r/Exvangelical

I’ve posted on here before about it, but my siblings and I have been trying to have an intervention with our evangelical MAGA mom and I think we are finally calling it.

Trump has damaged our relationship with her immensely, and we tried to keep the focus on that the most. Like “hey it’s hurtful you keep choosing this man over relationship with your children.” My sister had one more and probably final talk with her today and it basically cemented the fact that we have lost our mom.

Sure, we will probably still have a very surface level relationship, but the relationship we had before is gone. She was always conservative growing up but we always could come to her about anything. We always went to her when we needed comfort or needed to ease our anxieties. Truly she was one of our favorite people we could really be ourselves around and not fear any anger or judgement.
But then Trump happened. And she and her 3rd even more MAGA extreme husband moved out to the middle of nowhere. Isolated with no friends or family and with Fox News playing 24/7. It was a recipe for disaster and the cult has taken our mom.

My sister asked her if there was anything he could do to make her stop supporting him and she struggled to come up with an answer. So yeah.
Fuck Trump. Fuck MAGA. Fuck Christian nationalism.

Thanks for letting me rant.

When I started hearing clips from podcasts featuring manosphere influencers, I felt like I was back in a church pew again. Sure, there is more profanity, more cigars, and more supercars, but the core doctrines remain the same. Hearing talk about high value women (code for attractive virgins or low body count “females”), avoiding 403s (slang for hoes), and men needing to lead because they are evolutionarily superior is just more of the same.

With this messaging being so popular in both camps, two things feel unsurprising to me. First, that young men are experiencing a “loneliness epidemic” in secular culture. I can’t imagine many girls grow up hoping to live a life that feels like a cross-over between The Stepford Wives and The Handmaid’s Tale. For many, they’d rather avoid the headache—can you blame them? Second, I am unsurprised that young men are being drawn to religion at a much higher rate than young women. As a former fundie, I can’t help but notice that Gen Z men seem to be drawn to Christianity more for the alpha, aggressive, patriarchal aesthetic of its religious offshoots than they are the teachings of Jesus — a humble and compassionate Savior — himself.

Read now: https://www.playboy.com/read/politics/red-pilled-guys-are-falling-into-a-christian-fundamentalist-trap

(Context: did not grow up evangelical; joined evangelical school in high school; left 20 years ago. Im a woman and purity culture did a number on me.)

Something finally hit me tonight as incredibly ironic. When I was in the middle of it as a teenage girl, getting the messaging telling me that I was responsible for men's lust etc, and that i had to be excessively modest but still somehow attractive...

If clothes were sexy/ flattering, they were NOT comfortable for me.

Nowadays, I'm completely separated from it all. I'm married to someone who was never evangelical, and did not go through purity culture. I have a volatile relationship with clothes - I am horribly indecisive and constantly struggling to figure out what I want to wear (in addition to having dimensions that make it hard to even find clothes i CAN wear). My spouse always says that the most important thing is that clothes are comfortable. Tonight i realized:

If clothes aren't sexy/flattering to my husband, they are NOT comfortable for me. 🙄🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Oh the joys of all the paradoxical garbage they drilled into us. It took so much work for me to get past the idea that I should never be sexy to anyone ever... and now I'm still sometimes basically immobilized by the idea that I must always be sexy to my spouse. (He, BTW, always claims i am sexy, even when i know for a fact I look like garbage!)

Anyone else experience this?

That's it. That's the post. An unrelated group I was in on Facebook basically got taken over by Christians who just spammed religious crap 24/7, in direct, intentional violation of the rules of the group, but nobody did anything, and when me and some other folks asked them nicely to abide by the rules and stick to appropriate topics, then they called me an agent of Satan and told me they'd enjoy seeing me burn in hell etc.

I responded and said I have a great deal of religious trauma and would appreciate if they just followed the rules of the group and didn't violate that boundary for me personally. The response to that was that my mental health is my problem not theirs and they can say whatever they want, along with a bunch of other condescending insulting things, mocking me for it even.

They are the worst people on the planet for real. Just leave people alone! It's not that hard to be a good person, but guess they'd rather trigger someone on purpose than follow rules that exist for a reason. I hate them honestly.

I have read over 700 books in my life. Philosophy, theology, psychology, history, Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Camus, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Foucault, Augustine. But the most important book I ever read was I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris.

Not because it was the best book. It was not. Not because it was intellectually deep. It was not. But because it explained the world I had been thrown into.

That book was the hidden operating system of evangelical dating culture. It shaped the churches, the women, the expectations, the silence, the fear, the shame, the waiting for “the one,” the idea that God had a perfect spouse selected for you, and the belief that desire itself had to be suppressed until God delivered the right person.

And nobody told me.

That is the scandal.

I went to Bible college. I was surrounded by evangelical culture. I had professors, pastors, mentors, church leaders, older Christians, people who claimed to understand God’s will, marriage, sexuality, purity, and vocation. They judged me. They corrected me. They gave me clichés. They told me what God wanted from my life.

But nobody told me about I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

Nobody handed me the book. Nobody explained the system. Nobody said, “This is the culture you are living inside.” Nobody said, “This is why people are acting this way.” Nobody said, “This is the script many evangelical women and churches are following.”

I had to discover it years later, after the damage was already done.

That is why IKDG is the most important book I ever read. It was the missing document. The secret manual. The thing that explained the collapse after the fact.

I did not fail God’s plan for my life. I was never properly informed of the system I was being judged by.

That is the betrayal.

Did anyone delight in the scene in Shrinking (Apple TV) where Jimmy (tongue in cheek) asks a woman wearing a cross necklace what the "t" stands for? I watched Shrinking months ago but this really stuck with me. I think I'll be giggling about it for the rest of my life.

I’ve been looking for a subreddit for ex church staff members like myself to vent, share stories, compare notes, and generally commiserate on the effects of seeing the mess behind the curtain. So far I haven’t found one that fits the bill. Any former staff here want to share a story?

I’ll start. One of my first projects on staff was cleaning up storage. I was told to throw away more than 1000 premium brand shirts. Why? Design update, because the new person in charge didn’t like the look. Can I donate them instead? It’ll take too long and be too hard, so no. This little project stopped my tithing in its tracks and started a nearly 10 year deconstruction journey.

I hope I find a few ex staff friends here. Thanks for checking in!

What I gather from this sub is that most of us have stories of the crazy things our churches and parents taught us growing up -- things like creationism, purity culture, anti-queer narratives, etc., among a myriad of other things.

I'm kinda curious though: Are there any Exvangelical parents on this sub? As in, people who raised their kids in Evangelicalism, bought into/taught their children the sort of things mentioned above, but then left it.

What's your relationship with your kids like? Are they still Evangelical? If you now disagree with the things you raised your kids to believe, how do you and they navigate that?

I know these sound like pointed questions, but I mean for this to be entirely judgement-free. I'd like to hear about the sorts of experiences that either don't happen terribly often, or are just underreported.

Just wondering if anyone feels like talking about what they do in the morning as a routine for their mental health. I’m still searching for a routine that fits me best. My wife started doing this daily planner thing that asks her questions to spark gratitude etc. she calls it her “devotional”, lol.

How do you all consume your…”daily bread”?

Paula White Cain isn’t a “spiritual adviser.” She’s a power chasing hype woman who figured out that telling Trump he’s Jesus is the fastest way to stay orbiting his ego. Every time she grabs a mic, she turns basic political accountability into some apocalyptic martyr fantasy, like she’s auditioning for the role of “Prophet #3” in a low‑budget end‑times movie.

She’s not offering faith.
She’s not offering wisdom.
She’s offering weaponized delusion to a man who already thinks he’s heaven’s main character.

Paula White isn’t guiding anyone toward God.
She’s guiding a political movement off a cliff and calling it a resurrection. What is wrong with you people? God is praying for Donald Trump, Not to Him.

In retrospect, I think evangelical Christianity is kind of sex-obsessed. Just in a negative and controlling way. I've been away from it for 20+ years, and I still have issues accepting myself and doing what I want to do in my personal life.

Anyone else still feel inhibited by expectations of family, purity culture, etc., even if you should be prioritizing your own feelings, values, and autonomy?

It’s not just the loss of close-knit community and identity, although that certainly plays a role. It’s also the feeling that no one understands what I experienced and why it has been so hard even years later.

I suppose it’s asking a lot to find someone who was raised evangelical, got very involved in a controlling YRR baptist church for several years as a young adult, and then slowly left but didn’t leave religion entirely. (I’m Catholic…ish now, lots of mixed feelings and discomfort there). I rarely feel understood by anyone. Either they don’t understand what I was raised in, or they don’t understand why I left, or they don’t understand why it was hard for me to leave. Even in therapy, I have never found a therapist who really seemed to understand where I was coming from and why I couldn’t disentangle myself. My current therapist is better than most but she still doesn’t have any idea the sorts of things I was being told, and I can tell she doesn’t understand how I believed some of those things at the time.

It’s just a really isolating feeling. I probably got too used to having people around me who all thought the same and acted the same. If I did too, I felt okay. Now I don’t think or act the same as anyone I personally know, and it feels terrifyingly lonely.

My brother is a hardcore evangelical, and I remember one chilling conversation with him (back when he was still talking to me) where he said that he believed God's foremost, primary characteristic was not love or compassion, but rather justice or righteousness. I'm waffling a bit because I don't remember the exact word he chose, but the very clear implication was that he believed following rules was a lot more important than love or acceptance.

In some sense, I gotta give him points for honesty, because he was just saying what a lot of other evangelicals are thinking. They'll go to church and sing "they will know that we are Christians by our love," and then spend all their time and effort trying to make non-Christians follow a very Evangelical set of rules (by force of government), instead of just trying to love them the way Jesus loved prostitutes and sinners.

Since there's a huge crossover between the type of Christian who wants to force their moral opinions on everyone else, and those who believe the Bible is inerrant and infallible, it's really baffling why they think God would use the analogy of a good shepherd watching over his sheep. Sheep are notorious for being too dumb to understand things like rules or training, so being a shepherd has nothing to do with making sure your flock follow the rules.

Other than herding his sheep back in the pen at the end of the day, so they can be safe from wolves while the shepherd is asleep (an issue that wouldn't even apply to God anyway), a shepherd has nothing to do with administering or enforcing rules. They aren't training the sheep in obedience, they aren't raising the sheep to act a certain way, they very specifically according to the Bible aren't punishing the sheep who go astray. The good shepherd rejoices to bring that lost sheep back into the fold, he doesn't get angry at it for being disobedient.

How the fuck do they map that analogy onto a god who they believe cares more about holiness and obedience than love?

I recently cut off my family after having an intense breakthrough that I have been severely damaged by Evangelicalism, specifically how my father used it as a tool for control and manipulation over his entire family in lieu of being an actual father.

Let me back up a bit and give some context: My father is a die hard “entrepreneur” who has never worked a real job in his life (and prided himself on that fact his entire life). He had some early success in real estate in the 80s which led to prosperity in my family, but shortly after I was born (I’m the youngest of 3 by a big gap) he suffered a major loss when his business was “stolen from him” by his business partner. Instead of looking inward, grieving his loss, and moving forward, perhaps by pivoting to a new industry (they created an MLM btw…it’s called Market America, you can look it up) he entered a narcissist psychosis. Think how delusional Trump is. This is where his villain origin story begins.

He decided the problem was that he was “unequally yolked” with non-believers. That’s why his friend betrayed him and stole his business. So he now must work harder, never trusting anybody else.

And that’s when he converted to Evangelicalism. He disappeared behind a desktop computer for the next 30 years, pouring himself into his “work” that never came to fruition. Not one project. Essentially he was a deadbeat unemployed father for 30 years, but instead of drinking beer on the couch, he was dragging my mom and I to church every Sunday and draining her teacher salary in the collection plate. We never went on vacation, we never did anything fun. As a result, my mother became severely depressed and too tired to cook a family meal for me. When my father wasn’t doing that, he was busy neglecting me as he “worked from home” (he was ahead of his time really), his desk only a few feet away from me when I’d come home from school and turn on the N64. Even though he never made a dime, there was always a billion dollar project right around the corner, so he was always simply too busy for me. In the 30+ years I’ve been playing video games, my father never once picked up a video game controller.

That’s when I had my breakthrough realization.

This may be just my personal trauma speaking, but I wonder if there’s an element of truth to it.

This is for everyone who has ever turned toward Christianity or felt a need for a “God” to worship in their life…

You don’t need God. You don’t need Jesus. You’re just a little kid crying out for a real dad.

Every time I’ve ever felt overwhelmed by emotion for God and Jesus while emotionally manipulative worship songs played, as I cried out to God while listening to Jars of Clay that my parents would simply “see the art in me…”

…it was just my inner child crying out for a good father figure.

You don’t need religion if you have loving parents.

Christianity is for people who don’t have loving parents.

That’s all that is. That’s all “shout to the Lord” is. I would beg and plead to my God to love me and accept me when I felt scared or ashamed for something that wasn’t really a sin at all (in fact super natural aka “sexual sin” aka being exposed to internet porn as a teenager in the early 2000s with completely unsupervised access to a fire hose of “temptation” that spiraled me into a cycle of porn use and guilt and self mental flagellation that has tortured me for half my life) and wanted forgiveness. That was my relationship with Christianity. I was trying to invent a father who was never there. I was trying to have a relationship with a guy who would never respond. Prayer? That’s just one way communication. God never listened to me, because he can’t respond in real time. He responds through a Bible, a list of rules repeated over and over and again. It’s the same as my dad in the car on the way home from baseball games. Talking AT ME, never listening to how I felt when we lost. The same old shit, over and over, with no ability to change or listen. He might as well have died before I was born and left me some bullshit book to read in leui of actual fatherly advice.

That’s what the Bible is. It’s (mostly bad) parental advice for lazy parents. Coward parents. Naive parents. Idiot parents. Parents who are just little children themselves. Parents who need to hide behind a 2000 year old book for advice. Dr. Becky ain’t perfect, but I’d rather take advice from an influencer than men who lived thousands of years ago. The Bible is just Dr. Becky for parents who don’t know how to actually parent, who just then default to the Bible when anything hard comes up.

Fucking boomers man, they sucked so bad at being parents that they tried weaponizing an entire religion to take over and parent their kids and look how it turned out…

Christianity didn’t teach me to love. It taught me to hate. I now hate the Christian God for neglecting me just like my sperm donor did.

I am literally desperate at this point. my partner is progressive but religious and I am afraid if I don't get my shit together, I'll lose them. what are some things that helped you?

(I'm talking about MY experience, so if this doesn't resonate I respect that)

Growing up, I would roll my eyes at songs that mentioned God if they didn't have the "right" theology. I would be afraid to engage with stories like The Divine Comedy because they were mortal men speculating about the afterlife. I remember reading Huckleberry Finn in middle school and being exasperated at the Widow not understanding how salvation works. (She claimed Tom Sawyer was probably hellbound due to his behavior, when any "TRUE" Christian knew Salvation comes from a relationship with Jesus)

Now that I've chilled out on that rigidity, I'm reading old Christian poems and looking at artwork from a wide array of theological ideas and they're absolutely beautiful, wonderfully weird, and artistically rich. I'm reading Paradise Lost now and it's badass.

This extends to the Bible itself. I used to low-key dread having to hear the story of Job, since hearing about a guy I believed was real and literal losing his children because God and Satan made a wager was kind of a downer. But now that I read it as poetry moreso than a historical document, the discussion between Job and his friends, cumulating in God himself describing the vastness of Creation; comes across to me as both epic and beautifully human.

I’m not sure how to deal with my sister and her “just pray about it” attitude.

My sister loves to say, “I’ll pray about it,” to EVERYTHING versus making attempts to change things she wants to change. She wants to shift jobs but doesn’t know what she wants to do exactly, so I suggest looking up jobs related to her interest (urban planning) and doing research on it. She says, “I’ll pray about it” instead and stays in the same position. She was obsessed with the same guy who rejected her three times over a period of six times but instead of trying to move on by deleting his number or any other means she says the same thing. She says mean things about the person she supervises and when I say she should shift her thinking and try to be kinder she says, “I’ll pray about it,” but continues to be mean. Instead of being there for her friend who was going through a hard time, when I mentioned reaching out and being there she said, “all you can do is pray for her.”

She insists these are things that God and God only can change in her and she doesn’t need to do anything but pray about it. I tell her you can pray and still work on all of these things. Partially this is on me to just stop trying to help her become a kinder person. But I also, as her older sister, feel a sense of responsibility of trying to get her to be a better person. I’m not sure if I can do that if her only response is that she will pray about it, even if I were to cite the Bible and what not (which I’ve tried).

So how do you do maintain the relationships with Evangelicals that are like this? Or do you just not?