Large numbers of Americans are giving up on Christianity. The trendlines are unmistakable. Fewer people are going to church. The number of people who say they have no religious affiliation has risen. The "nones" are the biggest religious group now, outnumbering both evangelicals and Catholics. For some, walking away from religion is easy. But for a lot of people, especially those who once counted themselves in the ranks of the evangelicals, it can be a lot harder. The evangelical identity can be all-consuming, shaping not just how a person prays, but how they identify, how they vote and how they live their daily life. So it's no surprise that an online community of ex-evangelicals — exvangelical— has formed, giving those who have walked away a space to process their experience, move into a new life, and, often, warn other Americans about the political threat looming from this subset of Christianity.

In his new book "Exvangelical and Beyond: How American Christianity Went Radical and the Movement That's Fighting Back," podcast host Blake Chastain goes beyond recounting his own journey out of the Christian right, and into the larger story of how that community even came to be. He chronicles how white evangelicalism is not an ancient tradition, as its proponents often assume, but an American phenomenon. The faith, he argues, exists as much to justify racism and unbridled capitalism as it does to praise Jesus.

Chastain spoke with Salon about his story and why evangelicalism needs to be understood more as an identity than a theology. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let's start with the most basic question: Why write about ex-evangelicals, and why at this point?

The last eight or 10 years have illustrated longer-term issues within American Christianity. One outcome is that many people are disaffiliating from their churches, their belief systems, and their communities. In particular, people are leaving white evangelicalism, due to the inherently political nature of those spaces. Exvangelicalism isn't a complete belief system, like evangelicalism is. In many ways, though, it's a mirror of it and is in dialogue with evangelicalism. People who use the term "exvangelical" or "ex-evangelical" to describe themselves had a formative experience within evangelicalism. They no longer identify with that belief or belong to those communities.

"You can see through different surveys that have been done, especially since 2016, that there's a drift of what the word "evangelical" means. Many people who have not participated in a local evangelical church or community self-describe as "evangelical." It's a desire to affiliate with Donald Trump, the GOP, or general conservatism."

The thing........

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