White American Christianity’s Box Canyon

Since my book was released in September 2024, I have received three letters in response: two from relatives, and one from a former pastor.

Today I want to talk about the one from my former pastor.

I won’t address everything my pastor said, but I did want to talk about one aspect of what he wrote about in light of recent events here in the US. He wrote that I “may have ended up - podcaster, influencer, author - in a box canyon.” He continued, writing that“being in a role can be like golden handcuffs because, once we have staked out a territory, we will be seen as a traitor for ever leaving it behind.” He wrote later that “there will always been religion’s “cultured despisers,” but my sense is that the exvangelical is moving beyond its potency and into the realm of a grievance subgroup that will become consolidated into the ever-present network of groups against rather than persuasive promoters of something you are for.”

For what it’s worth, that is a salient critique, not just of exvangelicals, but also of our tendency to ascribe unchangeable roles onto people, and people are highly prone to change. We do this with the people we follow online, with celebrities, with our loved ones, and with our selves.

But what this critique does not address is why exvangelicals have grievances to begin with. Those grievances are the very things I covered in detail in my book and in nearly 10 years of podcasting: an entrenched commitment by denomination after denomination, group after group, leader after leader to resist change, to learn, to adapt. To acknowledge white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and jingoistic nationalism as the harmful social sins they are and repent of them and open the doors of their faith wider.

This is a form of faith practiced by millions of Christians and believers and non-believers of all stripes every day, but not by American evangelicals. Leaders within the evangelical church and evangelical public today at best deny that these were major issues that require reckoning & reparation, and at worst celebrate them as in accordance with the gospel.

Evangelicals have insisted that their beliefs are perfect, unchangeable and relevant for all time, that the order of things they have in their mind is simply the way the world should work for everyone, even if the testimony of fellow people speaks again and again to how it isn’t working for them. Their actions over the decades insist that some people’s misery is just the price of their “sin” and should be expected in a fallen, yet-to-be-redeemed world. This stance has been the fundamentalist inheritance of every living American evangelical, as evidenced by the fact that Tillich wrote in the 1950s that: the theological truth of yesterday is defended as an unchangeable message against the theological truth of today and tomorrow…. It elevates something finite and transitory to infinite and eternal validity…and it makes its adherents fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware.”

If an exvangelical is anything at all, it is someone raised in evangelicalism who is willing to do at least a modicum of shadow work. By denying the realities of white supremacy and all the other prejudices mentioned, American evangelicals deny that they even cast a shadow at all, and insist that all the darkness lives only in the individual human heart.

This has been the evangelical orientation for so long that Renn Padilla addressed it at the famous International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne in 1974, as Melani McAlister wrote in The Kingdom of God Has No Borders:

The audience was not surprised, then, to hear Padilla lecture his fellow participants at Lausanne on the sins of the evangelical church, and on its failure—their own failure—to take seriously Jesus’s call to social action. What was remarkable was the controlled fury emanating from the stage. Padilla (see figure 5.1) challenged the room to remember that Jesus had demanded that his followers confront the “darkness of the world.” But evangelicals, he pronounced, had focused so long on individual sin that they had forgotten that darkness included materialism, racism, class division, political abuses, and, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr, “collective egotism.”

So let us return to the box canyon of white American Christianity and ask: who led us into it? And who supplied us tools utterly unsuitable to the task of escaping it? What has over a hundred years of white American evangelical thought and community really given us? Their political dominance allows them to deflect from developing any moral humility, or even awareness of their own sins, but ordinary people notice.

I have spent so much of the last decade staring headlong at the political and religious sins of the evangelical church, and my heart has broken again and again, with anger and grief for those hurt and understanding for those who commit harm - because I could have been them, if life took had taken other turns, and I make no moral claim to perfection or righteousness today.

But I want to move on from that grief with an open heart, and a mind turned toward other solutions and sources of wisdom. I do not want to carry a bruised ego or hurt feelings forward anymore. I just want to move forward.

Here in 2026, we live in a political reality that American evangelicals helped to fashion. That is not a compliment. The ruling GOP has no moral, legal, or ethical standing aside from their constant appeal to abject, absolute political power that is nowhere near the supposed American ideal of democracy. We are poorer, sicker, and have less personal liberty, less freedoms of speech and expression. We do not welcome the stranger; instead, ICE abducts them and too many people, including children, die in custody.

People see the evangelical leaders saying that empathy is toxic, as if love your neighbor as yourself was not a core teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, yoked directly to the commandment to love God.

They see the evangelical-coded propaganda of an authoritarian regime, even as they see the witness of Catholic priests being shot with pepper spray in Chicago and Episcopal bishops instruct their pastors to prepare their wills and put their bodies on the line, amid so many other acts of faithfulness and care that do not reach the headlines we are able to discuss and link to.

People see the indifference to the revelations of the Epstein Files and the suffering of children, compounded by well over a decade of scandals within evangelical denominations.

People see the lack of condemnation of Trump’s racism, the utter lack of witness, of decency, of love.

They see the ascent of Doug Wilson, a slavery apologist whose church has had several credible allegations of abuse and whose survivors have spoken and continue to publicly, be invited to the Pentagon.

They see it all.

And so we individually grieve and rage, and we search for new tools to escape our box canyon. This is all done imperfectly, often with minimal resources, and on a much longer timescale than most people (including me) would prefer. Coordination and community have not exactly been easy to replicate, and the fact that most conversation occurs on the disembodied, fractured, and mediated social internet does not help matters.

But those who’ve left their churches are not as much a minority as we seem. The estimated number of exvangelicals in the US alone outnumber every major Protestant denomination. There are approximately 15 million exvangelicals in the United States, while there are 12 million Southern Baptists. Religiosity itself in the United States has plummeted over the last decade, and trust in clergy is at an all-time low. That represents quite the opportunity to pursue new paths, some of which will involve the church, and some of which will be done without them.

So that is where I am turning my attention to now: discovering new tools to build a different sort of future than the one being forced upon us. Exploring ways to escape the box canyon. Reading widely, acting locally, and living out what I am for. I am for greater justice, greater freedom, greater love. And given the path that most evangelical leaders have chosen, those are not things anyone will find within evangelicalism.