Raised Evangelical: A Call for Participants

I’d like to invite qualifying readers to be involved in my Raised Evangelical project. Being a part of this project involves responding to a list of questions about your experiences being raised in evangelical or fundamentalist families and growing up to leave evangelicalism and/or fundamentalism behind. I will then post these responses and set them up in the Raised Evangelical section of my blog.

You qualify to participate in the Raised Evangelical project if:

• You were raised in an evangelical or fundamentalist family.* **
• You are currently an adult (18 or above).
• You have questioned evangelicalism and fundamentalism and currently define yourself as a progressive Christian, spiritual, agnostic, or atheist.

Your responses should be candid and honest. I know that by design this project eliminates glowing accounts that function as promotional testimonials, but at the same time I don’t want your accounts to be designed to make things look as bad as possible, ignoring any positive and exaggerating the negative. Just try to be candid, honest, and real.

Here is how to submit your responses:

• Copy and paste the questions into a Word document (or equivalent).
• Type your response under each question.
• Email the Word document (or equivalent) to lovejoyfeminism@yahoo.com.

There is no deadline for this project, just send your responses in as soon as you’ve completed them! And as always, let me know if you have any questions!

* Several readers raised in conservative Catholic families have asked if they can participate as well, and the answer is yes. I’ve tried to make sure the questions are ones that can be answered by those in other conservative Christian traditions outside of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, so just pretend that a given question reads “Catholic” or what have you in place of “evangelical or fundamentalist.”

** I’m interested in both responses from those who grew up in the U.S. and responses from those who grew up in other countries. I might actually put the non-U.S. responses together to be read in tandem – I think that could be very interesting!