Milestones in My Journey Out of Evangelicalism

In many ways I still identify as an evangelical. I love Jesus, and I experience the sort of personal relationship with Jesus that evangelicals celebrate and psychologists are getting uncomfortably close to explaining away. I love the Bible too. And I love talking about Jesus. Those used to be the defining characteristics of an evangelical.

But times change. For a very long time evangelicals have tied themselves to the notion of biblical inerrancy, the notion that the Bible is always both consistent and correct with respect to morality, theology, and history. (It isn’t.) More recently, I’m growing suspicious that evangelicalism has reduced itself to little more than branding for a movement that subordinates women and condemns LGBTQ persons, a movement that so authoritarian and hypocritical that it will buy anything that advances its cultural interests. 

I realize this is a harsh judgment to make. And I confess that it comes in anger, as white evangelicals more than anyone else ushered Donald Trump to power. What’s especially striking about that is that few white evangelicals ever accepted Barack Obama as a fellow Christian, despite his consistent and compelling testimony. I know huge policy gaps separate evangelicals from an Obama-style Democrat, but the evangelical rejection of Obama’s faith leads me to suspect there’s a strong dose of racial resentment in that judgment. If this is harsh, and if this is angry, so be it. I hope this piece is helpful to someone else.

Maybe you’re trying to sort out your own relationship with evangelicalism. Like millions of other people, you have encountered Christ in an evangelical context, a relationship that brings you vitality, purpose, and joy – but that evangelical framework no longer works for you. If that’s true, maybe you can relate to these milestones.

Fornication. Having not grown up in church, I committed to Christ just before my fifteenth birthday. I quickly got the message that I should be reading my Bible. By my senior year in high school, I’d read it all the way through. And I had a question: “Y’all are always telling us to avoid premarital sex because it’s a sin. Well, I’m living that code, but I just read the whole Bible, and it doesn’t say that.” My youth director tried to convince me otherwise, but the truth is, he didn’t have such a great argument. A few days later I received a greeting card in the mail. Under his signature, he wrote, “Proverbs 3:5-6.”

In the King James the passage reads, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” In other words, my youth pastor told me to stop thinking for myself and accept the authority of my teachers.

The Synoptic Problem. While reading the Bible through, I noticed that the Gospels often tell the same stories – but in very different ways. Whenever I noticed this phenomenon, I just assured myself there must be an answer I just couldn’t understand. But during a college visit I sat in on an introductory New Testament class. The professor, Richard Batey, was using a handy-dandy pull-down chart to explain how the Gospels were composed. The color-coded chart indicated which passages Matthew, Mark, and Luke had in common, and which were unique to each Gospel.

Professor Batey didn’t need to explain the rest. Because I knew the Gospels so well by that time, the main point was immediately clear: the Gospels must have some kind of literary dependence among themselves. In other words, contradictions among the Gospels must be intentional, not just different ways of remembering the same stories. I would never see the Bible the same way again.

Charlatans. Just after my conversion I attended revival services at a local church with some friends. The preacher, a future president of the Alabama Baptist Convention, was preaching on Satan. Suddenly the sound system began to crackle and fail. The preacher accounted this phenomenon to the devil: “This happens any time I preach on Satan.” I was impressed.

At the time.

My freshman year in college I began visiting Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, where the famous Adrian Rogers was the pastor. It bothered me a little that church members frequently cited their pastor as the ultimate authority: “Dr. Rogers says….” One Sunday Rogers used John 2:11 – the story of Jesus turning water into wine – as an argument that Christians should not consume alcohol.

Let me say that again. He used a miracle in which Jesus creates wine to prove that wine is sinful.

His basic argument was that ancient wine had no alcoholic content. Even at 18 I knew how to chase down that bogus argument. Of course the wine, albeit weak by today’s standards, was alcoholic! I concluded that one of two things must be true: either (a) this preacher is inexcusably lazy and doesn’t do his homework, or (b) he lacks integrity. Oh, wait: (a) is a subcategory of (b).

I stopped visiting Bellevue. And I remembered the guy with the skeevy sound system.

AA and Gandhi. My church had taught me that anyone who did not know Jesus was bound for hell. I struggled with that doctrine, but I continued to believe it. Then my Dad entered treatment for his alcoholism. I rejoice that he’s been sober over 30 years, and he continues to stay in Alcoholics Anonymous. My Dad became a person I could really admire. But that created a problem: through AA, God became very important for him, but Jesus did not (at that time). Could I affirm God’s clear blessing in my Dad’s life without giving up my doctrinal belief?

About the same time, the film Gandhi came out. Yes, it’s just a movie. But the movie conveyed a sense of holiness that I could not deny. A few years later I got to meet Arun Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi’s grandson, and I experienced that same feeling. Over the years it’s happened countless times: the experience of profound holiness in the presence of non-Christians. Even as a college student, I realized: I can’t believe in a God who sends people to eternal damnation on the basis of their doctrinal beliefs. Sorry.

Southern Baptists and Abortion. In college I wrote a paper on “The Southern Baptist Witness on Race.” The project required me to call denominational offices, pore over denominational archives – in short, to do real history. It was fun!

Along the way I got a surprise. In 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that favored abortion as an option under certain conditions, including “the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” But wait. I thought Southern Baptists opposed abortion!

Encountering that resolution showed me that church teaching can change very, very quickly. Later I encountered Randall Balmer’s compelling argument that evangelical strategists embraced the pro-life movement as a means of leveraging support for other causes – particularly their right to run segregated schools and colleges.

The Southern Baptist Takeover. My church tradition was Southern Baptist. I served Southern Baptist churches, was founder and president of my college’s Baptist Student Union, and even served the denomination as a 2-year volunteer home missionary. I attended the denomination’s flagship seminary.

All the while, fundamentalists were taking control of the Southern Baptist Convention and its agencies, including my seminary. The process took more than a decade, but I was part of the last graduating class before my seminary fell under fundamentalist control. And yes, I was president of the student resistance club, the Whitsitt Society for Baptist Freedom.

We students were allowed to share a picnic with the new seminary trustees to try and establish some form of dialog. Over the years I’d seen some questionable things from the fundamentalists, especially baseless accusations against my professors. And I’d heard rumors of even worse: famous pastors condemning seminary professors as heretics without even reading their works.

One key debate involved the question of women in ministry. I shared with a trustee, “You know that the first Baptists ordained women as deacons?” He was sure I was wrong, so like a good little seminarian I offered to photocopy the primary sources and mail them to him.

You know the answer. I never heard from the guy. Of course I didn’t.

I. J. Mosala. By the time I entered graduate studies in New Testament, I’d changed my mind on many things. I accepted contradictions and multiple sources in the Bible. I’d come to celebrate women’s leadership and the full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the church. I certainly had abandoned the notion that non-Christians are categorically bound for hell.

But fundamentalism runs deep. I still hadn’t fully grappled with the complexities raised by Scripture. The pieces crowded my head, but the puzzle hadn’t come together. Then I read Itumeleng J. Mosala’s Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa. It’s not widely read, but Mosala demonstrates directly how some biblical authors promote the interests of oppression – even Luke, the supposed patron of the poor. I haven’t read Mosala in a long time, and I imagine I might disagree with him on some points now. But I could not escape his basic argument: not only does the Bible include diverse points of view, it also contains dangerous material that can’t be explained away.

I’m still ashamed that it took me so long to accept this reality. Back in high school I’d preached a sermon about Saul’s failure to kill all the Amalekites and their cattle – and somehow the ethical problems eluded me. That’s how thick the fundamentalist fog rolls in.

Religion is social. However much we might believe religion is about our personal mystical experiences or the stuff we believe, a religious journey is always formed by relationships, communities, world events, and the like. My journey out of evangelicalism is just one of many, but it is a path many, many people share in broad outline.

Way back in 2012 I wrote a blog chronicling some of this process: “Where Do ‘Liberal’ Bible Scholars Come From?” Picking up the theme, my colleague Peter Enns invited other biblical scholars, along with some pastors, to share their own stories. If you’re pushing away from an evangelical identity that asks you to set your brain aside, maybe you’ll connect with one of these stories.