I also dunno.

I’m Evangelical & have been so since junior high/high school. Campus Crusade and all that. Mission trips. Preaching & teaching. On staff at a church (“assistant pastor”) for about 2 years. Some Greek language learning (enough to parse a text and read the simpler books). Many books and many years of teaching & being self-taught.

In my entire life as an Evangelical I knew we were isolated in our theology compared to the wider world of Christianity, but the essentials of the faith seemed solid, and seemed transformative: believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that God raised Him from the dead, and you’ll be saved. That would then free you in love to do works of righteousness, joyfully, spreading the Good News of the kingdom.

Then we went…crazy.

In the 80s we were co-opted by the political right. (Remember the push for us to vote for Jimmy Carter because he was a Baptist and Reagan was…something not quite Evangelical? I do.) We became wholly wrapped up around abortion and then gays, and that became the focus of our faith and our outreach. We became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, gradually becoming more and more aligned with the conservative movement. By Clinton’s first term, we were done with our faith being against the world — our faith was now entwined with the Republicans.

The more we tried to “evangelize,” the more the world didn’t listen because our megaphone was stamped with the Republican elephant.

And then…the Tea Party and birtherism just exploded in the church/political symbiosis that we’d become with Republicans.

I began to be shaken loose after the election of Obama. (Note: I voted against him in 2008.) He wasn’t a strong candidate, in my opinion, but he was an honorable man.

The racism against him from my party and my church members just overwhelmed me. And then the juiced-up outrage about gay rights. And all the nonsense.

The church I had grown up in and that had formed me had become an alien bed of glass nails and poisoned food. It had become a festering sore of hatred against the “other.”

As I studied more and more about the Evangelical church in the 2010s, I dove more and more into our history in the U.S., and it wasn’t pretty. I discovered that there was a foundational streak in the Evangelical movement of white separatism and white racism, including Jerry Falwell’s proclamation that God didn’t want race-mixing, or Billy Graham’s anti-semitism (that Jews were untrustworthy). William Buckley said in the 50s (long whitewashed) that black Americans were incapable of self-governance, and that was a reason to deny them Civil Rights.

My orderly world of Evangelicalism and conservatism had a rotten base.

But although I moved on (I’m still Evangelical, just not tied to the conservatives/Republicans anymore), I found that all my work and self-study did not matter to my fellow Evangelicals. Nothing that I learned had any effect upon them or their opinions. They still told me Obama was a secret Muslim/not a Christian, that he was gay, that he was born in Kenya. (Yes, even today, they still insist upon it.) I held classes in my church on race reconciliation, and every week I had to push back against white men who told me that there was no problem in the white Evangelical community, that it was all the fault of black Christians who needed to pull their pants up and obey the police.

Mr. Rivers, what it means to me is that the Evangelical community is tribal, not informational. It is not held together by a common belief. It is held together by a common identity of being white before all else.

Now, I have a long history in the Evangelical/conservative space. (Not as a known entity, just as someone who was firmly Evangelical and conservative.) I was often wrong, but convinced I was right.

What helped me change was personal relationships, which helped me gradually loosen myself from the closed world of conservative Evangelicalism.

I don’t know how to rescue anyone who’s still in the bubble. They’re convinced they’re right, that they’re under attack, and that their religion is about to be crushed by the Leviathan state (a state that Evangelicals currently run).

I just don’t know how to break them free of their performative bubble of religion & help them be free to be loved by God and to love their neighbors.

All I know how to do is to keep talking, keep working, keep resisting, and keep praying.