Why Do the Exvangelicals Rage?

Anger, Social Media, and the Hidden Glory of Grief

Note: I’m pleased to publish this guest essay by my friend Ian Harber. You can read Ian’s writing at his Substack, Back Again.

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It’s almost a cliche at this point: the angry exvangelical on TikTok sharing their story of church hurt, or how they discovered that something they were taught as a child was untrue. Cliches become cliches for a reason: truth. Many, myself included, have sadly had these kinds of experiences. And for lots of people, these experiences lead to real anger toward their parents, youth pastors, or someone/something else. Anger—or some derivative of anger like disgust, contempt, bitterness, or judgment—is arguably the dominant emotion expressed in online exvangelical spaces.

In a lot of cases, the anger is warranted. Anger is the proper response at abuse, whether experienced firsthand or covered up.  Anger is the proper response toward a pastor, leader, or family member’s devastating moral failure. Their anger is a justified reaction to the failure of Christians and Christian institutions to live consistently by the teachings of Jesus they espouse. Still others express anger that they were not given the tools to support a robust, authentic faith that holds up the truth, beauty, and goodness of God in the face of non-Christian counterfeits. In some ways, it seems to me that if you can’t empathize at least a little with the anger of exvangelicals, you’re probably in denial or just not paying attention.

But anger is not a solution. In the throes of anger, many of us want nothing more than to burn stuff down. In a digital age, our box of matches often looks a lot like the 6-inch piece of glass we all keep in our pockets.

People often take to the social Internet to share their story after they have been removed, one way or another, from the context that hurt them. Their compelling narrative tears apart a person, group, or institution, laying bare the perceived failures and shortcomings of the exvangelical’s teachers, but from a distance. Lighting a fire in an attempt to purge the world of the source of their pain, they often don’t have in mind the unintentional consequences of their actions for the others who are still in the institution and haven’t experienced hurt.

There is certainly a place for holding people who have caused a great deal of harm accountable. But as a means of holding people accountable, social media is less like a surgical knife which removes the tumor for the good of the body, and more like a bomb that indiscriminately spreads collateral damage. As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who coined the five stages of grief, wrote about anger, “Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss. Unfortunately, however, anger can isolate you from friends and family at the precise time you may need them the most.” In our quest for justice and vengeance, our indignation ends up hurting the very people we most need in our pain.

The Anger Loop

Why is social media such a natural medium for anger and disillusionment? One answer is that it can  create contact between people who have had similar experiences to theirs. This alleviates a sense of being alone. They might’ve isolated the people closest to them who actually know them and can help them, but social media functions as a counterfeit institution that provides the feeling of finding community without the commitment that true community requires.

The second reason is a little more pernicious. Social networks reward outrage. This means that an angry person looking for solidarity and support on the Internet unwittingly steps into a psycho-social casino that rewards their anger with approval, status, and dopamine. The algorithmic slot machine delivers what the previous embodied community did not: frictionless affirmation. What feels like “truth-telling,” “community-building,” and “telling my story” ends up being a participation in an almost invisible feedback loop that incentivizes greater and greater degrees of anger as a performance for an ever-widening, ever-affirming audience. As you express your anger, you will be rewarded for it, which incentivizes more anger. This is why the angriest online voices grow the fastest.

To be sure, when you’ve lost your spiritual community, many friends, and even family, turning to online spaces looking for comfort and solidarity makes certain sense. There really is a kind of relief to finally encounter people willing to listen. But assuming a primarily digital presence involves terrible costs, which are well documented at this point in books like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (and of course, Samuel James’s Digital Liturgies). As Samuel James quipped, “You are what you scroll.” Social media is not a neutral tool for human interaction; it distorts our view of reality, isolates us from others, and acts like a millstone around the neck of our mental, emotional, and spiritual health. It’s no wonder we all feel like we’re drowning.

The Anger of Grief

In my forthcoming book, Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis of Faith, I argue that deconstruction should first and foremost be considered a crisis of faith, and that a crisis of faith is experienced as grief because deconstruction functions as loss. This is a loss of God, community, identity, meaning, and purpose. Anger is a normal and natural part of the grieving process. We should expect someone who is deconstructing their faith or processing pain at the hands of the church in some way or another to feel anger.

Yet even if anger is a natural place to pass through, it is a devastating place to stay. The digital feedback loop of anger, expression, reward creates an incentive structure that can cause someone to become stuck in the anger stage. When this happens, the grieving process hits a wall. Acceptance, which requires emotional progress through anger, becomes impossible.  

Acceptance is the stage where we begin to find meaning in our loss. As Kübler-Ross says about acceptance, “We start the process of reintegration, trying to put back the pieces that have been ripped away.” Acceptance is not about liking what happened, but it is about reintegrating your life to your new reality: adjusting, adapting, and putting things back together. It’s inherently constructive, or dare I say, reconstructive.

Being stuck in the anger phase of deconstruction’s grief prevents the reconstruction of someone’s faith and life, all while continuing to isolate them from the very people who know them best and care for them the most.

I can’t help but wonder what would be different if, instead of bringing anger into the digital casino, someone had instead committed to expressing their anger with two or three people they could trust. I wonder what would happen if those two or three people were able to absorb their anger, remain a non-anxious presence, and faithfully, lovingly, and prayerfully walk with them in it.

Would their mental health be better? Would they be able to properly grieve what they have lost? Would they find a little space to doubt their doubts, think more clearly, and begin to heal? Would the  anger give way to sadness, and might the sadness one day give way to a deep sense of meaning beyond knee-jerk reactions and destructive impulses? Would they find in the dark of their grief the light of friends and family who truly care for them? Would they find the surprising light of Christ there?

The Glory in Grief

Anyone who has ever experienced grief after the loss of a loved one (as I have many times over) knows that you never fully stop grieving. It’s always humming in the background, an ever-present, low-frequency bass note that never quite goes away and always reminds you of what you lost and the pain you experienced. And yet, allowing yourself to experience the whole grieving process somehow integrates the grief into your life. Instead of being something that is happening to you, it becomes a part of you.

It’s in this way that suffering is formative and a crucial part of our sanctification and formation into Christlikeness. I think this is why Paul says we “glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

When suffering has had its full effect on us, it becomes our glory. It shapes our character, produces a hope that cannot be taken away, and awakens us to experience God’s love poured into our hearts. Short-circuiting this process undermines the blessings that suffering can produce in our lives. The noise of our technology has a way of silencing the still, small voice of God that comes to us in our darkest moments. Without intending to, we can let that which we despise to become the thing that shapes us instead of the hope and love of God.

But there is another path. The path of logging off. The path of the digital monk. The slow path of meditating on God, of being in community, of wrestling with things the hard way. The path of absorbing the hate of your hurt into yourself, giving it to God, and allowing him to transform it back into love for the world. Of not paying back in kind. Of allowing God to be the judge and not taking the vengeance that is his into your own hands. Of patiently waiting upon the Lord and seeking him while he may be found. The path of quiet contemplation and faithful surrender to the God who sees and hears our sufferings and is himself well acquainted with grief.

The algorithmic casino might make us a slave to the anger that we rightfully feel, but “where the Spirit of the Lord, there is freedom.” So God frees us and transforms our anger, sorrow, regret, and suffering into a love that is poured out into our hearts and overflows into the world. That’s a love that the dopamine rush of likes, followers, and the indiscriminate release of anger could never give.

Ian Harber is a writer, Christian media producer, and author of Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith (IVP ‘25). He has written for The Gospel Coalition, Mere Orthodoxy, and RELEVANT. He writes about reconstructing faith in his newsletter Back Again, and about faith, media, and technology at Endeavor. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife and sons.