THE END OF THE EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT

I was raised in a white evangelical home in America.  My family remembered early twentieth century poverty quite personally and were oriented toward social justice in our worldview.  Unionization lifted my paternal grandparents into the middle class.   In recent years, lots of almost ex-vangelicals, much younger than I am, have redefined themselves as progressive evangelical or liberal evangelical.  This has made sense to people who had robust and formative encounters with God in their youth, but whose own education and widening experience of the world beyond their childhood church has pushed them to try to re-frame their faith identity.

Progressive protestant churches are full of these folks, often raised Baptist or non-denominational, people wanting to hold on to the essence of their faith in Christ, even as they see the world very differently than they did in their childhood naiveté.  In some cases, we have more of these kinds of members than the people who were actually raised in our own more liberal traditions.  Most of the young people raised in Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and similar churches are today disconnected entirely from organized religion.  The children of more conservative churches have often taken their places.

But in the last decade, as the former president spoke of Latin migrants like they were demonic and cozied up to overt racists, evangelicals followed him over the cliff like the Pied Piper. It was horrifying.  And it has caused me to ask some hard questions.

* Was this disdain of neighbor always baked into the evangelical recipe, just waiting for the right opportunity?  Was it inevitable that, under current conditions of both White population decline and massive defection from organized Christianity, that evangelicals would go here?

* Did evangelicalism give us the practiced skills to suspend common sense in order to be true to our tribe?  It seems evangelicals are more able than most to question science and mainstream media sources, and more able to compartmentalize themselves into a parallel (fictional) reality.

After sixty years, I find that not only is the term Evangelical so sullied as to be useless for Christian mission, but the core assumptions that have held the movement together are also increasingly problematic.  In light of this, I have to join the parade (of mostly younger people) out the door.  I am now truly an ex-vangelical.  The whole evangelical house of cards has just collapsed for me.  Even the Black evangelicals (who did not follow their white siblings into the moral abyss) are unable to redeem this movement for me.  I am just done.

I am as Christian as ever.  But I am done with walking around on eggshells about literal versus metaphor in the Bible.  I am done with a tradition that scares children into joining up with the threat of hell, even if the threat is subtle and oblique.  I am done with tolerating the notion that salvation is a purely individualistic transaction with God.  I am done supporting any faith community that inadvertently makes good people easier marks for authoritarian politicians.  I am done with the dichotomies of saved and unsaved, which too often function to trap people in backwards behavior and thinking.

I titled this column the End of the Evangelical Movement.  Evangelicals will be around into the future, but the movement is alienating so many so fast, that it is greatly shrinking its future influence in America.  And it is not dying with grace.  It is flailing, aligning at times with pure evil.  And it is coloring American perceptions of religion in general with very negative associations, hurting all of us.

Evangelicalism helped build this country - but now it is aligning with all that this country must defeat in order to live into its next best days.

Most of the churches presently disaffiliating from the UMC are unabashedly aligned with the Evangelical movement.  As they leave us, we wish them well - and we know that the future of Methodist Christianity is about to shift quite significantly toward a new center of theological and social sensibility.

I refuse to look back.  Great days are ahead!