During the early hours of May 4, 2019, as thirty-seven-year-old Rachel Held Evans passed from life to death, her Twitter followers transitioned from prayer posts tagged #prayersforRHE to remembrance posts tagged #becauseofRHE. Her friends, including fellow writers, eulogized Evans, while her readers and social media followers testified to her influence in their lives. The thousands of posts with this hashtag that poured out in the following few days evidenced the vast post-evangelical feminist community Evans had worked to create.
When Rachel Held Evans passed away, Margaret, then in her sixties, was shocked.Footnote 1 It felt wrong for a young person, the mother of two young children, a writer with a rich impact and a bright future, to have died. Margaret flew to Texas to meet five friends and together they got matching tattoos that read eschet chayil, meaning “woman of valor” in Hebrew. Like many women who posted similar tattoos on social media in the aftermath of Evans’s death, they had all been touched by her writing and digital leadership. Many were clergywomen, including Margaret, an Episcopal priest. Margaret and her friends had met through the blog RevGalBlogPals, written by women clergy; they were also involved in creating a feminist community online. Margaret had attended an in-person conference that Evans organized with the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, Why Christian? She felt that it addressed the question of why a theologically and politically progressive person would stay within Christianity, a tradition that she saw as deeply flawed, having, for example, historically discriminated against women and people of color. After Evans’s death, Margaret reunited with her friends to express their solidarity with Evans and Evans’s religious values through their tattoos. In 2022, some of them planned to gather once again to watch that year’s virtual iteration of the Evolving Faith conference, which Evans founded with the author Sarah Bessey.
Since its inception, evangelical Protestantism has attracted passionate converts and produced anguished deserters—people with intense evangelical experiences who have chosen to flee their churches and the peculiar stream of Christianity that once held their devotion. This paper explores the adoption of digital technologies in the twenty-first century that allowed for the creation of transregional communities in which geographically distant Christians who were leaving evangelicalism could build social connections with one another. Using blogposts, social media posts, podcasts, and ethnographic interviews, it examines the experiences of post-evangelical feminists who participate in digital communities.Footnote 2 I argue that post-evangelical feminists in the early twenty-first century used digital media to create online communities that alleviated isolation for those leaving conservative communities.
The paper builds upon the work of historians who include the experiences of doubt, criticism, and loss of community in the study of religious people. In his work Evangelical Disenchantment, David Hempton chronicles the lives of nine historical figures who had significant interactions with evangelicalism and who rejected it because of a range of intellectual disagreements, moral convictions, disgust for evangelical leadership, or personal inability to fit into evangelical norms for marriage and sexuality. They could not continue to toe the theological line and thus sought intellectual and spiritual freedom outside of evangelicalism. Although this disenchantment did not usually result in atheism but rather a “renegotiation of their religious sensibilities,” Hempton notes that these figures lost their religious communities when they left evangelicalism.Footnote 3 He shows that disenchanted evangelicals experienced a profound asymmetry between the entrance by conversion to evangelicalism and the exit: in the former, a person is welcomed into a vibrant community; in the latter, a person leaves into seclusion.Footnote 4
As I demonstrate in this paper, digital forms of religious community that arose in the twenty-first century have changed this reality, allowing for more symmetry between entrance and exit from evangelicalism by producing digital communities that serve to ameliorate the loss of in-person communities. Digital communities provided the means by which disenchanted evangelicals in the first two decades of the twenty-first century connected with one another and formulated distinct post-evangelical Christian identities that they cultivated online. Unlike the disenchanted evangelicals of other centuries, early twenty-first-century post-evangelicals had access to digital media that they used to construct progressive religious communities across geographic region. These progressive Christians and communities emphasize the equality of all God’s people, especially with regard to gender, race, and sexuality, and favor ecclesiological inclusion and political rights for women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.
New digital media forms popularized in the twenty-first century were the structures that Rachel Held Evans and other progressive post-evangelicals used to create feminist communities of writers and readers. I use the term “post-evangelical” to refer to people who have had meaningful encounters with evangelicalism but who have disidentified with evangelical identity, evangelical institutions, and certain evangelical theologies, even as they continue to identify with Christianity.Footnote 5 This self-imposed distance, however, belies the persistence of evangelical ways of experiencing the Christian faith and of evangelical theological emphases among post-evangelicals. Post-evangelicals often continue to experience their Christian faith as a “heart religion,” with emotive responses to God’s presence and work. They also often retain the central importance of the scriptures and the person of Jesus within their Christian practice. Post-evangelical feminists are feminist in the sense that they have embraced egalitarian gender theology, including the support of women in church leadership at all levels, as well as political equality for women, and consider these beliefs to be important to the Christian faith.
Blogging, social media, podcasting, email newsletters, and subscription platforms allowed women authors and their readers to evade the traditional gatekeepers of evangelical publishing, denominations, churches, and parachurch organizations, to form networks of communication that could transmit non-dominant theological and political messages. The development of post-evangelical feminist communities occurred in parallel to and intertwined with the unfolding of a succession of new media that became available to authors and readers in the twenty-first century. As the capabilities of the internet and digital media developed, religious communities adopted and adapted these new technologies. At the same time, such communities have themselves evolved in response to developments in digital media. This paper calls attention to the capacities and the limitations of early twenty-first-century digital media as both instruments of and influences on these post-evangelical feminist communities. First, it introduces the role that digital communities play as outposts in the metaphorical “wilderness” outside evangelical institutions; then, it sets these communities in the context of the history of evangelical media innovation; next, it examines the way in which digital media facilitates community; finally, it considers the nature of digital religious leadership and the role of digital communities in relation to in-person religious communities.
Communities Contesting Evangelicalism
When she began blogging in 2007, Rachel Held Evans recorded her questions concerning conservative evangelicalism, the faith in which she had been raised. Though she treasured some of the values and truths her parents and her evangelical church community had given her, she also had doubts about how scripture was interpreted, especially regarding the role of women as under the authority of men. She brought her journalistic skills and her biblical knowledge to bear in writing her blog and books. As she wrote, she invited a growing community of readers along on her spiritual journey. Some readers had similar questions, and some merely marveled at a woman unafraid to challenge the central gender norms of evangelical culture.
Alongside her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, published in 2012, Evans embarked on in-depth research on the many models of “womanhood” in the Bible, and she shared her insights on an accompanying blog series entitled “Week of Mutuality.”Footnote 6 In blogposts that challenged “complementarian” (patriarchal) interpretations of scripture passages, Evans focused on the Proverbs 31 concept of eschet chayil, a Hebrew term for “woman of valor.”Footnote 7 In one post, she wrote that “complementarian advocates bend the biblical stories to fit a June Cleaver-shaped mold” in order to “celebrate marriage, motherhood, and domesticity” over other models of womanhood present in the scriptures.Footnote 8 While Evans sympathized with the attempt to value motherhood and the domestic sphere in a capitalist world that demeaned work outside the economic sector, she saw a diversity of positive examples of womanhood in scripture, including singleness. Evans wrote, “A woman can bring glory to God with her life whether [she] is married or single, a mother or childless, a domestic champion or a woman whose talents lie elsewhere.” She pointed to the fact that Paul, the writer of a significant portion of the New Testament, was single and praised the virtue of singleness in his letters. She highlighted early Christian saints, many of whom were single. Evans, like many Christians before her, blamed Luther’s Reformation for an overcorrection against Roman Catholicism that rejected singleness, including monasticism, in favor of family life. She wrote that a woman of valor lives her life, whatever her circumstances, with “bravery, wisdom, and strength.”
This blog post was one of Evans’s most memorable pieces of writing, as evidenced by the many Twitter posts tagged #eschetchayil together with #BecauseofRHE in the wake of her passing. Tagging posts about Evans #eschetchayil signified an affirmation of her egalitarian interpretation of Proverbs 31 and an application of the term to Evans herself. In her writing and in her short life, readers avowed with their tweets, Evans had been a “woman of valor.” It was this meaning that Margaret and her clergywomen friends impressed upon their flesh when they were tattooed with the Hebrew words. Their actions marked them as members of a community influenced by Evans, in which they were encouraged to think of themselves as worthy of recognition by God and others. This understanding ran counter to their perception of the marginalization of women in conservative evangelical churches.
Digital communities, including the ones led by Evans on her blog, Rachel Held Evans, alleviated the social isolation that post-evangelicals experienced when leaving conservative evangelical communities.Footnote 9 A common metaphor that post-evangelical feminists used for their experience of separating themselves from conservative religion, whether that be physically exiting a conservative local church or intellectually leaving conservative ideologies behind, was wandering in “the wilderness.” The wilderness is a biblical metaphor repeated throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that has been useful to Christians throughout Christian history, especially those who have been marginalized or oppressed. In the biblical text, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years. Jesus went to the wilderness to fast and pray for forty days in isolation, where he was tempted by the devil. The wilderness is where Hagar encountered the “God who sees” when she was mistreated by Sarah and Abraham. Those in post-evangelical digital communities frequently used the metaphor on social media. At the first Evolving Faith conference in 2018 in Montreat, North Carolina, convened by Evans and her co-founder Sarah Bessey by promoting it on social media, the metaphor of wilderness arose repeatedly in authors’ talks, which were then reproduced in audio on the Evolving Faith podcast and released in subsequent years.
In the author Jen Hatmaker’s 2018 talk, excerpted on the Evolving Faith podcast in 2020, she used the metaphor of wilderness to describe her emotional state following her break with the evangelical community after she announced her affirmation of LGBTQ+ relationships.Footnote 10 She recounted that she had been comfortable within “the city gates” of evangelicalism where she knew the rules and how to stay within theological bounds. When she announced her affirmation of LGBTQ+ relationships, she was rejected by conservative evangelical individuals and institutions that had previously supported her. Although she acknowledged the grief of leaving familiar people behind, she reported that she was surprised by what she found in this post-evangelical “wilderness.” Rather than loneliness, she discovered a community of other Christians who had similar experiences. After a period of loss, she said she gained a “massive influx of new church friends and internet friends and conference friends. So my community shrunk, and then it enlarged, and it has been one of the great joys of my life.” Her mention of “conference friends” refers to the people who were in the room at that moment—those gathered temporarily for the Evolving Faith conference that Evans and Bessey promoted on their social media feeds. Hatmaker implied that her presence in Montreat was a direct consequence of having left the in-group, conservative evangelicalism, of which she had been a part, and finding others who also did not belong, her “internet friends.” These internet friends numerically surpassed the 1,500 attendees of the sold-out Evolving Faith 2018; Hatmaker spoke of her “community” as those who followed her on social media. She ended her talk with the sentiment, “My only regret is that I did not find you weirdos sooner.” Giggles in the crowd acknowledged her characterization and empathized with her point that, while Christians can suffer consequences from physically or theologically leaving conservative evangelicalism, there is community to be found on the other side, through the internet.
Digital communities like those cultivated by Evans, Bessey, and Hatmaker served as religious outposts in the “wilderness” outside evangelicalism that harbored those in need of interpersonal connection with other Christians who shared their theological questions, concerns, and commitments. Despite having left the “city gates,” post-evangelical feminists were able to digitally, and sometimes physically, interact with other people who were also seeking God beyond the perceived constraints of conservative white evangelicalism. They created these spaces using the digital capabilities of twenty-first-century technologies. In between reading books and attending in-person conferences, they had access to daily interactions with authors and readers from across the US and the English-speaking world who had the same religious concerns. They retained a form of spiritual community despite their loss of conservative evangelical community and identity.
Digital media differ from previous forms of media used by religious communities in that they have facilitated many-to-many communication that is able to produce a network of interactions in a way that was not possible in previous eras of individual or mass media.Footnote 11 They also allow for the aggregation of like-minded people across vast distances. A post-evangelical might not have been able to find the critical mass for spiritual community in their own town but they could on their computer or smart phone. Yet, even as they offered new community-building opportunities, many of these practices of religious innovation echoed those developed during previous eras using technologies such as the printing press, radio, and television. These post-evangelical digital spaces both reflect and depart from earlier evangelical uses of media.
Evangelical Innovation
Evangelicals, who have generally been given to pragmatism and innovation, have long used the latest forms of media to relay religious messages and build a distinct subculture within American life. When evangelicalism arose in Britain and the American colonies in the eighteenth century, its spread was facilitated by the transatlantic and transregional circulation of letters, Bibles, and Christian literature that spread the news of evangelistic revivals. As Candy Gunther Brown argues in The Word in the World, American evangelicalism further developed in the nineteenth century through the distribution of Christian books that popularized biblical interpretations and created a “textual community,” with editors and publishers operating as informal “cultural arbiters.”Footnote 12 Evangelicals developed a shared language and understandings through a shared body of literature that unified them in a reading public.
In the twentieth century, evangelicals used radio and television networks, as well as the mailing of audio and video tapes, to broadcast their messages directly into Americans’ homes. The Federal Communications Commission’s 1960 decision to eliminate the distinction between sustaining-time and paid-time religious broadcasting increased access to the airwaves to those who could pay for broadcasting.Footnote 13 It was the beginning a new era of commercialized religious media. This reversed the theological balance of religious broadcasting, decreasing mainline Protestant denominational broadcasting presence significantly and providing evangelical broadcasters, who were adept at raising money, with more time on the airwaves. Evangelical broadcasters, who had been considered by ethics boards to be too ideological on matters of doctrinal dispute, and who did not belong to the National Council of Churches, had been largely excluded from sustaining time on mainstream channels. With the increase in paid-time broadcasting, they had increased access to religious broadcasting. However, due to the high cost of radio and television production, only certain streams of evangelicalism were successful in producing, packaging, and distributing their messages on a mass scale.
The messages that were most successfully transmitted were those that could raise the most money to invest in production: the theology that came to be known as the prosperity gospel, and fundamentalist critiques of modernism that encouraged a hostile view toward liberalizing influences. The prosperity gospel conveyed the idea that God would reward certain behaviors—including donations to Christian organizations like Christian radio and television networks—with wealth and health. This message lent itself to abundant fundraising because people believed that in giving money to media production they would be rewarded with God’s blessings.Footnote 14 The second message was the belief that God required conservatism from God’s people—including an emphasis on the heteropatriarchal family, anti-intellectualism, and a reactionary response to modernism—and that this conservatism was under attack in American culture.Footnote 15 This message, which incited fear of those deemed outside the Christian family (often including Catholic and mainline Protestant Christians), included the notion that only conservative Christian organizations, including those producing these messages, could save America from a terrible fate.Footnote 16
Other streams of evangelicalism that did not emphasize these messages, including Wesleyanism and Anabaptism, for instance, were largely excluded from mass-scale broadcasting. Evangelical feminists, gay evangelicals, and politically progressive evangelicals who were focused on economic justice and racial reconciliation did not have the means to broadcast their interpretations of the evangelical faith. Representing marginal minorities within evangelicalism, they did not have the numbers needed for mass fundraising, nor the fear-based messaging that would compel donors.Footnote 17 Thus, evangelical broadcasting increasingly narrowed to certain theological and cultural emphases, though these emphases were contested within the evangelical tradition.Footnote 18
The advent of digital technologies in the twenty-first century, beginning with blogging and expanding to social media, podcasting, and other forums, altered these dynamics through the structure of new media. Rather than the one-to-many structure of mass media, which created largely one-way messaging from a charismatic speaker to a large audience, digital media allowed for many-to-many communication.Footnote 19 While newspapers, magazines, radio, and television require huge financial investment to produce, replicate, and distribute, blogs and social media have few start-up costs. This inexpensive entrance into new media allowed for a proliferation of alternative theological streams to gain an audience among evangelicals and post-evangelicals. It also circumvented traditional gatekeepers from established institutions like evangelical magazines and book publishers. While an established Christian magazine or radio station might not have been willing to publish work by a writer who challenged conservative evangelical theologies or politics, writers could now create their own forums in which readers could access their work. This diffusion of media voices and audiences is what the media scholar Stewart Hoover calls the “de-massification” of media in the internet age.Footnote 20 Whereas broadcast media had a relatively small number of household names that a large number of Christians would consume, the internet multiplied the number of outlets and, thus, the number of religious media producers. According to the historian Daniel Vaca, Christian publishers responded to this proliferation by way of “nichification”: the publishing of books appealing to a particular subset of Christians.Footnote 21 Recent scholarship has demonstrated the special relationship that evangelicals have to digital media due to their ability to creatively adapt the technology to their evangelistic aims.Footnote 22
For women writers, especially those who challenged dominant theologies and hegemonic politics within evangelicalism, blogs and social media—particularly Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—were outlets on which they were able to build an audience of those who also doubted or rejected conservative evangelical ideals, including gender complementarianism, racial ignorance, and heteropatriarchy.Footnote 23 In addition, groups of people who dwelled in these theological or political borderlands formed transregional and even transnational reading communities in which they discussed authors’ work. Post-evangelical feminists gathered across the expanse of the digital world to build community. New media allowed shifts in power and authority, opening space for new voices and flattening models of religious leadership as everyday readers and laypeople shared their own beliefs and experiences. The demassification of media in the digital age provided women writers with alternative avenues to religious authority and to building their audience than had previously been the case. In the twentieth century, proximity to male preachers, especially megachurch pastors, was a primary means to gaining a platform, as Kate Bowler showed in The Preacher’s Wife. Footnote 24 The internet, by contrast, allowed women to build platforms independently.
Digital post-evangelical feminist communities were produced and enacted across various media. The technology did not appear all at once but developed over time in a way that shaped the sociality of groups, including the feminist post-evangelical Christians. As new forms of media were adopted or accommodated by participants, old forms were remembered, imitated, rejected, and in some cases retained. Media were used unevenly across generational, life contextual, and personality differences. Like other people in the United States, post-evangelical members of feminist communities had ambivalent relationships with new media that included both appreciation and critique. Media produced sites for religious engagement at various levels of sociality: one-on-one relationships, small groups, megachurch-sized groups, and public audiences.
The Experimental Intimacy of Blogging
Like Rachel Held Evans, many Christian women writers built digital publics through blogging beginning in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Blogging allowed writers to reach readers through decentralized, individual blogs hosted on free websites or inexpensive private domains. Popular feminist Christian bloggers included Sarah Bessey, Jamie Wright, and Glennon Doyle. Most started writing to very small audiences and built followings in a grassroots way, reaching first friends, then acquaintances, and then strangers through the internet. Readers found blogs by recommendation or by searching for an author’s blog and then either subscribing through a blog reader or checking back frequently on a URL for new posts. The writers themselves also found one another’s blogs and reached out by email to connect, formed text threads, and wrote guest posts for each other’s blogs.
For the Canadian Sarah Bessey, blogging was a way to process her faith crisis that she later named as her faith “deconstruction.” After the end of her husband’s job as a pastor in an evangelical megachurch in the United States, the couple had returned to her home country of Canada. It was there that she honed her writing voice by blogging nearly daily for fifteen years. She started her blog in 2004 while she was working in financial services marketing and simultaneously raising small children. She blogged on her lunch breaks and maternity leaves. Looking back, Bessey noted that her blog was virtually unknown until 2011, so she was able to “write (and wrestle through my own messy deconstruction) in total obscurity for a long time.”Footnote 25 Later, she had the opportunity for a book deal because of her blogging, and has since published four memoirs and an edited collection of prayers, as well as becoming the leader of the Evolving Faith conference and digital community.Footnote 26
Jamie Wright, an American missionary and pastor’s wife, wrote her blog The Very Worst Missionary from her family’s post in Costa Rica and later from California after they returned to the United States. Her readers followed her from her early blogposts in 2007, in which she expressed hope for what God would do through her mission work, to critical posts about the evangelical missionary model. In a 2012 post entitled “So you wanna be a missionary…,” she encouraged readers to get a “real job” instead of going into mission work, and warned them that their “call” to mission work might actually be wanderlust.Footnote 27 Though her sponsoring mission agency attempted to curb her blogging, readers expressed thanks for her honesty.Footnote 28
Many evangelical and post-evangelical women bloggers were mothers; and they put fingers to keyboard to express the miseries and joys of everyday parenting. Glennon Doyle’s blog Momastery, begun in 2009, which she wrote in the early morning hours in her closet before her children awoke, addressed the fears and guilt of being a mother in the twenty-first century, as well as psychological issues of body image, anxiety, and addiction. The title of the blog reflected both her subject, motherhood, and her religious identity, which was Christian. Doyle had been raised Catholic, but in her early parenting and blogging years she and her husband, Craig, attended an evangelical church. Her story reflected her position as a sober, spiritual, primary caregiver, born-again after alcoholism and an accidental pregnancy. She depicted her continued struggles as the tribulations of a saint residing in the “brutal and beautiful” world.
These early fixtures in post-evangelical feminist blogging later recognized the advantages of blogging for their careers, friendships, and spiritual development. In a newsletter to her subscribers in 2022, Sarah Bessey wrote,
I don’t think I would have been able to develop the career I have now if it weren’t for the Internet because when else in the history of the world has anyone cared what some happy-clappy mum from western Canada thinks about anything to do with church and faith and scripture? Because folks like you were reading, we developed our own niche and it turned out that none of us were alone as we feared.Footnote 29
In a podcast interview with Ree Drummond, who wrote a blog called The Pioneer Woman, Jen Hatmaker said of her early blogging years, “that opened up a whole new can of worms for me as a writer that I didn’t ever know was really possible, that you could kind of build your own space on the internet with or without a book contract or without really anything. Or credentials. So yay for that!”Footnote 30 For evangelical and post-evangelical women, blogging was a form of open-access publishing that allowed women without ordination, a church leadership position, or connections to male pastors to build an audience who wanted to read their writing.
Blogging in the first fifteen years of the century provided a public avenue to reach a small community of readers with similar interests, lifestyles, and values. Although they could be viewed by anyone via the internet, blogs often attracted small groups of like-minded individuals rather than mass audiences. Through the replies in the comment section below blogposts, authors and readers formed relationships with one another. Writers frequently replied to comments by readers, and conversations ensued. The “obscurity” that Sarah Bessey described provided a degree of privacy that felt—both to readers and to some extent to writers—like intimacy. Although most readers did not have in-person friendships with the authors, the relationships that developed were not merely parasocial. Authors and readers interacted in public comments and sometimes by email.
Though an occasional troll would leave a negative comment, comments could be easily deleted by the blogger or even screened before they appeared. Readers could not tell when authors did this kind of curation. In this way, authors ensured that their digital blog communities were more theologically homogeneous than local churches would be. The culling of blog comments, which gave authors ownership over their digital platforms, could be wielded to ward off oppositional or abusive reactions, though some authors allowed negative comments to remain.
In addition to the larger community of authors and readers, several early post-evangelical bloggers formed a smaller community of their own for support in their lives as writers on the margins of evangelicalism. While some internet friends never met in real life, one group of women bloggers did. In 2022, Sarah Bessey wrote of her friendship with Jamie Wright, Jen Hatmaker, Tara Lively, and Kristen Howerton,
When we first became friends almost ten years ago, we were across four countries—Haiti, Canada, USA, and Peru so the time changes were a challenge. Plus we are all very busy with full lives . . . So we just leave messages for each other; long, rambly, fifteen minute personal podcasts and then we listen and respond when we have time.Footnote 31
As of 2022, the group still scheduled a trip once a year together, posting aesthetically pleasing photos on Instagram afterward.Footnote 32
The relative intimacy of the blogging years was lost when writers transitioned their content to social media, and as social media transformed from personal network to a forum for public discourse. Authors’ platforms were public in a new way and so were their readers’ discussions. Instead of invested readers opting into blog reading, posts were pushed onto news feeds not only of readers but of prospective readers, hate-readers, and trolls. Social media opened avenues to viral audience growth but also to vitriolic debate viewable by many eyes.
The Wide World of Social Media
In the 2010s, social media became the primary format of post-evangelical feminist writing in terms of readership and posting frequency, changing the nature of the discourse to one that was more exclamatory and combative but also providing authors and communities with greater exposure to more people. The advent of social media did not immediately make blogging obsolete, but rather social media was used to amplify and discuss longer-form blog posts. Social media posts also facilitated the dissemination of podcast episodes and digital newsletters when they grew in popularity. Its broad reach and immediacy meant that women authors were able to reach people who wanted to hear their voices and—perhaps just as significantly—people who did not. Algorithms directed new readers to their social media posts or to links they posted on social media, especially when what they wrote was controversial. The primary social media platforms used by post-evangelical feminists were Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Each had its own affordances that made it suitable for different forms of discourse and resulted in different forms of community. Each also had a distinct audience, with Facebook attracting a broad range of ages, while Instagram and Twitter were used by younger and middle-aged adults.
For post-evangelical feminists, Facebook served many functions: sharing personal family and friend photos, voicing political beliefs, and joining faith-related public and private groups. This platform, which launched in 2004, had developed from a college-based network into an international network of individuals, corporations, political campaigns, and small businesses and organizations. Facebook was not the first social media network, but it had a broader reach than platforms before it. In fact, 69 percent of US adults reported using it in 2021, and usage was high across all adult age groups.Footnote 33 Christian authors had public “fan pages” that allowed readers to affiliate with an author and to view authors’ posts when they provided updates.
Some authors also ran private Facebook groups for their readers. These private communities were a bounded level of discourse in which a group of people who shared a common religious identity or wished to discuss certain religious topics could write and post only to other members. Groups led by post-evangelical authors included Cindy Wang Brandt’s “Raising Children Unfundamentalist,” Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu’s “Evolving Faith,” and Jen Hatmaker’s “Jen Hatmaker Book Club.” Other groups were temporary and time-bounded, such as Beth Allison Barr’s “The Making of Biblical Womanhood Book Study,” which was set up to guide a digital book study with both asynchronous and synchronous elements from the end of September through November 2022. Some Facebook users created or were a part of smaller or more specific groups, such as a version of the blog RevGalBlogPals and a group for Presbyterian clergywomen, both of which contained many post-evangelical feminists.
While almost all readers I interviewed had a Facebook account, those under forty expressed limited use of the platform in comparison to newer platforms like Instagram. For younger generations of post-evangelicals, Facebook was either a functional place to participate in private groups only available there or a place to connect with older family members. This generational divide meant that younger and older members of reading communities interacted with authors and each other in different ways that were structured by the affordances of the social media platforms they employed. In private Facebook groups, however, they were joined in a single community.
For post-evangelical feminists, Twitter became the site where women authors interacted with people with whom they disagreed in full view of a larger public. In other words, while community was built among post-evangelical feminists on Twitter, that community was more public and less boundaried than Facebook groups or on Instagram. Twitter was founded in 2006 as a micro-blogging site. Due to its text-based nature, it became a place for discourse at the level of ideas—political, theological, ideological. It was not as popular as Facebook, with only 22 percent of US adults using Twitter in 2021. Twitter users were younger, had a higher average level of income and educational attainment, and were more likely to be Democrats than the average US population.Footnote 34 Moreover, Pew Research found that the most active Twitter users, those who posted most often, were more likely to be women and that they posted primarily about politics. Given these demographics, it is little surprise that post-evangelical feminists, many of whom were middle-class, educated, left-leaning women, were Twitter users.
On Twitter, post-evangelical feminists interacted not only with one another but with a larger evangelical public. In the 2010s, Rachel Held Evans was famous (and infamous) for her sharp retorts to sexist discourse from conservative evangelicals and for confronting well-known figures such as the Southern Baptist Russell Moore and the Reformed Mark Driscoll. Many people who had never read her books or typed in the URL to her blog knew her name and her theological views primarily from Twitter. On Twitter, authors built public-facing profiles, and readers curated a consortium of religious influences by “following” authors. One of the platform’s capabilities, the hashtag, also allowed multiple authors and readers on the same topic and their posts to be linked together and easily searchable. The media scholar Corinna Laughlin shows how feminist Christians used the hashtag #AmplifyWomen to form an “affective public” in response to a Christianity Today article criticizing the female blogosphere.Footnote 35 Twitter hashtags and algorithms in the 2010s produced increased visibility for post-evangelical feminist authors.
Whereas authors maintained official “fan” pages on Facebook and used Twitter for public statements or disagreements, Instagram was used for more casual posts about everyday life designed primarily for followers. Launched in 2010 and purchased by Facebook in 2012, Instagram emerged as a popular platform for young adults. In fact, 75 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds used Instagram in 2021, versus 37 percent of US adults.Footnote 36 As an image-based platform, it was popular for pictures of fashion, pets, food, and family life with young children. It was originally designed as a visual medium that would show posts in one’s feed only from people one chose to follow, which meant that users had a more receptive audience than they did on Twitter, which showed one’s posts to non-followers.Footnote 37 Posts on Instagram were often more personal—including pictures of spouses and children—and more contemplative—including pictures of nature.
Unlike Facebook pages, suitable for public announcements, or Twitter posts, suitable for text-based discourse, Instagram provided a “space” more suitable for reflection. When scrolling Instagram on a phone, a person viewed just one picture and caption at a time. If one stopped to read the words on an image or the long-form caption, one would not be distracted by comments above or below. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several women authors, including Cole Arthur Riley and Judy Howard Peterson, grew their followings by posting prayers and liturgy. These spiritual forms were words, often accompanied by beautiful photos or images, written for their followings, which addressed a kind of digital congregation that prayed along with the authors.
The format of Instagram and the national context of the early 2020s, including the pandemic and a movement for racial equality in the United States, provided the conditions for Riley to construct a digital community to whom she offered liturgical leadership. Having left conservative evangelical college ministry but still working with students in upstate New York at Cornell University, the twenty-nine-year-old Riley began the Instagram account “Black Liturgies” in response to the police killing of George Floyd. On June 26, 2020, she wrote, “Black Liturgies is a space where Black words live in dignity, lament, rage and hope.” The image had the words:
Ours is a BLACK
Liturgy. All power
And glory and light.
We are not the darkness,
We are well
Acquainted with the dark—
Bear its marks,
Know its ways in you . . .
Black bones know we are
Keepers of the light.Footnote 38
Using readable white text on dark-colored backgrounds, Riley continued posting, sometimes multiple times a day. She blended her own written “liturgy,” taking the form of poetry, with Christian scripture and quotations from Black authors such as James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Octavia Butler, Frederick Douglass, and Austin Channing Brown. Her words were explicitly Christian, with prayers sometimes addressed to traditional Christian names for God like “Christ,” “Creator God,” and “Immanuel,” as well as original formulations like “God Who Mends,” “Crying God,” and “God of protest.” Riley pulled directly and conceptually from the Old and New Testaments of the Christian scriptures, reimagining biblical passages such as the story of Hagar. In her first three weeks, she built a following of 5,000 people. On the comment section on her posts, those concerned with issues of racial justice, including but not limited to Black post-evangelical feminists, could pray alongside her. In 2022, Riley published her first book, This Here Flesh, with Convergent Books.Footnote 39
When Instagram added the feature of live videos in 2016, this provided another avenue for more immediate and personal interactions between post-evangelical feminist authors and readers. On Friday evenings in her kitchen in Philadelphia, the author Lisa Sharon Harper held casual conversations with her followers and other Christian leaders over Instagram Live. She sat on a stool at her kitchen island; multicolored tiles conspicuously marking the space as a kitchen adorned the background. Her dog could be sometimes heard in the distance. Each Friday, she told those watching what kind of tea she was drinking. These details of her home life, available to watchers by audio and visual means, gave them the sense of being welcomed into Harper’s home. On July 25, 2022, she told her listeners she was drinking chamomile rose tea.Footnote 40 As she did each Friday she was in town, Harper asked the people watching the feed to share in the chat their name, pronouns, and a word they had brought into the space that evening. In text that flew up from the bottom, readers chimed in with their words. Harper said her word that night was “full”—she expressed that she felt full after two recent trips: one to Haley Farms in Tennessee, and the other the spiritual pilgrimage she led in South Carolina.
During many of these Friday evening sessions, Harper responded to current events. On dates in 2022, she addressed topics including the Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on abortion, the selectors committee on January 6, and Will Smith’s “slap that silenced The Oscars.”Footnote 41 Sometimes she interviewed guests, including other authors and Christian leaders, and sometimes she brought her fellow hosts from The Four, a podcast of which she was a part.Footnote 42 The video format allowed an informality that came from being “live” rather than recorded and edited, and it could also be posted in Harper’s Instagram feed after it aired live for her followers to access it asynchronously.
Instagram Live videos collapsed the time between an author posting on social media and a follower reading a post. Readers were invited directly into author’s kitchens, offices, and backyards, at the very moment when authors were in those places. While watching Harper’s live kitchen table conversations, readers could feel like they were hanging out with Harper in her home on a Friday night. In one Instagram Live feed between the Canadian psychologist Hilary McBride and the American author Kaitlin Curtice after the release of McBride’s book Wisdom of Your Body in 2021, McBride’s new baby could be heard in the background crying.Footnote 43 Swinging her child around and settling her in her lap, McBride began breastfeeding her baby in the midst of the live chat with Curtice.
In response to authors, readers could press a heart symbol at the bottom of the screen and a heart would float up, animated and suspended over the feed. They could see other hearts from other readers floating up as well, in a heart chorus of agreement or appreciation for what the author said. A stream of reader comments flowed upward too and disappeared into the screen so the video could still be seen. At the bottom of the page was a watch-counter that told readers how many other people were viewing the stream at the same time as them. During Curtice and McBride’s conversation, the number of viewers fluctuated between forty-nine and sixty-four.
Instagram Live allowed authors to stream content that felt like an event or a gathering, sometimes even a church service, and provided the sense of a community of people who were all watching the same religious content at the same time, providing the feeling of collective effervescence. Whereas radio or television broadcasting might bring together members of a family or friends gathered in a living room, live videos with their hearts and live comments created a visible digital community with those from across regional and national boundaries.
The Addition of Podcasting, Newsletters, and Platform Applications
As blogging faded as the dominant form of media for post-evangelical feminists and social media became prominent, other forms of media proliferated and were popularized to fill the void left by blogging. The public nature of social media feeds and the algorithms that prioritized contentiousness were a boon to the fame of some authors but a loss to personal communication. As Rachel Held Evans described on a podcast in 2015, blogging first functioned for her like a personal diary, then developed into a conversation among friends, and finally, when she gained widespread notoriety on social media, became akin to a press release.Footnote 44 In the late 2010s and early 2020s, authors began using podcasts, email newsletters through Substack, and private group platforms like Patreon to communicate directly with self-selected communities of readers and listeners. In this way, they sought to mediate the public and combative nature of social media by recreating some of the familiarity—between themselves and readers—of blogging.
On podcasts, authors produced content tailored to their listeners, often by interviewing and promoting other like-minded authors. Authors without their own podcasts appeared as guests on podcasts to promote new books and share their faith stories. Podcasts were a longer-form medium than social media, averaging about an hour per episode, which post-evangelical feminists used for storytelling and nuanced discussion. The interaction between host and guest also created room for humor and for the performance of friendship. In speaking to her podcast guests on her podcast For the Love, Jen Hatmaker called her listeners “my community” and herself its “leader.”Footnote 45 For the Love tackled topics including but not limited to Christian faith. The Australian podcasters Devi Abraham and Jessica Van Der Wyngaard hosted Where Do We Go From Here? about living in the aftermath of evangelical purity culture, an experience many post-evangelical feminists shared.Footnote 46 Podcasts allowed hosts not only to reach a particular subgroup in the absence of a wider audience but, as the media scholar Kristin Peterson highlights, to discuss issues of faith outside religious institutions.Footnote 47
Another popular media form among post-evangelical feminist authors was email newsletters, frequently distributed through the platform Substack, founded in 2017. Email newsletters were not a new technology; in fact, not only did they mimic paper newsletters that had been common for Christian organizations for centuries but email newsletters had been used by Christian organizations since the late twentieth century. The media scholar Heidi Campbell explored the use of email to cultivate religious community in the late 1990s and early 2000s.Footnote 48
For Christian authors, the revival of an existing medium was prompted by the dying popularity of blogs, the public nature of social media, and the desire for an avenue of direct distribution of content that was “pushed” out to readers, rather than readers having to visit an author’s site to check if there was a new blogpost. In 2013, when Google announced that it was retiring its Google Reader, an application that had allowed readers to consolidate all recent blogposts from their favorite sites onto a single application, it was more difficult for authors to reach readers directly. Sarah Bessey created her popular newsletter Field Notes in 2018; Nadia Bolz-Weber established The Corners in 2019. The historians Kirstin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Bar both began their newsletters in 2022, after news broke that the conservative billionaire Elon Musk might buy Twitter. Many used Substack to distribute their newsletters.
While some newsletters were free, some authors used them to create a consistent stream of income. In hybrid models, some versions of the newsletter, or some individual essays, would be free to all subscribers, while the majority of the issues went only to paid subscribers. Newsletters varied in price, with prices in 2022 commonly around US$5 a month or US$60 a year. Sarah Bessey charged 5 Canadian dollars per month (around 3US$) but included a caveat that, if someone could not afford it, she would give the subscription away for free. Some newsletters offered an audio version so that readers could listen as they would to a podcast, read in the authors’ own voice. One reader told me that she listened to Sarah Bessey’s Field Notes in the evening after her children had gone to bed, as she picked up their toys around the house. Some readers did the same with audio versions of print books or with podcasts, all of which they downloaded onto their smartphones to listen to at convenient moments.
In addition to the newsletter that arrived in a reader’s email box, many newsletters included a digital forum on Substack where subscribers could comment on newsletters and reply to one another’s comments. In this way, email newsletters reconstituted the type of private forum that existed on early blogs with a small group of loyal readers. When I interviewed Bessey at a women’s retreat in 2022, she told me,
I think [the newsletter] functions almost like blogging, which is why I think I found some success with it. Because there’s this nature of relationship and longevity and you don’t have to be just one thing. I’ve never really felt like I’ve done really super well when I’ve been someone with a huge agenda. I’ve always felt more like just being a person.Footnote 49
According to Bessey, while social media narrowed a person to “one thing,” newsletters enabled authors to be whole people, just as blogging once did. She felt that, through newsletters, she could show more aspects of herself to her readers, rather than narrowing her message to polemical stands on one subject. The author Austin Channing Brown, a Black post-evangelical feminist writer, had a different experience with Substack. Though she had been glad for the connection to her readers when she began her Substack in 2020, after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, she felt that new subscribers joined her Substack to “relieve guilt” over racism in the United States, which made her feel “like I was a commodity to be consumed” instead of part of a community.Footnote 50 She chose to cancel subscriptions to her Substack, and by late 2024 she was looking for a new platform.
Authors also experimented with other private forums, including Patreon. Patreon is a website and accompanying smartphone application founded in 2013, on which artists, including writers, can create paying memberships for their subscribers, or patrons. The author Diedra Riggs expressed that she relied heavily on her Patreon community for encouragement and direction for her writing. “They’re just a great support group. I consider them like my board of advisors,” she told me.Footnote 51 When Riggs was inspired to write a series of Instagram posts about ways to be anti-racist, her Patreon community told her that she should write the content into a book and she should sell it. When she had drafted her self-published ebook, 30 Days to Being Actively Anti-Racist on Social Media, one of her Patreon community members offered to do the graphic design for free. She put out the offer for the ebook to her Patreon members first—they could pay her US$15 via Venmo for the digital book. After that, she posted it for download on her website. Patreon allowed her to evade the process of traditional publishing and market her book to a relatively small group of people. “It’s definitely my style. I don’t want to have to answer to a lot of people. Because by the time I have gone through your hoops, I’m onto something else. And I just want to get that message out there,” said Riggs. Patreon, like Substack, functioned as a private community for readers and as a stream of income for authors to be compensated for their writing.
In 2022, Evolving Faith introduced a new forum for conversation on an app called Mighty Networks, which was founded in 2017. The announcement was posted on its previous forum, a private Facebook group; it encouraged readers to download the app on their phones. Evolving Faith, led by Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, held its 2022 virtual conference on Mighty Networks, and in the following several years held specialized streamed religious services there, including a service for Pride month and a service of blessing for parents and teachers going back to school. The new app had many affordances for private forums, sub-groups, and streaming. Yet, although the Evolving Faith community on Mighty Networks had slightly more members than its Facebook group, many people I interviewed confessed they had not made the transition from Facebook group to the unfamiliar app. Part of this was because Mighty Networks, unlike Facebook, was not an app used by members for other purposes, so they opened it less often. In response to a post on Evolving Faith’s Instagram account, one reader wrote, “When Evolving Faith moved to a new app, I lost track of it. I appreciate the sentiment behind the new app, but it’s not something that pops into my mind to go to.”Footnote 52 Women authors were more successful in building digital communities when they harnessed well-known platforms that their readers already frequented.
Digital communities that arose in blogs, social media, podcasting, and digital forums in the twenty-first century were real religious communities in which readers and authors interacted with one another, formed connections across geographical space, and alleviated the loneliness of leaving conservative evangelicalism. Women authors who wrote blogs, hosted podcasts, held digital conferences, and were active on social media became religious leaders for those who read their words, joined online groups, and attended virtual events.
Authors as Digital Religious Leaders
As other American Protestant women had in the centuries before, the post-evangelical feminist writers of the early twenty-first century used the media available to them to gain and maintain religious authority in communities they assembled. The women authors who acquired social media followings and ran digital spaces where communities of like-minded post-evangelicals gathered became religious leaders whose voices reached thousands of readers.
Throughout the history of evangelicalism, women have leveraged the means available to them to answer what they have perceived as the call of God into evangelism and other ministry, especially in times of great social and religious change. Many evangelical traditions resisted including women in the roles of pastor or elder but, since the beginning of evangelicalism in the eighteenth century, women have preached in non-congregational settings such as camp meetings and conferences. For those who were barred from positions within the church hierarchy because of their gender, traveling to do itinerant preaching was a way for women to perform the ministry to which they felt called.Footnote 53 The historian Catherine Brekus shows in Strangers and Pilgrims that over a hundred women preached in the first century of the evangelical movement. Using technologies of transportation and of print, they conducted their evangelistic ministries in the face of much criticism. However, they failed, as Brekus notes, “to create a lasting, coherent tradition of female evangelism.”Footnote 54 Female leadership repeatedly waxed and waned over the course of evangelical history.
As technology developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women expanded their reach and gained charismatic authority through the mass media of radio and television. Historians have shown how the extraordinary leaders Aimee Semple McPherson and Kathryn Kuhlman leveraged the media of radio and television to reach audiences.Footnote 55 In doing so, they not only participated in the religious media of their eras but used media to change the trajectory of their Christian traditions. For example, Amy Artman argues that Kathryn Kuhlman led the “gentrification” of charismatic Christianity which transformed Pentecostal traditions into palatable practices for mainstream middle-class Protestant audiences.Footnote 56
Female leadership in the twentieth century was, as it has been throughout evangelical history, the exception rather than the norm. Though, as the historian Timothy Larsen wrote, women’s public ministry is a “historic distinctive of evangelicalism,” it was frequently contested and controlled by patriarchal elements within evangelicalism.Footnote 57 Women justified their leadership either by direct appeal to the Holy Spirit or by male permission. In The Preacher’s Wife, Kate Bowler tracks how women in the twentieth century gained platforms primarily through their proximity, often through marriage, to powerful men.Footnote 58 Other women found influence through writing or other media appearances, but this was a precarious form of power, able to be rescinded by male-run institutions for women who crossed theological lines or flouted gender norms. Moreover, opportunities for women’s leadership in the marketplace were not mirrored in local congregations. In a 2015 National Congregational Survey, the sociologist Mark Chaves found that women served as solo or senior pastor of only 3 percent of evangelical churches.Footnote 59
When the digital technological capabilities of the internet expanded exponentially at the turn of the twenty-first century, women capitalized on the affordances of new media to spread their religious messages. The media came with new opportunities to gain religious authority, as well as new complications for leaders to navigate. While digital media allowed women to reach audiences without leaving home, they required performances of authenticity and intersected with the growing “influencer industry.” The religion scholar Deborah Whitehead argues that bloggers were expected to produce a sense of “intimate universality” through personal narrative and that the community between author and reader was held together by faith in “the truthful representation of the blogger and her story.”Footnote 60 Bloggers felt pressured to display intimate details of their personal and family lives to produce relationships with their followers.
As blogging gave way to social media, these performances of authenticity became more imbricated with commercialization. As the media scholar Emily Hund describes, with the rise of the influencer industry, “every social media interaction [became] a potential point of commerce.”Footnote 61 Hund notes that influencers “helped create a growing digital media industrial machine interested in monetizing an authentic life, not embodying it.”Footnote 62 Digital religious leaders were not immune to the demand for authenticity and the necessity of monetization. Especially for women who were not authorized and paid by religious organizations, the appearance of being regular people of faith was the currency by which they acquired readers and funding streams.
Post-evangelical feminist authors negotiated these changes in varying ways, and they differed in the degree to which they were willing to embrace commercial partnerships. For instance, Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey mainly sold their own books and conference tickets, while Jen Hatmaker advertised a plethora of products on her Instagram account and partnered with companies to sponsor her podcast. Still others, like Jessica Turner, were primarily influencers promoting products, with occasional writing about faith and social issues.Footnote 63
Post-evangelical feminist authors expressed disdain for the necessity of branding even as they participated in it. In a 2013 blog post entitled “You Don’t Hate Me, You Hate My Brand,” for instance, Evans expressed, “I’m just so sick of RHE.” Distinguishing herself from the brand, “RHE,” which stands for Rachel Held Evans, she wrote, “They aren’t complete opposites of one another, of course, but they aren’t exactly the same either.”Footnote 64 Like their readers, post-evangelical feminist authors had ambivalent relationships with social media, enjoying its capabilities but lamenting its effects on mental health, self-image, and privacy. For years, Bessey posted about her children, whom she called The Tinies, on her blog, before making the decision to delete her blog archive and post sparingly about them, only with their permission. After announcing her decision to step down from the Evolving Faith ministry and to transfer its leadership to a local church in North Carolina, she took seven weeks off social media in 2024.Footnote 65 Thus, post-evangelical feminist authors harnessed digital media for the purpose of reaching readers and building their platforms while at the same time resisting their consequences and worrying about their trajectory.
Benefits and Limitations of Digital Communities
For participants in feminist post-evangelical communities, digital communities led by women authors augmented local in-person churches by fulfilling needs unmet by those communities. Digital communities were able to bridge gaps between and within local religious communities—geographical gaps between community members, cultural gaps between an evangelical upbringing and a mainline Protestant present, and chronological gaps between leaving an old church and joining a new one. During lockdowns and restrictions for COVID-19, digital communities became even more important in offering connection when physical churches could not gather safely.
This article has shown the ways in which twenty-first-century post-evangelical feminists have used the media available to them to create digital communities for those experiencing religious dislocation and change. Authors and readers exercised significant agency by learning the affordances of each digital technology and acquiring the digital practices that formed connections with like-minded people across regions and national borders. Heidi Campbell warns scholars of media and religion not to assume that technologies are entirely determinative and always opposed to religion’s purposes. She writes that technologies should not be framed as “tools empowered with god-like qualities to be feared.”Footnote 66 Instead, religious people wield technology in accordance with their values. The women authors and their readers I have discussed sought to use blogging, social media, and other digital platforms to spread theological and political messages and to form connections with others that were encouraging, convicting, and inspiring. In doing so, they changed the experiences of fellow post-evangelical feminists leaving conservative evangelicalism and allowed for coalition-building that altered the landscape of twenty-first-century Christianity.
At the same time, authors and readers negotiated the needs of their communities within the structures of the platforms they used. The transition from blogging to social media, for instance, brought opportunities for wider readership but also increased negative feedback from conservative co-religionists. The change in ownership of Twitter in 2022, later renamed X, and subsequent changes in regulations, made the platform less desirable for post-evangelical feminist authors and readers. Digital communities were constricted by the structure of the media themselves, which at times led to frustration, disappointment, and disillusionment.
Though digital religious communities served important functions in the lives of post-evangelical feminists, they did not entirely replace in-person communities. In-person religious communities make higher demands of congregants and in turn provide different benefits. In-person sociality produces stronger bonds, more social capital, and more sharing of material resources.Footnote 67 Digital communities alleviate isolation and create connection, but they do not enhance people’s quality of life to the degree that in-person communities do.Footnote 68 In-person religious communities require more commitment to join and are more difficult to leave, whereas digital communities may be joined by a tap on a smartphone. Many digital participants remain “lurkers” who do not respond and engage with others in the community. Most interlocutors with whom I spoke attended in-person religious communities in addition to participating in digital communities or were actively looking for in-person communities to join. Some transitioned successfully to mainline Protestant churches; some remained in moderate evangelical churches while trying to make changes in church policy or ethos around issues of race, gender, and sexuality; and some were not involved in in-person religious communities.
Conclusion
The digital communities formed by post-evangelical feminists in the early twenty-first century were led by women authors and co-created by readers in the wilderness outside conservative evangelical institutions. The communities were dynamic because of the ephemeral nature of digital media themselves with their ever-changing forms, as well as the developing needs they filled in the lives of participants. Such communities lessened the asymmetry noted by the historian David Hempton between entering an evangelical community and exiting one. Without these digital communities, the post-evangelical feminists who populated them would have felt alone in their developing faith.Footnote 69 With the communities, they had companions in their post-evangelical Christian life, even though these companions were geographically dispersed. The digital communities more fully embodied their new progressive ideals than the conservative evangelical communities they had left, including the equality of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals in the life of the church and society. People marginalized by their gender and theological beliefs used digital media as a structure to counteract their own marginalization and to forge religious belonging in a period defined by the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. This suggests that, while there are limitations to digital religious communities, communities formed on digital media serve important functions in the lives of twenty-first-century religious people.
