The Eternal Return of Evangelical Dissenters

Links and readings for the week of March 29.

As I mentioned in last week’s digest, I’ve been reading Traffic, Ben Smith’s book on the 2000-2020 era of digital media. It reminded me of a fact I always forget, which is the existence of The Drudge Report—the hideous, one-page right-wing site that has looked exactly the same since it launched in 1994 and has been a powerful force in American media and politics ever since.

So this week I thought I’d experiment with an homage to Drudge: more links, comment as pithy as possible—with the exception of one mini-essay on the “exvangelical” phenomenon at the bottom.

Culture & Media

A THIN RAY OF HOPE FOR MEDIA?: PJ Vogt (host of Search Engine) is joined by Ezra Klein (New York Times) to discuss the current media apocalypse. Takeaways: the traffic era was a disaster, the AI future is relentlessly bleak, the future of media success is in modest size and niche specificity, not “scale.”

FIFTEEN YEARS OF GRINDR: Jaryd Bryttle says it has “flattened gay desire” and produced sexual encounters that are “ruined in advance.” There’s something to this critique of the hashtagification of sex (see this footnote in last week’s post), but it perhaps colors too neatly inside predictable romantic lines. I’m not so sure that the surprise and “mystique” Bryttle has disappeared, nor that earlier styles of cruising were all “frisson” and no tepid, mechanical disappointment.

Books

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: The NYT reviewer describes

becca rothfeld

’s forthcoming All Things Are Too Small as “a carnival of high-low allusions and analysis,” and describes its “neo-Romantic agenda” as “to tear down puritanism and minimalism in its many current varieties.” Fuck yeah.

FROM BROOKLYN LIT BROS TO LOW-WAGE WORKERS:

Ross Barkan

interviews Adelle Waldman, author of the 2010s lit-fiction smash The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., about her new novel based on her time working at a big-box store. Laura Marsh (The New Republic) is skeptical of the claim that certain kinds of books are no longer important “after Trump”: “I am inclined to think…that the people of Town Square Store #1512 might have benefited from the kind of unflinching exploration Waldman devoted to the lives of Nathaniel P. and his friends.” Maybe I’ll skip this one and reread Nathaniel P. instead.

BOOKMARK FOR LATER:

Brandon

Taylor reads all twenty of Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart novels for the London Review of Books. I love this kind of completist reading and the essays it produces; it unsurprisingly took Taylor years to write, and at 7,000+ words will be too long to read on your lunch break.

Health

THE “ADDERALL EPIDEMIC”: A package of smart takes on America’s addition to Adderall. Confirms what I’ve always suspected, which is that something virtually an entire population has cannot be meaningfully treated as a disorder, that the whole notion of “attention deficit” is political, and that we have just decided everyone should be on uppers for productivity and profit. It doesn’t answer the question I wanted to ask (for a friend, obviously): is a low dose you take sparingly really this bad?

Politics

The Mini-Essay: On “Exvangelicals”

Every Republican president produces a micro-generation of evangelical Christians who undergo a major religious and political crisis, moving left politically and either embracing a more liberal variant of Christianity or rejecting it entirely. My first “era” as a writer was part of the disillusioned young evangelical backlash to the George W. Bush presidency; I tried to popularize the term “post-evangelical” as an appropriately vague, unsettled self-description for where I was at the time. The usual argument is that evangelical faith has become “too political”—a supposed betrayal of its more fundamental spiritual essence. The Trump era has produced a nearly blow-by-blow replay of this phenomenon in the form of “exvangelicals” who talk about undergoing “deconstruction.” Each generation of evangelical dissidents has a slightly different flavor absorbed from the culture of the moment: this time, it is heavily seasoned with TikTok therapy-speak. Personal pain and religious trauma seems to be the focus of Sarah McCammons’ The Exvangelicals, which positions itself as the manifesto of the current evangelical dissidents.

But it always goes the same way: as the dissidents mount a critique of evangelicalism, they are embraced the by the liberal mainstream, which is always looking for voices to explain the Christian right “from the inside.” They get book deals and media attention, but have little impact on evangelicalism itself, which remains as deeply right-wing as ever. These dissident micro-generations are often very impressed with themselves, very adept at creating the aura of a movement, affixing themselves with labels and brands. (Mine included!) But as Sarah Jones (New York) notes in this review of McCammons’ book, they tend to be rather myopic. They glimpse that evangelicalism is entangled in an elaborate infrastructure of right-wing politics, but have not yet realized that it is inseparable from that infrastructure. Evangelical faith as we know it in modern America simply is right-wing political ideology, and no amount of podcasts, books, and New York Times op-eds are going to change that. Jones: “White evangelicalism is strong stuff, political to its core; exvangelicalism can appear pseudo-therapeutic in contrast.” Evangelical dissenters are often sidetracked with squishy, pseudo-therapeutic moralism; they make the mistake of thinking politics is the problem rather than the only hope of a solution.

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I hope you’ve had a good March, and that April is even better. As always, please reply with your thoughts if you feel so moved (I always write back!), and send me things that have made you think.

David