The Most Important Online Movement of the Last Decade
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In this episode, Brad sits down with Blake Chastain, creator of the #exvangelical movement, to explore the growing community of people who have left evangelicalism. They discuss the origins of the #exvangelical hashtag, coined by Blake, and its role in giving voice to those disillusioned with evangelical institutions. Together, they examine the reasons people have left — from issues like sexism and racism to political conservatism — and how these individuals have found solidarity and community in the exvangelical movement. Blake also shares insights from his new book, Exvangelical and Beyond, where he delves into the enduring impact of this movement and what it means for the future. This episode offers a thought-provoking look at how former evangelicals are reclaiming their stories and challenging powerful institutions in meaningful ways.
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Without further ado, here is today's episode.
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I often tell people I know that this show was something when we were attacked by three major luminaries of the evangelical world.
And in the manner of a couple of months, Al Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary took issue with some things that we said on the pod.
And then it was Tim Keller from the Gospel Coalition.
And finally, Focus on the Family.
It was one of those moments when you realize that you're speaking back, speaking truth, not allowing some of those incredibly powerful institutions and leaders get away with it.
Well, that wouldn't have happened if I had not found hashtag exvangelical about six years ago.
When I found it, I was immediately enthralled because I was somebody who'd left evangelicalism 10 years prior.
After looking into it, I discovered a few people that would become friends and colleagues.
Chrissy Stroop and Tori Douglas, and also Blake Chastain.
Blake is actually the one who coined the hashtag exvangelical.
And he's written a new book called Exvangelical and Beyond.
In it, he asks about the legacy and importance of the movement, the ways that people have gathered around the hashtag in order to form community, to find fellow wayfarers who have been exiled from their religious homes and are now looking for what's next.
Today we talk about whether or not there's lasting power in Exvangelical, what it means for those who have no spiritual home to find one another, the difficulties of forming community around trauma, And the ways,
perhaps most importantly, that ex-evangelicals have challenged the power and authority of various religious leaders and communities, pushing back on sex scandals and abuse that have been covered up, not willing to listen to the age-old lies and hypocrisies.
All this and more.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White Jesus.
Well, as I just said, today we're joined by Blake Chastain, who is somebody I've known for years now, and is not only one of the smartest people in my orbit, but is one of the nicest.
And so, always great to have you back, Blake, and thanks for coming by to talk to me.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
I always enjoy talking to you as well on the show, and I want to apologize for my voice.
I have a little bit of a cold, but I'm thrilled to be talking to you today.
So we're here to talk about Exvangelicon Beyond, your new book.
It's just out, and it's fantastic.
It's one I got to read in various stages of the project, which is always fun to see things evolve.
And I want to just start, because I think there's folks out there that don't know this, and honestly, Blake, I think it means we're old, but you're a little younger than me, so maybe you don't want to.
No, I'm okay to be old.
You gave us, and I know you're going to tell me it came from a lot of other folks and their contributions, but you're the one who really did originate the hashtag, not only the hashtag, but a lot of the community surrounding it.
So we're going to get to that.
We're going to talk about where that came from, why it continues to be something that's important and meaningful to a lot of people.
But tell us about you.
I always enjoy hearing about the ways that Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So as, as you mentioned, I was born and raised in an evangelical type circles, more specifically, cause I, cause I think your, your audience can appreciate getting into the weeds a little bit.
Um, I was raised in the Midwest in central Indiana and went to a United I like to usually describe Methodism as always sort of taking on the local flavor, meaning that a small town Indiana Methodism is going to be different than downtown Chicago Methodism.
And in addition to that, I was also formed in a number of ways by the independent churches that my grandparents went to in southern Indiana.
And an even more rural Indiana.
And I mean, it was a fairly standard evangelical upbringing, I think, with the exception that the UM Church does ordain women.
So I never had that particular cross to bear as far as deconstructing or questioning the legitimacy of women and positions of authority.
During that time, I was always sort of a religious kid.
I was drawn to big questions, drawn to religion, and just took to it like a fish to water.
I had, in many ways, a very positive experience there.
And it was only as I got older and got into youth group culture in the 90s, which was very powerful, and I'm sure it's powerful all the time, but turn of the millennium youth group culture, there was a moment, I think, that was significant.
That was the heyday, man.
That was the heyday.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you for validating that feeling that I have.
And I was in that heyday, and I was swept up in it and felt the call to ministry at the ripe age of 17 that led me to choose my college, Indiana Wesleyan.
And it was there that I had what I would now call my first sort of faith crisis and start of a long period of questioning.
And now we have shared language around things like deconstruction.
And that was really around this sort of cognitive dissonance that I felt between what I was being taught in my history courses, which I could now really articulate was more of a Christian reconstructionist vision of things based on presuppositional thoughts and the biblical Christian worldview and all these types of things, and what I was learning in my religion courses, because I was a history and Bible double major.
And in the religion courses, I was learning about how the New Testament was constructed and a lot of those things.
And it was the cognitive dissonance between the very staunch conservatism of the history classes as opposed to what I was learning about the development of Christianity.
And the political moment that this was all happening during was my first week of college is when, first full week of college rather, was when 9-11 occurred.
And then it was the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and everything there.
And that I was becoming more increasingly politically liberal in a place that did not encourage that sort of thing.
And that was sort of my genesis as a child and then as a young adult.
There's so much here to talk about, but I do want to jump into things that are really part of your book and really, I think, great contributions to just the ongoing discussions about everything from the nature of American evangelicalism to faith deconstruction to Christian nationalism and so on.
But you're in the Midwest, you're near Chicago, striking distance as somebody in central Indiana.
And here you are, this person having what might be termed a crisis of faith, or at least small crises of faith throughout your months of entering college.
And there was really no room for you, for the most part, to stay within evangelicalism because as time goes on from that 2001 to that 2005 to that 2016, evangelicalism becomes more and more defined by these hard boundaries, eventually Trumpian boundaries, eventually MAGA boundaries.
But near you, and you write about this wonderfully in the book, there had been Yeah,
long term.
Yeah, yeah.
And if we just look at the 20th century and forward, There are a number of periods and a number of movements in which people within evangelical spaces really were trying to cultivate a more progressive type of faith and create space for those types
of dialogues that do touch on both politics and civil involvement, civic engagement, and their faith.
And that is always something that's up for negotiation for American Christians and has been for a long time.
And A couple of examples that I highlight in the book, people that really did try to turn evangelical attention towards more progressive causes.
One was about Urbana, this youth conference that would happen in Illinois called Urbana 70.
This was a large one.
And this was in 1970 and was during the civil rights movement.
These things were essentially in the ether.
They were things that the entire American populace were reckoning with in response to the civil rights movement and in response to so many things.
And there were evangelicals who wanted to become a part of that and who wanted to engage with that.
And as a result, there are people like Tom Skinner, who is a black evangelical, who comes and speaks and says that it wasn't our white brothers that came and told us about our value in Christ.
It was others.
It was other black people.
There were other people that came and spoke to us that gave us the gospel and really did try to...
To highlight the ways in which white supremacy, whiteness, racism was just not questioned within those spaces.
And people like Tom Skinner, people like Bill Pinnell, who goes on and has a long career at Fuller, which is a staunchly evangelical institution.
These are people that in their youth were really trying to push evangelical culture and including political culture into even a more moderate position.
I don't even know if we would need to say progressive.
And then there are other examples of other attempted reform movements that have tried, including evangelical feminism.
Again, and these are all along culture war type of topics, but there is a history of people who have tried their hardest to call evangelicals to a more moderate or progressive position while staying within The evangelical fold and are often turned away or if not turned away or exercised or excommunicated in some way,
then their power and authority is minimized to a degree that often they slowly and quietly lead.
I think about the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelicals who...
And if you think about that gathering, it did include people who we could rightfully call feminists.
It included people you could rightfully call environmentalists.
It included people you could rightfully call...
Who were advocating for the civil rights movement or the last chapters of that movement and so on.
But once again, as you say, they've been excised.
I bring that up, Blake, because I think your book is so wide-ranging and it covers so much ground.
You talk about the history of evangelicalism.
You talk about the genesis of the religious right.
But I bring up those sort of historical attempts for more space within evangelicalism, Urbana, Chicago, and so on.
Because I think there's a direct link there to Exvangelical, where Exvangelical is really a saying, there's no space for me here.
And I think a lot of people saying, I might even be somebody who might have stayed.
Mm-hmm.
As a quote-unquote evangelical, if there had been a little more room for difference, for political disagreement, for negotiation, for discussion at all about gender or about sex or about the environment, but there's not.
And this leads me to the big moment where, you know, going on a decade ago, not quite, you really gave us hashtag exvangelical.
I know you well enough to know you're going to tell me all the people who inspired you to do that, and that's amazing, and you do that in the book.
So feel free to jump into that story.
But I'm also just really wondering, what did that mean for you in that moment?
And I know you had no idea that you'd be sitting here eight years later talking about your book that just came out on the topic.
But what did that mean to you to start using that hashtag?
And why did it seem important when you started using hashtag exvangelical or building an exvangelical Facebook group in accordance with your podcast that came soon thereafter?
Yeah.
I really...
What I chronicle in the book is really that this was a process.
This was something that it was not something that I did flippantly.
And I think that is now we're in a different position where it is somewhat established.
And at least people who are aware of these conversations are aware of a term like exvangelical or of the hashtag or that there are people that start accounts that talk about these things.
And Really, it was the culmination of a lot of soul searching, but also realizing that so many people besides myself and my spouse, even the people that we went to Christian college with, had disaffiliated from their evangelical beliefs and their evangelical communities.
And that, to a degree, that even anecdotally, it was significant.
And why is this happening?
And the reason was because the way in which authority and belonging and acceptance are policed and managed in evangelical spaces really only make space for people who agree with whatever the leaders agree with.
The degree to which it sort of found resonance, it's really hard even now for me to wrap my head around.
The degree to which people, if you have that experience, if you were in the evangelical space and left, and you hear the term exvangelical, and you intuitively get it, Like, that is, it's, it's really hard for me to wrap my head around.
Like, and it doesn't, you know, and you're right, like, I think someone else would have come up with it.
I think what and I would absolutely defer to that.
I think the thing that was different is, and what I do talk about in the book and what is different about this moment is things like social media that makes the capacity to tell your own story much more feasible than in the past where you may have had to You know, had a book deal or some other way of being able to communicate these things.
But I mean, people have been leaving evangelicalism for decades.
Even Moody Publishing published a book called Exit Interviews in the 1980s.
And it was all about people leaving evangelicalism over a lot of the same reasons why people are leaving it 40 years later.
I feel like I didn't answer your question there.
No, you did.
And it's amazing to just have you say it because I think what's odd for me, Blake, is just personal history here.
I remember 2017-18 finding the hashtag.
I remember it resonated, as you just said, Intuitively.
My body knew exactly what it was.
And I started looking for all the resources.
I listened to your podcast and reading Chrissy Stroop's work and just trying to figure out how to connect with everybody in this group because it meant so much to me.
And I ended up writing about it in 2019 about the rise of Exvangelical because I knew there was so much potential here for...
For a moment that was going to be different than before.
Not, as you say, that people were leaving, but they were leaving and telling their stories and finding each other in a way that would make a difference.
How has that happened?
I mean, give us a little history here because I don't think a lot of folks listening understand that This started as a kind of fledgling thing.
You had a podcast.
As part of that podcast, you had a Facebook group.
That Facebook group had 50 people, then 100, then what, 10,000?
I'm not even sure what you landed at.
But those early days were not the days of Sarah McCammon writing a book called Exvangelical or other people having these book deals and these shows and these YouTube channels.
It was really a few folks gathering together to try to see if they could Help each other, learn from each other, and tell each other stories in a way that was meaningful.
Yeah, so as far as the origin of the podcast and everything, and I will defer to the book for some of the details, but we left our final evangelical church that we were a part of.
In 2014, and then through conversations with my wife, Emily, as well as friends and things like that, I started to kick around this idea of like, why are so many people...
Why have so many people left?
Why...
Why?
And just that very open-ended question.
And I mean, 2014, I think, was when Serial really brought podcasts to the mainstream.
And the thought was, well, people may not subscribe to a medium, which medium was Substack 10 years ago, or a blog about these things.
But it could be more interesting to hear from people Who are just telling their own story in their own words.
And the show really has stayed mostly true to this sort of three-act structure of act one, how did you grow up?
Act two, why did you leave?
Act three, where are you now?
And really trying to drill down.
And yes, a lot of things have been, there's a lot of commonality there.
For people of color, there's racism.
For women, there's sexism.
There's patriarchy for everybody.
There's purity culture for most people.
And there's all of these major themes, but the permutations are always unique to the individual and their circumstances.
And that really was the desire, was trying to understand the ways in which this particular faith community or communities was no longer a sustainable place for us and understanding why people would leave.
Because oftentimes that was something that felt sort of invisible.
It was something that couldn't really be seen.
There were people that That we're talking about it and also we're talking about their faith sort of changing and progressing and there were bloggers who were doing that beforehand.
But to talk about the actual process was something that just hadn't necessarily happened yet.
And within using that context, using some specific language and that That is what has led to so many other concurrent projects, is that clearly we are in a moment of a lot of transition and people feeling like they are not welcome in spaces or that the communities that they were a part of they can no longer support.
And that is significant emotional, personal work, and it also has a much broader social impact.
And the thing that was distinct was that a place like Twitter in 2016 was very lively, and in 2016, for Twitter in particular, You also were, people were trying to figure out why evangelicals threw the election in this particular way.
Totally.
You know, and then people are able to provide some personal context as well as some social and historical context that it was just the right tools at the right time.
And it led in a very sort of organic way to this continued exploration of these things.
You know, one of the things you give us in the book, and I know it's not your term, but it is something that I think will be new for many readers, is the idea of a counterpublic.
And it sounds like what you're discussing here is, for the first time, those who had left evangelicalism were able to find each other, were able to validate each other, were able to say, no, you're not crazy, you're not somebody who was never saved or never Christian, which is what they would hear from all those people in the communities that they had left.
And that led to the formation of a counterpublic for the first time in relationship to American evangelicalism, which has been an overwhelmingly powerful cultural and political force for a long, long, long period in this country.
So what is a counterpublic and how did ex-evangelical become one of those?
Yeah, yeah.
And I actually sort of stumbled upon this term just as a way of trying to understand what I had sort of been a part of and being able to articulate it because there are a handful of things that are at play.
I think, first of all, social media companies, especially as they were getting started in the late 2000s, They use words like community and things like that to describe the types of tools that they were building.
And there are communal aspects to what they're doing, but the thing about a term like community is, well, we have some assumptions about what that means.
And especially for people who were raised in evangelicalism or have a formative experience within it, We think of evangelicalism as that sort of primary and first community.
And it's also the one that we no longer have a relationship to.
And so I have always been a little hesitant to, not necessarily hesitant, but I want to be specific with the language that is used because the Online spaces are communities, but they function in very different ways than the ones that we came from.
And they have different rules for participation.
It's not apples to apples.
And as a result of that, why I think a counterpublic is a very powerful lens to understand what happens in these sort of online conversations that happen, whether it's on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or podcasts like this,
is that people are discussing their experiences, their beliefs, and that sort of thing in a space that can respond to the more dominant Perspectives of evangelicalism, which within the book, I dedicate a lot of time to showing that, well, the reason why these things are hard to extricate yourself from is because it didn't start in the 1970s.
It started in the 1870s.
These have...
Considerable institutional depth and support.
And these things that we're doing in shows like this, we're the upstarts.
And we don't have the same level of resources as the people that we're critiquing.
And Encounter Public comes from media studies, which is essentially an understanding of I have any group of people that are not well represented in the sort of media, elite media spaces or in the halls of power or that sort of place where your perspective is well represented.
When you go and you create a space of your own in which you can have your own conversations and also be in dialogue with or in response to that dominant public, that is a powerful thing.
And at the time, Twitter was very good at cultivating that sort of presence online.
It was present in things like the Arab Spring, It was present in things like Me Too and Church Too and Black Lives Matter.
And to its own degree and in its own way, Exvangelical was a way to introduce conversations about religion and public life, religion and personal life into that context.
And that's That is, I think, how things really have started.
And I'm not sure where things will go, but I think it is a really valuable lens to understand the way in which we, what is happening in these online spaces is to view it as a counterpublic.
You know, one of the things you might hear sometimes from like, you know, on this show, we call him Uncle Ron.
You know, Uncle Ron is like, The MAGA-loving uncle at the barbecue, and he's like, well, why do you get women's studies?
Or how come February is Black Pride Month?
What about Black History Month?
Why is no White History Month?
or, you know, like national Hispanic, whatever, this and that, right?
And I think what you're describing with the counterpublic of exvangelical is something that like people of color, women, queer folks, they have cultivated in this country.
Like the very existence of a black church is a black church, is a space where many enslaved people gathered on the one day they had away from their quote unquote work, which was not really work, it was something else, to gather together without the gaze and the eyes and the force of the plantation to gather together without the gaze and the eyes and the force of right?
And so, in many ways, you can think of a lot of spaces in American culture of marginalized group, of minority groups, who are gathering together where, as you just said, you have a chance.
To speak, to form community, to tell each other stories.
And then if you want to, to talk back to that dominant group or that dominant force.
So when I think of evangelicals as a kind of public, that's what I think of is like for the first time, there's a group of folks Gathering together who've left evangelicalism and talking back to evangelicalism and calling it out for its hypocrisy, for its failure, for its venerating leaders who clearly have sexual failings in terms of their ethics, for all the ways that...
The rise of Donald Trump in evangelical culture goes against everything you and I were taught in the 1990s about leadership and integrity and values.
And so I guess for me, that's how I take that counter-public idea with evangelicalism.
As we look forward, and you hinted at this, and this is a hard question, but You know, what are some of the things that have come out of hashtag exvangelical?
And what are some of the potentials for this kind of counterpublic going forward?
Well, I think one of the things that has come out is that it has made the possibility of survivors.
Pardon me.
Excuse me, sorry, that will be a little bit of editing.
And if I am rambling too much, let me know.
One of the things that I think that Exvangelical has made possible is has opened up the capacity for survivor stories or even things like memoirs or things like that to come to the fore and be more visible.
Because it has enabled people to see that, well, these other folks have spoken up.
And this is where I think that it is one way in which ex-evangelical stands alongside a constellation of other things, like conversations about Christian nationalism, like church too, and so many other things that are criticisms, that are these types of things.
Yeah.
It stands alongside those things in that it allows people to see that this is a valid perspective.
And I do think that one of the assets of the term is that it does indicate that you have a lived experience, that you're speaking from a place of authority.
You know what you're talking about.
You're not just bullshitting someone.
And that means that you actually have the capacity.
You can demonstrate that it's possible to change your mind.
It's possible to move to a new position.
And also to repudiate something that you see as harmful.
And a lot of times in this moment in America...
A lot of people feel really helpless or like the only thing they have is their word and that there are these massive things that are beyond their control.
But you can at least say these things and you can...
I'm a huge David Bazan, Pedro and Lion fan.
It should not be a surprise.
But they have a whole song called Bearing Witness and that's not what Bearing Witness is.
And I'll tie it to Bell Hooks.
And I'll paraphrase her in that she says that at the heart of justice is truth-telling.
And I think that whenever an ex-evangelical tells the truth about their experience, then there's value there.
And even if it's just one person that comes across one reel on Instagram, then maybe that makes a difference.
The other question, and I could go on for much longer.
You had another question about what might be next.
I feel like that's a secondary question.
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Don't forget, y'all, two live events coming in November y'all, two live events coming in November from Straight White American Jesus.
this.
One at the University of Southern California in LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
