Exvangelicals, post-evangelicals and other evolving creatures

Some born-again Christians are running away from the e-word as fast as they can.  

Check out this link to the article on Rachel Held Evans by Eliza Griswold posted Oct. 26 in The New Yorker in the section titled On Religion.  

You may have already seen the Washington Post article by Sarah Pulliam Bailey Oct. 22 on post-evangelicals and exvangelicals.  

Bailey attended an ad hoc gathering of a hundred post-evangelical pastors in mid-October in Indiana.  She  reports that some younger evangelicals are moving away from views often associated with evangelicals, tending to be more LGBTQ-affirming and more opposed to racism and Trump..

Some of us older evangelicals have been moving in a more tolerant direction for years.  

After all, this book Evangelical Feminism: A History was published in 2005.  There was a thirty-year history of evangelical feminism back in 2005.  

Another example is the group founded in 1974 as Evangelical Women's Caucus, now known as Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus - Christian Feminism Today.  EEWC-CFT has been LGBT affirming since 1986.  People didn't hear much about the Q back then.

Our website is full of thoughtful articles, book and film and music reviews, original poetry, and a useful FAQ.

Some in EEWC-Christian Feminism Today have tossed the e-word in the trash bin, but others like me still consider themselves evangelical, even if we don't look like it to the run-of-the-mill evangelical today.

Because the word evangelical just means "good news," eu-angelion in Greek, I see no reason to hand it over to right-wing folks who don't seem to me to be living out that good news.  

I'm a Bible-thumping, gospel-believing follower of Jesus, like Beth Moore.  She's been sending out some powerful tweets lately after being dinged by the Southern Baptist Convention for standing up against its all-male control.  See her on Twitter @BethMooreLPM

These positive signs remind me of that Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”