Outposts in the Wilderness: Post-Evangelical Feminist Communities on Digital Media, 2004–2024

ABSTRACT Since its inception, evangelical Protestantism has attracted passionate converts and produced anguished deserters: people with intense conversion experiences who have later chosen to flee their churches and the peculiar stream of Christianity that once held their devotion. In past generations, a person exiting evangelicalism left community into seclusion. However, I argue that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, post-evangelical feminists used digital media to create online post-evangelical feminist communities that alleviated isolation for those leaving conservative evangelical communities. This paper explores the invention and adoption of digital technologies in light of the evangelical history of media innovation. Using blogposts, social media posts, and interviews, it examines the experiences of twenty-first century post-evangelical feminists who participated in digital communities. The metaphor of outposts in “the wilderness,” commonly used by post-evangelical feminists, suggests that digital communities acted as havens of theologically and politically progressive sociality outside evangelical institutions. These communities provided an important function for those early twenty-first-century post-evangelical feminists who left evangelicalism but maintained a Christian faith. Those marginalized by their gender and their theological positions used digital media as a structure to forge religious belonging in a period defined by the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. This history illuminates the promises and the limitations of digital religious communities.