In February, I attended my first Midwinter Gathering, hosted by Friends of LGBTQ Concerns. Attending this conference was a highlight of my semester. Back in 2021, when I was desperate to find Quakers with affirming theology, this group was among the first to appear in my Google searches. I am happy to report: FLGBTQC did not disappoint. They have a history of advocacy, friendship, and inclusion that dates back decades, and they continue to strive valiantly toward radical inclusion.
Since we were less than a year old, I was honored to represent Affirming Quakers on Monday's panel exploring the future of Quakerism. But when they clarified that I would be representing the evangelical side of Quakerism, my body sent up a host of warning flares.
I have not identified as an evangelical for years. With perhaps one exception, none of the founding members of Affirming Quakers continue to use the label. The cruelest people I know are evangelical, armed with a well-stocked war-chest of weaponry that paints their cruelty with divine vocabulary. To find myself categorized in such a group was jarring: no wonder my body rebelled.
But then I began to wonder: are we evangelical? Our founding team is not, but is our community? To date, over 200 people have gathered with us on Instagram and our website: how do they identify?
It seemed important to find out. On May 7, we posted a poll in Instagram: Do you identify as an evangelical?
These results are what we call decisive: 90% of our community does not identify as "evangelical," with the largest portion (82%) representing those who once did but have since abandoned the designation. The comment section was even stronger and clearer. We had our answer: according to our own self-identification, Affirming Quakers is not evangelical.
I cannot even begin to fathom the amount of pain that lies behind these results.
Defining "evangelical," then and now
There was a time when "evangelicalism" was primarily a theological word, conjuring a particular, perhaps somewhat innocuous (or perhaps not) type of Christian. An evangelical was a born-again Christian who believed the bible to be the inerrant word of God and accepted Jesus Christ as lord and savior. How familiar these phrases sound to those of us raised in the evangelical tradition!
To be even more theologically specific, Isaac B. Sharp writes in the prologue to his book, The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist, and Gay Christians — and the Movement That Pushed Them Out,
In some contexts, an evangelical is a born-again Christian; in others, an evangelical is an orthodox Protestant. One of the nation's premiere evangelical seminaries puts it this way: 'to be evangelical has always meant, along with a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, affirming a cluster of doctrines' — including 'the person and work of Jesus Christ, including his deity, virgin birth, true humanity, substitutionary death, bodily resurrection, and ascension to heaven.
However, as a direct result of intentional and politically-motivated efforts to narrow evangelical identity, evangelicalism became a political term. The United States' version of evangelicals
channeled fundamentalist theology into a less sectarian stream that would attract conservative Christians of all kinds, which required defining liberal evangelicals out of the tradition for good. It was always a near-universally white project, built by conservative white Protestant men with conservative white Protestant men in mind…. From the outside, it was also a politically conservative project.
In the process, evangelicalism's mostly fundamentalist, theologically and politically conservative, white, straight, and male-headship-affirming claimants successfully formed twentieth-century evangelical identity in their own image. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, this is what US American evangelicalism looked like.
No wonder my stomach flipped over. No wonder the vast majority of our community rejects this label and runs the other way. Affirming Quakers is not all men, white, or straight — quite the opposite, actually. We certainly do not affirm male headship. Our approach to the bible is far more nuanced than a rigid and impossible "inerrancy." We celebrate most aspects of our diversity and guard it fiercely.
Affirming Quakers is not an evangelical organization. We clearly don't identify with what the label has become, and there are several in our community who do not even identify with what the term once was. Such diversity is very much consistent with the Quaker world, and I am overjoyed that we fit into it. A few queries, however, are in order.
Query #1: So we are not evangelical: are we #exvangelical?
"Exvangelical" is a new term, less than ten years old. Blake Chastain coined the word as a hashtag, #exvangelical, in 2016, followed by a podcast of the same name later that year. That date is significant: it was the unwavering evangelical support for Donald Trump — even after the release of the Access Hollywood tape — that served as the final straw for many one-time evangelical adherents. Chastain began tweeting under #exvangelical in order to create "a safe space for people to find solidarity with others who have gone through similar experiences.”
Jon Ward's 2023 book, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation,
tells the engaging story of his upbringing in, and eventual break from, an influential evangelical church. Ward sheds light on the evangelical movement’s troubling political and cultural dimensions, tracing the ways in which the Jesus People movement was seduced by materialism and other factors to become politically captive rather than prophetic.
Exvangelicals, then, are largely defined by what they once were but no longer are. In The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, Sarah McCammon provides the beginnings of a definition. Exvangelicals are:
a loosely organized, largely online movement of people who are trying to make sense of the world as it is, and who they are in it.
In some ways, Affirming Quakers is a perfect fit for the exvangelical label. According to our poll, 82% of us are former evangelicals. We are largely online. We are loosely organized. We are beyond grateful to have found one another and feel less alone for the finding. We are very much trying to make sense of the world and our place within it.
So I am intrigued by the exvangelical designation and especially applaud an origin story that is remarkably pastoral: Chastain created the term as a beacon to find others who felt as alone and isolated as he did. However, I am hesitant to claim it as Affirming Quakers' designation, primarily because I continue to be leery of defining ourselves in terms of what we are not. The term is not yet firm enough to claim it as our own, but the question remains open.
Query #2: What is it like to be evangelical in a space that has rejected the term?
I feel guarded empathy for the 8% of Affirming Quakers who continue to identify as evangelical and perhaps relate to the ejected "other" evangelicals who are the subject of Sharp's book. It is a particular kind of grief to watch something you love be co-opted and hijacked by others who are louder and more violent. If you are in the 8% who cling to the evangelical label, I see you and grieve with you. I hope Affirming Quakers will not contribute to any isolation you experience.
Query #3: Given our evangelical background, is it possible for the progressive side of the Quaker world to trust Affirming Quakers?
We know how evangelical Quakers view Affirming Quakers: they have made their exclusion and excommunication abundantly clear. What is less clear, however, is how progressive Quakers view us.
As Affirming Quakers has grown, we have found ourselves in an odd in-between. The evangelical side of Quakerism doesn't trust us became we are affirming, but the affirming side of Quakerism doesn't trust us because they think we were evangelical. They are curious but guarded, and they have many questions.
Their hesitancy is fair and well-founded. Evangelical and progressive Quakers have historically engaged in bitter battle, and even old wounds are still fresh, painful, and triggering. Furthermore, it would be naive for us to declare ourselves fully free from evangelicalism after years of swimming in its waters. Its language, assumptions, and habits are maddeningly hard to shake. No wonder the Midwinter Conference organizers automatically slotted us in the evangelical camp.
Therefore, my query: given our evangelical baggage, is it possible for the progressive side of the Quaker world to trust us? We cannot find a home on the evangelical side; can we find a home on the progressive side? Given our past affiliation with evangelical Quakerism, should we continue to be categorized as such? Because our community is diverse, we describe ourselves as a "cross-branch movement": can such a designation survive on a more formal level?
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