Evangelicalism’s Favorite Pastime (2024)

Megan Basham, a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire, has a new book out called Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.

has a post describing & refuting its thesis, linked below, but per Du Mez “[t]he book purports to show how “Big Eva”—institutional evangelicalism—sold out to the Left for progressive $ and mainstream respect.”

Du Mez’s post is, understandably, about the factual errors found in Basham’s book. I want to focus on the rhetoric—because it isn’t even remotely new.

For decades, evangelicals have sought to isolate and alienate those within their midst who don’t hold to the dominant conservative view. Tim Keller did it in his 2017 piece in The New Yorker. Michael Gerson did something similar in 2018 in the pages of The Atlantic.

Hell, Isaac Sharp wrote an entire book about the phenomenon called The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist, and Gay Christians--And the Movement That Pushed Them Out.

In my book, which comes out in just over a month, I draw upon the work of Sharp & Du Mez and others to show the lengths to which “Big Eva” has resisted reform—because as I’ve said for years, it does not want to reform.

Who is or isn’t “evangelical” is no longer a pressing concern for me. (This is The Post-Evangelical Post, after all, and I host the Exvangelical podcast.) But I do tire of these games.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re tired of them, too.

Regardless of whether or not you’re currently involved in evangelical churches and circles, the loudest and most powerful voices within white American evangelicalism have consistently been the conservative ones. They carry a perennial chip on their shoulder & an unearned persecution complex (they have dominated American politics for my entire millennial lifetime), and they routinely demonize their opponents within and without. Stray from whatever the orthodoxy-du jour is, and be punished. (Ask Richard Cizik. Or Russell Moore. Or Beth Moore. Or Tom Skinner. Or Rob Bell. Or any of the queer Christian artists—Trey Pearson, Jennifer Knapp, Ray Boltz, Marsha Stevens-Pino, and many more.)

It’s time we got wise to this tactic.

Let me share a modern parable based in videogames, not agriculture.

In college, I would sometimes play Madden with friends in our dorm, even though I was terrible at it. I didn’t know much about football playcalling, and would experiment with all sorts of defensive formations. One time, a friend knew this about me, and he ran the same option offense play and scored multiple times—often passing to the same receiver who ran a post route that exploited my defensive weakness.

I finally got wise to it, and learned to contain his QB before the option offense could play out. But I was still down several touchdowns, because it took me so long to realize that my defenses weren’t working.

Reader, we are already down several touchdowns and it feels like a lot of us have yet to get wise. It’s time we did.

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A good TikTok

I really appreciated this 2-part series on about the common traits between Leftist & Fundamentalist cultures. It’s both self-critical & self-reflective. This is vulnerable work to do in public.