team of approximately 30 licensed psychiatrists, therapists, sociologists, university professors, religion scholars, and Ph.D. candidates from around the …
Continue reading Exvangelical Meditation: Global Center for Religious Research
It may have been the Church that taught me the necessity of accepting Jesus as my Personal Lord and Savior, but it was a movie that introduced me to Him. I started really paying attention to movies the same time that I learned to read. Before, they were just background noise – like how words …
One of the questions I often get asked when in dialogue with evangelicals who have found out that I've left the faith is, what do I now use as a standard for truth in my life now that I no longer believe in the Bible? This question usually comes from a very sincere place that …
Continue reading Exvangelical Meditation: My Internal Compass
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” —Sinclair Lewis A Christian Fascist country disguised as freedom and democracy has always been the Moral Majority's plan, and their greatest asset is that the public believes that evangelicals are such buffoons that we don't need to take them …
Continue reading Dispatches: “In a Christian Nation State” – A Plea from Texas
Just for purposes of complete transparency, there are a few irrefutable facts that really aren't up for debate in my exvangelical essays. We can move forward with the confidence that they are so obvious that they are assumed. Here are a few examples: The Earth is round, Nazis are bad, vaccinations save lives, and the …
For many of us in the exvangelical and deconstruction communities, navigating the holidays can be a very tricky and even triggering time. Even though it is considered to be a season in which we are expected to be giving off the perpetually positive vibes of holiday cheer – “peace on Earth, good will toward men,” …
This is a guest article written by my friend and fellow exvangelical Shana Nielsen, who currently lives in Texas and is witness to the appalling attack happening right now on women's reproductive rights in that state. Shana's insightful story links these current events with a manipulative scare tactic that happened to her during a childhood …
Continue reading Dispatches: Under Attack –Evangelical Christianity’s Reverse Victimhood
Earlier this year, a poet friend of mine and I had a conversation about returning to normalcy after the chaos of 2020 and beyond. It stirred some speculations on what "normality" looks like and how it is defined. I was in therapy at the time for work-related PTSD, which I was processing both in its own …
To My Readers Who Are Fellow Exvangelicals: On Sunday, September 12, 2021, one of our forefathers passed – Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. He was a ripe old age, as the Old Testament would say, having turned 90 in June. When I call him a forefather, I mean that he was a pioneer of our …
Continue reading My Deconstruction Heroes: John Shelby Spong
Surviving the Spirit 