“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
Jesus Christ, The Gospel of John, The Bible
It Began with a Rebirth and Ended with a Rebirth
I came to New York for salvation. I emigrated from the Midwest in 2013 so I could attend a bootcamp and get a stable career. My first church was the one every evangelical spoke of in hushed tones: Redeemer.
Redeemer of Tim Keller, that magic man who spoke Manhattanese. Redeemer of the classical music and jazzy hymns. Redeemer, the church even educated people weren’t embarrassed to attend.
Late last year I formally resigned from Redeemer. A few months later I left New York. I was a man without a home or a home church. I had not only left Redeemer, I had left the evangelical movement I grew up in.
I was born again.
It Began with a Baseball Player and Ended with a President
America. 1917.
Billy Sunday was no wimp. He’d want you to know that.
He was a professional baseballer-turned-evangelist. And he was on a mission to make American Christianity more manly. When he wasn’t waving flags and saving souls he liked to pack his “old muzzle-loading Gospel gun with ipecac, buttermilk, rough on rats, rock salt, and whatever else came in handy.”
His was a macho Christianity, made for a world where men punched the clock instead of working with their hands. The advent of a world war made his preaching militant. You could serve both God and Country. In fact, you had to!
Ever since Sunday, evangelical leaders have always found new threats: the first world war, the second world war, communists, school desegregation, hippies, feminists, the war on drugs, gay men, undocumented immigrants and now transgender children. A gospel of fear kept butts in the pews and cash in the offering plate.
America. 2017.
The election of Donald Trump was an evangelical triumph. Here was a rough-around-the-edges-tell-it-like-it-is guy. He would outlaw abortion and deport unwanted immigrants. He would make America great again…
…for white men.
It Began with a Hashtag and Will End in 2077
Blake Chastain started #exvangelical on Twitter back in 2016.
There’s no dictionary definition for the term, so I’ll have to pull from Wikipedia here:
Exvangelical is a social movement of people who have left evangelicalism, especially white evangelical churches in the United States, for atheism, agnosticism, progressive Christianity, or any other religious belief, or lack thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exvangelical
For the record, I’m between joining an ethnic church and a progressive church. Maybe I’ll split my time between the two. But I won’t be going back to an evangelical church. Besides, the movement won’t last much longer.
Pew Research Center says that the percentage of Americans who identify as evangelical dropped from 30% to 24% from 2007 to 2021. Here’s the chart:
See the dark blue line on the left-most graph? That’s the trendline I’m watching. If that trend continues, my (very basic) projections have evangelicalism going extinct before 2080:
It Began with a Rebirth and Ended with a Rebirth
My father didn’t come to Upstate New York to get saved. When he showed up to grad school in the 80s, he was a hardened atheist in the hard sciences. Some classmates introduced him to a Christianity that was very different from his Mar Thoma church upbringing. This faith was restless and prolific. It produced converts and conferences and pamphlets and books. Here was a new faith for a new world.
So he converted and started attending a conservative campus church. He quickly found status and success as an elder. But the church buckled under a power-hungry pastor, right around the time my Dad graduated. But he kept the faith. My father was a new man.
He was born again.
