Media have a profound effect on the dissemination of ideologies and practices. This was as true with the invention of papyrus as it was with the later inventions of the codex and the printing press, just as it was with the computer, the internet, the cellphone, and as it has been throughout the digital revolution of the last twenty years. In the course of my lifetime, I have watched cultural consciousness and real-world sociopolitical circumstances change in response to the way that people imbibe and use media, and I have watched people themselves change, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, by the same criterion.
From this perspective the “Exvangelical” movement on TikTok makes a great deal of sense. TikTok, like Vine before it, provides a platform that “traditional” social media like Facebook or Twitter do not for a person to make a point through a complete audiovisual creation rather than through words or images alone, and so it offers the perfect, portable confessional for countless stories of when, where, why, and how people left the Christianity of their youth. “Exvangelical” is not a misnomer for the movement either, particularly insofar as the majority of these confessions of exodus are coming from former American evangelical Protestants whose faith became untenable for them for a variety of reasons. Sometimes these confessions achieve the level of celebrity: most notably, for instance, Abraham Piper, Calvinist theologian John Piper’s eldest son, is one of the primary voices of “exvangelical” TikTok, and his videos have sparked countless more such narrations of personal disenchantment with Christianity and, in many cases, with religion altogether. These confessions, and the responses mainstream communities are giving to them, are quite telling.
In the main, exvangelicals have left Christianity for the same reasons most people leave their religions, if they do leave: that is, Christianity, particularly the evangelical Christianity they inherited and perhaps attempted to make their own, lost its intellectual and moral credibility for them as a satisfactory cosmology and ethics. Breakdowns in the intellectual credibility of a religion can come from many corners: they can come from internal, emic sources, in the form of perceived tensions or contradictions in texts, dogmas, doctrines, or theology, which are either ignored, suppressed, or avenged when exposed; they can come from external, etic pressures put on a religion by the wider culture to expand or abandon its worldview, especially in relationship to other religious narratives, the sciences, and the arts; and sometimes they can come from severe, traumatizing catastrophes that completely undermine a religion’s tenability as an explanatory model for the universe and our life in it. Experience is the source of epistemology, and so when our experiences so utterly contradict our received wisdom, it can often be the case that the dissonance becomes too much for us to bear, mentally or emotionally.
When such breakdowns occur, they can often be transformative for religious traditions as a whole or believers in particular. Jewish and Christian Scriptures, for example, bear witness to a continual stream of broken, outgrown, and reconstructed paradigms for understanding the relationship of God and the World, the meaning and future destiny of human life, and the struggle between good and evil. Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic literature, out of which phenomena like messianism and prophetic figures like John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth, and Paul of Tarsus emerged, are attempts to come to terms with precisely such older models of reality in the Israelite and Early Jewish traditions being rendered obsolete by completely new historical circumstances and personal experiences. Various Christian communities have undergone similar paradigm shifts in response to new philosophical, scientific, political, and social stimuli, sometimes producing profound synthesis, sometimes entrenching in inherited viewpoint, and sometimes simply abandoning Christianity. The political and social volatility of the context in which Early Islam emerged is a classic example, where many Christians found the rousing success of Islam as an imperial/military force and the comparative simplicity of Islamic theology about God to be evidence that it was a superior worldview and converted. In both late antiquity and modernity, some Christians have felt the same about Judaism, or else about religions farther afield like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, or indigenous and New Age forms of religion or spirituality, or else about agnosticism or atheism. Breakdowns in the intellectual credibility of Christianity can be opportunities for tremendous Christian creativity in adaptation or else for suffocation and extinction of the Christian mind.
Likewise, the loss of serious moral ethos can lead to deep repentance or to defiant apostasy. Christians have been subject of and to moral scandals since the beginning of the Jesus Movement, and the reality of human imperfection and wickedness has always been juxtaposed directly with the austere and severe eschatological moral demands of the gospel. It is not accidental that when Christianity was legalized, popularized, and then officialized, the men and women most committed to the living out of the words of Christ and the apostles fled human society to be in the desert with God; it is not accidental that most of Christianity’s great clerical saints are people who actively did everything in their power either to avoid ordination, appointment, and councils or to forfeit their placement once they had received it. And it is likewise not accidental that, today, when most Christian ecclesiastical institutions in Europe and the United States are afflicted by crises of moral authority, instigated by sometimes clandestine, sometimes transparent addiction to money, power, and sex, and much of the evangelical Protestant world in particular has lost moral authority in the eyes of American culture for inconsistent application of the gospel to social ethics, those Christians who speak with the greatest ethical appeal in the eyes of much of the wider populace are those who are most critical of their own institutions. These issues are all the more acute if one happens to have been the victim of abuse or oppression at the hands of Christian laypeople and pastors, or if one has fallen through the cracks of an ecclesiastical system due to some moral failure on the part of church people or communities. For female, black, Hispanic, Asian, married and divorced, and LGBTQIA+ Christians, all of whom are marginalized in different ways by the majority culture in American churches, this oppression can be particularly unforgiveable, since the imbalance of the church’s focus creates long-lasting, deep psychological and sometimes even physical wounds which problematize religious belonging and belief for these individuals ever after.
Breakdowns in Christianity’s moral authority can become rallying calls for repentance and reform, as they did under figures like St. Basil the Great or St. Benedict of Nursia; but they can also be sources of systematized oppression, and they, too, can result in the experience that a religion’s truthfulness must be coextensive with its actualized goodness, and therefore conclusions about a religion’s falsehood. The exvangelicals are, on the whole, reacting to the low moral quality of contemporary American Christianities first, and to the dilapidated intellectual scaffolding that enables them second.
In all of these ways, the exvangelical movement is not particularly more or less interesting than other forms of religious exodus, and they are certainly not more morally culpable for it. It is interesting to watch them, as someone who left evangelicalism but not Christianity nearly ten years ago now. On the one hand, I sympathize with the intellectual and moral problems they found with their inherited religion as they attempted to make it their own. Many of them were also my problems: a lingering reluctance to embrace the natural sciences in many quarters of the evangelical world, as well as the historical and literary sciences of critical, exegetical biblical studies and theology; belief in and perpetuation of an American culture war in which Christianity, though ostensibly hemorrhaging and continuously losing respectability in the eyes of the culture through singular fixation on moral issues like abortion, pontificates on the social trends it likes least; etc. On the other hand, I remain convinced, as most exvangelicals do not, of the philosophical viability of classical monotheism, the revelatory value of Jesus Christ as the divine apocalypse, and the moral strength of Christianity’s ascetical tradition.
But it is also interesting to watch the exvangelicals because, for me, it has never been Christianity’s system or moral performance that has caused me to doubt it, but the terrain of Christianity’s historical origins that I have trekked as a scholar of religion. In college and graduate school, I encountered firsthand, in a way most Christians generally do not, the textual, historical, and “religious” ambiguities that surround, among other things, the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the veracity and character of his resurrection from the dead, the beliefs and motivations of Paul of Tarsus, his most successful promoter, and the gradual transformation of the Jesus Movement from Jewish sect with strong gentile following to almost exclusively gentile religion, “Christianity.” I have dealt with, in a way that typically only scholars do, the real problems internal to Christian theology; especially anxiety-inducing for me has been the delay of the parousia, the climactic “coming” of Jesus to judge the world, the fallen gods who rule it, and to assume the kingdom from their hands. The exvangelicals intrigue me because when I agonize about Christianity, it is not about trauma, whether that I’ve experienced or that afflicts others, nor is it some fear that science might rip down the emerald curtain. When doubt about Christianity gnaws at me, it is because I worry that in reality, it might be no different than any other religion: at worst, purely human in origin, with a history to which it is at every point subjected, a failed prophecy covered over by millennia of whitewashing and wishful thinking; at best, a non-privileged means of access to the divine through the cultural symbol of Christ.
And yet, despite haunted moments of doubt, I stay. Why, and what does it mean to do so?
First, why. I remain Christian through continuing belief in the resurrection of Jesus as experienced in the gift of the Spirit passed down generationally through the mysteries in the Christian ekklesiai, and as summarized in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol. These are, to my mind, the minimally necessary conditions for Christianity to have a staying power as an intellectual account of the world.
The resurrection cannot be proven as an event of history the same way gravity can be proven as a fact of science. Those apologetic attempts disguised as history which have attempted to argue for the facticity of the resurrection as a point of consensus about the Jesus of history attempt to prove too much and, in the process, betray that the epistemology they are working with is not historical. History is not a comprehensive epistemology, and many things can be known by means that are not historical in character; that the resurrection cannot be treated as a fact of history by historical methods is not the same as saying that it did not happen. It is simply to point out that whether it happened cannot be delineated by what historians are capable of doing.
It is my take that the necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of the resurrection are demonstrable, however. Philosophically, those include the reality of God as described by classical monotheism, a God who is the infinite ground of what David Bentley Hart, following Vedantic tradition, calls “Being” (satt), “Consciousness” (citt), and “Bliss” (ananda), and therefore that intelligible and phenomenal reality are intrinsically theophanic, an arena in which the miraculous is possible and possibly to be expected. Historically, it probably requires that Jesus, who was crucified by the Romans (and this is the primary fact we can know about him historically), was buried in a tomb, and that we agree, as most scholars do, that his earliest followers claimed to experience him alive again from the dead and that this claim reflected, at least as far as they were concerned, real experience. The resurrection is only possible if both these philosophical and the historical conditions are true; venturing beyond possibility to the realm of certainty is not possible for the historian.
This means that our knowledge—my knowledge—that Jesus is risen from the dead is mediated to me by the apostolic experience. It is a knowledge the apostles had through experience, and therefore an experience I can only share by receiving that experience from them and trying my best to understand it in their language. Here I am immediately confronted by the diversity of their understanding and memories. Paul, the earliest writer of the Jesus Movement whose work we still possess, openly professes that the risen body of Christ is pure pneuma or spiritus, a kind of fiery, divine cosmic breath or air (1 Corinthians 15). Mark and Matthew do not present any direct opportunity for meditation on the risen body of Christ, while Luke and John both attempt to stress the physical tangibility of the body: Luke, possibly against Paul, insists that the risen Jesus has flesh and bones and is not a pneuma (Lk 24:39), while John has the risen Jesus offer palpitation of his death-wounds to Thomas to assuage his doubt (Jn 20:24-31). These two doctrines of the resurrection body—that it would be a pneuma or that it would be reanimated and glorified flesh—continued to contend with one another throughout early Christian history and yet were both canonized in the New Testament itself.
I trend towards Paul and his heirs in Origen, the Cappadocians, Evagrios, and Maximos the Confessor, while retaining a certain loving appreciation of the tradition of Luke, John, and Irenaeus of Lyons on questions of resurrection and eschatology. But minimally, I believe in the resurrection: I believe in Jesus’ conquest of death and hell, his glorification and the deification of his humanity. The tomb is empty. And my belief in Jesus’ resurrection animates my further beliefs in the most basic Christian assessments of his significance, as Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36): that God raised him from the dead to designate him as Israel’s messiah and exalted him to heaven to give him the “Name which is above every other Name” (Phil 2:9-11), that is, YHWH, substituted in Greek as Kyrios, “Lord.”
How do I receive the apostolic experience that gives me this faith? There is no other source, beyond the reception of the Spirit in the mysteries of the liturgy. I was not there 2,000 years ago for the life of Jesus, to witness his crucifixion or resurrection, nor for the lives of the apostles afterwards. The ritual, oral, and written traditions which testify to these lives and their significance are my only access to them, and they become personally meaningful for me through the experience of the divine pneuma in worship, by whom I can acknowledge Jesus as Lord (1 Cor 12:3) and thereby, in and through Jesus, call on God as Father. The ascetical impulse that this experience of the divine triad of Father, Son, and Spirit in worship instigates also drives me further up and further in to an ever more real discovery of true human life, to gradual freedom from the passions and to moral and spiritual simplicity and clarity.
The language of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbolon, what we typically call the “Creed,” summarizes the fruit of this experience in profession of faith in one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, the homoousios Son of God the Father, incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended, and coming again, one Holy Spirit, and one, holy, catholic, and apostolic ekklesia. The barren consensus of the Symbol, as a lowest common denominator of faith, served as a token of liturgical reception in the late antique churches by which they could maintain the eucharistic koinonia of love with one another even as each community, with its tradition of Christianity, journeyed and developed apart. Of course the Symbol required a particular reconsideration of the Christian belief in the divine triad, by suggesting that Father and Son were homoousioi, of the same ousia or essence, and, as the Cappadocians would go on to clarify, different only by hypostasis, concrete instantiation or manner of having their divine being. But as Khaled Anatolios deftly argues, this is a hermeneutical and philosophical strategy of reading Scripture which maintains the coherence of Jesus’ primacy and deification of the human being.1 By saying the Symbol with conviction, I am uniting myself with them, and with the early streams of the gospel’s transmission, in a faith that structures my vision of reality and offers standards of good and evil by which to seek to move towards the good and away from the evil. Nicene faith is fairly simple without being simplistic, and that simplicity offers it a special opportunity for versatility in making sense of a world whose understanding of itself is constantly changing. The Symbol, because of its spartan focus on the essentials of Christian faith, can thus serve as a means of guest-friendship for Christians in a beautifully vast and diverse world.
My relatively simple, bare faith—that God raised Jesus from the dead in accordance with Jewish Scripture, exalted him as Lord and Christ, and sent the Spirit in his Name upon his disciples, from whom I also received it, and therefore the confession of Jesus as Lord—continues to endure the storms of academic, social, and political life. But much of the reason it has been able to survive has been the way that these very stimuli have caused my values in the knowledge and life of faith to change. To boot:
I no longer value certainty, but value experience and intellectual humility. Graduate school provides an amazing vaccination for the virus of seeking certainty about most anything. Paying serious intellectual and moral attention to changes in contemporary science, local and global society, and political regimes also pushes one inexorably towards a kind of silence in the face of the world’s complexity and opacity to simple kinds of explanation. So too in faith. At one time in my youth of faith, I valued certainty and intellectual resources to demonstrate the certainty of my faith. I no longer do, not just because I do not think such resources exist for faith, but because I do not think they exist for anything. The entirety of our episteme, our knowledge about things, and even our gnosis, our direct, contemplative knowledge of things, is only available by direct conscious experience of the world. Consciousness can expand, but there is no God’s-eye-view to be had on anything. We are all always radically dependent on nested perceptual and intelligible filters that are responsible for helping us see the world the way we do. Owning that is not necessarily an argument against faith. Instead, it can deepen faith as a kind of relationship of trust and a pilgrimage towards truth. And note, this is not playing faith off against reason, as though one should have faith despite reason; it is to say that faith always grows up into reason, just as reason grows into faith, and that the seminal form of the two in our experiences, direct and mediated, are the only place we have to begin in coming to know or love anything at all. A Christianity which seeks intellectual humility—dogmatizing as little as possible and only when necessary to clarify a mystery it has received, rather than proactively to pontificate on things it does not understand—is also a Christianity that will have an intellectual credibility in the eyes of the world.
I no longer value the purely ideal, but value the real. Philosophical idealism—the argument that the foundation of reality is consciousness and a world of intellectual ideas from which the material world springs and upon which it is dependent—need not commit one to a kind of fideistic idealism in which ideals are vaunted as more important than the realia of the world around us. In antiquity, there was a hallowed argument between Parmenides and Herakleitos on the character of change, the former asserting that it was impossible because of the supernal unity of reality, the latter asserting that it was the only fundamental truth because everything was in constant flux. Both are right from different perspectives (perhaps I will tackle that in another post), but faith traditions have a readily available vice in the form of ignoring Herakleitos in favor of Parmenides. Christians especially are too Parmenidean today: they are too obsessed with narratives of changelessness or of structured, controlled change and too deaf to the sounds of the flow of time’s river, which are always available. Herakleitos provides a helpful medicine for making peace with the mutability of our cosmic experience, with the realities of loss and change and shifting and movement that define our life in the sublunary realm or samsara or whatever it is we want to call it. Intellectually, this means detaching Christianity from the social forms it happens to find itself in at any given moment, and recognizing that the transmission of the fire of tradition across generations may well end up with substantially the same fire burning in a wholly alien collection of accidents. Morally, it means recognizing that beginning our ascetical and moral theology from some concept of eternal or natural law rather than from the concrete experience of the person and of persons in community is wrongheaded. This is not to say that there is no eternal or natural law, or no absolute truth, but that we only arrive at absolute truth through a precarious journey that begins from the contingent truths within which we live and move and have our being. Christianity’s moral credibility comes from its ability, in every generation and era, to distinguish between greater and lesser goods, greater and lesser evils, in community with others, with equal senses of deep justice and radical mercy. Real people are complicated; their intellectual and moral lives are complicated, and trying to construct preconceived systems into which they must be fit in order to be Christian can traumatize them to receiving the apostolic experience of Christ crucified and risen.
I no longer value partisanship, but value authenticity. My Christian life has taken me through Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism at different points. In each of these communities, I have experienced tremendous gifts of the Christian Tradition as well as bitter polemics and mean-spirited partisanship. At different points in my Christian life the purity of my partisanship has mattered quite a bit to me: finding and belonging to “the true Church,” the “fullness of the Church,” and so forth. My personal preferences still trend towards the ecclesial antiquity and historical continuity of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Roman Catholic Churches, as well as various Anglicans, as better witnesses and heirs to the faith of the earliest Christians than the majority of the Protestant world. But I have abandoned any pretense to seek, find, or promote any single one of these communities as the “true Church” to the detriment of the others, or with some kind of compulsion upon the others to convert. There are various reasons for this. The first is that all of the communities I list above are in fact shards of an earlier ecclesial unity destroyed mainly by politics and only secondarily by hardlining about theology beyond the limits dictated by the Nicene Symbol. Their pretensions to universality are all genuine insofar as they descend from and continue the Great Church of the second, third, and fourth centuries and are all undermined by their disunity from one another and their cultural restrictions to certain parts of the old world (Catholicism included). Taking any one of them seriously as the only or the main deposit of the catholicity of the early Church is nearly always an anachronistic and circular way of thinking. But second, and perhaps more importantly, what I have consistently experienced is that several of these communities are almost completely tone deaf in attempting to relate to the modern world effectively. Even Catholicism, which in theory committed itself to this kind of engagement at Vatican II, has been largely inept with institutional and ecclesiastical responsiveness to the unique issues of the contemporary world: at best, most Catholic leaders are still stuck in the situational thinking of the 1960s and 1970s, and at worst, several of them are stuck some centuries earlier. Orthodoxy is beginning its slow, tortured, and debated movement towards rapprochement with modernity, as are the Miaphysite and Assyrian Churches; Anglicanism has long been engaged in this kind of thing, since it is the church indigenous to the part of the world that largely structured contemporary modernity, but has now the opposite problem of trying to figure out what continuity it desires to have with ancient and medieval Christianity. And none of these communities are particularly growing at the moment, and several are hemorrhaging, because they are not providing a religion that strikes contemporary Americans as particularly credible in the way of a worldview or a practice. If Christianity is offering that to them, it is elsewhere; and what the exvangelical movement shows is that the Christian elsewhere is not particularly doing that job either.
The fundamentals of Christian faith are quite tenable under these auspices. More to the point, it is clear that the only Christianities that will survive the present cultural projects of deconstruction and reformation will be those that cultivate intellectual and moral humility before others, and that seek to communicate experiences as they have been understood in the life of the Church rather than to pronounce from on high on the faith and lives of others. Ultimately, the Christianities that survive will be those who cling for dear life to the best thing about Christianity, Christ himself.
From the perspective of the exvangelicals, no expression of Christianity was available to them which met these criteria. As a result, many of them will not consider Christianity or, for that matter, religion again, and so if any such community does present itself to them, it will not matter. Several continuing evangelicals scoff at this, insisting that their individuals or at least their churches or, at least, Christianity itself cannot be held accountable for the experiences of these people, and may seek to harden those who stay against their words, for fear of losing yet more, but not for horror at the deep-seated tendencies that drove these away to begin with. But truthfully, evangelicals are no more or less guilty of that sort of wagon drawing than are Catholics and Orthodox, than are any other religious community. We are all capable of pulling down our blinders when we want to ignore what is wrong, of telling ourselves it is not really our fault, and continuing on with business as usual.
So for some people, what it means to stay Christian in 2021 is about battening down the hatches and insulating themselves from the critiques of the world. This can be something as simple as refusing to listen to the exvangelicals, or it can be something as structured as the Benedict Option; either way, it is commitment to Christianity as a kind of entropy, a kind of self-enclosed system of deterioration in which conservation of resources to stave off eventual heat death as long as possible is the strategy.
For others, conversely, to stay Christian in 2021 means a wholesale recommitment to an aggressive missionizing strategy. It means more polemical engagement with the world directly, more targeted evangelism, more activity. It may mean broadcasting online, or going door-to-door, or going on a mission trip, or whatever it is that a local community thinks will get more people in pews. But this, too, is a kind of reactionary acknowledgement of decline: it is evangelism for survival, rather than survival for evangelism. The thinking here is that if we can simply shout down and drown out the world’s droning on and on about our hypocrisy and myriad failures, then eventually, Christianity will win out; but if we do not, it will certainly fail.
For me, to stay Christian in 2021 means to cling to Christ because he is all I have or want, because, for better or for worse, he is what has made my life worth living to me and I do not wish to live without him, because, honestly, what light I have I continue to receive by way of the vision of his crucifixion and the hope of his resurrection. But it is to embrace Christ in a way that allows for all truth to be the Truth that Christ is, and that encourages me to try and embody an absolute receptivity to the reality of others. I think Christianity is true, quite apart from me; and yet my participation in it is wholly conditioned by my own need for it to be true. If acknowledging that harms my witness, I am not entirely certain what kind of witness I could have, to Christianity or to anything else, since there is no discipline of knowledge that I could engage in where my own subjectivity would not, at some level, be implicated. And so it is my hope that Christianity as I have known it will continue after me, in my children and grandchildren, and in future generations of those Christians I know and love. And yet—here is the key—what it means to stay Christian in 2021 is letting go our need to control the flow of history, including the future history of the Christian Church itself. It is to acknowledge with humility that we have received the fire of the Holy Spirit in the warmth of the saints, and that we must pass it on if we can, but that what becomes of it is not finally our responsibility, and pretending it is may well be our doom. What is our responsibility is to ensure that if others will not take up the summons of Christ, that minimally it is not because they found in us too little mind or too little love.
See Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2011).
A superb piece of writing. Im very glad to have found this blog - or perhaps newsletter. I will be looking forward to your next post.
I appreciated this articulation on WHY BE CHRISTIAN - especially in light of universalism and religious pluralism. Why be Christian instead of Buddhist or Hindu or Stoicism? For me, much of what you articulated better than I could ever imagine to centers on the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. There is something about the Christ that sets himself apart from the others in a way that it matters (ontologically) to choose Christ over Buddha (for example). Or at least, that is what I have come to think at this stage in my life. Thank you for the lovely, well-argued articulation of why be Christian. Well done.