“Exvangelicals” are almost always people who received superficial Christian culture that feels fake, but their unease was suppressed until a horde of unanswered, typically elementary questions emerged into a statement of apostasy.

We need more than “positive and encouraging.”

We need Biblically-rooted, historically-grounded instruction that encourages questions as we recognize that Christ is the eternal Logos. Honest questions lead to the Truth.

Instead of replying to each response, quote tweet, and subtweet, I’ll just provide some points of clarification here.

1. I fully recognize that each story of deconversion is intellectually and emotionally unique. However, there are often basic commonalities.

2. I don’t at all mean to imply that exvangelicals are unintelligent. To the contrary, they often have an active mind that should be encouraged.

3. By “elementary questions,” I don’t mean unimportant, but rather questions readily answered within the Christian worldview.

This demonstrates that the struggle is actually with something more fundamental in their understanding of Christianity.

4. I’ve seen many try to maintain the strength of their Christian upbringing by saying that they were raised as fundamentalists. I know “fundamentalism”

can be defined in different ways, but, broadly speaking, this is likely part of the problem. What is often set forth as “fundamentalism” is the unthinking, externalized dogmatism my original post was aimed to critique.

5. None of this is meant to take cheap shorts at those who have struggled with the faith and found it wanting. My critique is with mainstream evangelical culture. In large part, my critique is likely similar to that of the exvangelicals, but from a different vantage point.

*cheap shots

Back to point 4. Fundamentalism also typically insists on literalism as a requirement for truth, which is a hermeneutic of materialism, not historic Christianity. This view in particular tends to produce exvangelicals who don’t understand Christianity.