I'm writing another book!

Plus: plans for this Substack for the next few months

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and I have some big news to share: I’ve just signed a contract with Penguin Random House to write my third book. It’ll publish with Forum Books in the fall of 2026, ahead of the midterms. The working (and, I suspect, final) title is In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers.

the author with the paperwork

I’m both nervous and excited about this one. Nervous because I’ve aged out of wanting to spend my time fighting on the internet, and you can probably imagine how a book by that name could inspire some dissents.

Also, I’m not immune to the ambivalence and uncertainty many American evangelicals feel about our tradition, particularly in the last decade and amid steady critique from secular and exvangelical commentators. But those accounts of evangelicalism don’t tell the whole story. They don’t comport with the ordinary goods and faithfulness I know this movement to contain—and that very tension is why I’m excited: I think there’s a real need for this book.

In some ways, it’s not a new need. In the 1950s, an era remembered with only some exaggeration as a time of record Christian religiosity in America, the inaugural editorial of Christianity Today (where I’m an editor) described evangelicalism as “neglected, slighted, misrepresented” in the public square.

And when my generation came into political awareness in the early 2000s, claims that evangelical voters’ loyalty to George W. Bush meant looming theocracy and fascism were paired with routine mockery. “On the tree of wacky media subjects,” observed a 2008 article at Tablet, “evangelical Christians are usually seen as the lowest-hanging fruit.” Not just politically troublesome or misguided but tacky, ignorant, backwards, stupid, an embarrassing American subculture always good for a laugh.

This kind of criticism has intensified, of course, since 2015, a decade in which the political rise of Donald Trump coincided with the exvangelical phenomenon, with rapid changes in American norms and laws around sex and gender, with a string of high-profile evangelical scandals, and with rising ignorance of religion in general.

Evangelicals were long since weird, outré, too into all that Jesus stuff. Still, in these recent years, the conversation really took a turn. It’s unremarkable, now, to see sweeping, merciless, uncurious declarations from fellow Christians about evangelicals’ (and especially white evangelicals’) supposedly total corruption and our personal responsibility for every evil Trump commits.

Maybe this is what it felt like when Constantine’s Easter message dropped?

None of this is to say that evangelicalism should be exempt from critique. Like any movement on this scale, it has its flaws and fringes. Like any branch of the church, it falls short in the imitation of Christ. I’ve criticized American evangelicalism plenty myself, and I have no plans to stop. (Right now, our relationship to digital technology is high on my list of complaints.)

But the question at hand is not whether evangelicalism has faults. It’s whether these sweeping condemnations are fair, coherent, and conducive to destruction or reform. It’s whether evangelicalism is a failed movement, irredeemable and embarrassing and without moral or spiritual credibility—or whether reformation is worthwhile, not only needed but deserved.

My contention is that evangelicalism is worth fixing. Its theological core, deep sincerity, and enthusiasm are good things, distinctives that should be consciously preserved. It deserves to be repaired, not discarded, and certainly not reduced to a tool in the hands of progressive pundits and populist politicians.

I’ll explicitly make that case in the book, but I’ve been circling these ideas for a while now—thinking that we’re overdue for a different conversation, one that heeds fair and reasonable critiques of our movement but, crucially, does so in service to a project of renewal and reform. You can see me moving this way in my work at CT, where I’ve been writing about a tendency toward repair; the complicated history and real goods of Christian education in America; critiques of evangelicalism that miss the mark; and the staleness of many debates over evangelicals and Trump.

And you can see it on this Substack, too, most straightforwardly in these two posts, the first from last summer—before the book was conceived—and the second from a few weeks back:

What I wish more people understood about American evangelicals

Evangelicals did not ‘abandon’ PEPFAR

As I worked on the proposal for this book, though, it became increasingly evident that I’m not alone in feeling like it’s time for a change. Both online and in real life, acquaintances, friends, and colleagues have expressed similar sentiments. I’m hearing a real exhaustion with a public conversation about evangelicals that seems so blatantly disconnected from the kind, normal, faithful people we know.

Here on Substack, Matthew J. Milliner’s post on “growing disillusioned with disillusion” (perfect phrase!) made a powerful case against the exvangelical industrial complex—the way it “became a sellable schtick” to “undermine what was left of the evangelical movement.” Then came Katelyn Beaty’s complementary dissection of deconstruction as a brand and Myles Werntz’s justified exasperation with bad takes about evangelicals.

None of these people are naive. None of them are ignoring headlines or winking at wrongdoing. Nor, I think, am I. My goal for In Defense of Evangelicalism is to help evangelicals have a clear-eyed view of what we tend to get wrong—and right. Along the way, I hope to make this sprawling, influential movement more intelligible and maybe even sympathetic to those who have left it behind and those whose only familiarity with evangelicals comes via baffling or frightening stories in the news.

This is an ambitious project, to say the least. I want to do it well, to be both honest and generous, incisive and charitable toward evangelicalism and its critics alike.

Now, my manuscript deadline is the end of this year, which is very soon by book standards. I’m already in research mode, and I’ll take some weeks of leave from CT this fall for focused writing time.

Here too, there will be some changes: Starting today, I’m pausing paid subscriptions until after the book is done. Probably they’ll come back in January, or maybe a little later, depending on how the editing schedule shakes out. Paid subscribers, this means that for whatever subscription time you’ve purchased, the clock will stop now, then resume when I start doing paid posts again. You’ll still get the same month or year of access, just spread out over a longer time.

That doesn’t mean I’ll stop posting (though I might simplify the format, at least for this season). On the contrary, I hope to keep the same weekly schedule, or at least close to it. Some posts will continue to be about whatever happens to interest me that week, but often I’ll share what I’m thinking and learning as I write this book. Though I expect these posts to be interesting in their own right, the subscription pause is because I don’t think it’s fair to charge you for posts that are partly promotional.

And finally, your interest and attention will matter enormously for this project. Books need readers, and I need your help. Whether you’ve read my stuff for a long time or are newly encountering my work, if you think this could be a good and useful book—one of service to the church and American public life—please subscribe to this Substack now to learn more about the project and follow it to publication day:

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