I’ve read a lot of response articles such as yours to this latest issue of high-profile evangelicals announcing on social media that they are giving up the faith and walking away from it all.

In your article, you make the same basic series of arguments I’ve read in other blogs, etc.: that they had a “shallow, unserious faith” (essentially suggesting that maybe they weren’t believers in the first place); admitting that evangelicalism today is badly broken, but that it can (and must) be fixed and addressing certain core issues, or we’ll just see more of these defections; etc.

Your underlying presupposition is, however, that it CAN and should be fixed. I disagree, and think that it’s beyond repair.

One major crisis you don’t even touch upon, moreover, that affects this discussion: the American 81% white evangelical blindly loyal support for Trump. I know personally dozens of ex-evangelicals for whom that was the last straw. What about that? Or Christian dominionism, which is increasingly involving itself in all sorts of levels of American government? The Religious Right? Project Blitz? And on and on.

And none of that touches on the major deconstruction theologically that many of us ex-evangelicals have undergone. I’ve been a pastor (12 years), followed by a PhD then 8 years as a Bible college teacher. I can assure you, I WAS a serious Christian who then found the faith wanting on multiple levels, and walked away from it all. Address THOSE issues, and you might just be figuring out what the real problems are within evangelicalism today that is causing people to abandon it in droves.