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
As a preacher's kid, we are instructed that our first order of business is to worship and devote our lives completely to God. When you are very young, being told to worship God is, admittedly, an abstract idea. It's like being shown a picture of George Lucas and having it explained to you that this …
“If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.” – The Joker It's taken me a long, long journey into healing and a brave, unexpected confession from someone dear to me to realize that it is time to tell this particular chapter in my story. Because it is not just …
Continue reading My Story: The Vanishing Act – A Tale of an Exvangelical’s Monster
This is not the exvangelical musing that I intended to write this week. But let me tell you about a brief conversation that I overheard in the break room a few days ago, so you may understand why this particular topic was suddenly one that I simply couldn't resist. Seriously, it was basically handed to …
Continue reading Exvangelical Musings: Tree-Huggers for Christ – An Ecocritical Bible Study
Today's dispatch comes from my friend Shana Nielsen, who like me grew up in the Evangelical Church and is now walking a path in which she is processing her experiences within it and coming to recognize its theology and practices as emotional and spiritual abuse that we carry with us long after leaving. She has …
I have worked with young children for far too long to not learn from their example and sometimes stand in awe of the wisdom found in their innocence. By observing them, I've come to some conclusions about the way humans work. I believe that people are inherently born with a sense of not only self-worth, …
If you were an evangelical teenager in the 90s, you listened to DC Talk. They were the compass by which all Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) was measured. There are plenty of explanations for their surge to the very top of our greatest rock stars, but the primary reason was because they were more wickedly talented …
It has never been easy for me to define family. I find this to be a common struggle among exvangelicals, not least of all because those in the evangelical community with whom we share DNA often simply cannot understand the reasons that we have decided to walk away from this path. For so many in …
Continue reading My Story: “Keep My Sister Safe” – A Tale of an Exvangelical’s Prayer
You may be surprised to learn that many of my greatest exvangelical heroes are Christians. In fact, it was an evangelical whose writings walked me through the process by which the Moral Majority came into power – how Nixon dabbled in creating a voting base out of the religious right, and how Reagan ran with …
Growing up in the Southern Baptist Church was basically life in a bubble in which we pretended the world we created for ourselves was the only one truly worth living in for everyone. Sometimes, people would just leave and we'd hear they were “backsliding,” but it's okay – we were prepped in Sunday school and …
Continue reading Exvangelical Musings: How to Talk to an Evangelical When You are Deconstructing
Surviving the Spirit 