The Global Church Era · c. 2010s-present · Digital-native; N. America and beyond
Deconstruction & Ex-vangelical Communities
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About This Movement
Since the 2010s a large number of people formed in evangelical churches have been publicly working out what they still believe, and doing it in podcasts, online communities and memoirs rather than in congregations. Blake Chastain coined 'exvangelical' as a hashtag in 2016 and it named something already happening. Rachel Held Evans published Searching for Sunday in 2015 and Inspired in 2018 and, with Sarah Bessey, founded the Evolving Faith conference in 2018; when Evans died in May 2019 the conference continued. Joshua Harris made public statements in 2019 about leaving the faith. Christianity Today's podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, released across 2021, gave the whole current a shared reference point. What the published record shows is not one destination but many: some people leave faith altogether, some rebuild it somewhere else, and the spread is the defining feature rather than an untidiness in the data.
Sources
- The published memoir layer (public voices only): Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday (2015), Inspired (2018); Joshua Harris's public 2019 statements; the 'exvangelical' coinage (Blake Chastain, 2016) (primary) — Only public figures' own published, dated words are used here — no private individuals are named.
- The platform layer: named public podcasts and episode archives; Internet Archive captures as de-facto preservation (primary) — These platforms are fragile and some material may not persist. Private online communities and any material that would identify non-public individuals are deliberately not cited here, out of real concern for the people involved.
- Independently grounded context: Pew religious-landscape/disaffiliation reporting (2019/2021); PRRI surveys (secondary) — No independent count of 'deconstruction communities' exists; any claim about the movement's present-day scale should be read as an estimate, not a hard count — that gap is named honestly rather than papered over. Scholarly literature is emerging but still thin.
- Structural note: the record's own shape (memoir + platform + aggregate data, no institutional archive) (reference)