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Lyndsey: Hi, welcome to Crumbling Empires. I’m here with Sarah Billups, the author of Orphaned Believers, and I’m super excited to share this book and to hear from Sarah. Orphaned Believers: how a generation of Christian exiles can find the way home. I think even in that word “exile,” there’s a lot of crossover with the idea of crumbling empires. So We’re really glad to have you here. Thanks for coming on, Sara.
Sara: Thanks for having me, Lyndsey. I’m really looking forward to talking to you. And, you know, we’ve been connected online for a minute, so it’s nice to actually have time to chat screen to screen.
Lyndsey: It really is. Yes. Um, so I wanted to start this time with a quote from the end of the book. Um, so you wrote:
“The white evangelical church is rupturing for several reasons, including the industry of fear that was built around end times, culture wars that divided families and congregations with single issue voting and nationalism, and a lack of spiritual formation that was no match to consumerism. The market has told us that instead of losing our life to find it, there is a way to self-actualize our best life, to keep spending until we find peace of mind and purpose.
The church is an institution, and any institution is really just a bunch of broken people. People aware of their brokenness are the most human. We are empathetic, in touch, and have eyes open to hypocrisy. We are the ones with the power to change things.”
So this quote, you wrote that the White Evangelical Church is rupturing. In my somewhat limited experience, that seems, that’s my sense of things. But you also wrote that more people started identifying as evangelical while Trump was in office than stopped–like that identifier grew. So is white evangelicalism, in your opinion, is it a crumbling empire or not?
Sara: Ooh, I like that question. That’s a good one. I mean, yeah, that was, that stat was interesting to come across in research because I think that a lot of folks that have been in church for a while or that are struggling to figure out our relationship with church, you know, we see people leaving or maybe we’ve left, maybe we’re taking a break. The kind of common narrative, at least in my circles here in Seattle, is that churches are hemorrhaging young people.
But because of a sort of flavor of, and I would say an echo of, any sort of actual Christian narrative, because of the Christian nationalist narrative being preached from the pulpit in many, many churches that I think have completely conflated politics and faith. These churches are growing because there’s a subculture that I would argue is very much not about the upside down kingdom Jesus invites us to, but it’s very much about identifying as a person who is maybe seeing demographics change or shift in America, is seeing that becoming, is concerned about security or is concerned about change or pluralism, and so is really grasping at identity and community around nationalist rhetoric. And so those churches are swelling or like busting out the seams.
And so interestingly, so I do think, I do think there’s different ways to talk about it. I mean, if I were to put a whiteboard behind me and just sort of mark out, here’s, you know, I’m not Catholic or Greek Orthodox, I’m Protestant. I don’t identify as a liberal Protestant, so I’m. I grew up in an evangelical tradition. Like I could flow chart it out and say, yeah, I’m an evangelical. I mean, I go to an Anglican church right now, in the ACNA, but there’s a way that if it was just not emotional or more mathematic, you could certainly see the trace of evangelicalism, but there is a great social cost in identifying as evangelical when there are many, many people and the general public perception of evangelical today is certainly white Republican, racist, sexist, a lot of ists and isms.
So I think the real question for those of us that came up in the tradition is, where is the, like, what matters and what do we want to keep and what do we want to set aside? And so for me, as a result of researching orphaned believers and writing the book, like, I am more convinced than ever at the potential beauty of the church just being the gathered body of believers that Jesus left us with, you know, I think that’s really lovely. On the question of what that means for evangelicalism to begin with, I mean, yeah, I’d say evangelicalism is a crumbling empire, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are not sort of like blooms or sprouts or things to keep or preserve or hold on to in the midst of a lot of brokenness.
And the last thing I’d say, I think is that the headlines we see for a lot of good reasons are about abuse, celebrity pastor. I mean, you know the list as well as I do, Lyndsey, but the sort of ordinary folks working quietly that don’t make headlines, that are just doing really good work in their communities that go to evangelical churches around America are certainly active and lovely people, and certainly globally, evangelicalism expresses itself differently. So I think it’s complicated. So I’m really careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater while being clear that there are real systemic issues that are quite broken and need to be reformed.
Lyndsey: Yeah, I really appreciated that you’re calling back to the global church and churches and institutions of color inside the US and historical traditions like Catholicism as resources and also as just these, even these precious things that evangelicalism actively threw away for a while and how much we have to relearn even about the heart of Christianity itself from these other Christians.
Sara: Growing up, Catholicism was considered, like, I don’t think that, you know, I was basically told we should be suspicious, there’s a lot of smells and bells. They’re probably not really Christian. I mean, there is a, and that’s sort of a historic, there’s been the anti-Catholic rhetoric for a long time. I mean, that’s not like a new thing, but that really showed up for my family. And I think a lot of families in the eighties and nineties.
Lyndsey: yeah, no, yeah. And we’re, I think we’re about 10 years apart. So I’m like firmly in the millennial generation.
Sara: And I have one foot in millennial, one foot in Gen X.
Lyndsey: Yes, you do. And that’s like a really fun part of this book, actually, is how much you let that meditation on generational differences infuse this whole story. But my point was just that we, I also remember us, our family, trying to convert a neighbor from Catholicism to Christianity.
I was a child. And yeah, I had no idea what Catholicism even was, but just that it wasn’t quite right enough to be right.
And yeah, there’s a couple of things going on in this book. There’s like the historical piece of like, understanding where all this came from, and then there’s the really, and there’s a theological piece of like, what are we salvaging? How? Where are we going? How do we– Where does an Orphaned Believer go? And how do we find God again? And then there’s just the really personal piece that’s not even always so much of a theological conversation about just grieving something you have lost but still love. That I think I’ve even heard a lot of other people say they really resonated with about this book and that was really healing for them about reading this book. There’s a sort of a motif throughout the book where you’re talking about your relationship with your dad, which so many of us are trying to navigate in ways that feel just extremely specific to our own families and then also extremely stereotypical or stories you hear over and over again. And I also I found the the metaphor of your own falling-down childhood house very moving, actually.
Sara: Yeah, yeah, I found a listing of the I grew up in an Indiana ranch in a cul-de-sac built in the fifties, and I found a listing of it on like Zillow. And the way it was foreclosed and the way it was listed was almost like they were breaking it down for parts. Like the house has closet, like toilet, shower. It was just so weird. Like it was very functional. And then thinking about the very visceral memories I have of growing up there and going through puberty and these sort of big events like the Berlin Wall falling, that sort of distance between those two, my memory and the explanation was really interesting to find.
Lyndsey: Yeah, that is funny. And I think there’s a resistance to just wanting to not feel like we’re breaking down our childhood faith for parts. Even though that might be sort of like an easy answer or a systematic way of going about organizing this very amorphous, emotional thing we have been tasked with.
Sara: Totally. Yeah, that’s right. And there’s this way that I think when we kind of grow up and decide how we’re going to claim a faith if we were raised in Christianity, if we’re going to claim that and how there’s this other, just to keep going with that metaphor of like leaving the family home, there’s this other way of sort of launching out and seeing what happens. And for me, that ended up being a lot of bewilderment and kind of wandering around a spiritual desert for a while. It took me a long time. I’m in my mid forties and I’d say it took until my late 30s to really find an orientation back to faith in a way that was growing and flourishing. So yeah, I think that we can play that metaphor a little bit more. I like that one.
Lyndsey: Yeah. And that’s very encouraging to hear. If I was at the beginning of my own bewilderment, that would be very discouraging to hear. But now that I have been through a few iterations of this wandering, it is helpful to hear you say, you go and you come back and you go where you need to be. You discover eventually that it was where you needed to be.
Sara: Yeah, I think that there is a, I remember hearing, there was a NPR interview with a Christian writer and I’ve tried, I mean, I’ve probably spent hours trying to find this tape. Lyndsey, I can’t remember what it was and it makes me, it’s just this unanswered question. But I was in my late twenties when I heard it and I stopped and turned it up and I called my husband into the room because this person said that he had spent 10 years of affliction where he just did not hear from God, where it was just 10 years of wandering. And I remember thinking that is wild and I cannot imagine.
I cannot imagine what that would be like. It was just unimaginable to me. And after having 12 years of an experience like that myself, like I not only see that if we are given the gift of a long enough life, which is a privilege if we are, there is sometimes it takes a little while, you know? And then also I think I just began to realize, especially through the pandemic, like many of us, that the empathy that can come, the way that we can look around and see a lot of other people in a similar place. Like all along the way, even in seasons of wandering or bewilderment, there are markers, there are little Ebenezers or markers of hope or community. There are things to hold on to. There are some handholds, I think, in long seasons of wandering.
Lyndsey: So you kind of walk through three aspects of white evangelicalism that a true Christian counterculture, as you name it, might be looking to undo and relearn an entirely new paradigm and way. And so those are Christian nationalism, consumerism, and looking towards the end of the world, perhaps in various forms. And there’s a political element to that end of the world as well that you talk about. And as you’re talking, it’s making me think, you know, in a lot of ways, I wonder if the nationalism and the consumerism, as things that give us a semblance of an identity and things that give us a feeling of purpose, sort of, are also ways of resisting that call into a wilderness.
And even even when I think about– you talk really beautifully about how people can have really good intentions from their own point of view, and also cause pain. And I think that’s just a really important lesson to learn as adults that’s that’s like, hard to teach kids sometimes, I think. And anyway, I see how a parent or a pastor or a leader could really want to protect a younger Christian from the pain of that wilderness and feel like they’re doing the right thing. But also we end up constrained and quote unquote protected from the beauty and the wildness and the humanity.
Sara: I love that. I hadn’t, you know, I hadn’t put together, I had put together you know, nationalism, consumerism, various identities in the market, whatever they may be as a form of some kind of some kind of community or collective identity. But the idea that those things are also a means for avoidance is really connecting them like that is really interesting and makes so much sense. Yeah, I think that’s right. And the thing that I think the better way the healthier way through, and I say this as a person that learned the hard way, the better way through seasons of wilderness then would be a awareness of how politics and exceptionalism and capitalism try to kind of infiltrate our soul, like on a spiritual level. But really to be, I think that’s an invitation to being well-formed, to spiritual formation as an inoculation against the forces that sort of want our identity or wanna give us belonging. When really, I think belonging, if we identify as Christians, is a beautiful invitation towards the upside down kingdom.
Lyndsey: Yes, and that is exactly where I wanted to go as well. That spiritual formation, as you point out, is so much more than Bible drills, or having the answers.
You write about cultivating imagination and cultivating all these other pieces of ourselves and ways of relating with God and just skills that we need to make our way through not having the answer but finding where God is leading us in one in a present moment.
And I also I think that’s so, just so astute and so even urgent or maybe, I don’t know if that’s word, urgent for me right now that this is what Jesus did in amidst an empire that was decaying and amidst injustice on many sides. Jesus called people into imagination and Jesus offered people new ways of relating to each other and to God and so, he talks a lot about spiritual practices and prayer and community. And so I want to, I just want to hear you talk about spiritual practices, spiritual formation that has helped you ground in love and truth, either the ones in the book or anything else.
Sara: Yes, there are so many competing forces for our attention, our time, our spiritual energy that it’s easy to be swept away. And so I think that for me, part of becoming better formed spiritually meant going back to the basics. I guess just talking practically for a second, there is a woman named Debbie Tacky Smith, who I started to work with in spiritual direction in maybe 2018, 2017, and that was a profound gift personally, because as a writer and an Enneagram Four and someone that has an imagination that I think can get me into trouble sometimes when it comes to anxiety, it’s kind of the other edge of that. Being guided into visual prayer, you know, we would do prayers where she would, you know, rooms of the heart where you would sort of sit in silence and imagine a room of your heart and where God, where Jesus was interacting in that space, or lectio divina, visual prayer, putting yourself in the scene. I’d never done anything like that before. And it was, it was really, it really resonated with the way that I think and pray. And I think with a lot of folks that lean mildly creative or visual, it can be quite helpful.
And so I think that doing so interestingly led me to more empathy, helped me to kind of humanize. Like I think that culture wars tell us to make a bad guy or an enemy or an us versus them. But I think that I was able to start to see my family and other people that maybe are across the aisle from me politically or socially or whatever with more empathy by being able to visualize the way that I think we’re all really loved.
And so that’s the other thing that happened. I spent a couple of years just reading just a various verse a day and just sitting for a few minutes about God’s love, because I think that a lot of us here, if we grow up Christians, from the time we’re quite small, that we’re loved by Jesus. But being able to really believe that is something that I’m still working on, and it takes a long time. I really was invited back to the basics to really understand that if we are made beings, and if God is good and God is real, that we are loved. And so just very fundamental pieces like that were where I started and has kind of led into more liturgy.
Because liturgy just means the work of the people, it’s how we’re formed. And so I was raised in a very American liturgy. My liturgy was going to the mall on the weekends. My liturgy was sugary cereal and then going to church on Sunday. I mean, there’s something wrong with the way that my heart was oriented towards various things that I think were not good for me, were not vitamins, but were kind of like spiritual. I just wanna say junk food, that’s kind of corny, but really just sort of understanding what feeds our soul in a way that’s healthy, that can then orient our hearts towards justice, towards service, towards other people around us has been a pretty big shift in the way I think about my faith these days.
Lyndsey: Yeah, um, me too. I feel, I think of these three things, between, um, anticipating the end of the world and Christian nationalism and consumerism, I think consumerism is definitely the most insidious and the one, um, that’s most difficult to disentangle from, even when, even once we’re like, “Christian nationalism is the devil!” We might even say consumerism is the devil, but you even write in your book about how that impulse morphs. And so I am also in that space of looking for the daily formation away from that.
Sara: I’m still understanding in my childhood how consumerism formed me and has impacted the church, the American church in a lot of ways. I think that I have a cognitive understanding of that. I have an understanding and acceptance of how that may have formed my childhood. But I’ve really lately, after writing Orphan to Believers, been inviting myself, I hope in a way that I would like a friend to say, like, if I looked at what I’m browsing at night, like if I look at what I’m taking in, If I consider my receipts, if I look at my bank account, like, how am I living? How am I modeling that for my kids? Just like, what is different? Like, what is an invitation to continue to go deeper and to shift and to do that kindly, but with like self accountability? And so I think that there’s an invitation just from me personally to continue to be honest about those things.
I mean, for example, just with social media and being a person that identifies as a woman and a writer and a Christian there is–as I’m sure You’ve experienced, Lyndsey–a real conflation between self-help and wellness and faith that is is certainly concerning to me. But I see myself and how am I am I doing that subconsciously or consciously am I comparing myself to other people? How am I interacting? What am I projecting? How are other people just that that whole world?
It’s endlessly fascinating to me. So that’s a whole other reason that I’m trying. I think that, I guess I’m just saying, I think the work is ongoing and there’s an invitation to continue to go deeper into it.
Lyndsey: Yes, I, maybe we don’t have time to go this way, and this may not be relevant to everyone, but that there is such an important aspect of that consumer ideology that becomes even more insidious when you are, feel compelled to try to be consumable. And there’s serving a marketplace and then there’s meeting people where they are. And then there’s being a consumable brand.
Sara: Yeah. And that’s the… I know that we’re… I don’t want to go too far, I feel, but the last thing I’d say about that really quickly is there’s this point when you are a person that writes a book about Christianity and you see that you are trying to sell that book. It is so easy to build a career and a life and then name on talking about the church, but then you are no longer formed or shaped or changed. There’s this way that you can build a whole platform and life and name in a way that is done much more insidiously by celebrity pastors and lights and big money churches or whatever. But like It’s so easy to do. So how are we invited gently again and again towards the way that Jesus models the first being last? How do we protect ourselves from that space? It’s really top of mind. How do I continue to call myself out in a way that’s, I hope, for the benefit of being a person that loves people better?
Lyndsey: Yeah, and I do think those practices of formation and imagination and prayer are places where we find another way, in a positive direction rather than a judgmental, overly analytical, overly suspicious, joyless way. That’s very easy to, you know, in the consumerism conversation.
Anyway, I want to shift gears because I think there’s a whole other part of your book that would also really resonate or be of a lot of interest to my readers and listeners, which is this whole weird, weird interconnection between the rapture stories and ideologies and Christian nationalism, and how that’s continuing into politics today even though we don’t have the satanic panic as much and no one’s really reading Left Behind anymore. So, and you come back to this over and over, that your dad continues to believe as he has since the 1970s that the rapture will occur in his lifetime, which since he was not even a very young adult in the 1970s, his lifetime is shortening.
And I… So the rapture, again, this was something that I lived with, this weird… And so many of my friends have these stories, and in retrospect, you know, of all the things that our churches thought we were facing and needed to be dealing with in life, this really became a central one. Like, are you ready to be raptured at every moment? And at the same time, it was not as huge for me as it was in your life. It felt a little, there was always the admission that most of us may not live to see it.
And so but at the same time, I this returning to this motif and thinking deeply about this element of evangelicalism, really got me thinking a lot about belief and truth and information and where we find how much of that has potentially contributed to the really dire confusion about competing truth claims and factual claims. Well outside of religious life now. And you compare it to QAnon.
There’s so many directions and questions I’m trying to ask you right now. I found it really fascinating that your family felt, your church family and your family felt so compelled to distinguish yourselves from Pentecostalism, as if maybe that legitimated the rapture part or made it seem more academic or reasonable. I think, and of course, some candidates have declared for the election that’s trying to get rolling that I am dreading. How are you thinking about truth claims, information, and faith?
Sara: Yeah, well, a couple thoughts. So interestingly, yeah, my dad still believes that he’ll be raptured before he dies and he has treatable but not curable bone cancer. So it is an interesting, I write in the book that I was convinced he was just avoiding what’s coming. And so we took this trip to the ocean. And I just brought my laptop and sat in the front seat and asked some questions and listened for a couple hours. And I wanted to understand what it would look like today for somebody to believe the rapture will come soon, to have a view of the book of Revelation that’s, you know, pre-millennial dispensationalist.
And also what that meant about how we thought about things today, how that affected politics, and also about healing, you know, because my dad, when he got sick, had a pretty profound experience in the hospital that he considers a healing experience, spiritually if not physically, but yet we were raised, he was, he’s a cessationist, he thinks that spiritual gifts ended with the early church and so doesn’t believe in miraculous things right now. And so there’s all sorts of contradictions, but the thing that I think is interesting, the through line to, I think, misinformation and conspiracy theories today is that when you grew up, I grew up in a house where we thought we knew this sort of secret truth that we wanted to tell other people. For me, I was a kid, so it felt melodramatic or like I had this sort of intense need to share what I knew to be true, what I was told was true.
But there’s a sense of exceptionalism that can come when, and a power dynamic that is just naturally in place when you happen to be in a position where you know how things are gonna go down, you truly believe that you do. And so I think looking at QAnon, which has been a heartbreaking way that many people have really lost family members, just such a intense and sad and complex thing, but really the reasoning I think holds true that when you think that you know the secret, they pull the curtain back of what’s actually going on in the government or in politics or in the world or with whatever people are kind of pulling the puppet strings, there’s this way that you have a sense of power. And that’s a really hard thing to give up. And in fact, I think you would do a lot to keep it, including estranging yourself from family or including going deeper, almost like pulling, almost like opening like, what are those like Russian dolls? Like maybe if I just open one more, there’s just this way that you’re seeking, you’re, you’re looking and you’re sort of take a posture of suspicion.
And so, um, so I think that even though end times culture and held in these like late great planet earth and Christian scare movies, which now sound a little campy and are kind of hokey, right? Like even though it’s a different era, it’s really the same kind of core human emotion, desire, need, we’re all just trying to feel like we’re in control and we know what’s going on because we’re scared, right? So that’s, that’s, that’s like the throughline’s pretty clear, I think, you know, between these things.
Lyndsey: Yeah. And I have very strong reasons why I think this is different, but I also, it really has me thinking that when I talk about systems and structures and histories that are forming our experience of life in ways that we do not see and often are not meant to see, I understand that to many people that reads very similar to conspiracy.
Sara: Oh that’s so interesting. Oh interesting. Okay.
Lyndsey: Which has become I I’m starting to see more people on social media in particular talking about losing their family to leftist ideologies in ways that may sometimes be exaggerated, are probably often exaggerated. And also, I recognize that impulse to seize control of a narrative and a cause and effect problem solution way of looking at things.
Sara: Yeah, that’s such a human thing. That’s so universal regardless of any identifiers, politically or socially.
Lyndsey: Yeah, and so that was one more thing I really was convicted and inspired by about your writing here was that you were not shy to name these systems and structures, not shy to talk about doing justice as essential to what faith in Jesus is, and to name even whiteness, and some of the more unpopular idols for naming, and also the grace you were talking about finding for your family and for others in God’s love for all of us, feels very refreshing to me that we can have that without, and it doesn’t equal compromise.
Sara: Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s important to, I’m not trying to burn it down. I’m trying to bring, I think we are called to bring truth to light, to speak truth to power. I think that surfacing the many things that are wrong. I mean, sometimes people say, why should we talk about difficult stuff? Isn’t it just going to highlight what’s wrong? And we need to be positive. Like, no, like, we need to talk about what’s wrong boldly, clearly, plainly with conviction. And I think personally that is, and it is because we’re convicted that there is something compelling about the way of Jesus, that if this whole thing is true, if this is really true, this is our time. And it’s our time to make things better and to work together to bring restoration and healing and justice.
And so I try to end the book with hope. And I actually truly feel hope that there are many of us working to reform and change and grow, the community of Christians in America that are actually trying to pursue Jesus right now, not some sort of politically changed version of that. So for me, it was important to end with hope because I actually do feel hope, which is a little ironic after researching this book, but it’s a wonderful grace that I do really bear it and hold it today.
Lyndsey: Yeah, I also try to end with hope even though if someone else forced that, um, forced a hope question on me at the end of an interview, I might take it somewhere weird.
Sara: Yeah.
Lyndsey: Usually my final question is how do you define hope and where are you finding it right now? Yeah. Um, I mean, I think that I’m, I’m thinking three, like three different things. So I’ve gone to the same church for 18 years, Presbyterian forever, we all voted to become Anglican. The church has over 18 years gone through so many, like so many ups and downs, just seen many waves of people. When Mars Hill ended in Seattle in 2014, we just doubled in a Sunday. I mean, just really being sort of faithful to this community for so long, even though there were various seasons.
There’s something that I was talking about last night–We had a meeting–that I think is shifting. Like I am hopeful that even after the pandemic, after masks, after the way that the murder of George Floyd was politicized. I mean, again, after all that we’re going through and have been through in American Christianity and in politics, I think that there are still like a magnet, like maybe a gentle pull towards people that are following Jesus finding each other. And so I feel hope that the church will remain.
And for me right now, that looks like an actual congregation on Sundays. For a lot of people in my life, that means taking a break, but not isolating, but pursuing someone else to talk to. For some people, that means an online space. Like when I say church, I mean that loosely and openly, but I mean finding each other and coming together. Because I think there’s something really beautiful about collective worship and expression.
So I really do think that a lot of us are looking around and think nodding our heads, thinking like, we’re still here and there’s something good. And so it’s bringing me a lot of hope to think that maybe that will continue. Like maybe, I don’t know that anyone’s turned a corner. Maybe things will just get worse. Maybe denominations will keep dividing and things will keep coming. That’s not really what I mean. There’s just a hope I think in our humanity and our kind of shared need for community. And for me right now, that’s enough.
Lyndsey: Yes, for me too. I’m so glad to connect with you as a fellow Orphaned Believer, and so grateful for your work in this book, Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home.
Sara: Thank you, Lyndsey. This has been such a lovely conversation. Grateful for you, grateful for your work.
Lyndsey: Absolutely, thanks for being here.
Lyndsey:
Wow, thank you to Sarah Billups for joining us for this episode. Thank you to you for listening. If you’re enjoying our podcast interviews and audio essays on the Crumbling Empires feed, we would love to have your support on their new paid Substack that we just launched. Paid members are going to get two extra essays a month and those will also be available as audio versions on a secret podcast feed. So, and that’s a great way to support the time that goes into this podcast, the accessibility of recording all the essays and audio and putting all the interviews via transcript online, so your support is needed and appreciated. We’ll see you next time on Crumbling Empires. Thanks a lot!
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