The year after my church dissolved, I listened to SZA’s “Good Days” on repeat. Lyrically, the song is about SZA cutting her losses after a relationship that has amounted to nothing: She wants to deliberately forget the past, “get right,” and keep it “always sunny inside.” But her declarations of resolve feel uneasy, and the track ends with a thickly layered instrumental outro suggestive of emotions she cannot bring herself to name. Looping beneath the instrumentation, low and barely distinguishable, is a voice murmuring “always in my mind, always in my mind.”
At the peak of my obsession with “Good Days,” I was trying to stanch my grief for a church I loved, an evangelical congregation that had tasked me with leading a racial justice ministry before abruptly ending its racial justice commitments. The pain of having the ministry dismantled was compounded by rumors that I had purposefully aggravated the church’s racial tensions to seed division in the community. After the congregation’s fractures finally led to its dissolution, I spent months scrolling through online content about church crises and their aftermaths.
The stories were plentiful. Podcasts, memoirs, reported accounts, and dedicated video channels have proliferated to allege and document the failures of evangelical institutions—and to promise guidance through the existential wilderness that rises up before you once you leave church or a church leaves you. I compiled a library’s worth of content, trying to find something that could tell me what to do.
Most of what I found seemed useless. Regardless of the medium, the narrative was basically the same: An origin story demonstrates the content creator’s familiarity with religious institutions. The content creator then encounters some variety of racism, misogyny, political extremism, or corruption embedded in the church community in question. Eventually, the content creator leaves behind the point of origin and arrives at a state of disillusionment, becoming—ostensibly—the church’s clear-eyed, objective critic, newly qualified to prescribe a remedy for its dysfunctions.
The church should never be exempt from critique, but popular exvangelical discourse seems extremely limited in its value. For those of us who are already aware of the church’s complicity with racism and systemic injustice, what is the use of proving, again and again, what we’ve long known to be true? For those of us who have personally watched church communities undertake the slow, painful work of repentance—only to be halted by the unpredictable frictions of real life—what good are arguments from content creators who evaluate our circumstances from a distance?
And it must be said: For those of us who have worked for racial justice and reconciliation as minorities within the majority-white evangelical church, why should we absorb recommendations from an exvangelical genre that remains, by all appearances, overwhelmingly and impenetrably white?
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When I review this content now, I think of what theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “indispensable and inadequate” dimensions of social reckoning: While we ought to examine our surroundings and try to make sense of what has befallen us, we should also consider the limited scope of our perspective and the vastness of what we are trying to appraise. And so as much as I think it is good for the church to be subject to criticism, I’m mistrustful of critique delivered via these popular forms, which often trade in certitude when I’m looking for engagement with complexity.
This is why I found “Good Days” so arresting. Having already considered my own disappointing relationship with the church, I had little use for content that confirmed what I already knew. The ambiguity at the end of SZA’s song came as a relief. Rather than allowing herself closure, SZA tries to excavate the questions she has not yet asked. Listening to her, I realized I was seeking not absolution in my relationship with the church, but interrogation.
I found my interrogator in Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations. The novel is oriented around David, a young man mourning the loss of his father and his pastor. He’s recruited to work for a charismatic Black politician from Illinois referred to as “the Senator.” Given the title of the book and the institutions it deals with—family, church, government—Great Expectations seems positioned to indict all varieties of systemic failure.
Yet Cunningham never offers the conclusions that I, and anyone fed on internet exvangelical content, have been trained to anticipate. This is particularly jarring because he seems to fit the profile of other content creators grappling with their experiences in the church. He has written prolifically about his Christian upbringing and has als discussed his work on the Obama campaign, as well as his experiences of family and parenthood. Consequently, for anyone who has been wounded by the church, the novel’s most compelling drama lies in its relationship to Cunningham’s life: How will he judge the organizations and people who shaped him?
Great Expectations shows the difficulty of answering these questions, for Cunningham and his readers alike: David becomes a careful observer of the Senator and his campaign—only to realize he’ll never be able to view the man clearly. The Senator is occluded by a miasma of public opinion, by the historically laden anticipation of his victory. Those who suppose they’re interacting with the Senator are often meeting only a projection of their own desire.
“People half-heartedly tried to engage him in deep policy discussions or rounds of pontification about the mood of the country,” observes David, “but in the end they did treat him like a sign.”
By the end of the novel, David suspects his understandings of his father and his pastor are similarly distorted. These kinds of men, he thinks, occupy such symbolically fraught roles that they can only be“ciphers, names that survived in our minds because of how deftly they evaded stable meaning.”
In the book’s final pages, David senses that he is on the verge of becoming the same kind of looming, influential figure other men have been for him. His life is changing. The Senator has won the presidency, foreordaining David’s own ascendance, and David is growing into his role as father to a young daughter. All this brings him to question how he will appear to the people who will one day look to him with expectation. He wants to be “real” for them in a way that other leaders have not been for him, but he doesn’t “yet know how, couldn’t fathom where to begin.”
This is why I read Great Expectations as a book about church: It is about believing yourself ready to indict a person or institution, ready to do better than those who have gone before, only to find yourself subject to the same vortex of desire, insecurity, and inherited circumstances that you imagined you had escaped.
Cunningham easily could have produced an insider’s critique of politics and religion. He could have demanded only the reader’s indignation and self-congratulatory assent. Instead, Great Expectations says something that is virtually unsayable in shallower works of direct criticism. When we are confronted with the institutions and people who raised us and harmed us, nurtured us and disappointed us, Cunningham suggests none of us are as clear-eyed as we think.
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Should that limited perspective keep us from openly discussing the church’s flaws? I don’t think so.
SZA and Cunningham aren’t making an argument for ignoring the painful fissures running through our relationships and communities. Like the creators of exvangelical church-crisis content, they’ve generated their work out of disappointment with things they found sacred. But what makes their approach interesting to me is their willingness to consider human subjectivity and the ways it ought to complicate every story we tell.
Journalist Eliza Griswold also takes this approach in Circle of Hope, her reported account of a Philadelphia congregation’s total collapse. Consequently, her book does not offer the predictable conclusiveness of popular church-failure content.
Griswold is forthcoming about the congregation’s problems: Succession challenges, theological conflicts, racist power dynamics, and generational differences tore the community apart. She writes clearly about these institutional failings but blurs the resulting portrait by asking us to consider how these weaknesses were linked to people who loved the church earnestly yet inadequately.
The men and women who hired one of the church’s few Black leaders were both “the kindest people [she’d] ever met,” Griswold writes, and the most foolishly obstinate when confronted with the implications of racial difference. The church’s most zealously welcoming evangelist, with his charisma and ambition, became its most divisive figure. The congregation is easiest to understand when viewed at a distance, framed in terms of its enormous, intractable problems. It is nearly incomprehensible when examined at an intimate scale.
These people in Circle of Hope were at once tenderhearted and calculating, well-intentioned and catastrophically unwise. It is hard to reconcile their conflicting stories, harder still to form a coherent theory about what they meant to each other as a community of believers. Griswold examines the church through their competing perspectives, pushing us to recognize the fundamental questions animating virtually every piece of church criticism: What do people actually think a church should do? How, in the end, is the church supposed to function?
Maybe, Griswold says, the people of this church “humbled each other, or perhaps ‘harrowed’ is the better word: raking one another’s souls, like fields.” At the end of their time together, this mutual harrowing was what the congregation finally achieved.
Christ calls the Father a pruning gardener (John 15:1–2), so the image of the church as a harrowed field is evocative. It implies that the church is, among other things, a site of denuding and exposure. Perhaps one of its fundamental roles is to offer us a confrontation with ourselves—with our finitude, our vulnerability, our internally fragmented state. Part of the church’s work, Griswold’s reporting suggests, is showing us the magnitude of our own need.
Since my own church crisis, I’ve joined a different local congregation, this time with the assumption that I cannot predict what will happen between us, but I can expect an encounter with my frailty. If SZA, Cunningham, and Griswold are correct, there’s often a great distance between what we say and what we believe, what we intend and what we produce, what we aspire to do and what we accomplish—and we will see proof of this in every human relationship and institution. The church, in this view, primes us to yearn for a God whose redemptive power meets our insufficiency (1 Cor. 1:26–31), whose Spirit reaches depths within us that we cannot plumb on our own.
Cunningham seems to intuit this idea in a sequence of Great Expectations that has David mulling over the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. David is agitated by Christ’s strangely phrased responses to Nicodemus’s questions. But he begins to understand Christ’s seeming indirectness as a necessity, a form of artful, oblique engagement that leads us to consider truths we would otherwise find unthinkable.
Jesus’ rhetorical feints, his provocations, his assertion that we must be born again, come to sound to David “like something from a sonata—a restatement by way of deepening, distortion, distention, modulation. The sentence isn’t necessarily easier to understand, but it is somehow, by way of image, more precise.”
Yi Ning Chiu writes Please Don’t Go, a newsletter about the pain and indispensability of communal life. Previously, she was a columnist for Inkwell, Christianity Today’s creative Next Gen Initiative project.
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