That Time I Accidentally Became an Evangelical Christian and Completely Lost Myself
For the first time, fewer women than men are being drawn to 'traditional' Christianity, and I can relate
Like Taylor Swift, I have my "eras," and some are better than others.
Perhaps the worst was my "religious era," which commenced twenty years ago when I accidentally became an evangelical Christian.
One of the many strange things about being a person who does their work in the public square is that over a long period, different people know different versions of you and continue to treat you as that version long after you have left it behind.
So there are still people who think I'm an evangelical or "pro-life" even though I am neither and haven't been for nearly a decade— and even when I was “pro life” I never supported making abortion illegal.
I've written about this in my former USA Today column and in more detail in my book Saving Grace1, but people obviously aren't tracking my every move, which is why I still get emails from people expressing their happiness I have"found Christ,” thanks to a viral 2013 Christianity Today essay that I wrote just a few years before I put Christianity on pause. I get similiar notes about me being “pro life.”
Like so many of my outdated views, they live in perpetuity on the Internet with no way for me to update them, since they are the property of the publications that published them.
There are also those who are blessedly unaware that my "religious era' "ever occurred and know me as the person I was before, when I worked in Democratic politics. Though I'm much more like that person today than "religious Kirsten," I'm still different in some meaningful ways because twenty years have passed, and with those years came some growth and change.
I'm revisiting my religious era here because the New York Times reported this week2 a shifting dynamic in American Christianity, where "among Generation Z Christians…men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip." Historically, women have been far more religious than men and more likely to be churchgoers, but something has changed.
The Times’ story focused on two Southern Baptist churches:
The young men at Grace and Hope churches "are looking for leadership, they're looking for clarity, they're looking for meaning," said a Hope Church pastor.
Young women are presumably looking for this too, but they are increasingly describing themselves as spiritual, not religious at much higher rates than their male peers. Also likely very relevant is the fact that roughly two-thirds of women under 30 say that men and women are not treated equally by most churches and religious organizations.
They are correct.
Which brings me back to my story.
You may be wondering, how does one accidentally become an evangelical?
The full answer would actually be a book, but the short answer is that it happened due to a combination of deep emotional vulnerability and extreme religious ignorance. While today it would be hard not to know who evangelicals are and what they believe, in 2005, living in New York City, I had only the vaguest awareness of them and knew next to nothing about their theological beliefs.
By the time I began to understand the core theology of the Presbyterian church I had been attending—which had successfully fashioned itself as "seeker friendly"— I was in too deep to easily extricate myself. I ended up there initially because of a boyfriend and because I ignorantly thought all Presbyterian churches were mainline Protestant, like the Episcopal church I grew up attending. (If you want a fuller accounting of this period, read the essays in these footnotes.3 4)