Can I Continue Worshipping Alongside Evangelicals?

When I saw that Donald Trump was winning the electoral college, I was stunned. When I saw that 80% of my fellow evangelical Christians had helped put him there, I was angry and felt betrayed.

I have been part of the evangelical church for a long time. I have known that "evangelical" and "republican" are pretty much synonymous and have accepted that I do not fit into that category as I vote for the candidate who will be the most likely to help the poor, "the least of these."

While pro-life, I believe that God strongly calls us as believers to make a priority the "widows and orphans" and that has taken priority for me. Not so for my fellow evangelical believers. As Rachel Held Evan has said, evangelical believers are "pro-birth" but not "pro-life." They were willing to vote for a candidate who is immoral and against every group of people who God says to protect in hopes that their vote would reverse Roe v. Wade and put conservative Supreme Court justices in place in the future. They threw "the least of these" under the bus. This has forced me to strongly examine whether I can continue worshipping along side people who have gone this direction.

As a good friend pointed out, I have felt for a long time that I don't fit there and now a huge spotlight has been turned on to show that this is definitely true and has forced me to make a choice. I can no longer call myself an evangelical Christian because it has negative connotations for me now. I have felt so lonely and different in the evangelical church for a long time and long to be with people who make it a priority to "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God." My good friend pointed me to this website and I saw that I was not alone; there are many others like me in our belief that God calls us to defend the "least of these" in our society, those that our society deems unimportant and throw-away. I don't know where to find these people around me but I'm praying that God will point them out and that I will find a church in my area with those values.