[The audio version of this post as a different title, but the content is otherwise the same—ran out of time to rerecord after I changed my mind. Sorry!]
Over on the X app, when I was going viral (what an expression), some people said aloud, or rather wrote, that I was talking out of my hat and had certainly never read the work of any exvangelical deconstructor and so could not possibly know what I was talking about. In my post-Easter haze, I did not feel like answering because obviously those people would not believe me, even if I enumerated all the books. But as I am coming to the end of The Exvangelicals: Love, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, which I will shortly be reviewing,* I tried to number to myself all the books I have read.
I think the first ever Bad Book in this genre that I endured was Rachel Held Evan’s Year of Biblical Womanhood. Goodness, I hated that book. At the time I had been sorting through my own Christian upbringing, wondering to myself why I was (am) still a believer while those who seemed so much more sure of their faith had walked away from it. I understood the world Held Evans was describing, and the way of reading the Bible she was rejecting, and, truth be told, while her brilliant writing made the pages turn quickly, her posture towards the faith was deeply offensive to me.
I went on to read several of her other books, including the one about the Bible, and then angered the world by writing about her right after her death. I went on to endure a bunch of terrible books by Jen Hatmaker, including the one where she decided to jettison orthodox Christian teaching by becoming affirming. That was the first ever article I wrote for CRJ, if I remember correctly. If you go over there, you will see a catalog of all the bad books I endured—Brene Brown, Brianna Wiest, Sheila Wray Gregoire, that book about Queer Marriage by David and Constantino Khalaf, Glennon Doyle, Rachel Hollis, Beth Allison Barr, several books about the Enneagram, as well as Amy Peerler’s Gender of Jesus book, the Revoice Conference, the Evolving Faith Conference, J and JW, and that person who wrote some terrible novel about the woman who probably married Jesus, among other topics like gaslighting, cancel culture, the death of pets, Santa Claus, Hallmark and so much more.
Which is to say, I know there are some exvangelical/deconstructionist books I’ve missed. I haven’t read Sarah Bessey or Jeff Chu, and I didn’t read Greg Cole’s book, though I did a “deep dive” as it were, into Spiritual Friendship. But the fact remains that they fall into a recognizable pattern, with varying degrees of success—the “I’ve been deeply injured by Christian teaching” meme.
As a connoisseur of the genre, I would say the standard bearer remains Rachel Held Evans. Everyone has only been copying her from the beginning, though without the breezy writing, the humor, or the wit. She made the road down which everyone travels—the questioning about science and theology upon first encountering “nice” evolutionists, the sense of betrayal when meeting “nice” gay people, the upset feelings with family, friends, and pastors who won’t change their theology, and finally, the glorious discovery that it’s actually fine to leave and become an Episcopalian because God is there too, only without abusive evangelicalism and all its attendant baggage.
I have come, in my own quiet way, to label this brand of deconstructing the “I Said…” motif. A few months ago, when I was listening to Sheila Wray Gregoire explain what was wrong with a prominent, wise, gentle, and eminently reliable Christian teacher on the subject of marriage, she said that she had “told him” what he was doing wrong, and how he was in error. “I said…” she said, dragging out the word “said,” but he keeps saying the same thing. She was exasperated, deeply annoyed, at the end of her tether. Here she had gone to all this trouble to correct this person, and he refused to be corrected. He continued using whatever information in his teaching that Wray Gregoire disagreed with so vehemently.
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