An Open Letter to Orphaned Believers

Wearied by seemingly endless discord in the church and numb to the chaos of our political climate, I was beginning to feel like I was crazy. Christian fellowship has never felt harder. To articulate and pin down where things went wrong seems a near impossibility. I began to wonder, Is it all in my head?

This is when Sara Billups’s book fell into my hands.

Billups’s book is a manual for our time. We are distanced by almost three years from the Trump presidency and the storming of the Capitol. The pandemic is no longer at its most dangerous height. And while Christian leadership abuses are being uncovered, there is still a long way to go. With some distance, perhaps we are all able to look at our recent past with more detached spirits. Maybe we can stand to look, more like it, and recognize the ridiculousness for what it was, allow ourselves to be puzzled, and find the root causes. The appropriate reaction to the chaos could be to leave, wondering what this church, or maybe even faith, was all for. The other option, the one I and Billups would suggest, is to stay, by a grace, hard to locate, which over and over has served as an “anchor for the soul.” Christ, our Savior and Head, withstands all changing tides.

With Peter in the Gospel of John, may we all ask, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”

Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home (BakerBooks) is an investigation into the rise and current state of the evangelical church in America. It is part memoir, Billups describing her apocalyptic childhood and young adulthood, and part guide for today’s orphaned believer.

According to Billups, an orphaned believer is someone whose faith may look different from that of parents or peers, is disturbed when “cultural Christianity has usurped the gospel’s call toward transformational” and often discomforting work, and yet is someone whose life is centered on Christ.

Perhaps, like Billups, this believer is of the generation disillusioned by “politically co-opted” churches of the 1980s and ’90s. Or maybe, like me, a generation later they’re simply trying to sort through the hand they’ve been dealt.

But by going back in time through the lens of her childhood and that of her End Times-obsessed father, Billups clarifies that the apocalypse frenzy, conservative nationalism, and consumeristic Christianity we have experienced or seen the remnants of did not arise out of nowhere.

Instead, Billups offers to the weary Christian an alternative to leaving the church.

She leads from the beginning principle that God is “not only real but loving. Actively loving. Actively loving each of us. Which means change and restoration are possible.” Perhaps there is another way, the reader begins to wonder. Perhaps, by God’s great love for us and his Church, there is a future. Maybe there is a place of belonging after all.

Because I grew up in the Southern half of the United States, home to the Bible Belt, Billups’s description of a popular, culture-tethered Christianity resonates with me. Throughout my youth, I happily reaped the sincere fruit of Bible studies, youth groups, and well-meaning teachers. Today, however, I feel I have come up from the water, and I find that what I was swimming in is now murky and almost uninhabitable.

From the point of view of her evangelical upbringing, Billups’s story is an exploration of why this is so for her. Through her personal story and in-depth analysis of the emergence of dispensational theology and counterculture movements, the book attempts to locate the roots of the ideas the American church reflects today. And, most important, it reminds readers of what the Church, the Body of Christ, should be.

Billups takes on a conciliatory voice throughout the book, like a counselor or friend who doesn’t just talk, but is attentive to the person in front of her. Billups not only connects with her reader but has the lived experience crucial to true empathy and insight.

This is exactly one of the central reasons for the book: to gather readers into community with one another, to say to them, “You’re feeling this way for a reason”; there are “specific societal and political forces that are working systemically”; and, most importantly, “You are not alone.” And here the reader can take a long, deep breath. It is safe here to question, and within this grand, messy story, we will seek answers.

Orphaned Believers begins much earlier in time, however. With the nostalgia of a cassette tape, Billups’s well-crafted storytelling rewinds the tape and lets it play again.

Although just a generation behind Billups, my childhood experiences in the church are distanced enough from hers for the chapters in Part 1 (“End Times”) to feel to me like I’m stepping into another world. She describes her childhood influenced by the 1960s and ’70s cultural movements that shaped her father. He was a member of Jews for Jesus, a group of Jewish Christians begun in 1970 who ministered to people in Haight-Ashbury. Later, he was an avid follower of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth premillennial dispensationalism.

In the chapter “End Times Kids,” Billups paints a picture of the world she and her friends lived in: “Sitting in the back booth of Scoops ice cream parlor sophomore year, I told my friend how the end of the world would go down … she looked at me … spoon suspended mid-bite.” Scenes such as these are in abundance and hit the reader as both comical in Billups’s witty tone, yet also anxiety-inducing and even traumatic, which Billups confirms they were. Her father told her and her siblings that they wouldn’t live to get married or have children—Jesus would come before all of that. Instead, Billups, at home or on the playground, would constantly be feeling for her feet to leave the ground.

However, these moments are tender too: “We long for people we love to float up.” With emotional resonance and historical analysis, Billups makes the reader understand the good intention behind much of what she readily admits was misguided theology. She thinks hard about the ideas which did not emerge from malicious intent but grew over time: “change that can be expected [can] therefore be controlled,” such as a lifetime-rapture, Billups theorizes, which, perhaps surprisingly, was appealing to many.

We might not expect that conservative beliefs in a lifetime rapture stem from a radical, countercultural movement emerging from the 1960s hippie culture in California. Confused and disillusioned — doesn’t this sound familiar? — by the Vietnam War, people of the Jesus Movement looked for escape, for a better end to time than aimless gunfire and nuclear bombs. Citing Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, Billups explains that “a tone caught on because it read as anti-establishment and conversational,” spreading an energetic, revolutionary faith among young people. Instead of trips on acid, these Christians longed for trips to the sky. Though she doesn’t say it explicitly, by speculating on motivations behind such contagious, cultural waves, Billups points out that political conservatism and liberalism — or ideals of Democrats and Republicans — are not eternal sides joined forever to certain theology. Hyper-conservative beliefs came from radical beginnings. Need for control came from human fear that can control us all. Fear has no ideological allegiance.

Such insight allows for charity, and what can follow then is the criticism that is necessary for change. By modeling this learning and discourse, Billups models what Christ himself taught: true love seeks understanding of the other. And this is what Billups does.

Billups unveils both the personal and societal impacts of fear and ideas. How did each play, and continue to play, a part in creating our situation today?

Nothing is new under the sun, but maybe we can learn from our mistakes.

Billups answers the question “How did we get here?” and then attempts to answer “Where do we go?” In part three, she examines two other factors that helped create the current state of evangelical Christianity: culture wars and consumerism.

In a chapter titled “Hot Buttons” in part two, Billups addresses abortion.

It was here, however, that I wished for more vulnerability.

Expressing her beliefs, she says: “Like millions of other American Christians, I’m politically progressive and I also believe in the sanctity of all life — whether in the womb or out.”

Here, the extent of Billups sharing her political leanings ends. She goes on to list what a Christian should be: welcoming to the stranger, nonjudgmental, etc.

I respect Billups’s refusal to be hostile toward one side or another. In doing so, she would contradict much of the aim of the book. Rather, resisting the urge to demonize, she counters societal norms.

However, I would urge Billups to push the envelope even more. The sentiments Billups expresses feel safe, however understandable. Amid the diverging paths Christians are taking to find the way of Jesus, I desire for someone to expand and propose clearly what that way may be. This, I know, would involve a difficult risk for any author, especially for a writer of faith in today’s climate. However, if the remedy to the tug of warring cultures and beliefs is a rootedness in historic Christianity, as Billups suggests it is, we must be willing to name how this faith is embodied, politically and otherwise. As Billups so beautifully puts it, “Our faith is embodied, but it is also yoked to a wild spirit.” Faith that is untethered to political ideology or culture can still hold fast to Truth. However, the question must at least be proposed. To modify a popular evangelical question, What would Jesus say?

The relationship between Billups and her father is the framing narrative that provides the flesh needed to demystify history, depolarize politics, and see people as human.  “For Dad and me,” quips Billups, “it always comes back to the end of the world.”

In the latter two parts of the book, Billups slips into heavy exposition with fewer concrete examples, both from her life and from the lives of others.

She leans heavily on the phrase “spiritual formation” as the antidote to “culture wars” — it “anchors Christians so that our liturgies can remain rooted in Jesus — not the market, not Republicans, not Democrats.” Spiritual formation, she explains, is the result of our daily practices, our work, play, and worship, good or ill. However, Billups spends more time explaining why Christians should engage in spiritual formation, and less on what it is or how it is practiced. She briefly describes her encounters with Ignatian “indifference” and Quaker clearness committees, both discernment practices used to make decisions which connect Christians to God rather than to their prejudices. However, I would caution Billups not to overemphasize another idea, a phrase to add to the growing list of lingo, to the detriment of clarity. If spiritual formation is the embodied process of shaping our whole selves to resemble Christ, giving examples of how to do this would be most fitting and engaging. The pressing question is, how do we draw nigh?

Ora et labora, prayer and work, is what the Benedictines would say. St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke to the birds and wore peasant rags, practiced a life of poverty. Perhaps we need to rewind the tape even more and read the early saints, those who were doing spiritual formation — this work of prayer, devotion, and wholistic worship — before it was cool.

I think a more expanded definition of spiritual formation, as well as perhaps giving examples of historic Christian prayer and worship, would put Billups well on her way to offering a wealth of guidance to her readers.

How is she, a fellow orphan, able to write this open letter, a message of hope, to all of us seeking belonging? When and how did she “come home”?

Perhaps with stories such as hers, we can arrive at the conclusion that the only agenda that is eternal is Christ’s. We just need to find it again.

Layne Matthews Boles is completing her MFA in creative nonfiction at Seattle Pacific University and writes on topics of faith, art, and culture. She lives with her husband in New Haven, Connecticut.