Sara Tillema
Graduate Program in the Study of Religion 
TUESDAY, MAY 28, 2024 12:00-1:00 PM || 912 SPROUL

DECONVERSION, DECONSTRUCTION, & EX-VANGELICAL EXPERIENCE IN THE US

While in many ways the political power of evangelicals seems stronger than ever, evangelicals are not immune to the trends of decline taking place across American Protestantism. This growing exodus has given rise to a subsection of former evangelicals known by a variety of names: exvangelicals, post-evangelicals, recovering evangelicals, un-fundamentalists, and more. In my paper, I turn our attention to this growing contingent of former evangelicals in the United States, a rich and underexplored population in the field of Religious Studies. This paper will engage with my emerging research on former evangelicals gleaned from ex-vangelical social media engagement and data collected in ethnographic interviews I conducted in 2024. Together we will explore the ways that the structures of evangelicalism continue to persist after the process of "deconstruction," a term frequently used by former evangelicals to describe their departure from evangelical religious communities, suggesting broader implications for the relationship between deconversion and the persistence of religious identities.

LUNCH SERVED 

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