Three Things Exvangelicals Need To Know About Being a Minority

The most popular kid in my school became my best friend in sixth grade.

I need you to understand what that meant in a town of seven thousand people where I was one of three Black kids.

It meant everything. It meant the kid who could sit with anyone at lunch chose to sit with me.

The kid whose birthday party was the event of the year handed me an invitation like it was nothing. Like it was obvious. Like of course you are coming.

His family had money.

Mine did not.

But that never mattered to him.

When I stayed at his house I wore his clothes because I did not have the right ones and he never once made me feel like a charity case. He just handed me a shirt and said let’s go. We dressed alike. We talked alike. We finished each other’s sentences the way only best friends can.

People at school and around that small Northern California town called us Salt and Pepper.

We did not mind. We thought it was funny. We thought it said something good about the world we lived in. Two kids who did not match but fit anyway.

As we got older we got our licenses and bought matching 1966 Ford Mustangs. Two kids in a small town with the same car, the same clothes, the same friendship that had become the thing everyone in town just knew about.

Salt and Pepper. That is who we were.

That friendship lasted years. It carried me through things I am not sure I would have survived without it. I know several times growing up I was protected from physical racist attacks because of that relationship.

And then one conversation ended it…

I am going to tell you what that conversation was about. But not yet.

Because before I do, I need to tell you three things that a lifetime of being the minority in the room taught me.

Three things nobody sat me down and explained.

Three things I learned the hard way and wish someone had just said out loud while I was young enough for it to save me some scars.

If you left the evangelical church, you just became a minority for the first time in your life. Most of you have no idea what that actually means. You think it means you lost your community.

You think it means people look at you differently now.

You are not wrong.

But you are not even close to the full picture.

I have been a minority since the day I was born.

Not by choice.

Not by theology.

By skin.

And the things I learned walking through that are exactly what you need right now.

So sit with me for a few minutes. Not because I have all the answers. Because I have walked this road longer than you have and there are some things you need to hear from someone who will not sugarcoat it.

This is the first thing and you are going to hate it.

You are offended. I know.

You left a system that lied to you, manipulated you, maybe abused you.

Your family treats you like a project.

Your old friends talk about you in prayer requests that are just gossip with a bow on top. People you loved for decades look at you like you are dangerous now.

That is real. I am not minimizing it.

But I need to tell you something that every minority learns early or learns the hard way. You cannot live in a constant state of war with every person who does not understand you. It will eat you alive. Not in a year. In a month.

I was ten years old when another kid called me the n-word, it was not the first time. It was Little League. I stepped up to the plate and the catcher started in on me. Every name you can think of. Every slur a grown adult should never let a child hear, let alone say to one. I was ten.

I looked at the umpire.

He was right there.

He heard every word.

I waited for him to stop it. To say something. To protect me.

He never did.

That was the day I learned the most important lesson of my life as a minority. No one was coming to save me from this. Not the umpire. Not the coach. Not the system. I was going to have to deal with it on my own for the rest of my life.

And here is what I learned from that plate…

If I had let every slur, every sideways look, every room that went quiet when I walked in consume me, I would have been swallowed whole before I turned twelve. The rage was always available. It was right there, every single day, waiting for me to pick it up and let it run my life.

I did not pick it up. Not because I am a better person. Because I would have run out of bridges before middle school.

Minorities learn something that the majority never has to. You have to choose your battles or the battles choose you.

And when the battles choose you, they take everything. Your energy. Your joy. Your ability to be in a room with someone who does not get it and still find something worth staying for.

You may have left the church angry and hurt.

Good.

Anger is honest. Hurt is honest.

if you let that anger and hurt become your entire identity, you just traded one cage for another. The first cage told you what to believe. The second cage tells you what to be angry about. Neither one lets you breathe.

Find your allies. Not your enemies.

I know that sounds soft. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. Because when you are a minority, enemies are easy to find. They line up for you.

Allies take work. Allies require you to look past the first impression and find the person underneath the bad take. Allies require you to believe that someone who does not understand you yet might still be worth your time.

I found those allies in the strangest places. Sometimes in people who said the wrong thing first and the right thing second. Sometimes in people who looked nothing like me but sat with me anyway.

That is what kept me standing in those rooms. Not the fight. The people who showed up.

You are going to need those people now. Start looking.

This one is going to feel like freefall.

When you were evangelical, you knew exactly who you were. You had a vocabulary. You had a tribe. You had answers to questions most people never even thought to ask. You could walk into a room full of strangers and within five minutes find your people just by the way they talked about grace or worship or the weekend sermon.

That identity was handed to you.

of you received it at birth. Your parents placed it on you like a coat and you wore it so long you forgot it was not your skin.

Some of you chose it at an altar call, which felt like a choice but was really just trading one handed-down identity for a shinier version of the same one.

Either way, you did not build it. It was given to you. And now it is gone.

I know what that feels like.

Not because I left a church. Because I never had one to begin with.

Black kids in white towns do not get an identity handed to them. You get handed a context.

The context is: you are different and everyone can see it.

What you do with that is your problem. Nobody sits you down and says here is who you are and here is where you belong and here is the group that will always claim you no matter what. You figure it out or you float.

I watched white kids grow up inside structures that told them exactly who they were. Their church. Their youth group. Their campus ministry. Their small group.

Layer after layer of identity, all of it handed over like a welcome packet at orientation. I did not resent it. I just noticed it. And I noticed that the kids who grew up inside those structures had no idea how to function without them.

That is you right now.

You are standing in the open for the first time in your life and there is no structure above you and no floor beneath you that someone else built.

The vertigo is real.

The loneliness is real.

The temptation to run back into the building just so you can feel walls around you again is real.

Do not go back.

I am not saying that to be tough.

I am saying it because the freefall is where you find out who you actually are. Not who your parents told you to be. Not who your pastor shaped you into. Not who your small group expected. You. The version of you that exists when nobody is handing you a script.

That person is in there. You just have never met them because there was always too much noise in the room.

It is terrifying. I know. But it is also the first honest thing that has happened to you in a long time. Maybe ever.

Build slow.

Try things that would have scandalized your old self. Read books that were banned from your shelves. Sit with people who believe different things and do not try to convert them or be converted. Just sit. Let the silence teach you what all the sermons never could.

You are not lost. You are just unbuilt. And unbuilt is not the same thing as broken. It is the start of something that is actually yours.

This is the one nobody is going to tell you. So I will.

When you were part of the majority, your rights were assumed. Not earned. Assumed. You did not think about them because you did not have to. The system was built for you, by people who looked like you and believed like you.

Your marriage was valid. Your family was respected. Your children were safe. Your voice carried weight in your community simply because you belonged to the right group.

That is over.

The moment you stepped outside the walls of the evangelical majority, you became someone the system no longer protects the same way.

Your family may have already made that clear. Your church definitely has. But what you have not yet understood is that this goes beyond Thanksgiving arguments and lost friendships.

It goes to your body. Your safety. Your life.

• On January 7, 2026, Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. She was a lesbian. That was enough.

• On January 24, Alex Pretti was shot dead in Minneapolis. He was a VA nurse who stood between an agent and a woman on the ground and held up his phone to record it. They called him a radical extremist. That was enough.

• On July 8, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot in Houston. Fifty two years old. Father of three. Thirty five years in this country. He was not even the person they were looking for. He did not obey a law enforcement officer fast enough. That was enough.

• A twenty six year old man was shot dead in Biddeford, Maine. He had a Social Security number and legal authorization to work here. He was not the target of the warrant. That was enough.

Eleven people shot dead by ICE or Border Patrol since this administration took office. And if you think this has nothing to do with theology, I need you to sit down for what comes next.

In 1525 Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet called “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.” The peasants had revolted. They wanted basic rights. Luther told the German princes to slaughter them without mercy. Tens of thousands died. Luther watched and called it righteous.

In 1527 Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat River in Zurich. He was the first Anabaptist killed by Protestants.

His crime?

Rebaptism.

He believed people should choose their own faith rather than have it assigned at birth. They drowned him as a mockery of the baptism he chose.

In 1553 John Calvin had Michael Servetus burned alive at the stake in Geneva. Servetus disagreed with Calvin on the Trinity and on infant baptism. For that, he was tied to a post and set on fire.

Calvin approved. The church celebrated.

Thousands of Anabaptists were hunted, tortured, drowned, and burned across Europe by both Catholics and Protestants.

Their crime was never violence. Their crime was dissent. They refused to submit to the approved theology. And the approved theology said that God’s wrath must be satisfied. That justice requires blood. That someone must pay.

That theology has a name. Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

I call it redemptive violence. The belief that God needed to kill in order to forgive. That wrath is not a flaw in the character of God but the foundation of it. That an act of violence is how the universe is set right.

Luther and Calvin carried that theology into the public square and it killed anyone who would not submit.

The labels changed across the centuries. Heretic. Anabaptist. Blasphemer. Witch. And now: illegal. Radical extremist. Groomer. Woke. Antifa.

The labels always change. The mechanism never does.

A wrathful deity who demands blood. A system that identifies sinners. And men with power who believe they are doing God’s work when they pull the trigger.

Eighty percent of white evangelicals support this administration.

Not despite their theology. Because of it. Redemptive violence taught them that God solves problems with blood.

They elected a government that agrees.

I watched this my whole life. I watched it as a Black kid who knew the system did not value my body the same as the white kid next to me.

I watched it as a pastor who saw the theology up close. I watched it as a citizen of Minneapolis who stood at a memorial site for a man killed by his own government for the crime of standing in the way.

And now I am watching you learn what I have always known.

When the system decides you are other, the protections disappear. Not slowly. All at once. The machine does not stop when it runs out of one category. It builds the next. Then the next.

Then yours.

That is what being a minority means. It is not a label. It is the lived reality of knowing your life is not valued the same as the person next to you.

Welcome to what I have felt every day since I was six years old.

I told you I would tell you how the friendship ended.

It was years after sixth grade. Years after Salt and Pepper became the thing everyone in our town just knew about us. Matching Mustangs. Borrowed clothes. The kind of friendship that felt permanent.

Then Trayvon Martin happened.

A seventeen year old Black kid was shot and killed for walking through a neighborhood with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea. And the country split in half over whether he deserved it.

As grown adults with kids of our own playing upstairs after dinner, my best friend and I had the conversation that millions of friends were having that week. Except ours was different. Because he was the salt and I was the pepper.

And for the first time in our friendship, that difference was not charming. It was a wall.

He did not side with me. He did not side with Trayvon, who looked a lot like me when we were kids. He just said it was unfortunate but it was legal.

Blame the law, not the killer.

That devastated me.

Not because he was wrong about the law.

Because he could look at a dead Black kid who could have been me and reduce it to a legal technicality.

Because the system he grew up in taught him to see the world that way. And no amount of friendship, no amount of Salt and Pepper, no amount of matching Mustangs and borrowed clothes and years at the same lunch table could override what the system installed.

That is the thing about being a minority.

The people who love you can still become the people who do not see you. Not because they are evil. Because the system is stronger than the friendship.

And when the system demands they choose a side, they choose the one that protects them.

Exvangelicals, that is your life now.

The people who loved you in the pew will choose the system over you when it demands it. Not all of them. But enough. And the first time it happens, it will break something inside you that does not heal the way you expect.

I know.

I lost Salt and Pepper over it.

But I am still here. And you will be too.

Not because it gets easier. Because you get built for it. And built is something nobody can take from you.

The free portion of this article told you what it means to become a minority. This section is for those of you who want to go deeper into what to do with it. Not in theory. In your actual life, starting this week. If you would like to be part of the deeper conversation in the private community please upgrade. There are some really great people in here you will love interacting with.

Grieve it before you build from it.

I know the instinct is to push through. To prove you are fine. To show the people who rejected you that you landed on your feet. That instinct is a trap.