evangelical Christian. Because in my freshman year at UNC Chapel Hill, I found myself in a religion class. It was actually introduction to the New Testament. And in this religion class, the professor was incredibly eloquent and persuasive and witty and funny. And he seemed to have his eye on us evangelicals in the audience. And then he started to tell his story. And his story effectively was, I was an evangelical once like you. It's not just that I'm a mean old sort of college professor now. I was once where you are, and this particular professor had been a student at Moody Bible College. This particular professor had been a graduate of Wheaton. And this particular professor ended up going off to Princeton Seminary and losing their faith. And now he's devoted his whole life, in one sense, to critique the Bible, undermine the Bible, and sort of bring as many people who are evangelicals along with him into this new frontier of unbelief. And that professor's name was Bart Ehrman. Now, you may know the name Bart Ehrman. He might be the most prolific sort of critic of Christianity today. He's written over 30 books and many New York Times bestsellers attacking the Bible and its reliability and so on. And Bart Ehrman was a professor at UNC Chapel Hill when I was there 30 years ago. And guess who's still there? Bart Ehrman. And I'm thinking, my daughter might end up in a class with him. And wouldn't that be interesting? It would all come full circle. Now, as I sat in that class 30 years ago, one of the things that's interesting is what made his story so persuasive? It wasn't, I would submit to you simply because he was smart or simply because he had good arguments. It wasn't simply because he was attacking the Bible in ways I never heard of. No. What made his story persuasive is that he was once one of us. What Bart Ehrman exemplifies is this whole category that I'm tonight going to talk about. And that category is the category of D conversion stories. Now, that's a weird title, Deconversion Stories. Usually when we go to church, we wanna hear conversion stories, right? About people who don't know Jesus and came to Christ, they get converted. If you want a great conversion story, you need to read the story of Rosaria Butterfield. Her book's in the back, Ben mentioned it. She was a liberal professor from Syracuse University and living as a lesbian and she was converted radically to Christ and she has done amazing work. So you wanna hear conversion stories, someday you need to read her book or learn about her story. But tonight, I'm not talking about that. Todd, I want to talk about a whole different story and that's deconversion stories. What's a deconversion story. A deconversion story is someone who seemed to be a Christian and talk like a Christian. It was within our circles and then has this little epiphany moment, kind of a light bulb moment where they realize, wait a second, what I believe, or at least part of what I believe, I think now is all wrong and they completely change and deconvert away from Christianity into something else. Now, deconversion stories look a lot different ways. Some people do what Bart Ehrman did, and they were once evangelicals who went to Wheaton and went to Moody Bible Institute and preached the gospel and were part of the youth group, and then they think Christianity's rubbish, and Ehrman now would define himself as sort of an agnostic atheist and so on. So he's completely left behind anything that looks anything like Christianity. So that's one kind of deconversion story. But then there's other kind of deconversion stories. Some deconversion stories are sort of what you might call half-deconversions. where they keep the claim in the name of Christian, but jettison controversial doctrines they no longer believe. And I think we all know that today, one of those big doctrines that people are quick to jettison in our culture is related to the biblical ethic on sexuality. What does the Bible say about sexuality? That marriage and sexual activity ought to be between one man and one woman. which seems so foundational and obvious. It's hard to even imagine you have to even say that is strange now, but it is strange now. Um, and so some of the deconversions aren't necessarily away from Christianity entirely, but there are away from that old version of Christianity that I no longer like anymore. That fundamentalist style Christianity that is just sort of caught in, you know, it's sort of frozen cultural moment and it doesn't move with the times, that kind of Christianity. I'm done with that. So I'm still a Christian. So I deconvert from an old version and into a new version, and this is the wave of the future in our culture today. In fact, it's interesting timing that we're having this conversation, because those of you who've been sort of maybe watching the landscape of Christendom know the story of Josh Harris that just happened last month. Joshua Harris wrote a very famous book in the 90s called I Kiss Dating Goodbye, which was an argument for sexual purity and sort of a culture geared towards courtship and not dating, and he made himself famous as a result. Well, if you don't know what happened, Joshua Harris deconverted. Just a couple months ago, he came out and said, I'm no longer a Christian. He's divorcing his wife. And guess what is the key issue he honed in on as soon as he announced his deconversion, that he now embraces homosexuality as legitimate, right, and good, and no longer repudiates it. So what you have is this weird phenomenon in our culture, evangelical culture of deconversion stories. So Barterman's one, Joshua Harris is one. And the one I want to focus in on tonight, and I'll talk about other folks besides this particular individual, is the story of Jen Hatmaker. Some of you may know the story of Jen Hatmaker. She is a very famous evangelical female author, writer, speaker, who is from Texas and spoke at many evangelical churches for years there. A while ago, she came out, too, as embracing the LGBT world and says, I no longer believe homosexuality is a sin, and I think it's compatible with Christianity. And so she deconverted from her old version of the faith into some newfound version. And that was quite the shocker in the evangelical world. Here's what's interesting is that all these deconversion stories follow a particular playbook. And what I want to do tonight with you is walk you through the deconversion playbook. Really, there's five steps to this deconversion playbook I'm going to lay out for you. And they're the five steps that Jen Hatmaker, in particular, laid out. But Bart Ehrman has a version of this. Peter Enns has a version of this. Joshua Harris has a version of this. And when you look at these five steps, it helps you understand what is coming your way. And then we can also think about, well, how do we sort of, you know, interact with that, respond to that, deal with those five things as they're laid out. So I want to lay out these five steps of these popular deconversion stories. And fundamentally, as we do this, I want you to remember why this matters so much, because I'm convinced that this is what makes these stories so compelling. We live in a world that's no longer persuaded to believe something because it's true. They're persuaded to believe something because of a certain emotion they get when they believe it, or maybe a certain emotion they don't get when they believe it. So what makes deconversion stories so powerful is the personal narrative behind them. So notice, it's not just as simple as standing up and saying, homosexuality is a good thing, and let's debate it. No, it's someone standing up and saying, let me tell you my personal story. And as soon as you do that, it changes the whole discussion. Have you noticed now it's so much more personal and intimate and relational and people react to that. They respond to that. So you have to realize that this deconversion story phenomenon has a lot of mileage. They're getting out of it. You may wonder, didn't people have deconversion stories a hundred years ago? 50 years ago, 500 years ago. Well, yeah, I think the deconversion stories have always been there. You just never heard about them. And what you, what you have now is a culture where people are doing what you might call reverse evangelism. It's not enough to leave the faith. You have to convince many other people to leave it with you. And so you have to understand that the world you're living in and the world you're sending your children into, cause I just did that with mine. is a world where people who deconvert don't want to just quietly deconvert. They deconvert publicly on social media. With what end? I want to take as many people with me as I possibly can. And it's all affected by the deconversion story. Now, by the way, you can pick up this culturally in other ways. I remember years ago when we were living overseas in the UK when I was doing my PhD work, one year the Olympics was on television. and my wife Melissa and I were very excited to watch the Olympics. But then we realized that British television isn't like American television. And when you watch the Olympics on British television, they just put the camera on the event and just let it run. There's the event. Enjoy. And you're like, Can't you give me some narrative here? Can't you talk about it? Can't you sort of have someone doing backstories on people or something? You just put the camera in on the event and then they tell you one. It's all very sterile and clinical. But then when you watch the Olympics in America, you ever notice what they do? They don't show you the event yet. What do they do? They give you the backstory of the athlete who's competing in the event. And they interview their parents, and they showed little pictures of them when they were little, and how they grew up, and how they had a little medal at five, and how they were going to be the gymnast that would save the world. And you go, you start shedding a tear before you even watch the event. And what happens? Before the event even happens, you're like in love with this person, right? This is the greatest person that's ever lived. And what do you do? It makes you cheer for them. Why? because you heard their story. You have to realize that personal narratives are impactful. So we have to sort of be able to spot it and diagnose it. Now imagine this scenario. Imagine if we debated the homosexuality issue actually on the merits of the issues. What have we debated homosexuality on whether the Bible taught it or not? or whether it was, you know, something that was good for society or not. Well, that would look a very, it looked like a very different debate than what we're getting in culture because we're getting culture is these personal deconversion stories. And I can tell you this, and I can, I see this in the landscape in the seminary world. This is a very scary phenomenon because people are eating this up all the time. Christians are, and they're deconverting following these other Christians. OK, so there's my framing of what we're going to do tonight. So let's walk through five steps in the deconversion playbook. And I'm going to say a quick word about each of these. And then when we're done, I do want to open it up for Q&A. And you can ask about the deconversion story phenomenon, or anything I said, or something related to these issues tonight. As a side note tonight, by the way, once you start talking about issues like LGBT stuff and homosexuality, my goal tonight is not to sort of make the case against homosexuality. Okay. As if my point tonight were to go through Bible patches, passages, and what do they mean? I, I, I'm, I'm assuming that, okay, that's, that's sort of in this context, I'm assuming that that's where you are. What I want to talk about is the message you're getting from the culture and how we can interact with it and deal with it. Okay. Five steps. First step to the deconversion playbook, recount the negatives of your fundamentalist past, recount the negatives of your fundamentalist past. Here's the amazing thing about almost all these deconversion stories, and I've seen a lot of them. because I've read the books that give them, is that almost all of them begin in the same way. They first flash their evangelical credentials to prove they're the real deal, that they really were one of us, and then after showing they were really legitimately one of us, I was actually an evangelical. I went to Moody Bible Institute, or Moody Bible College, where literally Bible is our middle name, right? If I went there, then I'm one of you, and therefore you should listen to what I say. Jen Hatmaker does that in her deconversion story. This was captured in a recent podcast with Peter Enns. Peter Enns is also a deconvert. The title of the podcast was fascinating. Listen to this title. This was the podcast that Jen Hatmaker was on, Changing Your Mind About the Bible, A Survivor's Guide. So she is trying to help the audience out there listening to the podcast understand why she changed her mind about the Bible. And if you change your mind about the Bible, how you can survive. So as she starts her podcast, this was step one of her playbook is to recount the negatives of her evangelical past. And she does that. She says, I went to a Southern Baptist college. How do you get more evangelical than that? Apparently, I don't know. And she grew up in a Southern Baptist context, and Texas of all things, right? How do you get more evangelical and more Southern Baptist than Texas? And she's like, look, I was there, I was in all these groups and so forth. But then she shifts into her negative critique. Now I realize, she says, that it had all these problems. Now I realize that it was sort of oppressive and sort of shut things down when people would ask questions and never were willing to sort of consider other views. And she sort of makes this sort of presentation of evangelicals as afraid of the hard questions. And then if you do get around to a hard question, they're gonna give you pat answers. And part of the reason that I'm now not that kind of Christian anymore is because I asked too many hard questions and no one was willing to answer them. And now I realize that they don't have answers, and that this was this sort of anti-intellectual, stick-your-head-in-the-sand kind of world I lived in, where you just aren't allowed to raise doubts. And if you do raise doubts, then someone's going to shake their finger at you and say, get back in line. If you think about that whole first step in the deconversion playbook, that's her narrative, I can tell you that is repeated time and time again in these deconversion stories. This idea that, you know, I was in this sort of fundamentalist world, wasn't allowed to ask questions, and when I did, I was sort of chided for it, and then I realized there weren't really any good answers, but these sort of shallow pat answers I got all the time, and I just, I had enough. I'm done with this evangelical thing. Now, as we look at this first step in the playbook, and I'm going to say sort of an analytical word about each step, is this true? Now, part of the persuasiveness of the deconversion stories is they're partly true. Now, they're also partly false. And by the way, those are the best kind of things that deceive people, right? People are not deceived by complete falsities. They're usually deceived by half-truths. And one of the master things about these sort of deconversion stories is the half-truth thing is brilliant. There's enough truth in there for you to almost buy it. Now, let me push back first on this. I hear this all the time, this idea that Christians are the ones who don't ask or are willing to ask good questions. They are not willing to look at things from a tough perspective and deal with the tough issues. I profoundly disagree in terms of evangelicalism as a whole. Now, I look at evangelicalism as a whole, and I'll come back to the exceptions of this in a moment, I don't see that. When I look at evangelicalism as a whole, I see Christians quite willing to dive deep into the tough issues. I see them quite willing to look head on into the challenging parts of the Bible or what they believe or the historical evidence for their faith. In fact, most of the people who are willing to take a real hard look at their worldview are actually Christians who want to know, do I believe something that's really true and can be demonstrated? In fact, Ben can testify to this and so can Travis. One of the things that we do at RTS is we don't just teach our students the sort of orthodox reform view on everything, although we do do that, we also teach them what people have said negatively about Christianity. He probably remembers my Gospels class. I presume you remember what my Gospels class said. You probably don't remember anything in it. One of the things I do in my Gospels class, the whole first half of the class, is all the criticisms that you've ever heard on the Gospels. And we look at them. We don't hide from them. We tackle them head on. And so one sentence, I hear this complaint and step one of the playbook and I'm like, you know, I'm not convinced. I think most evangelicals actually are quite willing to ask tough questions about their faith and quite willing to dive deep. In fact, what's interesting is it's not the conservative seminaries that are looking at only one side of the issue. It's actually the liberal ones. How many liberal seminaries read conservative books? Hardly any, but it's interesting. Is it conservative summaries read liberal books? I found this out when I had Bart Ehrman as a professor. I remember one day in class, someone raised their hand and go, why don't you ever give the other side? Why don't you ever give the other view? And he's like, well, all you're going to get in here is my view, effectively. I don't have time to give you all the other views. And I was thinking to myself, pedagogically, if you're going to get a good education, shouldn't you get at least more than one view, more than one side? And I realized that as a whole, it's actually, I disagree with her complaint. And yet, and yet, Is there not a nugget of truth to it? Here's where I want to challenge us tonight. And this isn't a challenge to this particular congregation in particular, but to us as evangelicals as a whole. Are we going deep enough in our faith to answer the tough questions when they come our way? Or are we skipping through our lives intellectually and doctrinally quite content because we know we believe it and we don't want to have to worry about ever answering questions when someone asks? And truth be told, because we don't have answers, we never engage the world around us because we know we're not going to have the answers. She may be partly right. I think there are pockets of evangelicalism that are pretty thin in understanding why they believe what they believe, and they're pretty shallow in the depth of their theology, doctrine, and understanding of their faith. And there's some Christians who don't want to ever ask hard questions about what they believe, never want to dive deeper, never want to read that extra book, never really want to go further in what they know. What I want to challenge us on here right out of the gate is let us, at least, not be those believers, right? When someone comes to you with a tough question, you know what would be wonderful is if it's not the first time you've ever heard it. That you say, yes, I've heard that because my pastor taught that to me. You know, one of the things I told Emma, my daughter, when I dropped her off in college, and one of the things that I think you would agree with is that I did not want her to hear the so-called problems with the Bible the first time from her professors. I wanted her to hear those from me and from her church so she knows that we're not hiding from it and we're willing to dive in and deal with those problems and that there's answers to those problems. In other words, I wanted to get ahead of it, right? I didn't want the first time she heard about a problem with the Bible to be from Bart Ehrman. I want her to know that when she heard that, she goes, yeah, this is old news, right? I've heard this before, Bart. You're not telling me anything I don't know, right? There's a word for that in medicine. It's just called inoculation, right? If you don't want someone to get measles to get and get wiped out by it, you give them inoculation for the measles, right? You give them a little bit of the measles so that they're ready for the real thing when it comes. Are we doing that? Are you doing that in this congregation? That's a good question to ask. So this first part of the playbook, It's a half-truth, but we can also ask honest questions about our own life and about our own ministries, and whether we really, really are going deep or not. Now, the book table out there is a good start, but don't think my book's the only books that do this. There's tons of places out there I know you can go deep in, and I know your pastors can guide you more on that. Okay, that's first step in the playbook. Let's look at step number two in the playbook. Position yourself as the offended party who bravely fought the establishment. This is a brilliant move, part two. So move number one is sort of recount the negatives of your fundamentalist past. Move number two is that you were a liberator. You fought that big, massive sort of institution called the church and effectively threw off the shackles of oppression and liberated yourself and hopefully others with you. And one of the things that Jen Hatmaker does in this interview is she sort of laments sort of how she was attacked and mistreated by the church and how she fought against that and was willing to stand up for LGBTQ people in the face of this oppressive opposition and so on. Now, her story is complicated because I think there's probably, again, a half-truth here. And this is part of each of these steps. I want to push back against part of it and then acknowledge a partial truth to each of those. First, let me push back against it. The idea that she sort of bravely fought the establishment and was sort of oppressed and so forth, I just simply struggle to find that sort of a believable scenario. Sometimes what you realize in our culture is that if someone disagrees with you, it's considered oppressive. And I think you're probably picking up on this. If we're talking with someone about homosexuality, it's such a sensitive issue that if I say I think homosexuality is a sin, It's not like, oh, we disagree. No, it's like, you've oppressed me. You've attacked me. You've made a personal sort of offense to me. This is damaging to me. It used to be in the past that you could just disagree with somebody. Now that's not the case anymore. So part of what I want to push back here on the second part of the playbook is this idea that sometimes you're just critiqued because your theology changed. And by the way, this isn't a minor theological change. right? This isn't sort of, you know, sprinkle or dunk and the baptism debate, right? Um, this is a monumental shift theologically. She's basically taking not only, I think some of the plaintiff's teachings in the entire Bible on sexuality and sort of bypassing them, but on top of that, she's bypassing a very remarkably uniform 2000 years of church history in terms of how to interpret those passages. It's not like she can come and say, well, you know, half the church has thought for generations that homosexuality is fine, and it's just your half of the church that thinks it's a bad thing, and now I'm just joining this half over here. No. On a historical level, it's actually been absolutely uniform for generations, all the way back to the beginning of the church for almost 2,000 years. In fact, one of our own professors at RTS Charlotte, Don Fortson, has written a book on this, actually documenting the historical view of the church on homosexuality for almost 2,000 years. It should be noted, and this is where we would point this out, that it just happens to be that her new view happens to coincide with one of the biggest cultural shifts in the Western world that is actually very recent in the last 10 or 15 years. Did you know that when Barack Obama was elected president on his first term, that he ran on a platform defending marriage between a man and a woman? That's not that long ago. You want to talk about how quick the shift has taken place. Any candidate for president now who tried to do that and want to get the nomination in the Democrat Party would not survive with that view. And you're thinking, how long ago was that again? That was 2008. It's a remarkable shift in our world. Just simply 11 years ago, that was the view of one of the major presidential candidates. And now it's unthinkable that anybody could ever hold that view again. So what you realize then is this idea that she is the sort of brave one who fought the establishment, I simply don't agree. However, there's an element of truth to it. I don't know her story, and I would not presume to dig into the details of her story, but from what I've read and heard in the interview, I think probably some people did mistreat her. They probably were cruel to her. Maybe they were mean to her. Maybe they did speak ill of her in a way that went beyond disagreement over her theology and led to what would legitimately be regarded as personal attacks. Could that have happened? Absolutely. Did that happen? Certainly possible. You know, one of the themes this weekend is speak the truth in love. And certainly we want to be all about speaking the truth, but we also want to do it with love. I'm going to talk about this more tomorrow in the Sunday school class. Now, this doesn't mean that the way you solve this is by then changing your view. This is, this is what happens. People think, well, golly, I feel so bad that some people who believe homosexuality is okay have been mistreated. Therefore, I guess I'll say homosexuality is okay. Now that's not the solution. The solution isn't changing your view. The view, the solution is just giving people the due respect, dignity, courtesy, and love that we give every human being, right? So we have to ask ourselves that question. So you notice the playbook here has a lot of things off about it, but there's also just a little bit on about it and you have to realize we need to ask ourselves those hard questions as well. All right, third step in the playbook. First step, recount the negatives of your fundamentalist past. Second step, position yourself as the offended party who bravely fought the establishment. And the third one's a big one. This is a big one. Portray your opponents as dogmatic while you're just a seeker. While you're just a seeker. This one is gold. If I were writing the playbook for the DP conversion stories, this has gotta be in there. If you read these deconversion stories at hat makers, Peter ends, Rob bells. We haven't talked about his, um, and so on. One of the themes that emerges is that the problem with you evangelicals, the problem with you and me is that you're just too certain about everything you believe. You just hold it too tightly. Whereas we, the enlightened ones, right? We are not that way because we are on a journey. That's what we are. We're just seekers. We're not looking to draw hard lines, not like you Christians do. We're just looking to sort of keep all the options open on the table. And when you hear that, it sounds very compelling at first. In fact, you hear that even maybe sitting there just the second you're thinking, I guess if I had to choose between being the hard line drawer person or the person on a journey, it sounds a lot better to be the person on a journey. In fact, the word journey, the word seeker, the word searcher. I, I, I, at one point came up with like a little list of how many times these words are repeated, uh, in these interviews. And it's amazing how often they're repeated, right? It's like talking points, you know, that use that word a lot and people will like you, right? Just on a journey, not trying to say anything dogmatic. Jen hat maker. I'll read a quote from her in this regard. She says this quote for a season, that sense of certainty was wonderful. But of course, upon scrutiny, it breaks down because as always, we come to scripture and the things that we say are certain are obviously not certain. Other people's certainty really only works in an echo chamber. Now at first you're like, wow, it sounds so humble. It sounds so reasonable. Maybe we just need to lighten up a little bit and not be so certain about what we believe. But then you realize, wait a second, hold on. But isn't hat maker herself telling us what she believes and is certain about? In other words, when she says, certainty only works in an echo chamber, couldn't I ask her, well, are you certain about that? What did she say then? She says, no, well, then if you're not certain about it, then what's your point? And if you are certain about it, you just contradicted yourself. You realize what's interesting in all this is that the whole point of doing the podcast, in one sense, is to tell people, look, let me tell you how religion really works. Religion doesn't work like you fundamentalist evangelicals think religion works the way I figured it out. Let me tell you how it really works. But as soon as you say this is how it really works, then you're not as uncertain as you portray. In fact, what you've done is you've smuggled certainty in through the back door. And I want you to see this because this is happening culturally everywhere. This idea that, Oh, we can't be certain about anything. But then when you're looking at this hand with this hand, I'm bringing in all my own certain claims through the back door, which you don't see, right? Nothing to see here. And what you realize is that there's this sort of double speak going on. Now, I don't want to suggest to you that this is always intentional. In fact, I think most of the time it isn't. I think most of the time the people in this world don't even realize what they're doing. They don't realize that all the talk about being on a journey and being a seeker and sort of wagging your finger at other people for being dogmatic, you realize that in order to wag your finger at all, you better be certain that you're right. And then if you're right, well then suddenly you're now making the same mistake you accused them of. This quickly becomes true later in this interview with Hatmaker when she starts talking about her newfound conviction about the goodness of the LGBT lifestyle. I wonder what would happen if someone says, are you certain that it's not a sin to be a homosexual? I imagine she would have said, absolutely I'm certain it's not a sin. But then, of course, that undermines everything. What if she said, well, you know, I just don't know. Here's one thing you don't hear in the interview. I don't know if homosexuality is a sin. I'm foggy about it. It's unclear to me. I'm on a journey. But that's not what happens. In the interview, she's absolutely sure that the Bible approves of homosexuality, yet at the same time, chiding Christians for their commitment to certainty. Now of course it raises other questions for people like hat maker because she is trying to hold on to a version of Christianity. If you're, if everything's uncertain, then is the resurrection uncertain? If everything is uncertain, then is salvation in Christ alone uncertain. Now here's the trick in all of this. This third point in the playbook is going to be pretty perceptive, pretty persuasive as a point against us because we already, let's just admit this. We already as Christians feel a bit sheepish about our beliefs in the world we're in. And one of the things we're very sensitive about, if we're honest, is this perception that we're arrogant know-it-alls. The last thing we want is for anyone to think we're an arrogant know-it-all. So as soon as someone says, you're a dogmatic, you're arrogant, all Christians always think they're right and everyone else is wrong, we hear that and we're like, oh man, I gotta solve that problem. How do I solve that problem? And we assume that the way we solve that problem is just to be uncertain about everything we believe. In other words, we're convinced in our mind that the path to humility is uncertainty. And what I'm going to do in Sunday school tomorrow is I'm going to, and in my sermon a little bit too, I'm going to break that, that myth. I'm not going to do it here because I'm going to do it tomorrow, but I can tell you, and you know this intuitively, the definition and the Bible's definition of humility is not uncertainty. You do not have to be uncertain about everything in order to be humble. The question isn't about whether you're certain about something. The question is, what are the grounds for your certainty? If the grounds for your certainty are your own greatness and your own intelligence and your own smartness, you got a humility problem. But what if your grounds were something else? What if you could be absolutely certain of something? Not because we think we're great and we're smart, we're wonderful because God has clearly revealed something to us by his grace. Could that make us certain? Absolutely. But not arrogant. In fact, on the contrary, it makes us humble. So keep an eye out for this, because I can tell you this is a big category out there. It doesn't apply only to this issue of certainty and uncertainty. This issue of sort of speaking with one hand and not the other applies to other things too, as we'll see in this next step. So let's move on to number four in the playbook. So number one, recount the negatives of your evangelical past. Number two, position yourself as the offended party who liberated and fought the establishment. Three, portray your opponents as overly dogmatic. And here's the fourth one. Insist your new theology is actually driven by the Bible. insists your new theology is driven by the Bible. Here's the thing about the interview with Jen Hatmaker that makes it so persuasive, is that she doesn't abandon the Bible. She says, I've found a new way to read the Bible. I've discovered a new interpretation of the Bible. Therefore, someone listening who's a Christian begins to think, well, maybe I could think of the Bible differently, or maybe I could retain the Christian label and just have a different set of theological convictions. So what she does then is she doesn't sort of throw out everything. She just throws out some things. And as a result, what you end up having is this sense of she wants to have her theological cake and sort of eat it too. She says in the interview this about her newfound view of homosexuality. She says, quote, it was a lot of work, a lot of labor. It wasn't just a feeling. It was an incredible amount of study, biblical study and inquiry. In other words, don't think I just did this out of emotion. I did this because the Bible brought me there. The Bible led me there. Now, in the playbook, that's a good argument because if you're going to persuade evangelicals to deconvert with you, and evangelicals believe the Bible is the word of God, that's not going to do very well, just to say, I just learned that the Bible is not the word of God. By the way, I got to say, that's more honest. One thing, one thing I got to say, I appreciate about Josh Harris's deconversion story, if you've kept up with it, is that he embraced homosexuality and realize it just doesn't fit with the Bible. And he just sort of owned it. And therefore he said, I now think these things are true. And I realized that I can no longer be a Christian. Okay. You know, I don't know, you know, I'm disappointed in that and I wish he didn't do that. And obviously I have disagreements with his views, but I got to give him credit for this. One thing is that he recognizes the incompatibility of certain views with Orthodox Christianity. He realized you can't have your cake and eat it too. He was just honest about it. Look, I'm on any reasonable definition said Harris, I'm not a Christian. And what's happening here and what's happening in a lot of deconversion stories is that it's changed the definition of Christian. so that it fits with what someone wants to believe rather than what's really true. Now here's the, here's the kicker that works good rhetorically, but it doesn't work when you start doing the actual math on what the Bible says. Is it true that the Bible could be read both ways? Is it true that the Bible is just foggy? Here's one of the quotes from hat maker. I want you to listen to how, She's, she's good. This is what she says. Quote, obviously so much of what is written about homosexuality in scripture is contextually bound and there's not much there frankly, but it's deeply bound to culture just like a thousand other points in the Bible are a thousand other points in the Bible and there's quote, not much there. So what she does is takes what I regard, and I think anybody would regard as a mountain of teaching about sex in the Bible, because there is. And with one sweep of the hand, it says, it's all culture. Just easy as one, two, three, nothing to see here. I'm just going to take all of what the Bible has said in 2000 years of church history and just, it's all in her culture. Now I hear that and I think to myself, so it's evangelicals that give pat answers. Remember the claim is that we give pat answers to hard questions, but yet here's a Bible and I don't have time tonight to do it. That from top to bottom is actually pretty clear on sex. And yet she says, well, you know, then how much to say it's all culture anyway. Everybody knows that. And then with a snap of the fingers, whoa, look at that. One of the most core doctrines in the history of all of Christianity suddenly gone. And you realize, wait a second, something isn't right here. You realize it cannot be swept away so easily. Then she says this later, when we struggled to find clarity on sexual issues, the Bible refused to cooperate. When we struggled to find clarity on sexual issues, the Bible refused to cooperate that darn old Bible. So stubborn doesn't do what we want it to do. So in other words, she tried to find clarity just isn't there, but yet, There is this verse, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, Genesis 2, 24. And Jesus repeats that same verse in the New Testament and reaffirms its truth. I'm no biblical scholar. Well, actually I am a biblical scholar, but I'm no biblical scholar. Sounds pretty clear. Then she says this as sort of the crescendo when it comes to biblical interpretation, quote, there's never been unanimity ever on anything. Now, if you want to join the cultural conversation, and I trust you're here tonight because you do, you're going to have to be able to answer these questions. We have to be ready for claims, well, the Bible doesn't mean anything. The Bible can mean anything. It's just all culture. There's never been unanimity in the church. Of course, you know that's not true. I don't have time tonight to sort of give you examples of that, even if something as simple as the Apostles' Creed shows you there's been unanimity in the church on a great many things that are core to what we believe. And as I've already indicated, there's a unified witness in the church for 2,000 years about this issue of sexuality. All right, that brings us to the last of the five steps. Here's the final step in your playbook, and that is attack the moral character of your old group and lift up the moral character of your new one. And this was a sad ending to the interview with Hatmaker, but it's a common thing in all of these deconversion stories, and that is, the issue of moral and immoral is flipped. And it's completely reversed. If it's people who believe in traditional marriage that were moral, and people that believe in homosexuality that are immoral, then the new narrative is that the opposite's the case. That it's the people who embrace homosexuality that are moral. and as people who defend traditional marriage are morally reprehensible. Stunning to think about. It's not even just we disagree with you or we have a good-natured sort of exegetical debate over this passage. No, there is a genuine declaration that if you hold the view of sex that a Bible is for a man and a woman that you are morally bankrupt. I won't repeat all the language she uses here. in the interview. It's pretty over-the-top. Apparently, the evangelical belief in marriage between men and women is responsible for almost every social ill before it's all done. Now, on one level, it's sad to see those sorts of charges flung out there. But what I want to point out to you is, first of all, this is fulfilling a biblical prediction that there are those in the last days who will call evil good and good evil. And it's a complete reversal of what's moral. But I also want to point out, again, one of the problems with this as part of the pushback is that it is ironic, is it not, that the very group that wants to reject Christianity, at least in a recognizable sense, and in many cases, like Barterman types, reject the Bible altogether, still have a very high moral platform. They have a very high moral code. In fact, contrary to the idea that non-Christians are not interested in morals, they're very interested in morals. So interested in morality that they're wagging their finger at you evangelicals for being so immoral. It's funny, some of you guys remember the 1980s when everybody was upset with the religious right and the sort of moral majority for always saying, you know, you shouldn't be this way, you shouldn't be that way. Well, apparently those days aren't over. It's just that now it's on the other side. But here's the question. If the Bible's out the door and if the Christian worldview is out the door, on what ground are you standing when you say something's right or wrong? How do you know something's immoral or moral? You know, it's wanting to get on the sort of moral high horse and sort of say, you people are so bad for, you know, oppressing people that have different views of sexuality and so on. But you have to have some moral standard that's coherent in your worldview in order to make such claims. This is, of course, what I want to help you see, is that that's the very thing we want to challenge our non-Christian friends with. It's like, okay, I can have a conversation about morality. Let's have it. As a Christian, I base my view of what's right and wrong on an absolute transcendent norm, namely God's own nature as revealed in his word. What's that absolute norm you base your moral world on? You hear that sound? That's what you will hear. Most non-Christians have never been asked that question. No one's ever stopped them and said, let's put the particular debate aside over this issue or that issue. Where do you get morals from in the first place? Now, at that point, if they say, well, it's just my own opinion, well, then the debate's over because if it's just your own opinion and there's not a moral norm out there, then why are you wagging your finger at everybody? There has to be some standard that's not being met. That's transcendent and absolute that you're mad at that person for not meeting. It has to be beyond an individual. It has to be a standard over everybody. Other words, what are you so upset for? Here's the thing is you realize the irony of the whole thing is they've just thrown under the bus the one worldview that could give them moral standards for their own private moral standards that they are then raising to almost a divine level. It's a sad example of how people want to become God. What is every human being and their own simple nature want to be? They want to create their own universe and they want to run their own universe and they want to set their own moral standards. What the non-Christian ends up doing is doing that exact thing. He wants to determine the way the world works. He wants, he has no grounds for morality outside himself, but that doesn't matter because he can be his own God. He can set up the world exactly like he likes it. In fact, in our world today, people can even create their own identities. They can decide whether they're male or female. They can decide everything. We are creators of our own destiny. You can't even imagine anything more contrary to the scriptural narrative than that idea that a human being can do that. And this brings us then to the sort of end of our sort of review then of these five steps in the deconversion story. As you realize that this is capturing the broader cultural conversation. And if we're gonna step into that broader cultural conversation, we have to have some sense of, the way it's being framed, the way it's being used, and how we can respond to that. And as I started with, what I want you to realize is that the narrative version of these stories is very powerful. Couch it in a personal journey, and it can be very, very powerful. But yet, we need to find ways to lovingly, politely ask hard questions and poke into that to find out what really works and what really doesn't. And at the end of the day, what you end up with is a worldview that looks a lot like Romans 1. which is where someone says, I will reject everything that's clear in the world about God. And I will, in one sense, worship the creature instead of the creator. And I would suggest to you, that's exactly what's happening in our world today.