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 the human heart in ways a more intellectual Christianity never could, many believers explained.
These religious characteristics describe a significant section of Black and Latino Protestantism, too. Since the 1970s, however, the term has mostly applied to white conservatives who coalesced around the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, becoming the most reliable and politically potent force in American politics, and the core of the Republican Party.
A wide majority of white Evangelicals continue to proclaim a zealous enthusiasm for former President Donald Trump – and they feel their support has been vindicated. Last year, in a resounding victory after a half-century of effort, a Supreme Court with three members appointed by President Trump overturned Roe v. Wade.
The nation’s high court, with a supermajority of justices who have conservative religious commitments, also opened the doors for taxpayer support for religious education, another top-line goal for Evangelicals. Similarly, the justices have made protecting religious liberty a paramount concern in cases brought by religious conservatives.
As white evangelicalism now stands at the peak of its political power, however, many are beginning to confront the movement’s own internal decline.
“More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined,” write Evangelical pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham in their book, “The Great Dechurching.”
While they suggest a nuanced picture of the decline of Evangelicals, it’s clear that politics is driving a significant part of younger generations away, surveys show.
“The No. 1 question that younger Evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible,” writes Russell Moore, former head of the ethics committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. He felt forced to leave the denomination because of his outspoken opposition to Mr. Trump. “Almost none of them even call themselves ‘evangelical’ anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories.”
The nation’s bitter political divisions have played a significant role in the fledgling movement of post-Evangelicals, who also emphasize their more progressive concerns as they try to reforge their understanding of Christian faith.
“What they’re leaving behind is anti-intellectualism; they’re leaving behind anti-LGBT commitments; they’re trying to leave behind patriarchy,” says David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta. “They’re trying to leave behind nationalism and militarism, because they believe that doesn’t really fit with following Jesus – in any country. And they’re definitely trying to leave behind the identification of conservative whiteness as synonymous with following Jesus.”
Once considered a preeminent Evangelical ethicist, Mr. Gushee wrote “Changing Our Mind” in 2014. His book appealed to biblical authority and traditional Christian theology to argue for the full inclusion of same-sex couples and transgender people. In many ways, his book remained conservative, in that it invited LGBTQ+ people into the tradition of Christian marriage, reserving sexual expression within monogamous lifelong commitments.
Mr. Gushee was used to being outside his culture’s conservative views, and he had always been comfortable calling himself a “progressive Evangelical.” But in this era of amplified polarization, former friends, colleagues, and students thought he had moved into a place that was both dangerous and wicked.
“More and more Evangelicals have the idea that the people who disagree with us – the people who gave us Roe v. Wade, the people who gave us the gay rights movement, or that progressives and Democrats in general – they’re not just wrong, they’re not just our respective opponents; they are demonic enemies of all that is good,” he says.
After 40 years as a committed Evangelical scholar, Mr. Gushee says that journey has ended. The time has now come to forge ahead and build something new with those that he says are “following Jesus out of American evangelicalism.”
A moment that changed a life
Ms. Ladouceur still vividly remembers the moment Jesus came into her life on Easter Sunday in 2005.
She was driving home late, as usual, from one of the restaurants where she worked in Tampa, Florida. She was 20 and still thrilled with her cute new car with leather seats and a sunroof.
She had gotten her GED diploma a few years earlier and had become a regional manager for a restaurant group, in charge of employee training at an age when most people are still in college. She was working long hours and making bank, spending weekends on boats with friends, attending parties, and dating a lot.
“I tried everything the world had to offer me that I thought was going to make me feel whole or fulfilled,” Ms. Ladouceur says. “But it all kind of came up empty.”
That night, she took notice of the sign in front of the sprawling evangelical church next to her restaurant, announcing its Easter service. She’d passed the campus probably hundreds of times, says Ms. Ladouceur. “I just felt a sort of a whispered invitation,” she says.
The next morning it was a bit strange, she says, being a single 20-year-old walking into a large church with lots of families. Four years earlier, she had legally emancipated herself from her own religious family. She describes leaving behind a household of addiction, abuse, and adultery, vowing she wanted nothing to do with religion as she set out to live alone at 16.
But she was drawn to the church’s high-tech worship, fun lobby photo booths, and focus on family services. “I suddenly felt this connection to a spirit of, ‘Yes, I do think this is part of what has been lacking in my life,’” she says.
She was gripped by the 30-minute sermon of a pastor she found “earnest and real and compassionate” as he talked about the struggles of living a Christian life. When she went home, she wrote a verse from the sermon on a sticky note and posted it on her mirror, where she could see these words of Jesus every day:
“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”
She felt reborn. It was a moment that changed her life. She began to see her work as a chance to build teams rooted in respect and kindness. Within weeks, she instituted a Building Better People policy for her restaurants’ training program.
“Every day, it was like, what do I have to do to lose my life but find my life in Christ before showing up to work to a managers meeting? How am I going to lead these managers? How am I going to talk about our cultural issues within our organization? What should I do with my money?” Ms. Ladouceur. “Yeah, it was just, what do I need to do to lose my life and what do I need to do to find my way to Jesus?”
She began to volunteer with the youth ministries. Within a year, the senior pastor asked the enthusiastic young member: You’ve been building restaurants and scaling a franchise. I wonder if you’ve ever considered building ministries?
It would mean taking a 70% pay cut. It would mean changing her lifestyle. That week she sat down and wrote pages and pages of ideas for leading a ministry for middle schoolers. It was, as she would later say, “a clear calling.”
She accepted the job, and the church gave her a modest salary and a new title: pastor of youth ministries.
But there were warning signs, even back then. The first came relatively soon, when her congregation called a new pastor of discipleship. He wouldn’t take the job they offered him if women were able to hold the title of pastor. Her gender should use their gifts to complement the proper spiritual headship of men, he believed.
So church leaders changed their young minister’s title from pastor to coordinator of youth ministries.
American evangelicalism in the 20th century
American evangelical Protestantism has long been forged in cultural conflict.
In many ways, it emerged from what were called the “modernist” controversies of the early 20th century. Historical and critical studies of the Bible and the theory of evolution challenged literalist interpretations. Many Protestant denominations adjusted their understanding of faith and miracles within a very different understanding of the cosmos and the physical world.
In response, conservatives issued a statement that became known as “the five fundamentals,” which insisted on nonnegotiable beliefs such as the virgin birth, the literal resurrection of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible. The Scopes Trial in 1925 brought these controversies to a crescendo in a well-publicized clash over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
For decades after that cultural defeat, fundamentalist Christianity mostly retreated from public life, quietly building new institutions and denominational infrastructures. The term “fundamentalist” became a mostly pejorative label.
By the 1950s, many conservative Christians started to distance themselves from fundamentalism, at least in a cultural sense. The Evangelist Billy Graham brought a more middle-class and business-friendly sensibility, wearing a suit and tie during his revivals. He used radio and television to share a less reactionary religious message, even if he still decried the country’s liberal direction and called for a return to its perceived authentic past.
“The modern American evangelical movement born in those years always had a kind of a ‘Take America back for God,’ and ‘Take the world back for Christ’ kind of vision,” says Mr. Gushee. “I mean, that’s just in the marrow of evangelicalism.
“The strategy was, you tell all your neighbors about Jesus and then you bring them to church,” he says. “And then you send missionaries all over, all around the world. It was, ‘win the world for Christ.’”
By the end of the 1970s, this cultural reemergence included political organizing, especially in support of Ronald Reagan. “But I now think that that strategy partly reflected a loss of confidence in the strategy of evangelism and missions,” Mr. Gushee says.
Abortion and sexuality played little role in the political organizing of white Evangelicals in the 1970s, historians such as Randall Balmer at Dartmouth College point out. The galvanizing political issue, he argues, was the desegregation of public schools and the needs of the private, mostly white Christian academies that sprang up in response.
Mr. Gushee’s book “Defending Democracy From Its Christian Enemies” traces how evangelical politics has evolved. Today, its targets include critical race theory and books about race and LGBTQ+ people, drag shows, and abortion and transgender health care.
“Christian nationalism is not my preferred term to describe the politics that has emerged,” Mr. Gushee says. “I call it authoritarian, reactionary Christian politics that increasingly doesn’t trust the democratic process.”
A rebel pastor
In truth, Zach Lambert has always been something of a rebel.
He grew up in Austin, Texas, as part of a family long steeped in evangelicalism. His grandparents were charter members of Great Hills Baptist Church, which flourished over the decades to become Austin’s first megachurch. His father, Reagan Lambert, was hired by legendary Dallas Cowboys Coach Tom Landry to open a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which he ran for 30 years.
Despite such a pedigree, Mr. Lambert bristled at some of the ideas about God he was learning at his family church. Confident and aggressive, he sometimes liked to challenge the youth minister on matters of theology during youth group discussions.
One Easter week, the youth minister was explaining the theology of atonement, Mr. Lambert recalls. When Jesus was on the cross, God turned his back on him, the minister said, because Jesus had all of our sins on him. God in his perfect holiness can’t abide sin in his presence, so that’s why Jesus said, “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”
“So, I raised my hand and said something to the effect of, ‘You tell us that this God is a good father and he is trustworthy and he loves us,’” he says. “And yet, it sounds like at the greatest time of need, he turns his back and is nowhere to be found. How does it work, anyway, that God can’t be around sin, which means, what? That he can’t be around the world or any of us at any time?”
The youth minister had enough. Rather than try to explain one of theology’s harder problems, he kicked the smart aleck out of the group. Far from chastened, Mr. Lambert was happy to go.
Like many teenagers in Texas, he was obsessed with video games and football, giving little thought to religion. He became a member of his high school’s varsity football team, which had the Rebels as a mascot. Like many teammates, he hung a Confederate battle flag above his bed.
But then a moment changed him. He reconnected with a friend he’d known from kindergarten through middle school. They had lost contact after each went to high schools on different sides of Austin. Excited to see him, Mr. Lambert invited him to hang out and play video games.
At the door of his bedroom, however, his friend froze, suddenly saying he had to leave. Confused, he asked why. His friend explained that his parents had told him that if he ever found himself with white people displaying that flag, he should leave as quickly as possible. Mr. Lambert was stunned; he had no idea his flag could cause such a reaction. He took the flag down and never put it back up.
When Mr. Lambert was 17, he was still something of a rebel, smoking weed and drinking. One summer evening when he was out late with friends, he overdosed on a combination of cough medicine and alcohol, needing medical attention. Not long after that, an acquaintance also overdosed, then died.
The experiences were devastating. “I started to ask those existential questions, like, why am I here? And is God real, and have I misunderstood Christianity? Do I need to reengage with it to find meaning in my life?” he says. He started reading the Bible again. Then, at a youth camp, he had a powerful conversion experience.
He’d always planned to attend a Christian college in Texas and play football. His plan was to study sports management and start a career as a football coach. But during his first year at college, he found a small evangelical congregation and became an active member.
A devastating injury meant he could no longer play football. But his church asked him to be their part-time youth pastor. Soon there was no doubt in his mind: His true calling was to be a full-time Christian pastor.
After graduating, he went to Dallas Theological Seminary. He also landed a pastoral internship at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, one of the largest megachurches in the U.S. During the Obama years, he worked closely with Jack Graham, who would later become a member of the evangelical advisory committee to President Trump.
“Politics, it was all very integral to what the church did,” says Mr. Lambert. “A church that was supposed to be doing God’s work was so enmeshed with right-wing politicians and political figures. ... So, yeah, I just got really disillusioned really quickly.”
And then there were the scandals. According to the 2022 Guidepost report on sexual abuse within Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Graham, a former president of the convention, “allegedly allowed an accused abuser of young boys to be dismissed quietly in 1989 without reporting the abuse to police.” The former music minister moved on to a congregation in Mississippi, where he was charged with abusing young boys, the report says.
In May 2008, another pastor at Prestonwood was arrested for soliciting sex from a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl online. A few years later, Mr. Lambert says a pastor on staff became addicted to painkillers and, during pastoral calls to older adults, stole their medications. Church leaders accused the pastor’s wife of neglecting her appearance, gaining weight, and contributing to her husband’s addiction.
“I kind of thought, yeah, I’m probably going to be done with ministry,” he says.
“It was a wild time”
Looking back, Ms. Ladouceur always felt a bit uneasy with the “purity culture” that seemed to fall mostly on women. She had lost the title of pastor, but she was still dedicated to her ministry, working with middle school children.
Another youth pastor started to pursue her romantically. “I actually said to him, ‘You’ll probably get fired for hanging out with me. Like, this is never going to be a thing,’” she recalls joking. But they started dating, and church leaders made it clear: They should marry as soon as possible, especially since he was planning to go to seminary. So they did.
Part of her new husband’s training included a position near Chicago at a renowned megachurch, Willow Creek Community Church. Its founder and senior pastor, Bill Hybels, was recognized as one of the most important Evangelical ministers in the country. Politically moderate and focused on evangelism and ministry, he worked with President Barack Obama on immigration issues. Unlike other conservative ministers, he supported women having the role of pastor.
Leaders at Willow Creek, impressed with her experience, also offered Ms. Ladouceur a full time job as a youth minister.
For over a decade, it was a good life. The young, energetic ministers started a family, having a daughter and son. “While I worked in student ministry, I ran a winter camp for 2,000 high school students while I was nine months pregnant” with her daughter, Olivia, she says. “It was a wild time.”
She moved on to other ministerial roles, including a peacemaking ministry, which sought to address the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. Then, six months pregnant with her son, Liam, she interviewed for an adult education ministry. She got the position, and she began to work closely with Mr. Hybels.
In 2018 in an international scandal, Mr. Hybels resigned after at least five women told their stories of being groomed and sexually harassed while working closely with him. Ms. Ladouceur was one of those women. Mr. Hybels continues to deny the accusations, including those of Ms. Ladouceur.
“The way Willow Creek and its leaders responded to me, it was gutting to me,” Ms. Ladouceur says. “I just really had to wrestle with, wouldn’t Jesus be moving toward the ones who were hurt in this situation, not protecting the organization?”
Her marriage didn’t survive the public ordeal. For a time, she returned to working with racial justice and peacemaking nonprofits, as she struggled to rebuild her life, and her faith.
“My faith paradigm had been decimated,” she says. “But Jesus was still the compelling force behind not wanting to give up my faith in Jesus.” Deep in therapy, she decided to go to seminary to work through her shattered call to ministry.
A single mother, she became a pastor again in a congregation in Kentucky. But she felt called to do more after her experiences in prominent evangelical churches. She wanted to try to change the paradigms of Christian ministry.
Her faith in Jesus was still calling her to build the kingdom of God, she says. And soon she was finding hundreds of people who felt called to do the same.
A church in exile
After leaving Prestonwood, Mr. Lambert decided to remain committed to ministry. In fact, he says he “really kind of caught the church-planting bug,” so he moved his family back to Austin and started a church from scratch.
He and others began to raise funds, and they formed a denominational partnership with the Evangelical Free Church of America.
At first he felt that his ministry should shun politics. But his church, Restore Austin, was becoming diverse, and it included same-sex couples and others who didn’t fit the evangelical profile.
“Everything started happening in our first year of being a church in 2016, and it wasn’t even because of the presidential election,” Mr. Lambert says. “At our first baptism service, we baptized a number of LGBTQ+ folks, including a lesbian couple. We gave a kids’ dedication service for another lesbian couple who became a part of the church,” he says. The congregation also started to have discussions about racial justice and Black Lives Matter.
These actions placed them under investigation by the Evangelical Free denomination and other financial sponsors. His congregation’s actions were considered unbiblical and sinful, and his ministry license was revoked.
“We were kicked out of absolutely every evangelical organization that we were a part of, including our denomination,” Mr. Lambert says. “We felt really alone.”
During the pandemic, he says, a miracle happened. As his ministry moved online, he started to connect with other ministers and congregations who had experiences like his.
“We realized, we needed to figure out how to build some systems and structures into an actual kind of network organization so that we can better support pastors, a lot who have been kicked out of denominations or stripped of ordinations. We all had the same stories,” he says.
By 2021, roundtables and meet-ups included hundreds of ministers and others who were starting to call themselves “post-Evangelicals,” and who were not ready to abandon their faith or call to ministry.
Ms. Ladouceur was among them. Together, they helped forge the Post-Evangelical Collective to support those who were either forced out or decided to walk away. So far, the collective has established “hubs” in at least 14 major cities, with about 50 congregations.
“Evangelicals are driving out their exiles. They are losing their young disproportionately,” says Mr. Gushee. “So God-oriented, Christ-following folks are heading into post-evangelical spaces, but it needs to exist institutionally for people to have a place to land,” he adds. “That is what is being built right before our eyes. I believe that evangelicalism is definitely shrinking, post-evangelicalism is definitely coalescing – and I believe it will become a significant part of U.S. religion.”
Mr. Lambert no longer thinks his ministry should be apolitical. “I’ve just become really convinced that the call to Christ’s followers is to leverage whatever power or privilege we have in the service of people who have less,” Mr. Lambert says, adding he feels a responsibility to use whatever privilege he has “in a way that helps people rather than harms people.”
Ms. Ladouceur feels much the same: “I feel way less pressure these days to have all of the right intellectual thoughts about Jesus, and more about just how upside down and subversive his way of being in the world was – a way of being that did not lead to destruction, but led to redemption.”
The story of the Syrophoenician woman in the Gospel of Mark has been in her heart, she says. Jesus is trying to get away from the clamoring crowds, and this Gentile woman falls at his feet and begs him to heal her daughter. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs,” Jesus retorts. “Lord,” the woman replies, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Impressed, Jesus tells her that her daughter has been healed.
“The idea that a Black woman would have changed the mind of the divine in such a tense interaction – I think it’s a really subversive text,” she says. “But I think the biggest thing is, time and time again Jesus made space for outcasts. And who Jesus came to welcome, every time it flipped religious ideals on their heads – even his own. He made a lot of religious people angry by continuing to build a longer table and invite more and more people.”
In some ways, the words of Jesus at her conversion were prophetic. “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”
