Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home

Journalist Billups’s scathing debut probes the causes of Gen X and millennial disillusionment with evangelicalism. Recounting her personal crises of faith as a young Gen Xer, she suggests that evangelicalism’s preoccupation with consumerism, end times prophecies, and waging culture wars has alienated a generation of Christians. She tells of praying for women at a Planned Parenthood clinic while she was in high school, but remarks that she rarely heard discussion of how to support new mothers. Chronicling how opposition to Roe v. Wade served to consolidate the evangelical bloc in the Republican party, Billups calls on readers to abandon one-issue voting and instead “vote for candidates of either party who uphold the most policies that result in improvements to the quality of life for every person.” Obsession with the end times, Billups contends, cultivates an “us versus them” mentality (everyone is either among the saved or the damned) that feeds into xenophobic and nationalist thinking. The author calls on readers to counter the end times “obsession” by valuing creation “instead of waiting to escape from it.” Billups is a sharp critic of the evangelical church, and readers will be heartened by her thoughtful advice on how to chart a brighter future for the faith. This is one of the better assessments of the ills of modern evangelicalism. (Jan.)