Evangelicals and the Limits of Evangelical Empathy
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She writes of her own experience where she turned against evangelicals.
Here are the critical paragraphs to think about.
And this will bring me to the ongoing evangelical moral panic over exvangelicals, those who have left the conservative, mostly white evangelical Protestantism we grew up with for more humane religion or spirituality, or, as in my case, for no religion at all. As Blake Chastain, a podcaster and the creator of the popular #exvangelical hashtag, recently noted, anecdotal experience in online exvangelical communities strongly suggests that those who leave the faith are, more often than not, precisely those who took it the most seriously. In many cases, we tried to push for positive change from inside but eventually realized that was a dead end.
Evangelicals are, as a rule, unwilling to face those facts. Most evangelical responses to exvangelicals are petty and dismissive, invoking simplistic tropes that paint us as intellectually unserious, “angry,” and motivated primarily by all that sweet, sweet “sexual sin.” As Chastain points out, on a recent episode of Mike Cosper’s “The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill” podcast, a Baylor University professor falsely claimed that exvangelicals point to marginal experiences rather than systemic issues. He also asserted that exvangelicals discussing our concerns in public “corrupts” our processing. Of course, that is precisely the sort of attitude that allows all kinds of abuse to proliferate in evangelical communities and institutions. Survivors coming forward and then finding and supporting each other is how rot gets exposed.
At the end of the day, evangelicalism is a type of Christian fundamentalism. And any fundamentalist faith is a type of totalizing ideology, and thus destructive of human empathy and dangerous for democracy. The expectation of total submission to the strictures of the faith makes empathy for outsiders — and especially for former insiders — a threatening thing, and anything that a fundamentalist community insists is “the will of God” is something on which its members will brook no compromise in the political arena.