The Damage Done and Why I Left Conservative Evangelicalism

I can only assume that the Evangelical leaders who brought my generation up in the faith did so the best they knew how, but they did damage greater than they could realize.  In many ways, we were set up to fail as young adults and continued to be harmed along the way by a system hubristically sure of its answers and woefully short on critical self-reflection. 

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life, but my college years were some dark, dark days.

In high school and even college, I was taught that I knew better than scientists who spent their careers trying to understand the development of life on earth. My young-earth creationism withered under the weight of one intellectual battle at a time, constantly trying to hang on some shred of what I had believed, because I was taught that a particular theory of human origins was crucial to the faith I held dear and that without it, my faith would fall apart.  The years of unnecessary doubt and struggling scarred me.

I was encouraged in high school to think critically about my faith, but what it really meant was to learn ways to support predetermined conclusions.  My intellectual quest to understand and support my faith led me to eventually deny most of what I had been taught to defend. The struggle to hang on to the faith I loved fueled years of doubt and depression that nearly broke me as a human being before I realized that conservative Evangelicalism was only an interpretation of Christianity, not the thing itself.

In his 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Evangelical scholar Mark Noll concluded that, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t much of one.”  I can’t find the reference, but it has certainly been suggested that not much has changed. I have some pretty smart Evangelical friends who don’t fit that mold, but anti-intellectualism (unless someone smart seems to prove what people already believed) always has seemed to be the order of the day.

Too often, the spiritual environment was undernourished as well.  With the occasional exception of Augustine and possibly Thomas Aquinas, Christian history for most of the Evangelicals I knew may as well have not existed between the writing of the New Testament and the Reformation.  I got far more church history as part of my music degree than I actually did in church. After the Apostolic Period, Christianity didn’t seem to really exist in a meaningful way outside of western half or so of Europe until Westerners brought it there – no riches of Eastern Orthodox theology, no (relatively) quick spread of Christianity to Persia, India, Ethiopia, and China.  That’s not to say that people who took the right classes or signed up for the right majors or went to seminary didn’t find out about some of these things, but you’d never know.  The popular myopia was and is astounding.

Much of the spiritual variety I was actually exposed to was the theology of a deterministic Calvinist God I was unprepared for, who created people only to force many of them to sin, reject salvation, and be damned forever.  My Calvinist friends seemed to have scriptural backing, and I was thrown into yet more doubt and a deep depression that continued long after I rejected their theology, as I continued to struggle with doubt about God’s very existence and much of what I had been taught about him.

Let me tell you, conservative Evangelicalism is a terrible place to be when you’re depressed.  Too often, Evangelicals equate spiritual health with positive emotion.  A peer from the Southern Baptist college ministry I attended who’s now a campus minister himself actually posted on Facebook, “If you are truly being faithful you will be consistently joyful.”  What a horrible thing to say to those who are hurting. As the title of a good book on depression puts it, faithful or not, sometimes “Darkness Is My Only Companion”. Give me the savior who suffers with me, not some kind of abusive emotional prosperity gospel bullshit.  

And reading the Bible is not the solution to everything either.  I got so sick of that.  No matter what the problem happened to be, reading the Bible was almost invariably the prescription.  No, reading the Bible didn’t make me feel less depressed, and it sure didn’t clear up the doubts I had about the text itself.

Beyond all that, I was taught, both implicitly and explicitly, a theology that confused the gospel with the Republican Party platform.  The more I thought about Jesus’s words, the less I saw the gospel in the politics that were expected of me.  Where were small government and free markets in the Bible? Why didn’t conservative Evangelical politics seem concerned with the welfare of the poor or with racism or social justice?  Many Evangelicals didn’t even seem that concerned about poverty on a personal level, instead the focus was on “sharing the gospel” and “making disciples,” as if those things could be separated from the social justice of God’s kingdom.  My politics changed more and more as I read Jesus’s words about “loving your neighbor as yourself” and trying to figure out what it meant to put them into practice.

As I became more politically liberal, I joked to one youth leader I knew, “I defected, but I’m not defective.”  She responded with something along the lines of “I don’t know about that.”  While such a response might have been funny delivered in a certain way, it sounded pretty serious when she said it.  For whatever reason, I certainly got unfriended on Facebook.

In 2006, in the midst of Israel’s war against Hezbollah, my church held something of a praise and worship open mic night.  Before I sang and played my guitar, I prayed for the innocents caught in the crossfire of a brutal bombing campaign across Lebanon.  I even had friends on the ground in Beirut when the bombs were coming down.  Even if they didn’t care about Lebanese Muslims, my fellow Christians could have at least cared about the large number of their Arab brothers and sisters in the faith living in the most Christian country in the region.  Instead, I got chewed out by a member of the congregation for daring to pray for the people of Lebanon.  It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it was just one cranky guy, but I had seen similar, Anti-Arab and Islamophobic attitudes all around me for years.  How could I remain in such an environment?

Even if I wanted to stay, there was no place for me in conservative Evangelicalism. I was a stranger in what had been my spiritual home.

Who am I now?  I’m deeply scarred and still trying to heal, but I’m finding my footing on firmer ground than ever before, and my faith has gradually but steadily gained strength over the course of years.  Chronic depression makes it hard, but I think I’m starting to find some degree of peace. I’ve discovered a God of love instead of vengeance, gotten a firmer grasp of what the Bible is and isn’t, and found a wealth of Christian thought and spirituality I never knew existed.  My faith, that though not free from doubt and filled with unknowing, contains a wellspring of life and rests on a firmer foundation than the sand upon which what I began with had been built.