đ±Discourse Whiplash & Social Media
When the conversation shifts and I canât keep up.
Last week, I published another RNS piece that I shared here, called âEvangelicals must stop consulting themselves for guidance.â In that vein, I was trying (as I have before) to contextualize the current push from elite evangelicals to obscure just how deeply troubling the current state of evangelicalism is - and how they have rejected people who tried to reform their movement from within many times before.
At the same time, itâs been difficult to situate the current State of Discourse surrounding âdeconstruction,â the current catch-all evangelical bogeyman. The Gospel Coalition has published an article saying it shouldnât âbe redeemed.â Christianity Todayâs current cover story addresses the subject (albeit without talking to anyone; it is an opinion piece). Skilletâs singer wants to âwage warâ on it.
Thereâs also an endless conversation happening about whether âexvangelicalâ is a useful term to describe where one is personally. And all of these various things jumble into one single timeline, talking about very different thingsâor at the very least, the same thing but with very different lenses.
Itâs a lot to take in, and I donât always process it well. I feel my anxiety tighten my chest, I feel my codependent tendencies kick in, I feel the tension build in my shoulders. I feel my CNS become enmeshed in the words and feelings of others. And itâs then that I come back to the passage I quoted and sketched out above.
Because while I intellectually know my own intentions and can accept responsibility for my own role in harm & being harmed (I am reading adrienne marie brownâs We Will Not Cancel Us right now, which is where I learned this language and framing)âŠ
âŠand while I know that #exvangelical as a hashtag has an SEO useâŠ
âŠand âexvangelicalâ is valuable in creating what Corinna Laughlin calls âcounter-publicsâ to âcombatâ evangelical rhetoric (to use General John Skilletâs metaphor)âŠ
âŠand I believe âexvangelicalâ as an identity has limitsâŠ
âŠand I think we need to get better at delineating between cultures, followings, and communities-all of which have different purposesâŠ
âŠthatâs impossible to get across in any single tweet or interaction. Itâs simply too much to take in simultaneously, mentally or emotionally. Especially at the speed of twitter.
Reading through some of my weekend posts, I can see how this played out within my own posts to twitter. First I was responding to elite evangelicals:
Later, I was trying to respond to evangelical characterizations of âdeconstruction:â
Then I was trying to frame why, if this is supposedly a âwar,â then it is incredibly asymmetrical:
Then I stumbled across a twitter conversation about folks who were formerly evangelical but donât relate to or use âexvangelical,â and went deep into my feels:
Then I struggled with how difficult it is to talk about something as massive as the impact of evangelicalism:
Then I realized I should recognize when to log off. And thatâs ok.
Then I made the sketch above.
These are the sorts of things I am processing as I continue to work on my book and participte in what danah boyd calls ânetworked publics.â But part of doing so, especially in a point in time where many of us are locally lonely, involves knowing when to step away from these networked publics.
Itâs something Iâm still learning, at least partially, in publicâas these tweets demonstrate.
How do you manage your emotions, expectations, and interactions? Let me know in the Discord or in the comments.
I am late to this discussion,but wanted to relate that your work and honest sharing is appreciated. I am a boomer and struggle just to understand. I did manage to self pub my deconstruction story with paid help as to the technology. Hope u donât if I mention hereâŠgonna have to assume youâll forgive it. âsomething to sayâ by LeeAnn Summerfield (Amazon). I feel that the whole relevance and only great meaning of my life is contained in this painful story. Only in the last two years have I discovered that I am not alone
Such good thoughts today. Many thanks. Exvangelical is the concept and new identity that allowed many of us to begin to imagine a new future for ourselves.
Pondering today's entry... Did we ever imagine, when in, the confused, convoluted and weirdly diabolical system that is today's evangelical universe? The thrashing push-back and defensive posture verify that it is now a wholly branded political, social and economic system so void of morality or empathy that it spends an inordinate amount of its effort putting down perceived "enemies" and re-defining those who have left as unqualified, bitter critics. It ghosts the rest as insignificant while also somehow being horrible. Meanwhile, it has the proverbial tiger by the tail as it defends, self-promotes and maintains thought dominance among followers increasingly solidified through an amorphous social media identity politically weirder and more ridiculous than the tiny John Birch obsessed Pentecostal church of my evangelically saturated childhood.
How do we now maintain our sanity, our balance? We are learning to take our happiness in small increments--a morning routine, the little life choices no one can judge but comprise who we really are, in loving our animals and kindred humans, soaking in great liberating thoughts and music, trying to manage anxiety--and we realize how lucky we are. We found the way to finally release the clamp on the brain that forced thought conformity and the constant need to be right. Remember when we always knew we were right. How incredible to finally be free of that.
Having left all social media (because old; one can digitally obliterate themself, disappear, and have no one be at all concerned) I still keep an eye on it through a myriad of articles and newsletters, partly because most of my extended family is still in and, like most of us, I still know more about it than they. I push back with reason every chance I get, and there are interactions when I think it is making a difference individually. At least it is personally satisfying.
I sometime wonder where in all this mess I would be if my income still depended on it. I wonder how many feel they can't get out since they don't want to risk losing their life, identity and every relationship and connection they have in their lives. I do know that when I lay down at night that I am deeply serene and sometimes truly happy. Yes, far happier than I ever felt in the troubled decades of my evangelical self. Enough.
Please take care, and live well. You are appreciated.