First there were the progressive “exvangelicals” who gained prominence in popular books and academia for their accounts of abuse, hypocrisy, and politicization in the institutional church, along with their emphasis on how such tendencies clashed with the ethics of Jesus. Now, conservative ex-evangelicals are allegedly gaining attention, embracing politics while retaining their churchly settings and downplaying Jesus’s teachings. The latter scenario is based more on anecdotes than on hard data, but in his online magazine Mere Orthodoxy (January 31), Jake Meador sketches out this “sociologic” defining the post-Christian right. [See RW, Vol. 30, No. 2.] He does note that one of the surprising conclusions in the book, The Great Dechurching, is that there are more people who dechurch into a kind of right-wing political religion than into a left-wing political religion. Meador writes that “the left exvangelical trend has tapered off, from what I can tell. The reasons why are too complex to get into here, but having been active in Christian media throughout the 2010s I can recall a time when publishers were snapping up every talented and kinda jaded evangelical they could find to write a memoir. That no longer seems to be happening.”
The anti-institutional critiques that left ex-evangelicals leveled at the church “now seem to be more about broader problems across social institutions of many types. Moreover, in a time of weakened associational life, some churches have seen surprising growth and resurgence precisely because they offer the sort of belonging and membership that so many people today are longing to experience,” Meador writes. In contrast, the emerging right exvangelicals “start with right-wing politics circa 2025 and then come to Christianity after you’ve already committed to the political vision of the American right.” Whereas left exvangelicals tried to “keep a proxy of Jesus and dispense with the church,” the right exvangelicals keep a proxy of the church and dispense with or even condemn Christian moral norms. Humility and meekness and other teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are now considered “loser theology.” The Jesus retained in their conception of the faith is the judge of the Second Coming.
Meador writes that the logic behind evangelical disenchantment on the left starts with an over-identification of “wokeness” with the moral teachings of Scripture concerning the poor and the rights of women. “Once `wokeness’ is presupposed to basically be a shorthand for ‘Christian moral norms concerning the marginalized’ the church itself is seen as actually hostile to the teachings of Jesus and needs to be exposed for its corruption and abuse and rejected…But once that move is made it is hard to keep Christianity around for very long. So, the next step comes when what they say of ‘the church’ is now applied to ‘Christianity.’” A similar logic plays out with the right ex-evangelicals, beginning with an “absolutized condemnation of ‘wokeness’ which also tacitly repudiates many Christian ideas about the vulnerable. Once that occurs, ‘the way of Jesus’ begins to look rather dangerous and hostile to the agenda of greatness and personal exaltation now ascendant on the right. And, with time, what is said about specific Christian ideas will start to be applied to Christianity itself. Indeed, if the left can attack Christianity for being an enemy of justice and equity, the right can just as easily attack Christianity as being a slave morality that suppresses human innovation and excellence.”
(Mere Orthodoxy, https://mereorthodoxy.com/two-types-of-exvangelicals)
