We are the Dones. Not the Never Were's (Re-Release)
Return episode following a great thread by @CaitlinJStout, Brad discusses why the people who leave evangelicalism are often the ones who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to it.
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Hello all, Brad here, Straight White American Jesus, and I wanted to just Talk today about something that's near and dear to my heart, a short episode, but nonetheless, something I think is important.
And that is about those of us who have left evangelicalism.
One of the things that people say to those of us who leave is that often the idea is that we were never real Christians to start with, and that we were probably never saved and never really believed.
And that's why we left.
When I left my church in 2005, those were the rumors about me.
That I had never actually been a believer, and I never really cared, and was never really saved.
And I know a lot of people have that same experience.
This came up because there was just an incredible, incredible thread on Twitter by Caitlyn J. Stout.
So, at Caitlyn J. Stout, who's a Who is a chaplain and a crisis worker and just a really smart person to follow on Twitter about all things sort of in the ex-evangelical world and so much more.
But here is the thread and I just want to read it and then just say a couple things in response.
A friend asked the other day what percentage of people I went to youth group with deconstructed and what percentage remained evangelical.
As I thought about it, I realized that for the most part, it was the kids who took their faith the most seriously who eventually walked away.
Those of us who tearfully promised that we would follow Jesus anywhere eventually followed him out the door.
The queer kids, more than anyone, learned exactly what it meant to work out our faith with fear and trembling.
They told us to read the Bible and take it seriously, and then mocked us for becoming social justice warriors.
Now they're warning us not to deconstruct to the point of meaninglessness, but they took a chisel to God until he fit in a box.
They deconstructed the concept of love until it allowed them to tolerate sexual abuse, celebrate white supremacy, That's a thread from February 25, 2021.
in cages.
Some of us got to where we are because we took it all to heart.
We took the most foundational elements of our faith to their natural conclusions.
Folks who deconstruct evangelicalism aren't dropouts.
They're graduates.
That's a thread from February 25, 2021.
And again, it's Caitlin J. Stout.
I just, this resonates with me so deeply.
I'm The idea of graduating to other things really hit me when I read that.
And I just want to talk about why for a minute.
I think Caitlin is so correct that for many of us who have left evangelicalism, it is not those who were lightly dabbling.
It is those who gave everything they had.
And that was me.
I give everything I had.
I from the time I converted at age 14, Was all in.
And I've talked about this.
I walked around school evangelizing.
I led a Bible study at lunch.
We had see you at the flag, which was a yearly day of prayer before school and people from various churches would show up before school.
And I thought to myself, well, Once a year we could do that once a week and so I would do that every Friday and sometimes I was with like two or three people but a lot of times I was alone at seven o'clock in the morning just standing in front of my school praying by myself.
All that to say I gave everything I had.
When my mom asked me for a Christmas present, one year I've shared the story.
I told her to send the money to an organization that would buy Bibles and other supplies for missionaries overseas.
Another year I asked her to buy me a Bible and a big study Bible where I could sort of learn all the commentary and all the other stuff.
That eventually led itself to teaching myself Greek when I was just out of college so I could read the New Testament in the original language and so on and so forth, right?
I could tell hours and hours of these stories.
And the idea that I was never saved or that I never really cared is just ludicrous and anyone who knows me from those days knows that.
But nonetheless, people say, oh, you've gone off the deep end, you never really cared, blah, blah, blah.
All right.
Here's what I want to get at.
Why is it that so many of us who were so dedicated, who were so devoted, are the ones who've left?
And I think there's a couple of reasons, but I think two stand out for me.
One is, those of us who gave everything we had were the ones who wanted to understand every aspect of the culture and the theological system that we were devoting our lives to.
We wanted to understand the Bible.
If the Bible is the most important thing that we could ever study and know about, then we wanted to know it in and out.
And we wanted to learn about everything from the Book of Genesis to the Gospels to the Book of Revelation.
We wanted to understand theology.
We wanted to understand history and why we do things the way we do, why we believe the things the way we do.
And when you start to investigate all that, when you start to sort of delve into a worldview in that detail, if it doesn't hold together, then eventually you're going to start to wonder why you're devoting yourself to it so forcefully.
Let me give you a couple examples.
I grew up in California.
I've been a surfer for a long time.
It's something I grew up doing, something I still do today.
And it's something in the world that I love very, very much.
It's just really, really a passion of mine.
It's something I look forward to every week when I can do it.
But that leads me, right?
Because I'm sort of into surfing to learn all kinds of things I wouldn't learn before.
So I learn about the tides and I learn about wind and swell direction, right?
All these things that affect how waves are formed and what the waves will be like on any given day.
I check water temperatures.
I check air temperatures.
I check wind direction.
I check whether it's a wind swell or a ground swell.
All that kind of stuff, right?
I also sort of learn in places I surf often what happens on low tide.
Low tide means that the wave breaks here because there's a reef and And it kind of works this way.
But on high tide, it breaks over here and it sort of moves differently because it's breaking on a different reef.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
Because I care so much about it, I've learned things that I would have never thought I'd learned before.
OK.
Another example of this is people who get so into different worlds like literary worlds or fictional worlds.
I went to graduate school at Oxford and my college there, Regents Park, shares a wall with The pub where the Inklings used to gather, right?
So the Eagle and Child Pub is where Tolkien and C.S.
Lewis and their cohorts used to gather weekly to talk and smoke cigars and have a few beers.
And so every time we'd go there, we'd unavoidably see tourists there who had come just to be in the place where J.R.R.
Tolkien had drank a beer or smoked a cigar.
These were people, and some of you out there may be these people, Who had devoted so much time and energy to understanding every contour of Middle Earth.
What are the rules there?
Who are the characters?
Who's in power?
Why do these characters do this?
Who are these people?
What is the terrain of Middle Earth?
What are the different communities?
What are the different histories, right?
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