Exploring the intersections of American evangelicalism, capitalism, and power.

  • Reactionary Evangelicalism: The Headless Horseman of the Apocalypse

    Evangelicalism is having an identity crisis. Reactionary Evangelicalism is taking advantage of that. To many insiders in the modern day, Evangelicalism is a last bastion of freedom and faithfulness, under attack on all sides by forces both spiritual and physical. They see themselves as a derided and suffering majority who for too long have endured…

What is Evangelicalisn’t?

Evangelicalisn’t is a blog about the past, present, and future of American Evangelicalism, and how the forces of class, capital, and nationalism have undermined and hijacked a movement that was meant to unite, to shape it into a force meant to delude and divide.

From the perspective of a long-time insider turned critical outsider, I believe large segments of American Evangelicalism, as a religious movement, have so entirely diverged from orthodox Christianity that it has become little more than a reactionary civil religion, a stalwart defense of American kyriarchy that baptizes the allocation of power as it existed in a mythical past and fantasizes over an impending apocalypse that always just about to happen.

I believe it is crucial that we understand the ways in which a mode of belief was sabotaged and undermined, not to attempt to save it, but to prevent the culmination of the collective efforts of the individuals behind its modern iteration – American fascism and a much-anticipated apocalypse.

The modern Evangelical apocalypse is, at its root, the inauguration of an American god, whose trinity is the red letters of Jesus unread, white supremacy, and the thin blue line of “law and order.” It is a release from the responsibilities of care for this world – why nurture a planet that will soon burn no matter what we do? – to await a time beyond discourse, beyond difference, and beyond disbelief.

In collecting this research, I hope that the story it tells is one that may call those who will listen within the Evangelical movement back to the duty of their faith – to “execute justice for the orphan and the widow”, to “love the strangers, providing them food and clothing”, and to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly” with their God. In equal measure, I hope that it will inform the rest of us in how we understand, interact with, and oppose this movement as we work tirelessly for the liberation, safety, and equality of all.

This project is, itself, an apocalypse in the historical sense – not an “end of the world,” but what the writer of the Book of Revelation likely intended: a revealing, an uncovering of the way that things truly are, and a harsh examination of the forces of Empire that have brought this reality into being. I fear that it must be either our apocalypse – to stare into the madness without flinching so that it may be named, analyzed, deconstructed, and healed – or theirs, which ends in fire.

Jay Pierce

Writer, Progressive Christian, & Seminary Dropout