That being said, over the past five years, though-no doubt due to the election of Donald Trump (lets just be honest)-there has been a veritable grievance industry that has exploded onto the scene that often involves self-described “Ex-Evangelicals” just savaging Evangelicalism as a whole. The subtitle of my book was: “What Every Evangelical Needs to Know about the Creation/Evolution Controversy.” I made it quite clear that I wasn’t attacking Evangelicalism as a whole, but was rather warning really good, sincere, faithful Evangelical Christians about something that I felt was very dangerous within Evangelicalism. Six years ago, I wrote my book, The Heresy of Ham, which was primarily about the dangers of the growing young earth creationist movement within the Evangelical world. Sadly, though, this is the very kind of thing I’ve been seeing, especially over the past five years or so, regarding many people’s take on-or better yet, sheer hatred of-Evangelicalism. It would be wrong to slander and stereotype all the little people within those organizations based off of the manipulative behavior of those bad leaders. Go to any big organization at all, be it religious, political, or in the business world-chances are that many of the big leaders who are atop of those organizations are going to be really corrupt, manipulative, and power-hungry. But I’m never going to slander or broadbrush Evangelicals en masse because of that. Like any religious group, denomination, or branch, Evangelicalism has its fair share of really bad, abusive, power-hungry charlatans. I don’t hate Evangelicals and I don’t think Evangelicalism is some sort of boogeyman religious cult from The Handmaid’s Tale. That being said, most of the Evangelical Christians I know, and have known for my entire life, are good, sensible, thoughtful, godly people who are trying to live out their faith on a daily basis. And the older I get, the more I can tell you that I think there are a number of real problems within Evangelicalism, and I know firsthand the damage that power-hungry Evangelical leaders can do. I still consider myself Orthodox, but I am still very acquainted with American Protestantism/Evangelicalism. Since there was no Orthodox church anywhere near, though, I attended a Baptist church for a while, and now attend a Methodist church. I ended up joining the Orthodox Church, all still while teaching at the Evangelical Christian school.Īs things turned out, I eventually ended up taking another teaching job at another Evangelical Christian school in Alabama and taught there for eight years. It was during my four years teaching at an Evangelical Christian school in Little Rock that I felt I had found a home in the local Greek Orthodox Church. During my four years teaching at an Evangelical Christian school in California, after trying a number of churches for a while, I simply didn’t go to church during most of that time. During two graduate school programs in Vancouver, British Columbia, I found myself at home in the Compline services of the Anglican church in the city. I just found the Evangelical brand of Christianity I had known all my life to be rather shallow.Īlthough I would still be more or less in the orbit of Evangelical Christianity throughout my life, my spiritual journey from that point on took me more and more away from standard American Evangelicalism. It wasn’t that I found either one bad or corrupt, or anything like that. Almost immediately, I had this distinct sense that I no longer really “fit in” anymore with Evangelicalism, either at the church in which I had grown up (particularly the youth group) or at Wheaton Christian High School. By the end of that summer, I decided to get baptized. The Christianity that Lewis discussed made sense to me- that Christianity was challenging and appealing. It was then that I read Mere Christianity by C.S. During the summer after my junior year in high school, I guess you could say I had an initial “crisis of faith,” and I proceeded to rethink what I really believed. I grew up in an Evangelical family, went to an Assemblies of God/Evangelical church, and attended Wheaton Christian High School. In fact, I lived pretty much at the center of it, in Wheaton, Illinois. I grew up within the Evangelical world of the 70-80s.