The success of evangelical youth culture in the 1990s has yielded a soul-searching generation of disillusioned exvangelicals in the first decades of the 21st century. Some of these have written books about their experience, and this paper examines the ways that their exvangelical deconversion narratives necessarily grapple with the conventions of the evangelical conversion narratives they had embraced before.

On her first visit to the Playboy mansion, Brenda Marie Davies met a movie star and got bit by a monkey, a pair of particulars either of which may have dominated the memory of that experience had both not been entirely consumed within the swirling anxiety that Jesus was watching. Having come up in the conservative culture of American evangelicalism and applied its tenets to her own life and choices, Davies floated breathless and tense through hallways, bedrooms, and grotto, among sensuous faces and bare skin, her mind and body engaged all the while with the oppressive conviction that she was a failure. Her invitation had come enveloped in seduction and her acceptance had disclosed her as a fraud. The central figure in a tale about and authored ceaselessly by herself, Davies had by then devoted nineteen years to crafting a storyline with contours, along a trajectory bound clearly for points more righteous than this. Like a plot twist in a bad movie, her arrival at the mansion violated the narrative arc, disrupting the exposition and invalidating her authorial labor. Only after a period of internal deliberation and a frantic call to her mother was Davies finally able to reconcile intentions with events, assuring herself in the end that her decisions had followed a rational—perhaps rationalizing—logic. After all, she reasoned, Christ spent his time with sinners, too.

Though unique in the details, Davies’ account is strikingly typical in the thematics, standing in for an entire genre of what are now colloquially dubbed “exvangelical” memoirs. Her book, On Her Knees: Memoir of a Prayerful Jezebel, recounts an obediently faithful childhood and a zealous adolescence followed by an early adulthood wracked with doubt, guilt, disillusionment, recrimination, and anger, expressed in rebellion and processed, often, as trauma. Like many other exvangelical memoirists, Davies is left at once embittered and activated by the formative experiences of her younger self, resentful of the narrative that she allowed to shape her understanding and inspired to help others avoid its darker effects. Also like her peers, Davies necessarily performs this introspective work within and upon that same narrative scaffolding, hammering away at the beams and boards without restraint but also without the power to break entirely through the protections they have promised or the limits they have imposed. For better or worse, these mark the durable legacy of a simple and resilient storytelling tradition.

Though less liturgical than its mainline cousins, evangelical Christianity does subscribe to at least one ceremonial speech practice—the sharing of personal testimony. Generative of social connection and communal bonding, testimony provides a clear and coherent storyline that the faithful may employ to order, understand, and narrate their lives. Common practice at church services, youth groups, camps, and conferences, the sharing of testimony is second nature to practicing evangelicals, and a key element of their initiation and training. In every case, it is modeled upon one of two narrative arcs—the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, or the parable of the Prodigal Son—each relaying a tripartite structure of sin, repentance, and redemption. Like many other Bible stories, these provide readers with resources for making sense of human life. But unlike many others, these have been adopted and deployed by countless Christian ministries as rhetorical templates to be studied, learned, and mimicked. I am interested in such narratives as rhetorical scripts from which believers continually read, by which their lives are oriented, and against which they sometimes revolt.

The testimony script is powerful because it is modeled upon a larger three-part narrative that defines the evangelical worldview. For evangelicals, a literal reading of Genesis documents the decline of human nature into sin, creating a rift between man and God. Because of this rift, human beings stand condemned for their rebellion, and doomed to an eternity of separation. However, because of God’s love for humanity, he sends his son to earth in human form, both to minister to the people and to die a sacrificial death on their behalf. By laying down his life, despite his innocence, Christ satisfies the demand for divine justice, paying the penalty incurred by sinful human beings. Finally, an offer of grace is proffered, through which people may be forgiven and redeemed, simply by acknowledging Christ’s sacrifice and believing in his divinity. By confessing their sins, seeking forgiveness, and being born spiritually again, Christian converts model their own life stories on the greater narrative of human history, effectively serving as embodied synecdoche for the human condition.

This is all fine so far as it goes, unless and until the believer loses faith. At that point, the very cohesiveness of the account becomes a serious liability with which the now ex-evangelical must grapple. Because the evangelical youth movement was so wildly successful in the 1990s and early aughts—fueled by its strong emphasis on apologetics and personal purity—and because the graduates of that training came of age and applied its tenets to mixed effect in the years since, there has been an influx of exvangelical memoirs published in the past two decades or so. In preparation for this essay, I read about a dozen of these, looking for common experiences, arguments, and themes, and always attentive to the ways in which they rely upon or respond to the evangelical testimony script. The result is an argument about the exvangelical experience, of which I am also a veteran. In the first part, I situate evangelical testimony and exvangelical memoir within the purview of narrative analysis, explaining how these describe and dictate the experiences of their authors. In the second, I analyze these narratives through the lens of three common themes—apologetics (or the logos of the narrative), purity (the ethos), and trauma (the pathos). Along the way, I demonstrate that the life and the afterlife of an evangelical faith are consciously crafted according to shared narrative conventions, each entirely congruent with the uniquely American desire to begin again (and quite possibly again) when a particular life path has run its disappointing course. As I show, Brenda Marie Davies’ experience is at once unique and not, given the commonplaces on which these narratives are constructed.

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