✍🏻 Some Personal News 📖

I'm writing a book!

Well, the word is out: I am in the process of writing a book for Convergent!

Blake Chastain @brchastain

✍🏻 SOME PERSONAL NEWS 📖 I’m writing a book about #exvangelical, the long line of leavers who’ve led the way before, and the end of white evangelical hegemony for @ConvergentBooks!

The book will demonstrate how the explosion of exvangelical/post-evangelical content and perspectives in the last 5 years is part of a longer history of people leaving white evangelicalism, why new technologies like social media have been both instrumental and inflammatory, and how a post-Trump, post-Jan 6th environment demands the end of white evangelical hegemony.

I’m extremely grateful to Convergent for helping me make this project a reality. Publishing a book has been a lifelong dream, and a privilege I do not take for granted.

People have been leaving white evangelicalism for years—decades, even. Today’s exvangelicals/post-evangelicals/post-Christians come from a long line of leavers.

¹

What feels different about this moment is the access we have to one another, and the ability to share our stories and find communities of people who relate to our experience.

At the same time, these personal experiences do not happen in a vacuum. Especially here in the US, we are embedded in social structures and cultural norms that are dictated by white evangelicalism and other factions of the Christian nationalist religious right. Today’s white evangelical institutions & their apologists present themselves as the direct recipients of an eternal and immutable gospel, but this account is fictional, ahistorical, and prejudicial. The modern evangelical ‘bubble’ has been built up for well over a century, expanding and encroaching upon more and more of people’s lives, allowing them to live an alternative lifestyle wholly separate from the rest of society.

That bubble has burst, in large part because of the groundswell of people talking publicly about their lives in ways that cannot be easily countered.

Those who left evangelicalism are graduates, not drop-outs as Caitlin Stout said so beautifully.

Caitlin J. Stout @CaitlinJStout

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 drop-outs; they’re graduates.

These are early days. We’re just now seeing the first fruits of an Exvangelical Dispersal, as people form new communities or find existing ones online and elsewhere, and explore more expansive visions of identity, society, and religion.

This historical moment is precarious yet full of potential. I’m grateful for the opportunity to take part in that conversation.

1. This turn of phrase itself is from an old Caedmon’s Call song.