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This is evangelicalism today: the civil religion of white fear, of brittle ego, of sameness that cannot abide any difference whatsoever. It is predicated on the cruel optimism of denial: Christianity continues to believe its own underdog hype even as it achieved world dominance.
Where, precisely, is the persecution white evangelicals claim? Where lies their suffering?
They aren’t isolated from each other. They are united in their hatred, in their purported faith, in their purpose to make their country great again.
Millennials have left Christianity in record numbers—church attendance in this country is at an all-time low. We are the most LGBTQ+-identified and least religious adult generation in American history, or at least, we will be until Gen Z grows up. Millennials attend fewer religious services, pray less, and believe in God with less “absolute certainty” than Gen X, Baby Boomers, or the Silent Generation.
Millennials have left the church, but we are still seeking spirituality. What are our options when the secular doesn’t always feel sufficient but the traditionally religious doesn’t feel safe?
forms of spiritual expression that embrace us, that validate our identities, and that offer opportunities for connection without condemnation.
In spite of having different backgrounds—some from cults, some LDS (Mormon), some ex–evangelical Christian (like myself), some ex-Catholic, some ex-Muslim—everyone at the picnic table shares similar traumas around sexual purity, rigid gender roles, authority and authoritarianism, and literal interpretations of religious texts. We’re all wounded, bitter, searching, healing.
Spirituality is a mundane, integrated way of living.
The church is broken. It cannot be fixed from the inside. Evangelicalism is rotten, shot through to the core with the kind of infectious hatred that cannot be undone one person at a time. The institution is designed to work against women, against queers, against anyone who isn’t white, against anyone who wakes up while still plugged in; it’s designed to press on us until we are crushed within it, unrecognizable to ourselves.
Black trans foremother Marsha P. Johnson, “There is no Pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”
Coming out and leaving the church was a death: of an identity, a worldview, everything I thought I had known about myself. Like so many queer people before me, I lost friendships, family, community.
