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Ah, that does mean evangelical. Almost universally, “non-denominational” means “Baptist in denial.” Sometimes with more charismatic influence than is typical of Baptists. It would be absolutely no surprise to me for a pro-choice feminist to have a falling out with such a congregation over gay marriage, as those congregations are typically conservative doctrinally even if they’re experimental liturgically and ecclesiologically. (And congregational autonomy isn’t even a strange idea for evangelicals.)
That also draws into relief why she felt her religion was either/or — one characteristic of many non-denominationals is a general ignorance of forms of Christianity outside the evangelical orbit, so the concept of an institutional Christianity that is somewhat, well, woke would be unfamiliar. That also makes her pathway more clear to me; she brought the non-denominational emphasis on spiritual autonomy, raw authenticity, and emotional intensity to her politics, with disastrous results.
Nondenominationals are theologically Baptist, but in practice strongly tend to be a bit more liberal than baptists are, not necessarily politically. Nondenominational churches near me run ministries for trial marriages, which baptists at the least would frown upon.
You’re right that virtually none of them are going to be OK with gay marriages. But this is probably more ‘how she chose to frame her disagreement with the church’ than the disagreement itself.
That's... weird. I've been out of the evangelical orbit for, woah, like 15 years at this point? So it wouldn't be surprising if the moral sands have shifted in ways like that in all that time.
I can testify, though, to the bare fact that moral drift in evangelicalism seems to have accelerated over that time, at least -- both my Baptist friends and my Pentecostal cousin are drinking (alcohol) now, and women in pastoral roles is becoming a commonplace belief and practice, even if the Southern Baptists are holding out for now. I also have a friend who was? is? an SBC deacon and had pre-marital sex with multiple women before his marriage, even after his entrance into ministry, because, to quote, "I don't feel convicted of it." (Is there a term for "perfect uncontrition?") He was always kind of a heartbreaker, though. Accusations of infidelity and sexual misconduct have followed him for a long time. So I don't exactly know he was going to let something as petty as "the moral commandments of the almighty God" get in the way of getting his dick wet.
This is indeed much more common than it used to be, and I think it’s a spiritually healthier place for the church to be. I have little knowledge of how it’s gone inside the holiness movement, though.
This is sort of true but in a weird way. There used to be more of a middle ground for evangelicals to combine a mostly theologically conservative outlook with gender egalitarianism. But that middle ground has eroded heavily, as the gender egalitarian types usually went liberal in other ways over time, to the point that this has become a kind of unconscious expectation. The delay for public figures to go from supporting women in ministry to deconstructing is now shockingly brief. I know some folks who still try to occupy that middle ground, but few of them are younger than Gen X.
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Baptists have always drank alcohol, even if they said they don’t. Remember the jokes- ‘Baptists? So rude, they won’t even say hi to you in the liquor store’ and ‘How do you keep a Baptist from drinking all your beer? Bring a second Baptist.’ Or even ‘Baptist church? Check the deacon’s office for beer.’
Sexual misconduct allegations of that sort aren't terribly unusual among baptists(or low church Protestantism generally), so it doesn’t surprise me, but even fairly liberal ones near me at least theoretically ban cohabitation. On the other hand it does seem like preacher’s wives have gone from Mrs pastor to copastor. Definitely have the impression that, liberalizing(slowly) though they might be, baptists are holding out dramatically better than nondenominationals.
I'm not familiar with those jokes. But my ultimate familial background is also in the holiness movement where not just the teaching but the strict expectation of avoiding alcohol was a point of repeated emphasis and "serious" sin results in loss of salvation -- often with the expectation of a public confession of sin as part of an altar call (the preferred term is "backsliding"). I reckon this background made me especially predisposed to the concepts of infused righteousness and sacramental confession, even if Wesleyan holiness tradition has a very different model of what "synergistic justification" looks like (and therefore finds no place for the veneration of saints as heroic). A famous quote from the Holiness movement is this, "The minimum of salvation is salvation from sinning. The maximum is salvation from pollution—the inclination to sin"; which is eerily Tridentine. So I suppose there's a little projection of my own that I'm doing, where I assume the historically strict behavior of my holiness family members is true of abstentionist Protestant movements more generally.
The sexual misconduct allegations had nothing to do with abuse of power or his work in the Baptist church, but were more informal, and are probably what I'd put in the bucket of "overreaction to a misunderstanding." If the exact terms of the accusations were discussed on the motte, they'd probably be laughed at. My larger point is simply to illustrate that this friend is... kind of a player, someone who seems very sociosexual, to the point where excessive sexuality seems to surround him. And to be fair, he does have bedroom eyes.
Maybe they’re Catholic jokes.
We also tell the joke ‘baptists only fornicate lying down so peeping toms don’t mistake them for dancing’. Applied holiness standards have been selective for a while.
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I'm not sure it's ignorance so much as disinterest. If she's in the process of abandoning Christian conviction anyway, why seek out a woke church instead of the woke secular friends she already has? In my experience exvangelical men and women usually end up atheist, with a minority of women falling into witchcraft instead.
A drift toward wokeness that maintains the form of Christianity is much more likely when it happens at the congregational level and up.
That's a fair point. But as someone who is, I suppose, a literal exvangelical according to the definition (if not the spirit) of the term, I agree that most conversions away from evangelicalism lead away from faith entirely (or toward performative paganism). But that actually goes to my point -- evangelicalism is so totalizing in its cultural orbit, so utterly identified with Christianity to many Americans, that rejecting it or its culture means rejecting Christianity. I speak from experience here: I knew profoundly little about non-evangelical churches when I left evangelicalism as a teen, except that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism theoretically existed, even if they seemed more like historical trivia than real religious bodies. Even Catholicism has long struck many white evangelicals from the Midwest and Southeast as something for elderly latinas, someone else's ethnic religion, a church for the still-pagan descendents of pagan Aztecs, a place for hyphenated-Americans. That tone has severely softened in recent years, as white Catholics have become the standard-bearers of the religious right in many ways, but there's a serious way in which the often harsh, but nevertheless informed critiques of more traditional forms of Christianity within historic Protestantism have been flanderized in evangelical circles to an absolute rejection of the Christianity of non-evangelical forms of faith -- indeed out of ignorance.
That said, evangelicalism has also been characterized by a firmer affirmation of conservative social doctrine than spiritual doctrine (I'm not saying spirituality isn't important to them -- I'm saying their emphasis, especially to people who grow distant, is often perceived to be culture war instead of spiritual development), and so leaving evangelicalism is often associated with leaving social conservatism. So most who proudly wear the title of "ex-evangelical" do so because they believe social liberalism is the One True Faith, and become evangelical atheists instead of evangelical Christians. Seen it many times; been there myself.
I also very much see cases of increasing non-denominational, doctrinally-loose and progressive churches that explicitly attract people like this; some Baptist friends of mine have a lesbian friend who attends such a church, which is growing. So there's clearly an appeal for a form of Christianity that basically reflects the worldview that Lana had before the breakup of her marriage, and I'm simply reflecting on the market failure where the mainline Protestant churches that have already been there for a long time now aren't even considered as an option, and are themselves being out-competed by "woke evangelical" churches the same way the megachurch is out-competing the Bible church on the street corner!
I had a somewhat different experience of the evangelical church growing up than you did, though I can see where you are coming from. I remain in the congregation where I grew up, a Baptist-adjacent Bible church in a blue state.
I’d say that our attitude toward Rome growing up was guarded, sometimes harsh, but not particularly uninformed; of course I have a deeper understanding of the critique as a middle-aged man than I did as a teenager, but that’s true of many things. We didn’t talk about the Eastern Orthodox much, but there weren’t a lot of them around. Our attitude toward middle- and even high-church Protestants was reasonably positive so long as they were strong on Scripture and held to sola fide.
I agree that the general evangelical attitude toward Rome is much less guarded today than it was. Opinions on Eastern Orthodoxy are pretty mixed, but the most common attitude is to regard them as eccentric Roman Catholics. (I will give you that this one is pretty uninformed.)
I can’t speak to your experience, but in mine people who leave evangelical Christianity tend to move toward social liberalism first, then when this clashes with evangelical Christianity they abandon evangelicalism. It’s a commonplace that when a young man comes to his pastor and says, “I just can’t accept the truth of Christianity any longer,” the correct response is, “Who is she?” Also common today are people who want to accommodate their friends on LGBT issues and leave their evangelical churches when those hold fast to the biblical teaching.
To those leaving it may look like the church is prioritizing social issues over spiritual things. But striving after obedience to God’s will revealed in Scripture is fundamentally tied up in spiritual things. (“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and, “Faith without works is dead.”) You can be socially conservative without being an evangelical Christian, or a Christian at all, but it’s no coincidence that socially liberal churches also have a low view of the Bible.
(There is a smaller cohort that leaves evangelicalism directly for more liturgical churches. This is a different phenomenon, and most of them don’t think that evangelicals’ positions on social issues are too conservative.)
I agree that this demand exists, but in my world it’s less than one might suppose. I expect that most “woke evangelical” churches will fade away in a generation or so as the children of their members abandon any connection to Christianity.
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