Finding Our Place

If you used to be a conservative evangelical and you have gradually shifted left, you have undoubtedly experienced some significant loss. You may be struggling to find your place. Friends, I see you.

Recently I was listening to Jen Hatmaker’s podcast. In it, she recounted a discussion she’d had with Rachel Held Evans years ago. Rachel had told her, “The evangelical subculture has room for [LBGTQ-affirming, progressive] you if that’s how they met you — you’re progressive; this is your ideology, theology. They do not have room if you change your mind.”

If you were a conservative evangelical and you changed your mind to become more progressive, that subculture cancels you.

I am not famous or even Christian-famous — and you, Dear Reader, probably aren’t either — and yet I have lived out this experience and found it to be true. I was enmeshed in the conservative evangelical subculture, yet I babystepped my way to a progressive theology over the course of years, and the more vocal I was about that shift in beliefs, the less place I had in the lives of conservative evangelicals. I changed my mind about some things, and they didn’t have room for me.

Many of you have lived a similar story. As our opinions and beliefs about the nonessentials shifted or evolved, our evangelical community slipped through our fingers. We lost friendships. Relationships grew clunky or stilted, became shells of their former selves. The community that we worshipped with up to three times a week, the people who delivered meals to our doors when we were sick, the people who celebrated our babies’ births and prayed over our hospital beds — they all slowly backed out of our lives like Homer Simpson fading into the hedges in a meme that used to seem funny.

First, let me acknowledge — even though I have been disappointed and disheartened by that former community (maybe even more than they’ve been disappointed in me), the loss of a community is still real. And grief surrounds the loss. I’d say it’s impossible to lose a community you’d been deeply entrenched in and not feel profound emotions about that loss. It’s been a few years, and I still feel waves of grief and hurt at times. People I viewed as extended family dropped me from their lives without so much as a word. They not only unfriended me on social media, but they offered no encouragement or support or compassion when I experienced a divorce and — even worse — when my ex-husband died, they didn’t show up for my children in any way. These are people who for many years were an integral part of our lives, people who held our hands in moments of grief, people who were at the hospital for the births of my babies, people we’ve shared more meals with than I could begin to count. And they evaporated from our lives. Grief blankets that loss. There is no way around it.

If you’re experiencing this pain, Friend, know that you aren’t alone. Your feelings are valid. Your pain is real. Your grief is reasonable.

Next, I have a theory about Rachel’s point that the evangelical community doesn’t have room for people who change their minds.

My experience in the evangelical church was that when evangelicals meet liberal or progressive Christians — first, they are immediately othered as not part of “us,” and second, they aren’t seen as true Christians. This puts progressive Christians in the same category as someone in a whole different religion or as unbelievers.

And evangelicals know what to do with people like that — those people are obvious targets of evangelical witnessing. There is a tidy place for these progressives. Evangelicals can be kind to them and befriend them and witness to them in order to win them to the “Real Jesus.” This is why conservative evangelicals are Facebook friends and friendly co-workers and kind neighbors and even real friends with all sorts of unchurched liberals or even progressives who attend non-evangelical churches. Those liberals are potential converts.

But people like me — we don’t fit neatly into categories and boxes. My former community knows me and my heart. They’ve heard me pray. They’ve heard me quote scripture and have seen me accurately apply it. They know I seek truth. They’ve seen God in me and at work in my life. I’ve taught their children in Sunday School and led the women in Bible studies, and they saw the fruit of my beliefs and of my teaching. They know I’d literally give up my life as I know it and follow Jesus wherever He leads, enduring whatever He asks me to endure — because they helped me load the UHaul!

My former community knows how much I love Jesus — they’ve seen that lived out all over my life and they’ve experienced it alongside me. And as my views have changed, I’ve been quite vocal about how it’s my relationship with God and the teaching of Jesus and the things I’ve read in the Bible that has changed me. My love for God and understanding of the Word drew me away from conservative evangelicalism and into a more progressive, inclusive approach to the world. The more I’ve read and studied the Bible for myself, the more I love the world. Imagine that — I’ve been influenced by the God of John 3:16 who loved the world so much that He sent Jesus to us.

I am not a target for witnessing because they can’t tell me anything about the gospel that I don’t already know — and believe! And they know this. I’m not one of them, yet I’m not an “other” who can be witnessed to. So where does that leave me? There is no category in their paradigm for me. Therefore I must be canceled. Unfriended. Uninvited. Ignored. Ghosted.

You see, I did exactly what I was taught to do within the evangelical church — I read the Bible for myself and I asked God to grow me. But the result wasn’t what the church wanted. My growth did not result in more rules and more judgment and less freedom and their definition of “holiness.” I didn’t stay trapped in legalism. And this makes that community uncomfortable.

I make them uncomfortable. And if you’re living a similar trajectory, you make them uncomfortable too. Keeping me in their sphere is uncomfortable. So we must be canceled. Unfriended. Uninvited. Ignored. Ghosted. There is no place for us. We do not feel safe.

And so, we must make a place for ourselves. For each other. We must find or form a new community. There is grief in that loss, but I’m telling you — there is such sweet freedom in this new place.