There is a class of people that has been forming over the last decade or so, in earnest, known as the Exvangelicals. Exvangelicals, as the nomenclature suggests, are people who once identified as evangelical Christians, but who have since become disillusioned with a whole cluster of identifiers and doctrines associated with said evangelicalism. When you read what most of these exvangelicals are saying, in regard to their reasons for departing the “faith,” it has to do with their respective dissatisfaction with the evangelical subcultural entailments. In other words, exvangelicals are tired of “playing church”; of ‘purity culture,’ so-called; of being out of step with the broader culture in regard to sexual and sexuality mores; so on and so forth. I would argue, though, that these exvangelicals haven’t walked away from historic orthodox Christianity; one that is defined by its doxological understanding of the triune God. Instead, they have walked away (sort of) from what I take to be an American (or Western) folk religion; some, like sociologist, Christian Smith, have called this ‘religion’: moralistic therapeutic deism.

I want to suggest that exvangelicals have, in point of fact, not walked away from anything. Indeed, all they have really done is internalized the theological presuppositions of evangelicalism, and taken them to their logical conclusion. A. N. Wilson offers an apropos description of the sort of “presuppositions” that have funded “evangelicalism” for many decades; he writes:

The nineteenth century had created a climate for itself—philosophical, politico-sociological, literary, artistic, personal—in which God had become unknowable, His voice inaudible against the din of machines and the atonal banshee of the emerging egomania called The Modern. The cohesive social force which religion had once provided was broken up. The nature of society itself, urban, industrialized, materialistic, was the background for the godlessness which philosophy and science did not so much discover as ratify.1

For many dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals the above description will have no traction; they won’t recognize their religion in this. But that’s just it: the exvangelicals finally do recognize the fund of their religion, and simply take the final and logical step of living into the naturalistic materialism they have been weaned on all their days in the evangelical club.

Evangelicals currently caught up in the ‘culture wars,’ particularly as that unfolds online, need to start to appreciate what they are up against. They need to become self-critical about their own hive of theological ideation, and understand that the reason they are having such a hard time making in-roads with their apostate brothers and sisters is because they are still on the same ground as them. Evangelicalism is ‘The Modern’ that Wilson describes. It is based on modern Enlightenment turn-to-the-subject premises and anthropology. It seeks self-actualization in the name of Christ, and consumes the materials of this cultural-world-system as its Eucharist and means of grace. It appropriates concert and corporate culture as its liturgy, and sees pastors as executives. Exvangelicals see through the façade, and simply opt to live in its full-flaming reality.

Martin Luther, when he visited Rome, as an Augustinian monk, saw the merchandizing of his Roman Catholic faith. He didn’t become an ‘Excatholic’ at that point; instead, he sought to reform his faith from the inside out. The difference between Luther’s day, and ours, was that he had a historic dogamtic foundation to refer people back to; evangelicals don’t have this. Evangelicals have Protestant orthodoxy, but in fact, much of the developments therein only lead us back to the materialistic deism that has produced exvangelicals to begin with. The way forward for evangelicalism is to return to the Nicene faith of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; through the mediatorial humanity of Jesus Christ. Doubling down on ‘back to the Bible’ is too simplistic. Evangelicals need to understand that we bring things to the Bible; that we have interpretive tradition (either good or bad); and that it is precisely because of what we often have brought to the Bible, and its reality, that we have arrived where we are today.

Exvangelicals haven’t walked away from evangelicalism. People like Josh Harris, Derek Webb, Paul Maxwell, Kevin Max et alia are simply living into their true evangelical selves. For them God has “become unknowable, His voice inaudible against the din of machines and the atonal banshee of the emerging egomania called The Modern.” Exvangelicals are evangelicals taken to its logical conclusion. They haven’t walked away from genuine orthodox Christianity, and the living God; instead, they have blossomed into the flowers that the seeds of evangelicalism have been cultivating into their lives for decades. They need to repent, and come to the risen Christ for the first time.

1 A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (London: Norton, 1999), 12 cited by Charles Taylor, Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 551 kindle edition.