In Name Only (part 2)
Christianity is the worst version of Fight Club
In today’s installment: a gospel that only works if you agree with it, a publisher dropping a friend, and the moment I realized exvangelicalism might not be salvageable.
Part 2: The Magic Words Don’t Work
What makes something Christian?
That’s the question I’ve been asking in some form since I started my public deconstruction journey (and platform) in 2020.
It was the original standard opening question of God Has Not Given. I would ask each guest to give me three things that make somebody Christian and then use that criteria to determine whether or not I was a Christian that week.
Sometimes I was and sometimes I wasn’t. And it mostly came down to whether or not the person giving the criteria still liked Christianity.
The criteria was always nebulous, but if Christianity was something they still saw as good, the criteria would be things that led to the answer being YES, I was still a Christian.
But if they saw Christianity as a negative, they would be happy to confirm that NO, I was not.
And of course—I was talking to friends. Nobody who likes me wants to look me in my face and say: here are three things that make someone something that I think is good, and here’s why you’re not in on it. And why that’s fine with me.
If you really believe (or want to believe) in a good god who loves and cares for good people, there’s no good way for you to spin me being unacceptable to him.
If you don’t know me or care about me, then it’s a frighteningly simple thing to say, “You don’t believe like I believe, so you’re going to hell.”
But when you do know me, and when you realize that regardless of our points of disagreement I’m not actually a bad person, it gets much harder to justify your god wanting to punish me eternally and you being okay with that.
My friend Tim wrote a book. A book that was supposed to come out later this year, but won’t be due to him being dropped by his publisher due to the machinations of entitled white women.
A tale as old as time and as cyclical as Theology Beer Camp in exvangelicalism.
Off the top of my head, I can think of several icebergs the deconstruction community has been steered into with white women at the helm.
And I’ll get deeper into it, deeper in the book, but the way my friendship with Tim has been coming between me and white women “allies” from the beginning was one of the primary motivating factors for how I decided to end things.
Before Tim was someone I even really considered a friend, I had a white woman tell me I had to choose between him and her.
And I get it. White men are the worst. Truly.
And also—not all white men. I can do nuance. But it turns out that exvangelicalism is not built for it.
We built it bad.
Because of my platform in deconstruction and the circles I moved around in, I knew a lot of people, was known by a lot of people and had backdoor access to a lot of things, including book drafts.
And so in 2025, I happened to have in my hot little hands (inbox) the drafts of two unreleased books by white men in the deconstruction community.
And over the past week, with so much of my time and so many of my mindgrapes being freed up by not being on social media, I sat down to read them.
I lasted about a page and a half before I started skimming and wasn’t more than five pages in before I rage-quit due to boredom.
