Becoming Exvangelical

Franklin Graham is coming to New Hampshire this month as part of an evangelistic sweep through New England called “Decision America – Northeast Tour” sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I will not be attending.

There was a time when I adored Billy Graham. I still hold his memory in high esteem. His son – not so much. Franklin is too political and his rhetoric too intolerant for me to tolerate any longer. It shows how much evangelicalism has changed, and how much I have changed.

I used to attend Billy Graham “crusades,” back when we never gave a thought to how offensive the term was to Muslims. While in seminary I was a counselor at his 1977 crusade in Cincinnati and at Billy Graham films. My father-in-law (also a Baptist pastor) thought of him so highly that I sometimes suspected that he considered Billy as the third person of the Trinity.

Those were the good old days when “evangelical” referred solely to one’s religious persuasion. Now it has become synonymous with the Religious Right. Back in those halcyon days Jimmy Carter was the public face of what it meant to be evangelical – before Ronald Reagan captured the hearts of the Moral Majority.

Now the word evangelical means that you support Donald Trump and a conservative social agenda. (Eighty-one percent of evangelicals voted for the president in the 2016 election.) It means that you are opposed to abortion, homosexuality, Islam, immigrants and a host of other “sins” and “sinners.” Furthermore it means that one wants to enforce that agenda through legislation.

Evangelicalism used to be – at least in my mind – a biblically-based expression of the unconditional love of God to all people. Now it feels very unloving. At least that is the way I hear it, as voiced in the rhetoric of Franklin Graham and others of his ilk. It also seems to be increasingly intolerant of progressive Christians and people of other faiths.

From my perspective evangelicalism has abandoned the gospel in exchange for political power. I am sure they see it otherwise, and might say that I am no longer Christian. The whole situation saddens me. I am glad that my father-in-law is not alive to see what has become of the organization that bears his hero’s name.

I am in the process of reading my 2013 book “Experiencing God Directly” on my podcast. As I recorded the introduction to the book recently, I found myself reading aloud these words: “I am a Baptist. In fact I would acknowledge the term evangelical to describe my religious persuasion, although I seldom use this term because of its connotations in popular American culture.”

That is no longer true. I no longer identify with the term, and I haven’t for several years. Not because I have changed so much in the last six years. It is because evangelicalism has changed so much. I guess I have become an ex-evangelical or “exvangelical” – a word recently coined to refer to those who have left the evangelical fold.

Some exvangelicals have abandoned religion completely. I remain stubbornly Christian and incurably religious, while becoming more progressive theologically, socially, and ethically. I have left evangelicalism in order to remain authentically Christian. I choose to remain a follower of Jesus and his radical gospel of love and grace, rather than walk the meandering paths of evangelicalism. So long, Franklin Graham.