 Ten years ago, when fellow Kentuckian Kim Davis refused to marry a gay couple despite being legally responsible for doing so in her role as county clerk, I wrote a short blog post that I shared on Facebook using the hashtag #IWasKimDavis. In the post, I detailed my journey from fundamentalist evangelical Christian to queer agnostic progressive organizer, and tried my best to humanize the woman who insisted on dehumanizing people like me. Davis’ insistence that her Christian faith prohibited her from executing her public duty was not only a false choice, but helped grease the wheels for the religious right to wrap their decreasingly popular homophobia in a fictitious blanket of free speech.
Now Kim Davis is back again, and the Supreme Court will consider on Friday whether to hear her case against marriage equality. Given that Ms. Davis is back in the news, I thought it might be worthwhile to weigh in on her efforts again. Here’s a bit of what I wrote ten years ago: “Rather than talking about Kim Davis, I'm going to talk about me. I grew up not far from Rowan County and identified as an evangelical conservative Christian through high school and much of college. I distributed Christian ‘tracts’ at school, helped organize ‘See You at the Pole’ days of prayer at school, and engaged in witnessing to folks at the local mall. It wasn't until I went to seminary that I had my own ‘crisis of conscience’ after deep conversations with my very patient classmates and roommates. With the support of classmates and faculty, I was able to carve out a place for myself in seminary to not only ask hard questions, but also to lean into a far more progressive theology that seemed (and seems), to me, to much more accurately reflect what I saw (and see) in Jesus.” Following that big shift and the deconstruction of my theology, I found the progressive movement – which is also where I found community organizing. I’ve been deeply fortunate over the past twenty years to be part of powerful and meaningful organizing work to support the dignity and humanity of LGBTQ folks, undocumented immigrants, communities of color, and domestic workers. Ten years ago, when Kim Davis first entered the fray and I publicly affirmed my own identity, the term “Exvangelical” was just starting to emerge as a way to name a shared, common experience among those who grew up evangelical but have since left that tradition. Though millions of people had been leaving the evangelical church by then, efforts by the evangelical church to dehumanize and vilify LGBTQ people – plus overwhelming evangelical support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election – led to millions more deciding to leave. Exvangelicals now number at least 15 million according to the Public Religion Research Institute – and that number continues to climb. PRRI’s data shows a few really important things about those who are leaving the evangelical church. First, we disproportionately live in the South (58%). Second, we exist across all racial identities and economic conditions. And third, the second most-cited reason why people leave is “negative religious teachings about or treatment of gay and lesbian people.” Cases like Kim Davis’ highlight not only the harm that evangelicals continue to exact, but also how much they’re willing to lose in terms of adherents in order to exact that harm. Even after seeing the results of his first term and hearing the promises of his 2024 campaign, white evangelical Christians overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2024, with 85% casting a ballot for him – and they continue to support him in his second term. Pew Research Center found that, in April 2025 – after the first three months of Trump’s second term, which included massive firings of federal workers, the launch of ICE raids, and vicious attacks on transgender folks – 72% of white evangelical Christians approved of Trump’s job as president. This approval softened a bit from those who voted for him just a few months earlier, but still reveals the vicegrip that Trump maintains over white evangelicals. So it wasn’t a big surprise when I saw that Kim Davis and her lawyer, Mathew Staver from the ultra-conservative Liberty Counsel, were back in the news to try and undo marriage equality again. For those who, like me, might have been an evangelical Christian in the past but can no longer stomach the way that the white evangelical church, in particular, is creating an idol of the Trump presidency to the exclusion of any regard for Jesus, I have one very clear message – you can leave. Millions of us have left the evangelical church – whether because we could no longer stomach the theology or we could no longer watch the violence being done in our names. Whether you find another church home that feeds your spirit or you pursue a different spiritual path that resonates more deeply with your values, there is freedom on the other side of fundamentalism. Twenty years after deconstructing my faith and leaving the evangelical church – and ten years after Kim Davis was last in the news – I’m now spending my time creating pathways for Exvangelicals to build community, share our stories, and organize campaigns to stop the harm being perpetuated by white evangelicals. Though #IWasKimDavis at a very different time in my life, I’m using the good pieces of what I learned in the church to actually live into the values that I see in Jesus’ teaching – to care for one another, to create welcoming spaces for those who need them, and to name the ways in which powerful people are exacting violence on others for their own gain. #IWasKimDavis once upon a time, but am no longer. If you grew up evangelical and are on the fence about the same things I was – about how we’re called to treat our neighbor and about how to bring about a world of freedom and abundance – now is the time to leave, and to build community with others who share that vision. Join the project by adding your name here: www.project2112.org. Heather Cronk is the founder of Project 21:12, an organizing home for Exvangelicals. (Image by Ted Eytan under Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike" license. No alterations have been made to the image.) |