Why Will No One Listen to Ex-Evangelicals?
Summary
Blake Chastain, host of #Exvangelical and Powers and Principalities, and the author of a recent piece on the recent Christianity Today podcast on the downfall of Mars Hill, stops by to talk about why religious leaders and thinkers refuse to listen to ex-evangelicals.
He and Brad discuss the excuses that the Christianity Today podcast and other sources make about why people leave high demand religions. What becomes clear throughout the conversation is that the refusal to listen is a refusal to self-reflect on the issues within church communities and religious traditions.
Transcript
Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad Onishi. I am faculty at the University of San Francisco for the semester and our show hosts in partnership with the Capps Center at UCSB. I'm joined today by someone who will be familiar to many of you, and who I am lucky enough to not only call a podcasting colleague, but also a friend, and that is Blake Chastain. Blake, how are you?
Blake Chastain: I'm good. Thank you for having me back on the show.
Brad: Blake, you are the host of the podcast Exvangelical and also Powers and Principalities. You're also the author of the newsletter The Post-Evangelical Post, which is great. You just recently published an op-ed that we're going to talk about today at the Religion News Service. It's called "Evangelicals: You're Still Not Really Listening to What Ex-Evangelicals Are Saying." It's honestly a great piece, and it really addresses so many things that I think many of us have felt and commented on, but have not put into kind of systematic analysis like you have here.
Let me start by asking you this. In my mind, you have a kind of singular role in the ex-evangelical community and history. You started the hashtag. Your show was called Exvangelical. You've been doing this work for five years within the community, on Twitter, on Facebook and many other places. Can you just run us through the reach of exvangelical, the hashtag, and also some of the communities that have kind of spun off from the original hashtag, where people are really finding places to connect with others?
Blake: Yeah, it's been sort of incredible, and thank you for that introduction. It's been sort of crazy the way in which these different communities have spun out and proliferated across multiple social networks. On Twitter, according to a site like Union Metrics, which does some light analysis that you can access, usually across even just a sampling of 100 tweets featuring the hashtag, there's a reach of around 100,000 to 250,000 impressions per day.
On TikTok, the hashtag has been viewed over 300 million times at this point. It's been used over 45,000 times publicly on Instagram, and you can find a whole host of other places. There's also a Reddit community numbering in the thousands. The Facebook group that I manage and administer, along with other administrators, has over 10,000 members, as well as other dedicated subgroups for different topics.
It's really been sort of incredible over the last five years to see these types of communities proliferate and focus on different things. Some may be focusing on an expression of queer spirituality, or ways in which people of color who grew up in white evangelicalism are discovering other forms of spiritual practice or religious belief. Other groups might be more specifically anti-theist or non-theist, but each group, I think, really informs the other, or at least shows that there is quite a bit of diversity once you leave white evangelicalism in practice and in belief.
Brad: You name some of these in the piece—hashtag Empty the Pews, which was started by our friend and colleague Chrissy Stroop, hashtag Faithfully LGBT, hashtag Ex-Mormon. We're seeing sort of adjacent high-demand fundamentalist religions also show up with hashtags.
Now, one of the things you address in the piece that I think is really important is when we think about ex-evangelicals and others who have left high-demand religions, one of the things you'll hear people say is, "Oh, this is new. It's a trend. It's a fad." Something is sort of just in the air in terms of the godlessness of the United States or the rise of the nones or whatever. I guess one of the things that you argue is that's probably not the best way to look at it. So is this new? I think I already know the answer. And if not, what's changed to make it more visible in the last five to ten years?
Blake: I would say this is not new. If you look, even if you limit your searches or cast your net only to the types of books that were published in the last 20 years or more, you actually find texts that address leaving evangelicalism, leaving high-demand religion going back to the 1990s, at least.
Marlene Winell's foundational book about leaving the fold, and then you also have other texts like Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, The Post-Evangelical, Evangelical Christian Women by our colleague Julie Ingersoll, a spiritual memoir by Diana Butler Bass from the early 2000s. I think it's completely in keeping to say that a lot of the people that might be known as progressive writers or bloggers of faith also sort of started—they may not have used this terminology, but what they were emerging from was the same sort of traditions that ex-evangelicals or people who use that term for a season of their life or in order to share their content are working in. They really are working in the same sort of area and exploring the same sort of questions.
What's changed is the social networks provide a higher level of visibility and make these things indexable, searchable and shareable. So the fact that a hashtag like exvangelical or Church Too or Empty the Pews—those being three really strong examples that have stayed the test of time over the last few years—the fact that we're seeing that, I think, is because of those platforms, and not necessarily because all of a sudden everybody decided that it was trendy to do that, like it was the milk crate challenge or something.
Brad: I agree. I mean, I started seminary—this is how old I am—I started seminary in 2003 right after I graduated from Azusa Pacific, and in 2003, 2004, 2005, I read some of the books you're talking about. I read On the Canterbury Trail. I read The Post-Evangelical, excuse me. It was in the air. It was definitely around. We just didn't have the ways to connect and to make it visible like we do now. You can see that all over the place, in terms of just how those things have proliferated over the last decade and a half.
Brad: So it's not new. It's certainly not something that has just popped up in the last four or five years as a trend. But one of the main points of your writing here is that evangelicals continue to just not listen to ex-evangelicals when they talk about why they've left. You reference a recent episode of the Mars Hill podcast, or the "What Happened to Mars Hill" podcast from Christianity Today, and the host is Mike Cosper. Cosper spent some time asking various folks, "Why do people leave?" And I'm going to throw some different reasons that are given, and I want to see what you say to these various things.
One person is Matthew Lee Anderson, who teaches at Baylor. Matthew Lee Anderson says that ex-evangelicals, for the most part, did not have a mainstream evangelical experience—they were sociologically at the margins of evangelicalism—and that they also sort of corrupt their story and their journey by making it public. So what would you say to Anderson in response when he states these answers for the sort of ex-evangelical phenomenon?
Brad: Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWAJ episode. In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus premium subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes. It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire SWAJ archive—over 550 episodes. You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access and so much more, all that for less than six bucks a month. And it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism and rising authoritarianism. Check it out. It's not hard, I promise.