Leaving Evangelicalism

Abstract

Exiting from a religious community, like joining, entails more than just intellectual recalibration or tinkering with belief. It is, rather, an overhaul of one’s previous conception of self, a re-creation of one’s way of being in the world. For this reason, the transition out of any religious community—and notably evangelicalism—is rarely smooth. For example, James Baldwin, the famed American writer (1924–1987), described his exit from evangelicalism as a “pulverisation of my fortress.” John Ruskin (1819–1900), leading English social thinker of the Victorian era, referred to his deconversion as a “crash” (Hempton 2008). Numerous “obstacles”—theological, psychological, and relational—rise up and block the way. From the perspective of the evangelical community, these “obstacles” are more accurately described as methods of identity preservation. These are intentionally cultivated ways of being, intended to render certain evangelical beliefs and practices steadfast, to establish the faithful in their Christian identity. In other words, the evangelical identity, like all identities, is established through a repertoire of repeated, ritualised performances, in the sense given the terms “identity” and “performativitity” by American Philosopher Judith Butler (1956–) in Gender Trouble, her groundbreaking work in 1990. Identity, in her terms, is a sense of self that congeals over time through performance of a series of socially prescribed bodily practices that transpire within the framework of a particular social unit with its unique codes and compulsions. In my fieldwork on evangelicals who leave the fold (from 2007–2017), particularly at a unique American (in the state of Oregon) school run by renegade post-evangelical Christians called the Oregon Extension (established in 1975–), I have documented the manner in which evangelical deconversion entails not only a relinquishment of the performative practices of evangelicalism, but also, simultaneously, the cultivation of performative strategies by which one signifies to self and other that a new identity has been assumed. In fact, my field work convinces me of the importance of defining conversion and deconversion in such Butlerian terms.