Meet the post-Evangelical Christians. They’re just getting started.
Keri Ladouceur no longer calls herself an Evangelical Christian.
Like many younger members of this sprawling American religious tradition, she’s left what she says has become a movement mostly defined by aggressive white conservatism and Christian nationalism, the prerogatives of male privilege, and a near obsession with regulating human sexuality.
For a woman who devoted her life to evangelical ministry, it was particularly personal. Again and again, she experienced moments in churches she served that nearly shattered her faith altogether.
But Ms. Ladouceur says her relationship with Jesus carried her through. Though she has disassociated herself from a movement now intimately enmeshed with Republican politics, she and others have embraced an enigmatic new label. She formally identifies herself today as “post-Evangelical.”
There’s an ambivalence embedded in this identity, even if she and others are just beginning to figure out what it means beyond deconstructing white evangelicalism’s fusion of faith and right-wing politics.
There are, of course, plenty of choices in America’s robust array of Christian traditions, including those that have long traveled more progressive theological paths. There is also the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, “the nones,” who may have spiritual beliefs but no longer identify themselves as adherents of an organized religion.
Ms. Ladouceur and her fellow post-Evangelicals say they want to hold on to the faith they’ve lived, even though they reject – or have been rejected by – their former churches.
There are reasons to keep the term they use to describe themselves, even if they are decisively putting traditional evangelicalism in their pasts.
“I just find the person of Jesus and story after story of liberation and healing and redemption just a really compelling depiction of who God is,” says Ms. Ladouceur, now the co-founder and executive director of the Post-Evangelical Collective, a small but growing consortium of congregations of former Evangelicals. “It’s just something that I still want to try to align my life with.”
She still testifies, too, to the dramatic personal encounter with Jesus that compelled her to change her life almost 20 years ago. Though she no longer uses the expression, her spiritual experience of being “born again” still defines who she is.
As political power grew, pews shrank
Two decades ago, white Evangelicals comprised over a quarter of the U.S. population. This number has since dropped to about 15%, according to a 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.
There’s a certain irony in this decline. For decades, the religiously conservative movement flourished in the U.S. as more liberal Protestant traditions lost members. Raw, real, and literal, evangelical Christianity engaged
