A “PARALLEL UNIVERSE”

The “black and white, sacred or secular” universe that Stephanie Stalvey described, and which formed so much of our evangelical childhoods, required careful construction and curation.

My parents were married in 1976, which Newsweek deemed the “year of the evangelical”—a time when the white conservative evangelical Christian movement was growing in numbers, prominence, and power, as members organized themselves in reaction against the rising tides of cultural change.¹ The evangelicals of my parents’ generation had come of age during the height of the sexual revolution and in the shadow of the Vietnam War. But now, as they entered adulthood and married life, many were searching for guidance about how to navigate the world and raise their young families.

In the aftermath of seismic cultural shifts, many Americans, including young adults like my parents, “were ready to hear a new message, a message that cloaked itself in a very simple morality, one that appropriated the language of Christian values,” historian Randall Balmer argues in The Making of Evangelicalism. It was also a moment when decades of work by evangelicals to build up a robust subcultural infrastructure, in the form of educational and media institutions, was beginning to bear fruit in political power and cultural influence.²

My parents embraced this ascendant evangelicalism, casting aside the free love ethos of their youth. Out was the drug culture and anti-war protests; in were praise choruses, sung with the aid of a guitar in each other’s living rooms, while their children played cops and robbers in the backyard.

I was born in February 1981, in the earliest days of Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term. He’d taken power with the help of white evangelical voters and their leaders, in what historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez describes in her 2020 book Jesus and John Wayne as an “election widely hailed as the moment the Christian Right came into its own.”³

The families like mine that formed the backbone of the Christian right found themselves surrounded by a sea of conservative Christian leaders and institutions eager to provide guidance for every aspect of their lives, in the name of Jesus. While their secular counterparts were tuning in to Phil Donahue or Johnny Carson, a growing cadre of Christian broadcasters, writers, and publishers were serving up an alternative vision of life, and a safe cocoon in which to bring up the next generation of white American Christians, including my siblings and me.

This belief system took the fundamentalism of an earlier era, with its traditional gender roles and literalistic interpretation of the Bible, and repackaged it with a more accessible, modern gloss. This was more than merely a religion, or even a path to eternal salvation; the evangelicalism of my childhood offered a relationship with God and with a young, energetic community, led by confident, telegenic preachers who promised guidance and offered a vision for both families and a nation dedicated to carrying out what they saw as the will of God.

By the 1980s, when I came along, conservative Christian television and radio had become booming businesses. Televangelists entertained audiences and preached about following Jesus, promising blessings from God if their viewers would open their hearts—and their checkbooks—to their ministries. This teaching, called the prosperity gospel, saw wealth as a sign of God’s favor, attainable through positive thinking and, often, by giving what little money people did have to religious leaders as an act of faith.⁴ For these white evangelicals, unlike many of their forebears, the pursuit of Christian holiness no longer required separation from the earthly trappings of the political process, nor the avoidance of material wealth.

Never mind the warnings from Jesus against idolizing wealth, when he told his disciples, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”⁵ For the televangelists of this era, I suppose, money could buy you a needle large enough to drive a whole caravan through. Indeed, as Balmer writes, this “spiritualized Reaganism flourished as never before in the 1980s.”⁶

While some members of the evangelical community embraced the televangelists and the so-called name-it-and-claim-it or Word of Faith theology pushed by preachers such as Kenneth Copeland, my parents had reasons to reject this brand of evangelicalism. Our church, Full Faith Church of Love, embraced charismatic Christianity, a movement popular among many evangelicals, which promised the direct intervention of God in the lives of Jesus’s followers. God’s work in our lives, they believed, was manifested through what were known as “spiritual gifts”: laying hands on sick people to pray for healing, or speaking in tongues in a “spiritual language” that we were assured God could understand, even if the speaker could not.

Word of Faith theology melded neatly with the charismatic emphasis on the active presence of God in Christians’ individual lives and emphasized the power of faith to achieve financial success, health, and happiness if you believed enough. If you did not get what you wanted, the thinking went, you needed more faith.

But for my parents, those ideas had yielded deep disappointment and pain, never shaking their faith in Jesus but producing a healthy skepticism of this type of theology. By the mid-1980s, both had lost their mothers to cancer in quick succession. I was too young to remember either of my grandmothers very well, but I do recall my parents repeatedly reassuring me that both were with Jesus. My dad told me that he’d asked his mother, who’d been raised Catholic, if she knew Jesus as her Savior, and that on her deathbed she’d said, emphatically, “The Lord is my Savior,” enough to put his mind at ease. My mother’s mother was Lutheran, and despite my mom’s concerns about the fervency of some mainline Protestants’ faith, she said she was certain her parents had truly believed.

Even so, no amount of passionate, faith-filled prayer could delay my grandmothers’ deaths. My mother told me that she had prayed for divine intervention, and that some of our fellow church members had encouraged her to believe in God for a miracle. But watching her mother die suddenly, only a few weeks after a lung cancer diagnosis, convinced her that sometimes it’s simply God’s will “to bring someone home,” for reasons that we can’t understand.

Whatever the televangelists might have promised, this was a fallen world, and we had to trust that even the pain was all part of God’s plan, that he loved us, and that we would see our loved ones in Heaven again someday if we believed.

So we took the televangelists with a grain of salt. Many would ultimately embroil themselves in scandal or worse. Jimmy Swaggart, a gospel singer and Pentecostal evangelist, was brought down by a series of prostitution scandals, becoming for many Americans a living symbol of religious hypocrisy and greed after he delivered an infamous 1988 speech in which he perspired and cried and confessed, “I have sinned!”⁷ Jim Bakker, famous for the luxurious lifestyle he shared with his wife, was accused of rape by a church secretary and later convicted and imprisoned on fraud charges related to fundraising activities by their ministry, the PTL Club (an acronym for “Praise the Lord” or “People That Love”).⁸ In 1987, Bakker’s ministry was ultimately taken over by Jerry Falwell, Sr., who founded the massive Christian college now known as Liberty University in Virginia, and cofounded the Moral Majority, which mobilized evangelical voters for conservative political causes beginning in the late 1970s. His son Jerry Falwell, Jr., would go on to become one of Trump’s most important evangelical allies and a prominent, and eventually disgraced, evangelical leader in his own right after reports surfaced of an affair between his wife, Becki, and a much younger pool attendant the couple met while vacationing in Florida.⁹ The young man, Giancarlo Granda, has alleged that he and Becki carried on a multiyear affair that included having sex while Jerry watched; the Falwells have denied that Jerry was involved.¹⁰

If the televangelists sometimes left something to be desired, there were plenty of other conservative Christian public figures shaping evangelical thought and life during that era. Along with millions of other evangelical families, my parents wholeheartedly embraced the teachings of James Dobson, whose Focus on the Family ministry functioned as what’s often been described as a de facto evangelical Vatican, issuing its pronouncements not as encyclicals or papal bulls, but through influential magazines, books, and radio shows. Dobson’s organization, founded in California in the late 1970s as a ministry focused on offering parenting advice, provided entertainment and guidance for evangelical families through every stage of life, billed as alternatives to the influence of secular media.

As a preschooler, I would sit on the living-room floor of our house, soaking in the warm sunlight streaming through the picture window, and listen to Dobson interviewing his radio guests about their life stories. I remember a particularly poignant episode about a little girl who suffered severe burns in a fire, and how God had provided comfort and strength to her family during that time. Dobson’s voice radiated warmth and interest in the people whose stories he shared, and his radio show provided ambient entertainment as my mother and I spent quiet afternoons at home.

Dobson soon branched out into politics, launching the Family Research Council in the early 1980s, which grew into a powerful evangelical think tank that has worked to promote abortion restrictions and anti-LGBTQ+ policies nationwide and around the world.¹¹ A wicker basket that sat by our kitchen telephone was filled with stacks of Focus on the Family’s monthly magazine, and Citizen, a publication focused on politics and news from Washington, DC.

For the kids, there was a radio drama called Adventures in Odyssey, with characters who were entertaining, but also wholesome and prayerful, and a magazine called Clubhouse, a pared-down Christian answer to Highlights for Children, full of games and recipes and interspersed with mentions of Jesus. Later, I’d subscribe to Brio, marketed as a wholesome alternative to Seventeen or YM for girls, with articles offering advice on dressing modestly and dating cautiously, so as to stay pure until marriage. One summer, we even visited the Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs on our family vacation, stopping off long enough to tour the radio studios and scoot down the giant slide in the children’s play area.

Dobson was such a constant presence, my parents told me later, that as a toddler I would bounce through the house quoting the most recognizable line from his radio show over and over in a singsong voice, “I’m Dr. Dobson! I’m Dr. Dobson!”

At that age, I didn’t yet recognize that this man with the cheerful voice was the same man who’d provided my mother, and many other young evangelical parents, the term “the strong-willed child.” Dobson’s book by that name, published a few years before I was born, built on his earlier work Dare to Discipline. Dobson’s parenting philosophy called for “shaping the will” by spanking children as young as fifteen months—some still in diapers according to his description—with a “neutral object” like a “small switch or belt,” but not the hand, which should be seen by the child only as an “object of love rather than an instrument of punishment.”¹²

I’d heard my mother use that phrase in describing me to her friends. “Sarah’s strong-willed,” and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but I felt a hot sense of shame spread over my body when I heard it. I tried to be good. I was desperately afraid of the consequences for misbehaving, and my teachers would later describe me as a “delight to have in class,” with the occasional exception of some excessive chatter. But for Dobson, and for my parents, part of being a good Christian mother and father required controlling a child’s will and bringing it in line to “train up a child” in the way she should go, as the Bible instructs.

Another part of my training came through Christian television designed specially for kids. Superbook, from Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, took us on colorful adventures through the stories of the Bible, from Adam and Eve to Jesus and his disciples. The Christian TV station in Kansas City, Channel 50, carried Superbook as well as The 700 Club, along with some local programming for women that my mother would watch.

Our media diet was limited and selective. Books given to us at the holidays by my grandfather were sidelined in favor of creationist children’s books, like Dinosaurs: Those Terrible Lizards, which described dinosaurs as directly created by God, alongside colorful illustrations.¹³ On the radio, it was mostly the two Christian stations, except for NPR on road trips or sometimes the ride to and from church (I have a memory of my dad jokingly calling it “National Liberal Radio” and “National Perverted Radio”—though he doesn’t remember calling it that. But either way, I knew it was a bit suspect; even so, we’d catch the headlines there sometimes). On TV, it was network news in the evenings and children’s programming on PBS or the Saturday morning cartoons lineup. My parents preferred that we watch the classics from a bygone era, like Tom and Jerry or Rocky and Bullwinkle. Some cartoons were forbidden altogether. Rumor had it that The Smurfs—those weird blue characters so popular in the 1980s—were actually demons, so I was trained from an early age to turn off the TV or quickly change the channel. (I’m not sure where this rumor originated, but apparently this was a belief shared by some Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group we viewed as a cult.¹⁴)

Even public television sometimes had to be filtered. Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were allowed, under the supervision of watchful eyes. In one episode of Mister Rogers, the puppet Daniel Tiger is asking the human character Lady Aberlin about the origins of things like flowers and rainbows and snow. Lady Aberlin tells Daniel Tiger unequivocally that she believes God made all of those things: the mountains and the sun and the stars. But there was a problem, at least from my mother’s perspective. In one concluding stanza, Lady Aberlin sings, in an early nod to gender neutrality, “God made the sea and She made the land … made the people, He made it all.”¹⁵

It went by quickly, but not without the notice of my mother. She allowed me to keep watching but wanted to make sure I knew that the use of the female pronoun for God was unbiblical. “The Bible makes it clear that God is male,” she said. “We do not worship a he/she God.” These perceived violations of “biblical truth” underscored the need for evangelicals to create their own institutions and publications, and to carefully monitor the secular influences shaping their children’s thinking.

By the late 1980s, when I was still in elementary school, nearly one in four Americans identified as white evangelical Christians, approaching levels that matched the once-dominant religious movements of mainline Protestantism and Catholicism.¹⁶ Those numbers would bounce around slightly before returning to that peak around the mid-2000s, and then begin a steady decline that’s continued throughout my adult life.¹⁷

And yet, we perceived ourselves as a maligned minority, as the “remnant” of faithful believers spoken of throughout the Bible. Around the country, Christian schools like mine, many initially opened by white churches in the 1960s and ’70s in a revolt against school integration, and later, the Christian homeschooling movement, sheltered white Christian students from the outside world and reinforced a nostalgic vision of an America once dominated by (mostly white) Christians.^*

By pulling out of public schools, evangelical parents could ensure that their children spent hours each week studying the Bible and absorbing a vision of American exceptionalism infused with divine blessing. They could graduate from high school without ever taking a course on evolution or sex ed and, like me, move seamlessly to a four-year Christian college with the same philosophy, where opposite-sex romantic relationships were closely monitored and same-sex relationships were cause for expulsion.

In the opening pages of one Christian high school history textbook originally published by Bob Jones University in 1988,^† the writers warn against the growing secularization of the country: “Secularism is the belief that religion has no place in government.… As you read about American history, watch for the slow move away from religion as a central part of society. The America we now live in is far different from the America that once was.”¹⁸

The text speaks repeatedly of the horrors of slavery and praises civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, but mentions lynching only once, in passing, and redlining not at all. It acknowledges the Trail of Tears and other brutal acts of violence against Native Americans. But it nonetheless paints a picture of America as a place blessed by God: “We should look for ways in which it seems He has used our nation to spread the gospel and bring His blessings to the rest of the world,” the introduction reads. It then goes on to urge young Christian students to do good by working to “help end abortion,” among other good deeds, like raising a Christian family one day.¹⁹

All of it—the textbooks, the radio programs, the magazines, the television shows—pointed toward a vision of a “Christian nation” filled with successful Christian families, led by godly patriarchs married to devout women tending to the next generation of young evangelicals, who would in turn permeate the culture and obtain political power in the service of those goals.

As Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes, this “evangelical popular culture” has been developed over the past fifty years or so through a massive industry of self-reinforcing Christian media and organizations. Of the late 1970s, she says, “The evangelical consumer marketplace was by then a force to be reckoned with, but this expansive media network functioned less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals created and maintained their own identity.… Christian publishing, radio, and television taught evangelicals how to raise children, how to have sex, and whom to fear.” The “shared cultural identity” that had been created and sustained by that marketplace, she argues, quickly became a critical tool for evangelical political mobilization.²⁰

Or, as D. L. Mayfield, a writer born into an evangelical family in the early eighties like me, put it on what was then still called Twitter, “Being born into white evangelicalism as marketers were figuring out how to package and sell Christian nationalism and reformed theology to people was really bad timing, I guess.”²¹

That mobilization arguably reached its zenith in the last several years with the election of Donald Trump, who was swept to victory in 2016 with the support of 81 percent of white evangelicals and who made good on his campaign promise to appoint US Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide.

And yet, for all of the successes of the religious right, white American Christianity has been experiencing a precipitous decline, dropping from 65 percent in 1996 to 42 percent in 2022, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s Census of American Religion.²² White evangelicalism in particular appears to be undergoing seismic shifts. The religious group that during my lifetime has supplied the Republican Party’s most important single voting bloc, making up close to one-third of GOP voters, and which supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 in massive numbers,²³ is getting older and whiter at a time when the nation as a whole is becoming increasingly diverse.

“Since 2006, white evangelical Protestants have experienced the most precipitous drop in affiliation,” the Public Religion Research Institute reported, “shrinking from 23% of Americans in 2006 to 14% in 2020.”²⁴ That figure has held fairly steady in recent years, according to updated data from the Public Religion Research Institute. Meanwhile, white Christians, including white evangelicals, are growing older, as growing numbers of Americans—particularly younger people—are disaffiliating from formal religion altogether.²⁵ A Pew Research Center survey from December 2021 found a similar trend, with people who described themselves as evangelical or “born-again” slipping from 30 percent to 24 percent of the population since 2007.²⁶

Even so, there is not a single story about what is happening in American evangelicalism; at minimum, this is a time of change, of shifting crosscurrents. Even as white Christianity declines, the number of Christians of color appears largely stable in the United States, with Hispanic and Latino Christianity on the rise.²⁷ In a 2021 piece in The Atlantic, writer Meaghan Winter described Latinos as “The Fastest-Growing Group of American Evangelicals,” arguing they could have the power to dramatically alter the nation’s religious and political landscapes in coming years.²⁸ And this is all happening in the context of a larger, general shift away from religion among Americans as a whole.²⁹

In recent years, Pew data also has noted an opposing current: some white conservatives newly identifying as “evangelical” because of their support for Trump, even as others leave in part because of his influence.³⁰ A 2021 Pew survey found “solid evidence that White Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.”

In The Great Dechurching, a 2023 analysis of some 40 million Americans who’ve left Christian churches of all stripes over the past 25 years, the authors argue that some former evangelicals are actually moving to the right after leaving the church. They cite research that found that more than a quarter of “dechurched” evangelicals expressed support for the idea that America is a “Christian nation.”³¹

Furthermore, according to sociologist Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of The End of White Christian America and other books on these trends, the decline of white Christianity and particularly white evangelicalism has not immediately resulted in a corresponding decline in evangelical power. Jones notes that white evangelicals have historically voted at above-average rates compared to many other groups,³² and they’ve overwhelmingly directed their political power toward Republican candidates and causes.

“The reason why they’ve stayed so influential is because they are so lopsidedly aligned with one political party,” Jones told me.³³ “When you’ve got a two-party system, and they make up a third of one of the two political parties, that still gives you a lot of influence, even if your absolute numbers are dropping.”

The future of evangelicalism as a movement is difficult to predict, but all of the data points to a time of rapid change, with the country’s increasingly diverse demographics challenging the long-standing dominance of white Christianity, and many younger evangelicals rethinking their faith or leaving the tradition because of concerns about racism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who was raised in a conservative Christian church and describes himself as still “loosely” evangelical,³⁴ told me that he and many other researchers expected the Trump presidency to be the death knell for the movement. But he was surprised to see that opposition to Trump in some quarters has been counterbalanced by a doubling down among many conservatives.

“We were all predicting it after Trump in 2016. We were all like, ‘That’s it. Evangelicalism is done, people are going to leave right and left,’ and we all expected there to be this huge abandonment of the evangelical category as people kind of ran for the hills,” Perry said.

Perry argues that in a society that is both increasingly polarized and nonreligious, evangelicalism is morphing into an “ethno-religious” category, defined far more by race and ideology than theology. He describes younger exvangelicals who vocally disaffiliate from the movement as a “natural expression” of coming of age in a world with growing support for LGBTQ+ rights and concern about systemic racism, and white conservatives embracing the evangelical identity as a sign of the nation’s increasing polarization along ideological lines.

It’s a long-term trend that preceded Trump by at least a decade, he said, and it’s one that has escalated in the aftermath of his administration, influencing both churches and the culture around them.

“Americans more and more are choosing their religious identification and categories by their political views,” Perry said. “So Americans who would have previously otherwise called themselves Christians, and believed Christian things, and don’t want to reject Jesus, but they want to reject all of the negative things that are associated with that, are now calling themselves nothing. And I think more and more, they feel pushed out of Christian spaces.”

For many of the exvangelicals I’ve met, those Christian spaces feel less and less like home, and Jesus seems harder to find in them. And for some, following Jesus, or at least the truth as they see it, means stepping out of those spaces—out of that “parallel universe”—and onto a new and unfamiliar path.