Religious

Faith After Exvangelical Deconstruction

Untangling the Gospel From the Church of My Youth

Zack Verham / 10.27.21

Nearly all of my memories of childhood and adolescence are bound to the church. It’s mostly sensory snapshots, but they’re all the more real for that lack of coherent interpretative gloss: old-smelling books in the tiny library, touching the wooden framework of the sanctuary while it was under construction, watching the morning arrive during sunrise Easter services, feeling embarrassed praying in front of the flagpole at my school, lock-ins and church camps that left me so sleep deprived my stomach hurt. I lived and breathed church growing up.

I remember the gospel being preached in those spaces. I remember learning who Jesus was and being presented with the foundational elements of the faith. But also, as I continued to grow up and invest time in fundamentalist evangelical spaces through my college years, I also collected memories which, with the hindsight of years of separation, are quite troubling to me now.

I’ve previously written about the unremitting demands for piety I experienced in college which fed my scrupulosity and exacerbated my anxiety and OCD, but the other side of the coin is that my formative communities converted piety into social capital. The students who made public True Love Waits pledges and committed their lives to publicly and loudly proselytizing their friends and classmates were the students who became the vertices of the social graph. Those who prayed the most fervently at the fundamentally political See You at The Pole rallies were the student leaders in the youth group. The rank-and-file kids who were maybe just curious about God were second-class citizens when compared to the self-proclaimed prophets who were going to “save the world” for Jesus. I know because I tried my best to be one of the “first-string” Christians (and of course, I failed miserably).

Many church services concluded with the inevitable sermon tirade or student-prophet soapbox moment which either bemoaned the atheistic hordes that were going to persecute our families within the next decade or belittled our lack of work to evangelize the world as the Left Behind-tinged apocalypse drew ever closer. We were taught that it was up to us to evangelize “the nations” in order to force the Rapture to happen – that it was up to us to bring Jesus back to judge the world with fire.

If I take stock of the past decade of my life, I can say without hyperbole or cliché that it is miraculous that I am still a Christian. It truly is by God’s hand alone that I continue to be compelled by Jesus, particularly as I consider the unique expression of Christianity that I (and many other millenials) grew up in across fundamentalist evangelical youth groups and college ministries in the first decades of the 21st century. If I had remained in that world and continued to experience Christianity — a version of it primarily informed by Law — I would have almost certainly hung up the towel and called it quits.

Skimming the exvangelical and deconstruction hashtags on Twitter, it is clear that many millennials who grew up in similar cultures are also taking stock of their youth and young adulthoods and have chosen, in the words of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, to “give back [their] entrance ticket.”

And yet, God remains faithful, even as a large segment of my generation looks back at the Law-based religious communities we tried and found wanting.

I write this with the hindsight provided by years of separation. I don’t think I would have labeled the communities I grew up in as “fundamentalist” from the inside, and I wouldn’t have considered their theologies or cultures problematic or destructive. To be honest, I didn’t really have the vocabulary to consider the possibility of alternative expressions of Christianity existing. But the reality is that I grew up in spaces which, if not explicitly self-identifying as “fundamentalist,” were fundamentally driven by judgment and shame.

You might say this Christianity was well-intentioned, but it was deeply flawed nonetheless. I can draw on example after example, memory after memory, but I’m pretty confident that those who grew up in similar environments can finish the script for me. The driving forces behind the development of fundamentalist youth culture are legion, but the result was systemic, and the consequences are widespread. A generation was fed a version of Christianity which was so entwined with culture wars, social control, and power that the only logical solution for many was to walk away from the project entirely.

When you’re only taught about a legalistic Jesus from a fundamentalist perspective, when the years that form your psychology and your symbolic framework for understanding the world bind the Gospel to a specific political vision or sociological order, how are you supposed to begin untangling that? Can you untangle it at all?

*****

I often find myself turning to both the collective and the individual work of the members of the band Boygenius (which consists of three fellow millennials: Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker). In September, I saw all three musicians at different sold-out shows, and as I looked around at the packed-out venues I realized that people really want to listen to what they have to say. It was nearly impossible to get tickets to these shows, and they were mostly packed out by other folks my age.

There are a lot of points of coherence between Baker / Dacus / Bridgers and their audiences, from lyrical themes that grapple with sexuality and mental health, to a brooding sense of confused nihilism mixed with a lack of self-seriousness. But in all honesty, I (and others like me) often find myself turning to their music because of shared experiences with the failed experiment which was evangelical youth culture in the early-to-mid 2000s.

The members of Boygenius all grew up in the same era of early-aughts evangelical Christianity that is so familiar to me and many folks I grew up with. Baker and Dacus are certainly more explicit about their experiences growing up in the church than Bridgers, who through my amateur sleuthing seems to have grown up in a parallel reality which sometimes crossed streams with my own, tweeting about escaping youth group to go to California Pizza Kitchen but also stating in interviews that she wasn’t raised religious. Regardless, all three had formative experiences with Church at the same time that I did. Baker and I grew up listening to the same Christian hardcore and screamo bands. Dacus grew up drowning in church activities every week like me. All three write about questions of religion, spirituality, faith and doubt, and the (non-)existence of God. Only Baker maintains some semblance of religious faith, while Bridgers is explicitly atheist and Dacus describes herself as ‘Post-Christian’, stating that “It’s, like, embedded. It will never leave.”

The music of Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus publicizes the hidden religious wreckage which has resulted from the failed experiment that was Christian youth culture at the turn of the millennium. My generation continues to grapple with those consequences in terms that are often unintelligible to ourselves, let alone those observing us. But the reality is that, even as post-fundamentalist millennials realize that they can’t think about God in the way they were taught, they’re still *deeply* interested in religion. Even Bridgers, the least explicitly religious of the Boygenius trio, states about her song “Chinese Satellite” that:

I have no faith — and that’s what it’s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can’t do it…I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter [from Hogwarts], which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It’s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.

In her song “Ringside,” Baker ruminates on the difficulty of believing in grace more explicitly, singing:

So Jesus, can you help me now
Trade me in, oh, for a briar crown
Is there anybody coming back for me
If they ever were, they are not now
…
Nobody deserves a second chance
But honey, I keep getting them

I don’t buy the notion that millennials are uninterested or apathetic towards religion and spirituality. Far from it. It’s a community that is deeply invested in thinking about God, but doesn’t know how to untangle God from a culture that made God unintelligible. All three members of Boygenius write from different perspectives about God, and they pack out shows with audiences who probably feel their muscles clench and their blood pressure rising when they even think about having to sit through another hour-long sermon of shouting condemnation. Our interest in God hasn’t mysteriously disappeared, but for many it has been forced “underground,” outside of the orthodox venues for religious thought, because of the pavlovian connection between Jesus and the toxic cultures which form their earliest sense memories.

If we think of the members of Boygenius as a proxy for the segment of Millennials who grew up in fundamentalist evangelical culture, we see two outcomes simultaneously at play. First, we see the wreckage of a Law-based religious system which emphasized political power and social control. Millennial ambivalence towards Christianity should be no surprise — many people my age lived it, and it didn’t save them. At the same time, God continues to love and abide with the ’sinner’ millennials who find themselves religiously adrift in their late 20s — the relapsed Christians, the post-Christians, the deconstructing Christians, the atheists, the agnostics, the questioning, and the people who just don’t want to feel the burden of having to think about God anymore.

To be honest, I often find myself in that last camp. Untangling the Gospel, and even my own psychology, from the world I grew up in is incredibly difficult. Community helps with this, but the reality is that it remains a struggle. I understand why people walk away.

But God continues to graciously teach us how to work out whatever faith (or lack thereof) we have with creativity and compassion, regardless of how stuttering or resigned or frustrated that process is. God continues to plant seeds and nourish them, regardless of how scorched the garden’s soil is. When I say with Dacus that “It’s, like, embedded. It will never leave,” I say that about both the harmful culture within which I learned about God, and the mustard seed of Jesus’ Gospel message that continues to sprout and grow, “though I know not how.”