Chrissy Stroop - Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church

For those who have left the fold

Edited by Chrissy Stroop and Lauren ONeal

Foreword by Frank Schaeffer

E MPTY

THE

P EWS

stories of leaving the church

Copyright 2019 by Chrissy Stroop and Lauren ONeal.

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Cover photo, Cathedral in Ruins, by Sergio Souza in Cndido Mota, So Paulo, Brazil.

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A Girls Guide to Sexual Purity copyright 2015 by Carmen Maria Machado. First published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Remission copyright 2015 by Sara Novi. First published in Catapult.

My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Bestseller copyright 2012 by Maud Newton. First published in TheNew York Times Magazine .

Rapture from Jesus Land: A Memoir by Julia Scheeres, copyright 2005, 2012. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

to the elders from BONE by Yrsa Daley-Ward, copyright 2014, 2017 by Yrsa Daley-Ward. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Contents

Frank Schaeffer

Chrissy Stroop and Lauren ONeal

Garrard Conley

Carmen Maria Machado

Rebekah Matthews

Sara Novi

Matthew Clark Davison

Lyz Lenz

Maud Newton

Lauren ONeal

Deirdre Sugiuchi

Julia Scheeres

Peter Counter

Mel Wells

Juliana Delgado Lopera

Chrissy Stroop

J. L. Powers

Ruby Thiagarajan

Linda Tirado

Rooney Wynn

Rachel Ozanne

Topher Lin

Isaac Marion

Frank Schaeffer

There is a great exodus taking place in Christian circles. Can it be called a loss of faith? I dont think so. It is rather a loss of confidence in everything at once. Christianity has always been about the Word, but these days, words dont seem to matter. Theyve lost their power to describe and convince in the face of horrible deeds, from climate-change denial to the persecution of trans people to the wholesale abandonment of Christs teachings in favor of abusive meanness. The hard-right white evangelical voter gave us Trump. The church sat silent as industrial oligarchs ruined the earth.

Christianity is improbable. When its cultural presence fades, be that through the Roman Catholic sex-abuse meltdown or because of the Trumping of white evangelicalism, all thats left is disillusionment. Presuppositional theologythe sort of apologetics my late father Francis Schaeffer dealt inonly works if you accept the possibility that some of this (i.e., the entire claim of historical Christianity) might be true. Fewer and fewer people do these days, outside of the initiated and indoctrinated. The grim witness of how Christians have behaved and voted is too heavy a blow for faith in magical thinking to survive.

This anthology marks a historic moment as a group of younger writers and scholars have come together to record what is happening (and has happened) to their inner lives of faith. What ties these essays together is one idea: history needs record keepers. Bluntly: as the aging, Fox Newsloving alternative facts crowd dies out, whats left? These writers and the millions they represent are one answer.

There are some big differences between these contributors and me. They represent a generational shift. Most, though not all, are Gen Xers and Millennials to whom Im the old guy. And none of them had anything like my kind of nepotistic celebrity within evangelicaldom. That said, I find solidarity herein, the solidarity of survivors.

Many people who grew up in evangelical homes will understand me when I say that remembering my own evangelical upbringing seems like an odd and bad dream. Throughout my early childhood, we Schaeffers were busy littering train seats, caf tables, and assorted telephone booths all over Europe with luridly illustrated little pamphlets in the local language, in case someone is led to read it, as Dad said. They had titles such as What Must I Do to Be Saved? and Is There a Heaven and Hell? and Where Will I Spend Eternity? Sometimes, as our train roared through Italian or Swiss towns, Dad would fling handfuls of tracts from the window at astonished passersby. The lesson I learned from all this was that there was us (the saved) and them (the lost). This set in motion the us-and-them way of thinking that, transposed decades later to politics, cast Democrats as the lost, deserving of hell, and we Republicans as saved and favored by Godno matter how far our actions strayed from anything remotely Christlike.

How do you unscramble this level of broken-brain toxicity? To read this book is one good answer. The writers here are exposing the Christian right as a toxic farce. Since I was for a time a leader in that netherworld, and since Ive been a bit of a pioneer in speaking out about leaving it, I welcome this book of essays. It heralds the arrival of the next wave of questioners I helped unleash by asking some questions of myself through my novels, nonfiction books, and media appearances.

A large part of what this book does is capture a generational exodus from toxic Christianity from the perspective of (for the most part) former believers. What is the usefulness of these essays? They are a record of dissent! They are a record of heartbreak! They are a record of hope based on lives lived, not unattainable magical fixes! They are also a therapeutic reaching out to those (like me) whose neural pathways have been damaged by what has to be called nurtured insanity.

During a different period of religious madness, in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson was an unauthorized Bible teacher in a dissident church group who, in the words of the Boston monument honoring her, was a courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration. She was also a student of the Bible, which she interpreted by the light of what she termed her own divine inspiration. In other words, like the writers in this book, she came to believe that in order to remain a sane and decent being, she had to pick and choose what she believed from her tradition. Lets hope a better fate awaits these essayistsHutchinson was banished from the colony for her stand.