“What is the ‘Post’ in Post-Evangelical Feminism?”

Just days after the first election of Donald Trump in November 2016, Rachel Held Evans wrote in a blogpost entitled “Life After Evangelicalism,” in which she reflected, “I eventually left evangelicalism when it became clear that the fight was wearing me down, with little promise of change, especially as it concerned my LGBT friends and neighbors.” Evans declared that her faith tradition of origin had turned its back on the very values she still treasured, including Jesus’ solidarity with people on the margins of society. She condemned the “unholy marriage between Donald Trump and the white American church.” She was not alone in her analysis.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the racial reckoning of 2020 in the United States created a new wave of defections from evangelicalism. Many young adults in the millennial generation and generation X who grew up in or had intense engagements with evangelicalism had been wrestling with the social and political commitments of white evangelicalism for years. Many dissented from the coalition between evangelicalism and the Religious Right that had solidified with the 1980 election of Reagan. However, the disparate responses within evangelical communities between progressive and conservative members to the national events of 2016 and 2020 created a new crisis, widening the divide that had existed for decades.

For digital communities of Christian feminists who once identified as evangelical, the late 2010s and early 2020s served as a watershed moment for their religious identification and affiliation with evangelical institutions. Though many people historians refer to as evangelicals have typically described themselves variously as “Christian,” “Bible believer,” or “born again,” the political and social context of the twenty-first century caused progressive feminists to actively disidentify as evangelicals. Unlike the politically progressive evangelical leaders of the 1970s and 1980s like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Virginia Mollenkott, and Tom Skinner, these new dissidents rejected continued connections to their conservative co-religionists. Post-evangelical feminists pointed to patriarchy, racism, and homophobia within conservative evangelicalism and chose to semantically separate themselves from the evangelicalism they considered to be dominant in evangelical institutions, which they had personally experienced and which was frequently depicted by the media. Often their rejection of evangelicalism entailed a physical separation, such as leaving an evangelical church and moving to a mainline church or choosing not to attend any church, even when many of their theological beliefs and religious practices remained.  

This paper will examine the words of post-evangelical authors and readers who disidentified with evangelicalism to explain this disidentification in historical context. My sources are published blog posts, social media posts, and Substack newsletters, as well as 75 semi-structured interviews I conducted from 2021-2023. From these sources, I argue that post-evangelical feminists’ primary reasons for disidentification are the interconnected issues of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia within white evangelicalism.

Secondly, I discuss my use of the term “post-evangelical” to write about my interlocutors in my scholarship. The term simultaneously connects them to the evangelical tradition that originated in the revival period of the 1730s and 1740s in the United States and Britain and separates them from the political conservatism that has been dominant in American evangelicalism since the 1980s. Finally, it respects the choice of my interlocutors to disidentify with the term, describing them as historical subjects in ways they would recognize themselves. In this way, I balance the demands of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “History 1” and “History 2” to provide scholarly analysis and to respect my subjects’ self-understanding.

Recent scholarship has wrestled with the problems that come with defining evangelicalism without attending to its political dynamics. Matthew Sutton’s article, “Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right” pointed to the insufficiency of theological definitions of evangelicalism to account for the political leanings and overtones of American evangelicalism. Scholars Isaac Sharp, Anthea Butler, Kristin Du Mez, and Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, have examined streams of racialized, gendered, and politicized evangelicalism and argued that these elements are central to the development of American evangelicalism, especially in the twentieth century.

Online, post-evangelical feminists often describe their intentional separation from the white mainstream evangelicalism as “deconstruction.” In Ministers of Propaganda, scholar Scott Coley writes that evangelical deconstruction “is essentially an effort to decode propaganda that’s embedded in the ideology of the religious right.” Indeed, many post-evangelical feminists recoil from the political ideological material their co-religionists post on social media and the political rhetoric they believe and repeat. They reject vaccine misinformation, support of Trump they consider idolatrous, and anti-abortion rhetoric. In addition to these political differences, they appeal to deeper streams of gender, racial, and sexual inequalities that pervade not only national policy but ecclesiological polity. They find it necessary to separate themselves not only from Trumpian politics but from conservative evangelical institutions.

The paper will make clear, however, that post-evangelical feminist communities continue to embody many of the characteristics of evangelicalism: the centrality of scripture, the practices of testimony and evangelism, and the belief in the Holy Spirit as the inspiration for and strength behind Christian calling. While post-evangelical feminists claim discontinuity with the evangelical tradition, as a historian I recognize significant continuity with the theology and ethos of evangelical history.