“And I have to admit, looking back, I was part of that world,” our friend said, ruefully. We had been chatting for an hour or so, catching up on kids and grandkids, gardens and vacations, when – lowering her voice with a quick glance over her shoulder – she had suddenly re-directed the conversation toward the volatile mix of MAGA politics and evangelical Christianity that had recently roiled Ottawa County, Michigan, where Mary and I were visiting family and old friends.
West Michigan isn’t unique, of course; self-identified evangelicals nationwide had voted in overwhelming numbers for Donald Trump in three consecutive presidential elections. But towns like Holland, Zeeland, Hudsonville, Jenison, and Allendale felt the impact of this alignment in a very local way in 2022, when a slate of candidates for the Ottawa County Board of Supervisors swept into office under the banner of “Ottawa Impact,” representing an aggressive mix of Christian nationalism, homophobia, COVID skepticism, and disruptive governance.
Ottawa Impact receded fairly quickly as a political force, done in by administrative misfeasance, internal conflict, and public exasperation. But its brief ascendancy was indeed impactful. It offered a tantalizing taste of power to its true believers, while demanding a reckoning from many others, like our friend, who saw their churches, schools, libraries, and health clinics swept up in the maelstrom. What virus in evangelical religion had produced these extreme symptoms? How have our own lives been affected by it? And, having seen what we have seen, can we remain “a part of that world”?
These are not just intellectual questions; for many, they are existential. The more deeply rooted one is in the evangelical world – in its congregations, conferences, family and friend networks, schools, publishers, book clubs, social media – the more difficult it is to confront the truth about its sickness. Redefining one’s place in that world, or removing oneself from it and rebuilding a life elsewhere, can be equally daunting – indeed, traumatic. It’s not surprising that this phenomenon has begun to generate its own vocabulary: Religious Deconstruction, Ex-vangelicalism, Post-Evangelical Traumatic Stress Disorder.
It has also produced a flood of memoirs. Already in the teens we saw Rachel Held Evans publish Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions (2014), followed by David Gushee’s Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism (2018), and Rob Schenck’s Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love (2019). Now there is a flood-tide of books by women: Beth Moore’s All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir (2023); Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church (2024); April Ajoy’s Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding a True Faith (2025); and Jen Hatmaker’s Awake: A Memoir (2025), to name just a few.
One recent book connects the earlier and later periods: Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith (edited by Sarah Bessey, 2026), which collects posts from Rachel Held Evans’s influential blog, from its beginning in 2007 up to her sudden illness and untimely death in 2019, interspersing them with short reflections by over three dozen of Evans’s family, friends and readers. The timing of the book’s publication, one year after Donald Trump re-won the presidency and dodged accountability with massive support from self-identified evangelicals, is not lost on the contributors. It suggests that the MAGA-fication of evangelicalism is not a short-term illness, but rather a grave, chronic condition.
Evans knew this, even as she argued cogently against MAGA Christianity. Yet, she (mostly) managed to maintain an attitude of resilience, cheerfulness, and open-heartedness toward her erstwhile opponents. She would have asked along with Jen Hatmaker: “So many people gathered under these problematic umbrellas are, to put it succinctly, my beloveds. How do I reject the systems without disparaging the people I love?”
Perhaps Christians in these circumstances are called on to develop and practice the virtue of magnanimity. Not the aristocratic Greek version that haughtily regards one’s opponents as too insignificant to be bothered by, but a Christian version rooted in humility that sees them as fellow fallible humans loved and forgiven by God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us, “The only fruitful relation to human beings … is love, that is, the will to enter into and to keep community with them.”
But such loving magnanimity must be grounded in a sober grasp of the reality we are facing; and human social reality is always shaped by history. Hence, we need books like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s forthcoming Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (September 2026; available for pre-order), which promises to be a worthy successor to her Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2021).
Above all, of course, we need to represent a winning expression of the Gospel, what Evans would call a “wholehearted faith” – one that is not shackled to prideful nationalism and the politics of resentment, but rather one that is defined by generosity, vulnerability, inclusion, and a commitment to truth and reality – a world of faith that we need not rue being a part of.
