The Insufferable Recovering Evangelical

The real pain with which a recovering evangelical may suffer makes relating to the church difficult—but wearing that pain as an identity is another thing entirely.

Thus far in life, I have found few more insufferable than the “recovering evangelical”—or, as the movement now brands itself, the exvangelical. Through all my theological education and time in religious circles, those who “grew up evangelical” and now define themselves primarily by what they have left behind have been the most difficult people with whom to speak about faith.

Even as a former evangelical Protestant myself—one who left evangelicalism for the Catholic Church—I take issue with the term “recovering evangelical” itself, a moniker that is thrown around cynically like “recovering alcoholic.” Evangelicalism is not a disease from which to recover. It may be, as I will argue below, an incomplete system—one with genuine doctrinal limitations—but incompleteness is not pathology, and a tradition that brings millions of people to a living encounter with Christ deserves better than a clinical metaphor.

If it were, the most popular treatment appears to be some form of progressive, nebulous Christianity that looks a lot more like the broader culture than the traditional church in terms of acceptable social mores and moral imperatives.

The recovering evangelical personifies the Babylon Bee headline: “Man Bravely Abandons Unpopular Christian Belief To Affirm Extremely Popular Cultural Belief.” It’s acquiescence posing as courage, cynicism posing as wisdom, and weakness posing as strength.

What Is the Exvangelical Movement?

The term “exvangelical” emerged in the mid-2010s as a social media hashtag and has since grown into a recognizable cultural movement. It describes people who have left evangelical Christianity—whether for progressive Christianity, mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, other religious traditions, or no religion at all. The movement gained momentum through books like Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals (2024) and has been covered by outlets from PBS to the American Enterprise Institute.

The reasons people leave are as varied as the people themselves: some experienced genuine spiritual abuse or manipulation, others found themselves at odds with evangelical stances on science, sexuality, or politics, and still others—like me—encountered theological traditions with deeper historical roots and greater intellectual coherence. The pain is often real, but pain—however sincere—is not an argument. The abandonment of an entire belief system because of the personal failures of its adherents is emotionally understandable but logically incoherent, an edifice of conclusions built on ad hominem foundations. What concerns me is not the leaving but the posture many adopt afterward—one defined more by rejection than by any affirmative commitment.

Not everyone who questions evangelicalism becomes an exvangelical in this sense. Some, like John Henry Newman before them, follow their theological convictions through years of rigorous investigation into a more ancient and comprehensive faith. That was my path from evangelicalism to Catholicism, and it is the path I commend—not because the questions are illegitimate, but because the answers deserve more than a hashtag.

The Pain Behind the Exvangelical Movement Has Various Roots

I acknowledge the pain that many people have endured within and at the hands of evangelical churches. But acknowledging pain is not the same as granting it argumentative force. I “grew up evangelical” myself, and I too left it for another faith tradition (in my case, Roman Catholicism).

I nonetheless adamantly reject the “recovering evangelical” label. My background, my upbringing, brought me to where I am today, and I do not look back upon it with any disdain.

I grew up in a devout Southern Baptist household in Arkansas where a somewhat fundamentalist doctrine coexisted with a genuine zeal for social justice—a term that has since been coopted beyond recognition into something alien to the Christian tradition from which it sprang. My family took in foster children because the Gospel demanded it, not because it was fashionable. The evangelical Baptist churches of my youth gave me Scripture, gave me a personal relationship with Christ, and gave me the urgency of the Great Commission. I have never left those convictions behind.

I left Protestantism more than I left evangelicalism because of what I perceived to be the foundational doctrinal inconsistencies within its structure—particularly the doctrine of sola scriptura and the absence of a coherent teaching authority. I did not, however, leave as a mark of disdain or animosity for that faith tradition.

I like to tell people that I went to Yale a conservative and left even more conservative, pressing back beyond Martin Luther to the Church Fathers. My Catholic faith is the fullest expression of what I first encountered in those Baptist churches—though I understand to some this may be hard to understand. In that sense, I consider myself an evangelical Catholic: someone who holds the fullness of the Catholic faith while cherishing the evangelical passion for Scripture.

Yes, there are judgmental people within the evangelical church, and yes, evangelicals tend to focus on “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” more than may be healthy. Such things, however, while at times misguided, are merely manifestations of sincere attempts to live a life consistent with biblical values and Christian teaching.

Suffering in the Church Is Inevitable

I cannot speak to the specific hurts of individuals, nor would I presume to try. I am in no position to diminish or downplay whatever pain they may be carrying around with them. I grew up in the same environment, and I understand. I have my own scars that have yet to heal.

The reality is, however, that living life and interacting with people will inevitably result in a large number of festering wounds and nasty scars. If I didn’t grow up evangelical, I would have acquired my injuries somewhere else.

That is simply a testament to the fallen nature of humanity rather than the inherent backwardness of a particular theological point of view. Personal experiences are not a solid basis from which to attack a theology.

This is a point the sociological literature on religious disaffiliation consistently reinforces. The Pew Research Center’s studies on the “nones”—those who claim no religious affiliation—show that the most common reasons people leave are intellectual: questioning religious teachings, believing morality does not require religion, and finding spirituality outside institutional settings. Personal grievances and distrust of religious leaders are also significant factors, but they are secondary to the philosophical ones. In either case, the departures rarely engage with the theological claims themselves. Leaving because you were hurt—or because you found the answers unsatisfying—is understandable; concluding that the theology is therefore false is a non sequitur.

I appreciate this reality more since coming from evangelicalism into Catholicism. Many have suffered terrible things within the Catholic Church, as the sexual abuse crisis—documented extensively in the John Jay Report, which catalogued decades of abuse from 1950 to 2002—has demonstrated.

Indeed, many have left the Church with scars that will never heal after suffering terrible evils perpetrated by the very people entrusted with their care. Yet, a pedophile priest, a corrupt bishop, or a genuinely terrible pope—and the Church has had some, from Stephen VI’s cadaver synod to the Borgia papacy—do not diminish the value and truth found within the Catholic Church.

The following satirical video captures the obnoxious ex-evangelical archetype perfectly:

The Logical Fallacy Behind Exvangelical Arguments

We have a tendency to project our individual situations onto a larger narrative. It is a macro exhibition of the argumentum ad hominem fallacy. (“The evangelical church is full of hypocrites; therefore, evangelical theology is bankrupt,” is a nonsensical argument.)

Systems of belief must be evaluated on their own terms, not merely on the basis of the behavior of their adherents. Evil (and stupid) people exist in all walks of life, and they will always use the tools available to them to manipulate others.

Unfortunately, sometimes the available tool is religion. A man using a hammer to kill another man, however, does not diminish the value of a hammer for its intended purpose. Faith is frequently misused to harm, but that does not reduce its value, only demonstrates its power.

We should also remember that nationalism justified the Nazi expansion and genocide. Atheism reigned supreme when Stalin engineered the Holodomor—starving millions of Ukrainians to death—and when Pol Pot tortured his own people under the Khmer Rouge.

Evil is not the exclusive playground of religion.

This is why evaluating theological systems on their own terms—rather than on the behavior of their adherents—is essential. The anti-Catholic evangelicals I have engaged with over the years commit exactly the same fallacy in reverse: they point to the Borgia popes and the sexual abuse crisis as if these refute the Church’s doctrinal claims. They do not, any more than the Southern Baptist sexual abuse scandal—which revealed systemic failures across hundreds of churches—refutes the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The fallacy cuts both ways.

Yet, the “recovering evangelical” crowd harps upon the troubles they witnessed growing up, frequently waxing poetic about the “liberation” they have found in mainline Protestantism (or atheism).

Like someone starting a gluten-free diet or finishing their first week of CrossFit, they cannot shut up about it.

The “Intellectual” Path Out of Evangelicalism

The intellectual apostates—of which I may be one—are often the worst. They’re the ones who leave because of an intellectual incompatibility with the faith they developed. Their journey usually begins with a questioning of evangelicalism on the basis of some group of scriptural passages.

They may, for example, discover that the Church Fathers frequently understood Scripture allegorically—Origen’s De Principiis and Augustine’s De Genesi ad Litteram being obvious examples—learn about the complexities of interpreting the first eleven chapters of Genesis, and then question the traditional creation account.

While evolution may not be a prominent position to hold in most conservative evangelical churches, it is not incompatible with evangelicalism, either—nor, for that matter, with Catholicism.¹

Such recovering evangelicals had built the foundation of their faith on such a house of cards, however, that once one piece fell, the rest soon followed. The nascent recovering evangelical will then jump from something as benign as believing in evolution to denying the Bible as a source of ethics and authority and going all-in with progressive relativism.

What is often missing in this trajectory is any encounter with the breadth of the Christian intellectual tradition. The faith deconstruction narrative typically moves from “my evangelical church was too simplistic” to “Christianity is intellectually bankrupt”—skipping over two millennia of rigorous theological and philosophical thought. Augustine’s Confessions is one of the great works of Western literature. Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae engages every serious objection to Christian faith with a rigor that would satisfy any analytic philosopher. Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine wrestles with exactly the kind of historical and theological complexity that triggers faith crises in the first place—and emerges with a more robust faith for it.

The problem is not that recovering evangelicals ask hard questions. The problem is that they assume evangelicalism is the whole of Christianity, and when it proves inadequate, they throw the entire enterprise overboard rather than discovering the tradition that predates it.

This is what makes the faith deconstruction movement so frustrating to watch. The underlying questions are often legitimate. The Church Fathers did read Scripture allegorically. The Bible is a more complex text than many evangelical churches acknowledge. But the leap from “my Sunday school teacher oversimplified Genesis” to “Christianity is oppressive” is not a logical progression—it is an emotional one dressed up in intellectual clothing.

Why Recovering Evangelicals Seek Community

Everyone wants to be a member of a tribe. I get that. No one wants to be left flapping alone in the wind, so it is understandable that when someone starts to question evangelicalism, they seek a crowd more at ease with them and the road down which they are walking.

Yes, they’ll have to face backlash from some evangelicals who resent or feel hurt by the perceived abandonment of the faith by a friend. (There’s a very understandable reason why most groups don’t take kindly to apostates.) But they will find solace in a form of Christianity that is more conducive to living in modern society.

I get it. I understand that such is the path of least resistance, and when someone is exhausted after years and years of discomfort in a particular faith tradition, it’s hard to fault them for taking this road.

Yet, the way these recovering evangelicals can condemn so freely those who hold the same positions they themselves held not too long ago is baffling.

There are many things I used to believe that I no longer do, but I remember what it was like to accept them. I remember my motivations, and I can’t imagine a reason why I would condemn others who still hold those beliefs beyond some innate need to virtue signal to those around them.

What I Would Say to the Recovering Evangelical Instead

If you are in the middle of this journey—questioning the evangelicalism you inherited, unsure where you belong, wondering whether the whole thing was a lie—I would offer a few observations from someone who has walked a similar road.

First, the questions are not the problem. The greatest theologians in Christian history have asked hard questions and emerged with a deeper faith for it. Augustine questioned. Aquinas questioned. Newman questioned so relentlessly that it carried him from the Church of England into the Roman Catholic Church, at a time when such a conversion came with enormous social cost. Questioning is not faithlessness; it is the engine of theological maturity. The problem arises when we treat the questions as destinations rather than as paths.

Second, resist the temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If your youth pastor was a hypocrite, that tells you something about your youth pastor. It does not tell you whether the Resurrection happened. If your church community was judgmental about divorce but silent about gluttony, that is an inconsistency in application, not a refutation of the moral framework itself. Evaluate the system on its own terms, not on the basis of its worst practitioners.

Third, if you must leave—and I did leave—walk forward toward something rather than merely running away. I did not leave evangelicalism because I was angry at evangelicals. I left because I encountered the Church Fathers, the Magisterium, the depth of Catholic intellectual tradition, and I could not unsee what I had seen. That is a fundamentally different posture than the one adopted by many in the exvangelical movement, who seem more defined by what they have rejected than by what they have embraced.

And finally, extend to your former community the same grace you are asking them to extend to you. They are doing their best with what they have, just as you were when you sat in those pews. The evangelical who is uncomfortable with your departure is not your enemy—they are someone who loved you enough to care where you land.

There is an old cliche prayer: God, save us from the converts!

Save us from the recovering evangelicals as well. But if you are one, I hope you keep walking—just resist the urge to burn down the bridge behind you. The evangelical Catholic tradition is proof that leaving Protestantism need not mean leaving behind the passion for Christ and Scripture that made evangelicalism beautiful in the first place.

What Exvangelicals Get Wrong About Evangelical-to-Catholic Conversion

There is a version of the exvangelical narrative that goes something like this: “I grew up evangelical, I deconstructed my faith, and now I’m free.” The implicit assumption is that leaving evangelicalism is itself the liberation—that the act of departure is the point. This is precisely what makes the recovering evangelical so insufferable: they have mistaken the journey for the destination.

My own journey from evangelicalism to Catholicism followed a different logic entirely. I did not leave because I was disillusioned. I left because I was too convinced—convinced that the theological claims of evangelicalism pointed beyond themselves to something older and more comprehensive. The doctrine of sola scriptura raised questions it could not answer on its own terms. The absence of a coherent teaching authority meant that every doctrinal dispute devolved into competing interpretations with no principled mechanism for resolution. And the evangelical tendency to treat the first sixteen centuries of Church history as a footnote left me hungry for the tradition that had been there all along.

This is what exvangelicals so often miss when they encounter Catholic or Orthodox converts. They assume we left for the same reasons they did—that we were hurt, or bored, or intellectually restless in a way that demanded escape. But the evangelical-to-Catholic conversion is not an escape. It is an arrival. It is the recognition that the evangelical instincts—for Scripture, for a personal relationship with Christ, for the authority of the Gospel—find their fullest and most coherent expression within the Catholic intellectual and sacramental tradition.

The exvangelical movement tends to frame conversion as a spectrum from “more religious” to “less religious,” with the implied direction of progress being away from institutional Christianity. Catholic conversion inverts this entirely. It says: the problem with evangelicalism is not that it asked too much but that it did not ask enough. The apparent difficulties evangelicals find in Scripture are often problems of interpretation that the Catholic hermeneutical tradition—with its tools of literary genre, historical context, and the analogy of faith—has long possessed the resources to address. The moral rigidity that drives people out of evangelical churches is, in many cases, a distorted echo of a moral tradition that is more nuanced and more humane than its evangelical approximation.

I do not say this to be triumphalist. The Catholic Church has her own sins to answer for, and I have never pretended otherwise. But the exvangelical who dismisses Catholic conversion as merely trading one set of rules for another has not understood what happened. We did not trade rules. We found the source code.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the exvangelical movement toxic?

Not inherently. The exvangelical movement gives voice to people with genuine pain and legitimate questions. It becomes toxic when it substitutes rejection for reconstruction—when leaving becomes an identity rather than a transition, and when former evangelicals treat their past community with the same judgmentalism they claim to have fled. The healthiest departures from evangelicalism are those that walk toward something, not merely away.

Can you deconstruct your faith and still be Christian?

It depends on what you mean by “deconstruct.” If you mean critically examining the beliefs you inherited—testing them against Scripture, reason, and the breadth of the Christian intellectual tradition—then yes, emphatically. The greatest theologians in Christian history—Augustine, Aquinas, Newman—wrestled intensely with doubt and emerged with deeper faith. But if “deconstruct” means systematically dismantling every inherited belief with no commitment to rebuilding on firmer ground, then the word is doing different work, and the answer is less clear. The Catholic intellectual tradition has always held that faith and reason are complementary, not opposed. Honest questioning is the engine of theological maturity—but only when the questioner is genuinely open to answers.

What is the difference between an exvangelical and a recovering evangelical?

The terms overlap significantly. “Recovering evangelical”—modeled on “recovering alcoholic”—frames evangelicalism as a disease. “Exvangelical” is the broader, more neutral term for anyone who has left evangelicalism. In practice, both labels tend to define their holders by negation: what they have left behind rather than what they have embraced. Not all former evangelicals adopt either label. Many, like Catholic converts, prefer to define themselves by the tradition they have entered.

What do exvangelicals believe?

There is no unified exvangelical theology. Some become progressive Christians, some join mainline Protestant denominations, some enter the Catholic or Orthodox Church, and some leave Christianity entirely. What unites the movement is a shared background in evangelical Christianity and a departure from it—not a shared destination.

Why do people leave evangelical churches?

People leave for many reasons: experiences of spiritual abuse or manipulation, disagreements over science and biblical interpretation, discomfort with the entanglement of evangelicalism and conservative politics, disillusionment with perceived hypocrisy, and encounters with theological traditions they find more intellectually satisfying. For a deeper exploration of the doctrinal questions that often drive departures, see my posts on sola scriptura and Catholicism and errors in Scripture and biblical authority.

What is the difference between faith deconstruction and deconversion?

Faith deconstruction is the process of critically examining the beliefs you inherited—questioning assumptions, testing doctrines against Scripture and reason, and discarding what cannot withstand scrutiny. It does not require leaving Christianity. Deconversion, by contrast, is the abandonment of Christian faith entirely. The two are often conflated in exvangelical spaces, but they are fundamentally different. Many of the greatest Catholic and Orthodox theologians—from Augustine to Newman—engaged in rigorous deconstruction and emerged with a more robust faith, not less of one. The danger is when deconstruction is treated as an end in itself rather than as a means of arriving at deeper truth.

Is it okay to leave your church?

This is not as simple a question as it may seem. From a Catholic perspective, the Church is not a voluntary association one joins or leaves based on personal preference—it is the Body of Christ, and membership in it carries real obligations. That said, leaving a particular congregation or denomination because you have encountered a fuller expression of the Christian tradition (as I did when I entered the Catholic Church) is not only permissible but may be demanded by conscience. That is qualitatively different from leaving because you are wounded and want distance. The first walks toward something; the second merely walks away. If your church has caused genuine harm, stepping back may be necessary for a time. But the goal should always be to find a community where you can grow in faith and receive the sacraments—not to abandon communal worship altogether. Christianity is not a solo enterprise, and the impulse to go it alone is one the faith has always resisted.

Where do exvangelicals end up?

The destinations are remarkably varied. Some exvangelicals move into mainline Protestant denominations like the Episcopal Church or the ELCA. Others enter the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Church, drawn by liturgical depth and historical continuity. A significant number adopt a “spiritual but not religious” identity, and some leave religious belief entirely for agnosticism or atheism. Research from PRRI and the Pew Research Center suggests that most exvangelicals do not land in another organized religious community—which, from a Catholic perspective, is the most concerning outcome, because it means they have abandoned the sacramental life and communal worship that Christianity has always understood as essential.