By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter.
Charles Cha and I joke that we were evangelical Christians before it was cool.
In the early 90’s, we attended a bible study for high school students sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. It was basically a training camp for evangelizing students, teachers, administrators and coaches at our public-school campus in Orange County, California.
During our junior year, Charles and I invited friends to join us in Mr. Leander’s classroom during lunch so we could get them saved. We utilized a tract called “The Four Spiritual Laws,” which was created by Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright back in the 60’s.
Charles had the whole thing memorized.
He used the whiteboard to scrawl out bible verses from the Book of Romans.
He drew images to show how our sin will send us straight to hell – and also how God’s grace builds a bridge to heaven for those who make a decision for Christ, whose death on the cross makes us clean.
None of our friends bought that bridge.
Charles went to a very conservative Korean church in Irvine with his family. He graduated first in our class of seven-hundred-something students and then attended UC Berkeley where his evangelical faith was methodically dismantled by course syllabi and the eccentrics on Telegraph Ave.
Charles was instrumental in guiding me out of the cult of the white American Jesus, but over the past decade, we’ve watched friends on our Facebook feed – friends who had zero interest in faith when we were in high school – now getting baptized into the Way, the Truth and the Life.
All in the name of Jesus Christ – and Donald Trump.
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I fled the evangelical fold a dozen years before the cult of the white Jesus jettisoned Trump into the White House. I cut ties because I was no longer compelled by a whole host of its theological and political convictions.
The authoritarian He-God on the throne.
The second-class status of women and LGBTQA+ people.
The bold claim that the bible is error-free and The Absolute Truth.
The condemnation of non-Christians – and the desperate need to save them from their “sin.”
The unquestioned allegiance to America and Israel.
The label “evangelical” comes from a Greek word that pops up all over the Christian scriptures. It means “gospel” or “good news” – and the first Christians used it to subvert the fake good news promoted by the Roman empire.
I came to see that the message of American evangelical Christianity is not good news for the vast majority of people on our planet, particularly those persevering the violent imperial policies of America – a so-called “Christian nation.”
I was bound to this bad news from the time I was ten until I was thirty.
Many of my fellow former evangelicals believe that you must ditch Christian faith if you want to get healed and free and be in solidarity with women and poor people, queer folks and immigrants, Black and Indigenous communities, Muslims and Palestinians, and the Earth and all her living beings.
I totally disagree.
I followed Jesus out of evangelical Christianity. I am dedicated to deepening my intimate connection to crucified Love and reclaiming the truth, beauty, grace and goodness that white male pastors have been counterfeiting for far too long.
Of course, because I refuse to play by their rules, most evangelical Christians do not believe that my faith is legitimate.
A former student of mine, who is now the pastor of an evangelical church, recently sent me an email lamenting that we had gone in different directions.
He labeled me a “pastor of deconstructionism” and criticized me for attacking the Church and leading people away from the Christian faith.
He said that he has no interest in “activist churches that use Jesus to justify their agenda.”
He said that he is neither conservative nor liberal. He is just a “historically orthodox Christian” adhering to the traditional creeds of the Church.
One of the reasons I find his framing problematic is the fact that far too many Christians believe in the creeds of the church while they dodge the deeds of Jesus.
Over the centuries, the vast majority of “orthodox” Christians in the West have signed off on genocide, slavery, and all sorts of violence, exploitation and greed that completely contradict the original good news message.
The creeds proclaim the virgin birth, the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus, but they don’t say a word about the love, compassion, grace, truth-telling and humble service that this dark-skinned Palestinian Jew gave every ounce of his life to.
The Gospels make it clear that Jesus was not a conservative or liberal either. He was a revolutionary who inaugurated a divine kingdom in solidarity with the meek, the merciful, those in mourning, the poor, the pure in heart and those persecuted for the sake of justice.
Jesus turned the tables on a corrupt, hypocritical establishment that attempted to neutralize the threat of his movement by nailing him to an imperial cross.
Today, evangelical Christianity has become the sanctifying centerpiece of an imperial establishment crucifying people all over the planet.
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I identify as a post-evangelical Christian.
Some women suffer postpartum depression after childbirth. Some people suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after an extremely painful situation or series of events. Post-evangelicals deal with the brutal aftereffects of being baptized into a supremacist subculture.
I believe that it is crucial for post-evangelicals to get in a serious process of recovery from our traumatic faith relationships – with parents, pastors and others in our social network, many who still gaslight us with their judgmental, exclusive and abusive god.
In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk says that trauma rooted in relationships is the toughest kind of trauma to heal from.
I do not resonate as much with “ex-evangelical” or “exvangelical” because these terms seem to suggest that we can somehow flip a switch and leave all our traumatic evangelical baggage behind.
My spouse Lindsay is a licensed marriage and family therapist. I have learned from her that when we attempt to cut-off from the painful past, we won’t heal. The painful past will come back to haunt us, re-packaging itself in all sorts of insidious ways.
A big part of my long process of healing and getting free from evangelical Christianity is choosing – one day at a time – to stop reacting, and start acting.
Reactions remain tethered to whatever we are reacting to.
To act is to live for Something Else.
Many of us post-evangelicals react to the god of our parents and pastors and become atheists. We ditch heaven and hell for eternal oblivion. We bail on the inerrant bible, saying it is just a book of fairy tales. We switch sides – from Republican to Democrat – still caught in a corporate-sponsored culture war where both sides tout an “American Dream” that depends on exploiting non-white populations, from the Detroit ghetto to the Gaza strip.
On my post-evangelical path, I eventually came to realize that I still needed to get saved. Not from “original sin,” but from the addictive system called “America.”
Repentance is a crucial aspect of this recovery program. It requires turning my will and my life over to Something Else. Because only a Power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. This power of Love is empowering, and it operates at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation.
Because nobody’s free until everybody’s free.
Discovering Something Else has been a long, adventurous process. The good news on this messy path is that perfection is not permitted.
I have come to believe in the non-duality of a divine Love gone viral, a feral Force full of wonder and mystery, brimming with a beauty, grace and goodness that are dialectical and non-binary.
This is the One in whom we live and move and have our being, who is totally committed to us and closer to us than we are to ourselves. We are inextricably connected to a divine web that threads through everything else in the universe.
Psychotherapist Francis Weller calls this “an interpenetrating reality:”
We are not isolated cells partitioned off from other cells; we have semipermeable membranes that make possible an ongoing exchange with the great body of life. We register in our psyches, consciously or not, the fact of our shared sorrows.
There is something deep in every living entity that is made up of what is invisible and indestructible.
Spirit. Being. Essence. Something Else.
This is who we really are – and who everyone else is too.
Not only do we belong to each other – we are each other.
This is why my post-evangelical path is not defined by what I am against, but who I am for.
An interpenetrating reality represents a huge contrast to the evangelical emphasis on personal piety and individual salvation, audaciously exemplified in Billy Graham’s rapture response to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech:”
Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.
Francis Weller says that most people learn to cope with our deep soul connection to the devastating things happening to others around the planet through amnesia and anesthesia. This interpenetrating reality is too painful. So we deny it with distractions and numb it with addictions. This is precisely what evangelicals do with heaven and the Rapture and their obsession with getting everyone else saved for eternity.
What if the way to healing and freedom is spiritually surrendering to the divine Love that eternally dwells in the midst of the world’s death, depression and grief – so we can come out the other side and rise to newness of life?
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On my post-evangelical path, I refuse to bail on the bible. Because this ancient collection contains too much beauty, grace and goodness.
I am committing the rest of my life to reclaiming the sacred text from all these powerful pastors and politicians who cherry-pick passages to promote their supremacy stories.
Palestinian theologian Daniel Bannoura calls the ridiculous evangelical inerrant reading strategy “selective literalism.” This pick-and-choose weaponization was invented in the 19th century to support slavery.
The bible is not the Absolute Truth without any mixture of error. It is a fierce ancient debate over what it means to be divine.
In this book of sacred contradictions, there are supremacy stories. But there is also a prophetic thread that proclaims Something Else. It represents a divine power that desperately desires steadfast love, instead of sacrifice.
If every human being is really created in this image, then it changes everything.
I am actively confronting the supremacy stories of my evangelical adolescence with conviction, which ought never be confused with the dogma and fundamentalism of my white evangelical forefathers.
The word conviction is rooted in Latin. It literally means “to struggle with.”
This radical commitment to mutuality reverses the evangelical mission trip.
I go to the margins to find the poor, the persecuted, the meek and the mourning, not because they need my message of good news. I need theirs.
I take cues from Mexican theologian Elsa Tamez who has noted that “sin” is not actually addressed until the third chapter of the book of Romans. In the first two chapters, the Apostle Paul speaks only of the rampant injustice of empire.
Dr. Tamez says that what is needed to get healed and free from empire is a radical transformation of our patriarchal, racist and sexist society. This is a completely different gospel message than what Charles and I preached at our lunch-time crusades in high school.
Elsa Tamez is not just using Jesus to justify her activist agenda. She is reading the Jesus story in its original colonized context, bringing us back to the Global South where the gospel got its start.
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Ever since I followed Jesus out of fundamentalist Christianity two decades ago, he’s been rearranging me through those whose prophetic faith pulled them to the margins. Because they put the radical deeds of Jesus before the historic creeds of the church.
My post-evangelical path has been trailblazed by holy rebels like Hagar, Moses, Miriam, Elijah, Elisha, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, John the buck wild baptizer, Jesus of Nazareth, Mary Magdalene, the Canaanite woman, the Good Samaritan, the Ethiopian eunuch, Pelagius, Benedict, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhardt, Menno Simons, John Woolman, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Sojourner Truth, Laura Smith Haviland, Elijah Lovejoy, Charles Turner Torrey, John Mars, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Ida B. Wells, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Coretta Scott King, George Houser, Rosa Parks, Robert and Jeannie Graetz, Fannie Lou Hamer, William Stringfellow, Plowshares activists, Catholic Workers, Koinonia Farm, Vincent Harding, Pauli Murray, Thomas Merton, Oscar Romero, James Cone, Cornel West, Edgar Rivera Colon, Alice Kisiya, Munther Isaac, Marian Kramer, Maureen Taylor, JoAnne Watson, Steven Thrasher, Bree Newsome Bass, and many others who have been historically marginalized by the powerful and pervasive institutions of Western Christianity.
These prophetic people were not making up something new.
They were staying true to the interpenetrating reality that weaves everything together with Love.
They lived for Something Else – no matter what it cost them.
Radical Discipleship 