A6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021
feelings about his church’s plan
to become an LGBTQ-affirming
church. But coming here and
hearing from author and speak-
er Matthew Vines, who works
with churches that want to be-
come more inclusive, gave him
more confidence to make the
change.
On the second day of the
gathering, Houston pastor Sean
Palmer, who is Black and he ads a
predominantly White congrega-
tion, led a group of about 20
about how White people can
speak up for racial justice.
“White people are fragile,”
Palmer told the group. “I’m like,
‘Is that trauma, or did someone
hurt your feelings?’ ”
Palmer said what post-evan-
gelicals could work on was pro-
ducing a corporate liturgy for
repentance and forgiveness for
the sin of racism.
“A lot of places in society will
make you eat it for lunch if you
confess to racism,” he said.
“Church is the place you can
confess and find forgiveness.”A collective future
Toward the end of the first day,
the leaders huddled over round-
tables and discussed whether a
similar gathering could take
place next yea r. With more mar-
keting and sponsorships, they
knew it could draw an even
bigger crowd and become even
more collectively powerful. But
with more people and more mon-
ey involved, some people fear it
could adopt the same celebrity
and consumer cultures these
leaders want to avoid.
Donna Burkland, who grew
up in evangelical churches in
Orange County, Calif., told the
group that she thought the word
“evangelical,” even if it were
used as simply part of the term
“post-evangelical,” could be a
trigger word for some people.
She was worried that “post-
evangelical” could simply be-
come a copy-paste version of
evangelicalism.
People shouldn’t rush to throw
everything out and start all over,
argued Aaron Bailey, whose net-
work LaunchPad helps more lib-
eral churches get off the ground.
“But you don’t want a copy-paste
version of evangelical and then
tweak it to make it slightly less
evil either,” he said.
Tommy Garvin, a l ife coach
based in Charlotte whose work
includes “spiritual deconstruc-
tion and reconstruction,” asked
why people had any attachment
to the term “evangelical” in the
first place. Garvin, who uses the
pronouns they/he, avoids labels
because they paper over self-con-
tradi ctions.
David Roberts, who said he
was kicked out of his church
when he decided to become LG-
BTQ affirming, suggested post-
evangelicals can move forward
by identifying and drawing from
the best elements of the evangeli-
cal movement.
“There’s something useful
about having a common lan-
guage,” said Roberts, now a pas-
tor at Watershed Charlotte
Church. “Maybe there are things
worth mining from the histor y.”
[email protected]said. “We’re always evolving, al-
ways changing.”
The two biggest issues that
came up in several conversations
were LGBTQ inclusion and racial
justice and how those topics have
led to their members decon-
structing, or reevaluating, their
faith.
Angela Logan, who is Black
and grew up in a predominantly
Black church tradition, said she
had to square her Church of God
upbringing with her Catholic
education and said s he’s been
deconstructing her faith her
whole life.
“To hear people here talk
about deconstruction recently, I
think, that wasn’t your child-
hood?” she said.
She began attending South
Bend City Church in 2016, short-
ly before it decided to become
LGBTQ affirming. Now, she said,
she couldn’t go back to a n on-af-
firming church even as her cur-
rent one remains predominantly
White.
“It would feel like a betrayal to
gay friends,” she said. “I want to
be an ally for people in a space
they couldn’t fit in.”
Many religious Americans are
becoming more accepting of LG-
BTQ people, according to re-
search by Denison University
political scientist Paul Djupe,
who found that while 90 percent
of evangelicals believed that
their house of worship forbade
homosexuality in 2007, that
dropped to 65 percent in 2020.
One pastor, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to pro-
tect his job, said he had mixedsince then are far less likely to be
regular churchgoers, according
to Pew’s Greg Smith.
Many who have dropped the
label evangelical go in different
directions: they might become
mainline Protestant or Catholic,
or th ey might leave the Christian
faith entirely. A m ovement called
“exvangelicals” that started as a
hashtag in 2016 captured the
experiences of thousands of peo-
ple who have le ft evangelicalism.
The idea to create an orga-
nized group of “post-evangeli-
cals” for people who remain in
the Protestant tradition has been
raised before, though it has nev-
er taken off in any formal way. In
the early 2000s, many evangeli-
cals joined the emerging church
movement, which challenged
traditional Christian under-
standings of faith. It has mostly
faded from the landscape, but
still influences many pastors to-
day.
David Moses Perez, who left
the evangelical tradition after
seve ral decades, said his experi-
ence didn’t take place after
“church trauma,” like many oth-
ers who had come to South Bend
who may have been forced out of
their churches. His “deconstruc-
tion journey” happened when he
reexamined his own theology
while reading emerging church
authors like Brian McLaren and
Rob Bell.
When his Spero Dei Church in
Nashville started in 2018, he
decided against crafting a state-
ment of faith and instead shares
five values that aren’t concrete.
“It’s pretty d--- messy,” PerezDefining ‘evangelical’
Exit polls in previous elections
have shown that White evangeli-
cals have made up about a quar-
ter of those who voted, making
them a valuable voting bloc, but
it wasn’t until recent decades
that the evangelical movement
has been strongly associated
with conservative political be-
liefs.
The word “evangelical” comes
from a Greek word that means
“good news,” and historically the
word is connected to famous
preachers like Billy Graham,
Jonathan Edwards, George
Whitefield and their followers.
Graham’s break with fundamen-
talist leaders in the mid-20th
century led most evangelicals
somewhere between hard-right
fundamentalism and more liber-
al mainline Protestantism.
Many academics of evangeli-
calism have tried to summarize
evangelical beliefs as those who
share belief in the authority of
the Bible, belief in Jesus as
humans’ only savior and an em-
phasis in sharing the gospel. But
there are no agreed upon defini-
tions or set of rules for the label
“evangelical.”
Today, they tend to attend
church and pray at higher rates
than most other Americans,
though the kind of person who
calls themselves an evangelical
has shifted, according to a recent
Pew Research Center analysis.
There has been no large-scale
exodus from the evangelical
movement since Trump’s 2016
election, but those who have
adopted the term evangelicalvalues, and voting Republican is
considered the Christian thing to
do.
Some of the leaders left the
evangelical tradition decades
ago but decided not to find a
home in a more liberal, main-
line Protestant church where
they might find shared beliefs
and institutional support.
Many of these leaders appreci-
ate the nondenominational
structure, which gives them
more freedom to create their
own structures and rules, so
some of these leaders, like Tex-
as-based pastor Zach Lambert,
have planted, or built, their own
churches.
But getting funding to start
these churches was a c ommon
complaint. Recently, Lambert,
who leads Restore Austin
Church, said that when he hired
a Black female pastor, two people
told him that they wouldn’t give
him funding because she was a
woman. Another said they
wouldn’t give funding because
she was Black and, they feared,
adhered to Black liberation the-
ology, a perspective considered
too liberal for many White evan-
gelicals.
Lambert said that he stopped
referring to himself as an evan-
gelical in the past few years
because it does more harm than
good in his more liberal city of
Austin.
“I don’t want people to know
that I’m a pastor until two drinks
in,” he said. “The word ‘evangeli-
cal’ does nothing for me. It’s only
negative. Trump was the last
straw.”said Mike Goldsworthy, a Califor-
nia-based ordained minister who
organized the gathering.
As the pastors traded stories,
they quickly found shared ex-
periences. They lamented their
conservative evangelical parents
who watch Fox News, as well as
their peers who had reexamined
their beliefs so much that they
lost their faith entirely. They
skewed younger, many in their
30s with tattoos covering their
arms.
Most of the leaders held some
belief in Jesus and the idea that
people gathering in churches is
still a good idea. Many want their
churches to be affirming, mean-
ing that they would perform
same-sex weddings and include
LGBTQ people in leadership and
membership. They preferred cu-
riosity over certainty, inclusion
over exclusion.
They also vocally oppose racial
injustice and Trump. And they
want their churches to be part of
solutions to building or rebuild-
ing their local communities.
(South Bend City Church, where
they met, had purchased and
renovated a s ection of a histori-
cal Studebaker factory as part of
a local effort to revitalize the
area.)
They looked to each other to
ask, What could it look like to
organize as “post-evangelicals?”
They had at least one thing in
common: They were all on some
journey of deconstruction, the
process of reexamining their
long-held beliefs, and they want-
ed to participate in reconstruc-
tion and the building up of
something new.
Amy Mikal, who was once a
pastor at Chicago-based mega-
church Willow Creek, is one of
those leaders. She said that her
new church, called A Restoration
Church, is avoiding megachurch
strategies such as taking pictures
from the ceiling to count attend-
ance. She’s encouraging her con-
gregants to reconsider God with
male pronouns. And as a church,
they’re studying through the Bi-
ble to see what they think collec-
tively.
“The hardest part is that we
were taught to take the Bible
literally,” Mikal said. “We want to
be a place that asks more ques-
tions than provides answers.”
‘Our job is to create the
conversation’
Over the past several dec-
ades, the evangelical movement
has produced celebrity preach-
ers and teachers with churches
that attract thousands of peo-
ple to their services. But most
of the leaders gathered here
didn’t have massive social me-
dia followings, podcasts or
books to sell. Their discussions
were led by Scott Erickson, an
Austin-based artist, and Brit
Barron, a Black-Mexican lesbi-
an who worked for a mega-
church in California at 26 be-
fore she began reexamining her
beliefs.
As she jumped on the church
stage as the group’s “spiritual
guide,” Barron joked about pos-
sibly needing a fog machine,
like the ones used in many
evangelical megachurches. She
asked the gathered leaders
whether it was necessary to
believe in a literal resurrection
of Jesus Christ, a question that
would make most evangelicals
deeply uncomfortable because
it is generally seen as a c ore
belief of the Christian faith. In
this room, no one walked out,
but no one cheered either. The
pastors just listened.
“We can come to the table
knowing that we are good, that
we have divinity in us,” Barron
said as they were about to take
Communion together.
During an interview, Barron
said she didn’t know what a
post-evangelical movement
could look like.
“Should there be alignment on
anything? H--- if I know,” she
said. “Our job is to create the
conversation. If someone opens
up and says, ‘I don’t know if any
of this is real,’ then we’re doing
our job.”
Barron began reexamining
her faith after she picked up a
book by the late author Rachel
Held Evans and in 2016 came out
as a lesbian, prompting her to
leave her church. Now, she said,
she wants people to foc us less on
“here’s what the church did to
me” and more what the church
could become.
“You shouldn’t have to believe
anything in particular to be a
part of this group,” she said,
before pausing to reconsider.
“Well, if you’re racist and ho-
mophobic, you might be uncom-
fortable.”
Most of the pastors gathered
here come from worlds where
there is no hierarchy, n o pope, no
single authority. But for most, it
was a p lace where the Bible and
sharing about Jesus were core
EVANGELICALS FROM A
After Trump, liberal evangelicals reexamine their paths
PHOTOS BY JOSHUA LOTT/THE WASHINGTON POST
Attendees participate in a roundtable discussion during the two-day Post Evangelical Pastor & L eader Gathering in South Bend, Ind., on Oc t. 12.Many “post-evangelical” pastors aren’t sure what exactly the movement should look like. Brit Barron, left, wants people to focus less on
“here’s what the church did to me” and more on its future. David Moses Perez, top right, has five values, instead of a statement of faith, for
his Nashville church. Sean Palmer. bottom right, suggested a corporate liturgy for repentance and forgiveness for the sin of racism.