“To me, it meant there was no God,” Muriel said, before going on to explain that, as an absolutist, she felt that if anything the church taught wasn’t true, then nothing the church taught was true. I see this logic among many of my interviewees when they first begin to question the church’s teachings. They hold on to the good/bad binary they were taught growing up; they just swap everything around on it. In their new reverse binary, evangelicalism goes from good to bad; the secular world goes from bad to good; sex outside of marriage goes from bad to good; abstinence goes from good to bad.
