Well-known defectors from fundamentalist Christianity—musicians, writers, preachers—sort roughly into two categories. First there are those who became agnostics, and who think Christians are misguided at best. With varying degrees of sympathy and anger, they like to rehash silly lessons from Sunday school and congratulate themselves for being skeptical. Then there are the salvagers, who sift through the Christian teachings of their youth and decide the most basic parts are worth preserving. They promote a sort of not-your-parents’ Christianity, where it’s okay to doubt God’s existence and reject the old teachings on homosexuality and gender roles.
Neither side has contributed much to the literature on religion and belief, though they have revealed a lot about the evangelical subculture. The New Agnostics seem to retain a cartoonish notion of God as a Homeric being who created the universe in a single temporal event. As for the New Christians, instead of arguing about God’s existence, they mostly try to atone for the previous generation’s mistakes by creating a more hospitable church environment with a more transparent leadership. However noble their intentions, both groups are for the most part intellectually shallow, and neither is much in conversation with spiritual traditions outside the ones they grew up in. They’re self-styled rebels who define themselves against Billy Graham’s breed of Christianity.
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