#102 – To reject or reconstruct?

Five exvangelicals compare notes about our decisions to either reject or reconstruct a faith system that just wasn’t working for us.

Image by Sunny Sunflower from Pixabay

Picture a gymnasium full of “kids” celebrating their 30-year high school reunion. After graduating from the same school, they all took different paths through life. Joined completely different professional societies. Mixed in different socioeconomic circles. But now they’re all doing the same thing: talking about how they’ve learned what’s really important in life …. that it’s not all about money, power, and control … showing pictures of their kids and grand-kids …. and looking for ways to re-connect and enjoy life together. And as the evening wears on, and the huddles get smaller and tighter, the conversation morphs gradually toward the unknowns and the unanswered questions.

In a way, that’s the experience that Scott and I had this week, talking to three of our listeners who started on the same path as we did, who made a choice radically different from our own …. and yet found that we arrived at the same spot.

All five of us had fully bought in to an Evangelical/Fundamentalist worldview. And we all had a similarly introspective, inquisitive, open-minded personality. All five of us took courses in religious studies at the college/university level, four of us doing so at the graduate level. But so much thinking, searching and learning generated so many questions and so much cognitive dissonance that we had to reject the faith system we started with.

We all became exvangelicals.

But that’s where our paths diverged. Two of us started reconstructing a new Christian faith system that just made more sense of the world around us, radically different from the one we started with, while three of us decided there wasn’t enough worth salvaging from the ruins.

And in this episode, we had that reunion experience I referred to above. We compared notes: believers vs atheists. We raised questions and shared perspectives that many of our listeners will relate to. About certainty. Doubt. Wanting to believe, and yet finding it hard to do so. Whether the label “evangelical” is worth hanging on to.

As always, tell us what you think …

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