Yes, You Should Still Call Yourself a Christian
deconstruction as hubris
Back in my #GirlBossProtestant days, as I like to call ‘em1, I really enjoyed books by a handful of evangelical speakers. Sarah Bessey, Jen Hatmaker, Rachel Held Evans, and Jamie Ivey were regulars on my shelf and in my earbuds. I liked that they swore sometimes, and that they drank, and that they ate chips and queso, and that they had tattoos. Female Catholicism role models at the time were often a) nuns or b) dead, neither of which felt super relatable to me. Now, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, we are blessed with Helen Alvare and Jennifer Fulwiler and Kathryn Whitaker and all kinds of brash, outspoken women to inspire and impress us. I mean, they were around back in 2015, too, but I was unfamiliar with them.
So from time to time when I’m still feeling nostalgic, I click around to those women’s profiles to see what they’ve been up to (RHE sadly died a few years ago, Jamie Ivey seems to have vanished off of the internet after a a heartbreaking scandal, and I can’t tell if Jen Hatmaker is still Christian).
Sarah had a recent piece come out entitled Are We Still Calling Ourselves Christians? where she asks a question: “why are we still calling ourselves Christians when the very name has become so synonymous with harm?”
You might call that fair. After all, think of all of the harms Christians have perpetuated. Lately, okay: memes about illegal immigrants, Constitutional violations, a push to end no-fault divorce, sex abuse scandals. People standing under the title of Christian while spouting absolute nonsense. But deeper than that, and further back: The Crusades. Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, where young mothers were abused and basically had their children kidnapped from them. Have you ever heard of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre? In 1572, Catholic mobs took to the streets and murdered every protestant they could find, leaving tens of thousands dead in the streets.
Why are we associated with these people? Why would we want to claim the same title? These freaks and f-ups are part of this clan—shouldn’t we be running the other way?