Is There Life after Evangelicalism?

Have you walked away from the church — and possibly your Christian faith too?

If that’s the case, then here’s my question for you at this point: where are you headed now?

For those of us who grew up within evangelical or fundamentalist Christian churches, and have since walked away from the church (and possibly the Christian faith altogether), there is often a major sense of “separation anxiety” to deal with. Ex-evangelicals will say that “it feels like I’m going through a painful divorce!”

Just reflect on how much time, effort, energy, and money we spent. There’s a social cost, too — the potential loss of friends or family members who are still within the system. In many cases, this decision represents the forfeiture of much of the support system on which we relied.

For those of us who spent years within the church, the doctrines and teachings we received from preachers Sunday after Sunday, month after month and year after year were deeply ingrained into our very souls. They ended up forming both our identities and worldviews. As a result, when we divorce ourselves from our religious past, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are now embarking upon an odyssey of reconstructing an entirely new identity.

This is a scary journey indeed.

Think about how deeply ingrained this whole thing was for so many of us who spent years within the system. For example, one can’t listen to sermons on a weekly basis (allegedly based upon the…