Recent appearances online
Highlighting recent interviews about Exvangelical & Beyond
It’s been almost two weeks since the release of Exvangelical & Beyond, and I’m grateful that I’ve had an opportunity to talk to several podcasters and journalists about the book.
I’ve been battling a cold for the last several days, so I haven’t been able to sit down and write here until now. While not back at 💯, I’m finally able to at least collect my thoughts and share out some exciting conversations I’ve had about the book.
Also! If you’ve picked up the book and read it in the last couple of weeks, please give it a review on StoryGraph/Goodreads/Amazon/etc. Kay certainly did.
And just a reminder, because I haven’t mentioned it in a while, if you do want to support my work directly you can upgrade to a paid subscription (for reference, I have 52 paid subscribers at the moment, which is about 1.2% of my readership here). I donate 25% of net revenue from those subscriptions. You can read all about that here.
My interview in Salon
To start the week, Salon ran an interview with me. I was interviewed by Amanda Marcotte, who does great pieces (including this piece from March on tradwife content online that I contributed comments for).
Let's start with the most basic question: Why write about ex-evangelicals, and why at this point?
The last eight or 10 years have illustrated longer-term issues within American Christianity. One outcome is that many people are disaffiliating from their churches, their belief systems, and their communities. In particular, people are leaving white evangelicalism, due to the inherently political nature of those spaces. Exvangelicalism isn't a complete belief system, like evangelicalism is. In many ways, though, it's a mirror of it and is in dialogue with evangelicalism. People who use the term "exvangelical" or "ex-evangelical" to describe themselves had a formative experience within evangelicalism. They no longer identify with that belief or belong to those communities.
The thing that is distinct over the last decade or so is the maturation of social media. Far more people can share their individual experiences than ever before. Whereas in the past, to tell a story of deconstruction or de-conversion you had to write a book. Now you can start an Instagram page, a TikTok page, a podcast, or a YouTube channel.
What I hope to do with my book is show a history of people both trying to reform evangelicalism from within and people who have not been able to do that and have had to leave. They're our predecessors to today's online ex-evangelical movement.
Podcast: A Tiny Revolution with Kevin Garcia
I had the pleasure of re-joining my friend Kevin Garcia on their show, A Tiny Revolution. I always love talking to them and I hope you enjoy this show.
Podcast: Veterans of Culture Wars
I also really enjoyed going back on Veterans of Culture Wars. This was a bit of a follow-up episode, after having first gone on the show three years ago to talk to Zach & Dave. When I went on there last time, David still identified as evangelical; he now uses the term ‘post-evangelical’ - which should be familiar to anyone who subscribes here.
Podcast: Dangerous Dogma
I also had the pleasure of joining
who publishes the excellent newsletter here on Substack on their podcast, Dangerous Dogma. We talked about reckoning with the full heritage of our faiths of origin and much more.Podcast/YouTube: A People’s Theology
To round out the recent interviews, I spoke to Mason Mennenga, Twitter all-star and thorn in the side of all theobro reply-guys. We talked about how tenets of evangelical theology that are presented as eternal and immutable are in fact rather novel, and much more.
I’ve got more in store for this month and the rest of the year, including other content that isn’t book-related, but I’m in the thick of promotion at the moment.
See you soon.