On Apostasy

Thoughts on Why Joshua Harris, Rhett and Link, and Millennial Evangelicals are Leaving Christianity 

By Bishop Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West) 

In the dedication of my first book, written at the tender age of 19, I thanked Joshua Harris for his encouragement. It didn’t amount to more than a couple sentences; “Yeah, man, write a book! That would be great!” But, to me, an impressionable 17-year-old at a conservative Christian homeschooling conference, those words carried an enormous weight. 

“To Joshua Harris, for encouragement to write this book….”

It was a hopelessly lame thing to do, to dedicate my first book to a kid just a few years older than me. But, to me, Josh represented all that was good and true about the Homeschooling culture of the mid-nineties. I couldn’t begin to imagine what Josh would do, twenty years later, in undercutting everything that we believed at the time. We were a new generation. We had seen through the lies of secularism. We were young, energetic, “rebellious” (not a word that we would have used for ourselves), and we wanted to push back on the institutionalization of political correctness and Postmodernism that we saw everywhere. We were Jordan Peterson before it was cool. Joshua was cool.

I remember singing a song called “They Overcame Him”, based on the passage from Revelation 12:11 where it talked about how the saints had resisted until death and had triumphed for God and for the Lamb. 5,000 young people lifted up their thunderous voices in a huge public stadium, singing with the heart and resolve of young revolutionaries. As a 17-year-old kid, I wept. I could barely sing, so overcome by the vision of glory that surrounded me. Here was Christ’s faithful Church! Here we were, the dedicated, the pure, the resolved, the willing martyrs! We would overcome, turn America back to God, raise our future children as faithful generations, and restore a new, theocratic vision of America that would convert the world to Christ!

Encouraged by massive homeschooling conferences, missions conferences, creation science conferences, and Christian camp and ministry service, on top of already full church ministry schedules, the young evangelical homeschooling culture was confident that, in a generation, we would win the culture wars. We had dedicated, hard-core parents, families where 6 children was an average, and thriving evangelical church ministries all throughout the American heartland. I remember the feeling of jubilation when we heard that some of our older representatives became congressional aids in Washington. Several of my friends became lawyers at an astonishingly young age. Some ran for political office. A couple became the heads of large ministries before they hit their mid-twenties. It was a phenomenal time to be alive, and things seemed to be going in a very positive direction. 

Then, something happened…

In the early 2000’s, the internet began to proliferate. Churches began to see an increasingly disturbing trend among even the highest echelons of leadership - pornography was seeping into Evangelical families and ruining young men. Previously impervious creationists started to have trouble convincing youth about the merits of a healthy skepticism of science, since new atheists and new content providers on platforms like YouTube and Facebook made Christian culture appear lame and ridiculous by comparison. What previously had only happened in science or philosophy classes at public universities, where young people were shamed and punished for their outdated religious beliefs, was now happening online to Christian kids at a younger and younger age. A compromised conscience and the introduction of doubt suddenly became the two barriers to youth ministry, and, focused on appearing relevant and geeking out about church aesthetics, this trend went unnoticed by most Christian leaders. Even while their churches were morphing into megachurches, based on the movie clips, awesome bands, and coffee shops, their constituency’s spiritual lives were hollowing out from within. Two forms of false communion had come to replace the communion of the church - self-gratifying, masturbatory, pornographically-oriented culture, and, a sarcastic, ironic, critical intellectual culture, emotionally calloused and scornful of any claims of tradition or authority, in which doubt was the highest virtue. 

This culture change was extremely fast. For people who came of age in the ’90's, the change was palpable, since we were old enough to remember the culture before and young enough to adapt to the new technology. For kids who came of age after 2000, there is nothing to compare to. The hyper individual, avatar-mediated, visual-oriented culture is all that has ever existed. This is one of the reasons why the older generation couldn’t address the shift. They still operate in the old way and have no idea how important younger people’s online personalities have become to them. They see quiet, disinterested, lazy Millennials that aren’t having sex as young or as frequently as they did in the ’70’s and ’80’s. If they could only see the reality of what these kids are doing online. They would be afraid. 

The burgeoning Christian counter-culture succeeded, as long as young people could be incorporated into living, multi-generational Christian communities. Active homeschool families were the pillars of church ministry, and their children benefitted immensely from mowing old widow’s lawns, singing in church with the elderly choir, and working for the various older men in the church on odd handyman projects. There was a transfer of ideas, of values, of lived life that allowed the “greatest generation” to directly interact with Xers and Millennials. In many churches, it was as if the 1960’s never happened and the drug-addled, sex-experimenting, atheist academic and business class didn’t even exist. As long as this traditional community’s centrality could be maintained and cultivated, and as long as parents could limit the access of their children to materials created to ideologically compromise them, children would assume the older identity and live in faith and purity, rather than doubt and impurity. 

After the proliferation of the internet and its acceptance by Christians, the culture change took only five years, especially with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. As soon as people began to live unaccountable, atomized lives online, kids were no longer defined by their parents' culture, and their tastes and beliefs were formed by whatever was most entertaining. This had already occurred in some ways with television, but on a much more limited scale. TV was hampered in its ability to communicate large amounts of information quickly because of commercial monetization. I remember as a child how I would zone-out during commercials. It was boring, commercials were frustratingly long, and I couldn’t chose what I wanted to watch. With the proliferation of content on YouTube and other platforms, this was no longer a problem. In one fell swoop, the attention of young Christians was successfully transferred out of the church community and into the world, and there was very little that their parents or grandparents could do about it. Unfortunately, becoming “Internet Amish” never seemed like much of an option for most families. 

Over the last few years the culture wars were lost. Evangelical culture lost its assumption of power and eventual theocracy. First, Obama legalized same sex marriage, which had been the symbolic threshold for what Evangelicals saw as the beginning of the cultural end. Second, when presented with the option, they chose Donald Trump instead of certain defeat and a complete loss of power. Donald Trump, the one that I heard many pastors mention as a kind of Antichrist in Sunday night sermons growing up, was hailed as a kind of savior of Evangelical values, and his multiple marriages, hard swearing, casino-owning, womanizing ways were completely forgotten. The transformation was complete. The “Silent Majority” was truly silenced by its own abandonment of some of its founding principles, and the expectation that Christian-endorsed leaders would live a Christian lifestyle was lost. It was Evangelicalism’s “Constantinian Moment.” I like many of Trump’s policies, too, and I definitely understand the dangers of “the other side.” But, this doesn’t negate the fact that the standards went out the window. Evangelical expectations have collapsed, along with their hopes of a truly transformed, united, godly country. 

I found out last year that Josh Harris recanted his faith on Instagram, as well as announcing his split with his wife of nearly twenty years and his apology to the LGBTQ community. I knew that he was headed in that direction from some of the blogs and videos he made between 2015 and 2017. He was taking critical theory seriously and started talking about social justice, all code words for a struggle with accepting Evangelicalism as true. I was sensitive to it because I had gone through the same process, but had made a critical choice that ended with me taking a different path. I had embraced Orthodox Christianity in the Anglican Patrimony as a dynamic process, directed by the Holy Spirit within the Church as the authority, and not the texts of Scripture themselves. I was sad for Joshua. I was sad that he didn’t give anyone like me a chance. He moved too quick, too sure, towards involvement with the Gay community to actually have a meaningful philosophical conversations about the assumptions he was making. I don’t know what moral choices Joshua made, but, as always, I suspect that his morality was in some ways influencing his philosophy. 

Just last week I heard almost identical stories from two YouTubers that I’ve always liked, Rhett and Link. I couldn't quite put my finger on why I liked them until I learned about their background. They were, basically, very well groomed for the Evangelical pastoral class. From their "slightly-too-old-to-be-Millenial-(but-still-in-skinny-jeans-anyway)" style to their infrequent use of dirty words, along with their child-like curiosity and gleeful immaturity, these guys had a "squeekiness" that lent itself to the culture of Evangelical comfort. They seemed like long-lost friends. Last week, along with everyone else, I discovered that they had joined the ranks of “Deconstructionists” and, like Joshua Harris, openly declared their apostasy. 

I can’t say that anyone’s apostasy comes as a shock to me. I have been tempted to it many times. The thought process is a very easy one to understand. Someone proves that the Bible is not scientifically true, either in the fact that it has two, slightly different creation narratives, or in that some of its chronologies are internally contradictory. Once this reality settles in, one starts to be open to reading and listening to scholars who focus on external incongruities - like how the Egyptian histories don’t line up with Exodus, or how archeological evidence proves that the Hebrews were in Canaan as a native population at times when the Scripture leads us to believe otherwise. Everyone struggles with this, and then, depending on how they understand Scripture, either sides with the Church Fathers (Origen, the Cappadocians, St. John Chrysostom, St. John Damascene, and St. Maximus Confessor) on an anagogic interpretation of Scripture, or they start to short-out and see Scripture as a political document, meant, from the get-go to control people’s minds and make people subservient to a superstitious morality system. If one sees it politically, then the New Testament is the next thing to fall under the axe. And, then, ultimately, the claims of Jesus Christ. His claim to being the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” are found to be untenable. The shaken, ex-Christian, trembling and ashamed, apologizes to the world for being “one of them,” asks for pardon for the unspeakably horrible sin of homophobia, and is reborn as a truly free, curious, uninhibited mind, maturely accepting the reality of their own morality and looking into the abyss of eternity without fear. 

This is the script. Josh, Link, and Rhett all followed it. The Evangelical community is shocked. Many Christian magazine and blog articles are written on the topic of them “not being saved to begin with” (something Rhett explicitly asked his listeners not to do), and it is trumped up to yet another case of false conversion and overly gullible, loving Christians being duped by wolves in sheep’s clothing. There is only one problem with this story - it isn’t true. 

Evangelicals have forgotten a powerful component of the Christian story: the possibility of apostasy. The very comfort and security, false, smug assumption of knowledge, favor and success that this error brings is also one of the reasons that so many of the intellectual, young, pastoral class falls away. By teaching an eternal security that is not synergistic, we make it God’s fault if we decide to leave Him. The Early Church didn’t believe in the Calvinist formula, nor did they believe like the “fence-sitting Baptists” to ignore the process of “working out your salvation with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2:12) Instead, there were many debates in the Early Church about, if someone denied Christ under duress, if they were allowed back into the Church or not. Thankfully, the Church decided that after proper repentance, someone could be allowed to return to the congregation of the faithful, but not for the second time. Faith doesn’t mean “belief” in Greek, it means “allegiance”, and just like a deserting soldier can’t claim to be loyal, so no Christian who recants can claim to be a child of God and heir to the Kingdom. This is why, under so much pressure and with so much to lose, Christians resisted (and still resist) to death. Denying Christ is worse than death, because with such a denial, one separates themselves from God. Jesus Himself said this in Matthew 10:33, “But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.”

The way that the guys from “Good Mythical Morning” approached the Bible was at odds with how the historical Church has approached those same texts, but they didn’t know this, because, like all good-willed Evangelicals, they assumed that their views of Scripture were normative. Evangelicalism set them up for the fall. We forget the hard-won philosophical truths of an earlier age, which insist that Scripture is meant to be an internal guide to beliefs and attitudes, a document that is as intricately psychological as it is mythological. Scripture is meant to create internal struggle. Hebrews 4:12 says, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Within these stories are so many layers of meaning and truth, that, literally, it takes generations to unpack. They reveal what is really inside of us, because we externalize our internal interpretive paradigms onto them. They are not merely constructed as simple, forthright, clear stories that hold material, scientific knowledge. They are deep stories that formed over many generations of holy prophets and priests, telling and re-telling, shaped and formed by the Holy Spirit to mean things that are still astonishing today. They are profound and powerful stories, narratives, that control the hearts and minds of mankind when they hear them with open hearts and minds, in a community, unfolding inner potential to be in communion with God, the Creator of the universe, and not dry, sterile, materially-oriented texts. 

This is not a liberal view of Scripture. This is what the ancient Church believed. As St. Hilary of Poiters said, “Scriptura est non in legendo, sed in intelligendo.” (“Scripture is not in the reading, but in the understanding.”) I know it seems counter intuitive, but I have come to see that authority rests in the interpretation, the ability to ascribe meaning to words and phrases within different environments and cultures through analogy (which always must be a directed process, because of how easily this “meaning by association” process can go off the rails). We are not the original audiences for any of the Scriptures, our underlying lifestyles and modes of thought are different, and many of the original assumptions of the hearers of Scripture have been obscured by multiple moderating languages (English speakers hear through German responses to Latin texts, which were mistranslated by St. Jerome to fit Roman legal categories, instead of Greek philosophical ones), all of which bring in contexts that were foreign to the Scriptures themselves. Therefore, in order to have continuity of meaning, one must have continuity of culture, which then necessitates both a submission to institutional structure and an adherence to historical forms, without considering the “fashion of the day” (contemporary, receiving culture). In order to have an understanding of what Scripture means, it’s accompanying culture must be kept alive and its context must be brought down. The Apostolic Church attempts to be a Hermeneutic for Scripture, hence all the fuss about how the authority of Scripture is wrapped up with the history and structure of the Church.

Biblicism is impossible without the interpretive mechanism of the Church’s synodality and the definitions of the Creeds and Councils, which maintains the "Tradition of the Apostles." (I Corinthians 4:17, 11:12, Philippians 4:9, 4:19, I Thessalonians 2:4, II Thessalonians 2:15, 3:6, II Timothy 2:2) "Comparing Scripture with Scripture" relies on the same principle as comparing Scripture with the Creeds and the Ancient Fathers, as it provides a conciliar baseline upon which all comparative hermeneutics can be done with integrity, not accepting an individual position or interpretation as truth. As it says in 2 Peter 1:20, "Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation." We only ultimately know the meaning of Scripture by the Power of the Holy Spirit (John 14:26, 1 Corinthians 2:10, Ephesians 3:5), and the Holy Spirit was given to the Church in Communion (as it came upon the Apostles at Pentecost in Acts 2), as a group and not individually, imparted by baptism and the laying-on of hands. It is maintained within the process of faithfully passing down apostolicity generation to generation. The Holy Spirit and the correct interpretation of the Scriptures does not come from outside of this process of communal reading and digesting the Holy Scriptures, which can only properly occur within the context of Christian Worship. Therefore, our worship cannot be separated from our doctrine and how we glorify God directly reflects in how we believe. Truth is not manifest primarily through individual understanding, but the understanding of the Church as a Whole, the Apostolic Deposit of the "faith which once was delivered unto the saints." (Jude 3) It is this reflection of the whole which is called "kata holos" in Greek - "Catholic." As such the Apostolic Faith is "the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth." (I Timothy 3:15)

My heart goes out to my former heroes and friends who have left Christianity because of a wrong understanding of what Scripture is and Who Christ IS. There is nothing more tragic in my mind than someone losing allegiance to Christ, because, in so many ways, it represents a loss of meaning, a loss of culture, a loss of the Christian history that, in many cases, has been passed down through many generations of faithfulness. This is not a cautionary tale about fake conversion, but a warning against the abuses of Scripture and History that are running rampant in Evangelical Churches, simultaneously lulling congregations to sleep and alienating thinking young people. Lulled into complacency because of a belief that they cannot “lose their salvation” many go about doing just that, because they are not on their guard and believe faith to be a “fancy and a feeling”, rather than the outright internal war with self and the deep, communal responsibility that it really is. Evangelical theology was always about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and a true encounter with God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit - but personal maturity and formation can only occur within a strong, communal bond of an apostolic family. Evangelicalism has often been too individualistic and independent. It is one of the reasons Americans, in our rebellious culture, like it so much. We have to remember that we aren’t hatched from eggs. We are reared by Mother Church and Father God, surrounded by the brothers and sisters of all the local, catholic churches throughout time. Our faith is formed by an inheritance that is too complex for us to even begin to understand. We receive our understanding through relationships, life experiences, words that we learn (and don’t make up ourselves), and many, many influences that are so subtle and numerous it is hard to categorize and understand them as individuals. We believe, with our brothers and sisters, the saints of old and to come, what has been received by all, in every place, and at every time. We are not sufficient on our own. 

We can either look into a cosmos filled with saints and angels, shining with the Glory of God, reflected off of the myriad of experiences, sufferings, and strivings of the Creation; or, we can cut ourselves off from all of this, insist that we are sufficient on our own, that we need no one else, and bravely stare into the void, the blackness, the abyss of a universe without God. This is the world where sexuality and personal choice are just a flash of consolation before eternal death, when it won’t matter anyway. This is the world without meaning that apologizes for pointing out that homosexual relationships lead to barrenness, cultural atrophy and death, because, well, death and non-existence are the ultimate point of a universe without God. Only with God is the universe “enchanted”, filled with meaning and with life, leading somewhere and for a cause greater than ourselves. 

The culture war may be lost for Evangelicals, but now is the hour of our salvation, because now we can repent and rectify the error of our selfish ways. The wrong teachings that kept us from truly evangelizing ourselves has been revealed for what it is - a heresy leading to death. Now we can strive for holiness, instead of for political power, and do those first works that make us powerful according to God, full of virtue and able to impart life. Then, maybe after three generations, when they throw dead men onto our bones, they will jump up again with new life and glorify the Risen Lord. 

And we should cry with St. Callixtus, one of the famous dual-popes of Rome who helped us settle on whether or not apostates could return to the Church -  “Josh, Link, Rhett! Repent, return, confess your apostasy and live! God is merciful, Christ’s sacrifice sufficient, and the Holy Spirit is ready to cleanse you from your sins! Jesus is mighty to save!”