I’m going be honest with the Twittersphere tonight: the last 4+ years as a twenty-something—one who grew up in and has a deep, abiding love for evangelicalism—have been disorienting to say the least.

I was born in 1991. In both 2016 and 2020, I haven’t been able to shake what I heard while growing up about how Clinton was morally unfit for office and relativism was a danger not only to Christianity but the common good.

I also learned about God’s heart for the nations from my elders in evangelicalism. I KNOW there are good-faith disagreements about the level of immigration *any* country allows; this isn’t about immigration policy.

But the xenophobia that’s reared it’s ugly head, even in the American church, which often encouraged teenagers like me to consider leaving our families for missionary life for a summer (or a lifetime if God had called us!), has been confusing, to say the least.

At the same time, I realized 4 years ago that there was an opposite error. I started to write about and lead conversations on race, and realized after several months that I’d been absorbing ideas from critical theory—even though I didn’t know what it was at the time.

I just knew people around me who were also concerned about the President’s character and rhetoric, racism, etc. were suddenly sacrificing core theological or ethical convictions and embracing theological liberalism or leaving Christianity altogether.

It wasn’t until I took a course on postmodernism that I even *began* to understand this trajectory among the people around me. The “deconstruction,” “decolonization,” etc. was a hollow offering to me.

As @alisachilders has said before, a progressive, reconstructed Jesus of the 21st century flavor wasn’t attractive to me; I either wanted to believe in the historical Jesus or nothing at all.

Anyway, this is Twitter, and it’s difficult to sum up the last 4+ years of my life in a few tweets. I am sharing more about this in some blog posts soon. But tonight I just felt compelled to share some of this in case others are feeling kind of “homeless” right now.

I’m NOT sharing this to say the “homeless” position is the righteous, holier-than-thou space to be, either. I *know* I have my own blind spots—we all do. Praise God he doesn’t withhold his salvation until all of our epistemological, theological, and ethical ducks are in a row.

2020 has been a difficult—even isolating—year. My counsel to others would be to find a community committed to the truths found in Scripture and the implications of those truths for our obedience to Jesus.

These debates are not new. They might just *feel* new because we’re more exposed than ever to theological and political differences within the American church because of social media.

But Jesus is worth all of the truth-seeking.

Amen.