The Three Bugbears
How evangelical politics traded the Sermon on the Mount for a culture war — and why the people most affected are telling their own story now
Christianity Today recently published a piece arguing that James Talarico’s Christian faith won’t win him many evangelical Republican votes. The author, Bonnie Kristian, frames this as a straightforward observation about political reality. And on one level, she’s right. But buried inside that argument is a confession the article never quite makes: the evangelical political movement has spent decades deciding that some moral issues count and others don’t — and the ones that count happen to line up perfectly with Republican Party priorities.
The three issues Kristian cites as the insurmountable barriers? Abortion. Transgender rights. Immigration under Trump.
Let’s call them what they are: the three bugbears. The monsters held up in the dark to keep the faithful voting the right way. And the remarkable thing — the thing that should unsettle every political operative who has relied on them — is that they’re working less and less.
What We’re Actually Talking About
Strip away the theological language and the three bugbears reduce to this:
One: Whether a person carrying a pregnancy is morally obligated to continue it regardless of her circumstances, her health, her future, or her own conscience before God.
Two: Whether the genitals a person was born with should permanently determine how they are permitted to move through the world.
Three: Whether someone’s country of origin disqualifies them from the basic human dignity Christians claim to believe God bestows on every person.
Now hold those three things next to the actual content of Scripture.
The Bible contains approximately two thousand verses addressing poverty, economic justice, and the treatment of the vulnerable. Two thousand. Jesus began his public ministry by quoting Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” He said it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. He told the rich young ruler to sell everything and give it to the poor. The prophets — Amos, Isaiah, Micah — reserved their most withering condemnation not for sexual sin but for rulers and merchants who ground the faces of the poor into the dust. Proverbs states flatly: “Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth will only come to poverty.”
And yet, in the political theology that Christianity Today takes as its baseline, a candidate focused on the rich exploiting the poor is the one who must answer for his moral priorities.
The inversion would be darkly funny if the consequences weren’t so real.
The Sleight of Hand
Here is the trick that has been performed, slowly and carefully, over about fifty years of American evangelical politics: certain issues got labeled moral, and others got labeled political.
Opposition to abortion? Moral. A living wage? Political. Concern about which bathroom a teenager uses? Moral. Children going to bed hungry in the wealthiest nation in human history? Political. Border enforcement that separates families and leaves people to die in the desert? Moral — on the right side.
This sorting didn’t happen organically. It was constructed through a deliberate fusion of conservative political strategy and evangelical institutional power. The key question isn’t whether believers sincerely held these convictions — many did, and do. The question is why those convictions became politically dominant while equally prominent biblical concerns remained politically optional. Why did the two thousand verses about poverty become a matter of personal charity rather than political priority, while a handful of contested passages about sexuality became the litmus test for Christian faithfulness?
That question doesn’t have a theological answer. It has a political one.
The result is a framework where a candidate’s position on gender-affirming care for a small number of teenagers is a dealbreaker, but his posture toward billionaires funding his opponents’ campaigns is just “economics.” Where a politician can slash food assistance programs and still receive the evangelical endorsement — as long as he’s solid on the bugbears.
Bonnie Kristian’s article doesn’t challenge any of this. It accepts the bugbear framework as natural terrain and asks why Talarico doesn’t simply work around it. The possibility that the terrain itself was engineered doesn’t come up.
The People Who Weren’t Asked
There’s a significant data problem for anyone who wants to keep running this playbook, and it has a gender.
Women — particularly younger, educated women — are leaving evangelical spaces at historic rates. Among women ages 18 to 29, weekly church attendance dropped from 29% in 2016 to 19% in 2024. Religious non-affiliation in that group rose from 29% in 2013 to 40% in 2024. By 2025, only 36% of American women reported attending church weekly, compared to 43% of men — the largest gender gap in recorded history. The exodus is disproportionately female, a reversal with enormous implications for institutions historically sustained by women’s labor and participation.
Now here is something worth noting: the institutions tracking these numbers are largely not asking women why they’re leaving. The surveys measure departure. They rarely center the voices of the departed.
But those women aren’t silent. They’re on TikTok. They’re writing memoirs, launching podcasts, and building YouTube channels. The hashtag #exvangelical has generated communities numbering in the millions. One woman, who left evangelicalism and began posting under the handle “skeptical_heretic,” has amassed 240,000 followers critiquing the church’s political entanglements — at the cost of her relationship with her family, who tell her she’s going to hell.
When exvangelical women speak in their own words, their critiques converge on four themes: politics, patriarchy, abuse, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. PRRI survey data confirms that exvangelicals are 58% female. Among those who left: 80% say they no longer believe their former religion’s teachings; 58% cite anti-LGBTQ stances; half say their faith harmed their mental health; one in three say their church became too focused on politics.
To be clear: religious decline has multiple causes. Broader secularization, declining trust in institutions, changing family structures, the internet opening windows onto other ways of living — all of these are real forces affecting all denominations. No single explanation accounts for everything.
But the timing and gender distribution of this particular exodus raise uncomfortable questions. Women’s weekly attendance dropped nine points between 2008 and 2023. Men’s dropped two. That gap began widening in 2016 — the year white evangelicals aligned wholesale with Donald Trump. College-educated women’s attendance fell below men’s for the first time ever that year. When women who left are actually asked, the themes they name are not vague spiritual drift. They are specific institutional failures: churches rallying behind a man many of them recognized as an abuser, purity culture that policed female bodies while protecting powerful men, and a political theology that amplified their subordination while calling it faithfulness.
“I spent all those years ministering to women, being the hands and feet of Jesus,” said one exvangelical author, “and then the church is telling me I should be excited about somebody that attacks women.”
We might not know every reason women are leaving. But we might want to start by listening to the ones telling us directly.
The Loneliness Nobody Mentions in the Same Breath
There’s another data point worth holding alongside the female exodus, because they’re almost certainly connected: the so-called male loneliness epidemic.
As women have left evangelical spaces — and progressive social spaces more broadly — a significant number of young men have moved in the opposite direction, toward online communities defined by grievance, hierarchy, and a nostalgic vision of male authority. The same political ecosystem that has doubled down on female subordination in churches has also produced a flood of content telling young men that feminism destroyed the social fabric and that traditional gender roles are the solution.
Meanwhile, birthrates are declining across the developed world. Young women are postponing or forgoing marriage and children at rates that demographers find alarming. And young men are increasingly lonely, disconnected, and angry.
The people running this political ecosystem would like you to believe these trends are unrelated. They are not. When institutions spend decades telling women that their role is submission and their bodies are political battlegrounds, women eventually make other choices. The market for female compliance, it turns out, is not inexhaustible.
What Talarico Actually Represents
James Talarico is a seminary-trained Christian who has spent his political career fighting for public school teachers, opposing voucher programs that strip resources from low-income communities, and centering his campaign on economic exploitation of working people. He talks about his faith constantly — not as a tribal identifier, but as the animating source of his politics.
Whether one agrees with his policy conclusions, his focus is clearly rooted in themes that occupy a substantial portion of the Gospel tradition. It is also, by the standards of the bugbear framework, inconvenient.
The Christianity Today piece essentially argues: you can’t win evangelicals by appealing to shared faith because policy disagreements are too deep. But it never asks why those specific policies became the dividing lines, or whether those lines accurately reflect the weight of biblical teaching, or whether voters drawing them might be operating from a framework handed to them by political strategists rather than derived from Scripture.
Voters — especially the women flooding out of evangelical spaces and onto TikTok to tell their stories — are increasingly asking exactly those questions. And they are not satisfied with the answers they were given.
The Longer Game
The bugbears were always a distraction. Not accidental, not innocent — a deliberate distraction from the questions that most consistently occupy the biblical text: Who has power? Who is being crushed by it? What are you doing about it?
Those questions are inconvenient for donors. They’re inconvenient for the economic arrangements that the current political alignment has spent decades protecting. They are, however, extremely relevant to a race against Ken Paxton — a man whose record of alleged corruption, ethical scandal, and indifference to working Texans is precisely the profile the prophets had in mind when they wrote about rulers who devour the poor.
Progressive Christians don’t need to cede the moral terrain. We need to reclaim it — specifically and without apology. Not by declaring our interpretation the only honest one, but by pointing steadily at what the text actually emphasizes, at what proportion, and asking why so much of it has been treated as politically irrelevant for so long.
The exvangelical women on TikTok are already doing this work. The young people walking away are asking these questions. The voters who look at the choice between economic justice and culture war theater and quietly choose the former are casting a verdict.
The bugbears are losing their power. The question now is who will be there to meet the people leaving — with something more than another list of issues that someone else decided are the real moral priorities.
The general election for U.S. Senate in Texas is November 3, 2026.