2025 FFRF convention speech — Chrissy Stroop

This is an edited (for space) transcript of the speech given by Chrissy Stroop at FFRF’s national convention on Oct. 18, 2025, in Myrtle Beach, S.C. She was introduced by FFRF Director of Operations Lisa Strand. To watch her speech, go to ffrf.us/con25.

Lisa Strand: Our 2025 Freethought Heroine, Chrissy Stroop, was raised an evangelical in the Indianapolis area and in Colorado Springs. She was sent to culture-warring Christian schools that demonized queerness, abortion and anything viewed as liberal. She earned a Ph.D. in modern Russian history from Stanford University and worked as a senior research associate with the University of Innsbruck’s Postsecular Conflicts Project, which investigated international right-wing networks. A former weekly columnist for openDemocracy and a frequent contributor to Religion Dispatches, Stroop is now a full-time writer and speaker with bylines in Foreign Policy, The Boston Globe, Political Research Associates and other outlets.

Her newsletter, The Bugbear Dispatch, explores American politics and society through the lens of an ongoing moral panic, of which Stroop, as an out transgender woman, is a primary target. She is also a co-founder and co-owner of the intersectional feminist outlet The Flytrap, and with Lauren O’Neil, coeditor of the essay collection “Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church.”

Please welcome Chrissy Stroop, FFRF’s 2025 Freethought Heroine awardee.

By Chrissy Stroop

Thank you for that warm introduction. It’s truly an honor to be receiving the Freethought Heroine Award. It kind of came out of the blue to me. I don’t really think of myself as too brave of a person.

I grew up in Indiana, which is about the southernest Northern state you can find. I grew up within evangelical subculture and young-Earth creationism and all kinds of wacky evangelical ideas and that kind of indoctrination. It really does a number on you. As I started to deconstruct that and reject it, that was a long, painful process for me because that indoctrination runs deep. Leaving that often comes with a high social cost. I started wanting to find other people like me who had had the same experience and same values — progressive values, secular values, valuing the separation of church and state.

So, today I am going to talk about evangelicals and how they are at the at the root of what has happened, certainly with the overturning of Roe and the attacks on DEI, and anything that the right defines as CRT and also, of course, transgender rights and LGBTQ rights more broadly.

Exvangelicals

But I’m also going to talk about exvangelicals and the power of stories, particularly of counternarratives, to challenge prevailing narratives like the many false narratives that are currently shaping our society. The term exvangelical, it’s a neologism. My friend Blake Chastain coined it in 2016, and he used it as a hashtag on Twitter. Twitter was much more useful to promote counternarratives at that time before Elon Musk took it over. Prior to that time, I was in grad school at Stanford and, before that, teaching English in Russia for a year.

I was really just unpacking my youth and how much it turned out that it traumatized me and how much I hadn’t been really aware of before getting some distance. I really hoped to meet more people like me, but I’d only ever managed to connect with a couple. And then Blake Chastain comes up with this hashtag “exvangelical.”

Suddenly, a lot of people start connecting online, especially on Twitter. Blake also founded a podcast by that name, and then he created a Facebook group for it, and then he opened up the Facebook group to everybody from that background, not just people who listened to his podcast. I served as an admin of that group for a couple of years, and it grew to over 10,000 members. That’s pretty remarkable.

There is a blossoming amount of literature, by and about exvangelicals, that I think can serve as very powerful counternarratives. I would appreciate your help in getting it out there. Maybe gifts for family or friends, maybe put them in Little Free Libraries and, the essay collection “Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church” is a pioneering volume in that regard.

This award that I’m receiving today, I really need to give thanks also to Lauren O’Neill, my co-editor for that volume. We both contributed essays and then we curated the collection and found a very diverse group of voices of people who had all grown up in one form or another of high-control Christianity — some Catholic, some Mormon, mostly evangelical.

I’ll just take a moment here to define my terms. When you use the word “evangelical,” I think most people know what you’re talking about. It’s a religious community. Yes, but it’s also very much a cultural community. It’s a community steeped in American white supremacism. It is an intensely patriarchal community, hierarchical community. You can try to define it theologically, and that’s fine. I think some theological definitions work well enough.

When I’m talking about evangelicals and the kind of evangelicals that I grew up with, they have, since the Reagan years, been the backbone of the Christian right. They started building up their institutions in the 1970s. That’s when you get the Heritage Foundation and things like that. Also Focus on the Family. I’m not going to lie; I’m kind of happy that James Dobson is dead. Yeah, I said it. That man did more than anyone to insist that godly Christian parents must use corporal punishment on their children.

I’ve got to say, the worst I ever got was the wooden spoon. They occasionally broke, but not that often. I’m the oldest child, and if my parents even looked at me funny, I would start crying. I have a highly sensitive personality, so they didn’t have to discipline me that much. I tried to be a people pleaser. I think that’s also part of why it took me so long to reject everything, and then to stop being silent about it, because it’s hard to rock that boat with your family, and you risk losing a lot of social support. You don’t know how much you’re going to lose.

And, I certainly have lost some. I am grateful that I now, at this point, have an open and honest relationship with my parents. But it took some doing. It took a lot of hard conversations over the years, and not everyone comes out that lucky. So, leaving is risky.

Getting back to defining evangelicalism, sociologically and culturally, it’s interdenominational, it’s decentralized, but it’s connected through what are sometimes called parachurch institutions. Those include things like summer camps and missionary organizations. They’ve got their own books, they’ve got their own music industry, and used to have a lot of brick and mortar bookstores. Not so much anymore. I think that has less to do with American secularization simply than with macroeconomic changes in the book market. But they’ve still got their own presses, and a very powerful lobby.

Growing up Christian

I was sent to Christian schools. My mom is a retired Christian school teacher. I had that sort of awareness that my mom was one of the teachers at the school, and, it’s a private school. So, a lot of people were richer than the teachers’ families. When you come back from spring break, people are like, “Oh, I went to Cancun.” “Oh, yeah? We went to Santa Barbara.” “We went to Disney World.” They’d ask me, “Where’d you go?” and I’d say, “Uh, we went to Target.” It was definitely a whole thing.

For most of my K-through-12 education, I went to a school called Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis, but I didn’t know that “heritage” was such a loaded word, because, for me, for many years, it was just the name of the school that I went to. But, I did find out from an alum (who was the son of the original elementary school principal) that when the school was founded in the 1960s, it was a feeder school for Bob Jones University, which I think pretty much does qualify it originally as a segregation academy. In that school, children have to say three pledges every day, not just one.

We had to pledge not only to the American flag, but also to the Christian flag and the bible. Some of you may know the history of the Christian flag — it’s a white background with a blue, sort of square and then a cross inside it — was founded as an ecumenical thing for the nicer Protestants, but has become largely a symbol for right-wing Christians, evangelicals and fundamentalists.

It showed up, for example, in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. There were Christian flags along with Trump flags. “Don’t tread on me.” There are multiple versions of the pledge to the Christian flag. The original one ends with some sort of nice vague thoughts about brotherhood, but ours ended with “one savior risen and coming again with life and liberty for all who believe.”

Not for all. No, there’s hell for the rest of everybody. It was very much an anti-pluralist thing. And evangelicalism, in the sense that I’m talking about it, is deeply opposed to pluralism, whereas pluralism is essential for democracy. So, it is authoritarian and anti-democratic at its core.

I define American evangelicalism as a form of Christianity whose adherents uphold white, cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal and anti-pluralist values and has no tolerance for those of us who exist outside these realities. In practice, with the individual, how much tolerance there’s going to be can vary. Obviously, most of the time we go out and about in society and you’re interacting with evangelicals, in the grocery store or whatever, they’re mostly normal, but sometimes they go into Target and smash the Pride signs and then Target caves and backs away from a lot of its Pride stuff. Yeah, you can boo that if you like.

Regarding the kind of Christian schools that I went to, I like to say that we were doing alternative facts before it was cool. And, we were doing disinformation and propaganda that now is so much more prominent than it was back then.

Based on some data that was gathered by the Huffington Post back in 2017, we can conclude that there are approximately 2,400 non-Catholic Christian schools using extremist curricula. And that would be specifically Bob Jones University Press, Accelerated Christian Education, also known as ACE, and Abeka Books. Those are the big three. Now, there may well be other schools that don’t use that curriculum or do use them and don’t receive voucher funding.

There undoubtedly are. So, this is a low estimate. If there are about 2,400 such schools in the United States, there’s at least a few hundred thousand kids going through this kind of education in Christian schools at any time.

These Christian schools still practice corporal punishment. They paddle kids and they teach all kinds of pernicious things. Everything from creation science to being gay or being trans is a sin. Growing up in this environment, I always felt off and different from people, and it made me a very cerebral kid and a good academic performer. That turned out to be a way out of it for me.

I just never felt like I could fit quite right. I couldn’t go along with the flow of everything, instead stepping back and kind of just observing life. I always felt a little uncomfortable in my own skin, but it took me until I was 33 years old to realize that I was queer because that was all just so repressed, and I was working through so many underlying issues, this kind of long-standing crisis of faith. By the time I was 21 or 22, I didn’t believe in hell anymore.

I was still trying to believe in God and Jesus, and I was actually still very afraid of hell. You don’t shake the fear as quickly as you can shake the ideas and the beliefs, because it is instilled in you from your earliest years, when are told that basically you’re broken. “You’re a terrible person. You’re lucky that God loves you. Only he can fix you. You got to have Jesus in your heart. If you don’t, you’re going to be tortured literally forever.”

As a highly sensitive kid, that does some damage. That also means you gotta check all these particular boxes. You’ve got to live that middle-class white picket fence dream.

Power of stories

What I want to talk about now is the power of stories. The Christian right uses stories to exert control, and they don’t want to just tell their own stories, they want to make everyone else fit into their story. They want to tell my story. They want to tell your story.

Part of what I’ve been trying to do with promoting exvangelical literature is to try to get that counter story out there, reclaim my own story and help other people reclaim their stories so that we don’t just end up being object lessons and get swept away by this fascist movement that is so powerful in America right now.

There’s the old canard that Darwin converted on his deathbed. They taught me that as a kid in Christian school, and I just believed it for a while. The narrative that Darwin converted on his deathbed is very old, but it was debunked right away by Darwin’s family and friends who were there when he was dying.

It doesn’t matter to evangelicals that this has been debunked. They want to believe it’s true and so it’s true. That is how authoritarianism operates.

Another one of those stories is that abortion is murder. I was taken to an anti-abortion protest by my church in 1991. It was quite a way to grow up, and it’s all part of creating this narrative and creating this space in which that narrative is supported. They want to control women’s bodies. They want to control queer people’s bodies.

Another one of those stories is that trans people like me are really just “men in dresses” who want to sneak into women’s spaces for nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, that fear tactic has worked really well. That has created a big moral panic. I created my newsletter, the Bugbear Dispatch, which is hosted on Ghost, as a way to examine fear and moral panic in the context of Christianity and society.

A lot of it is autoethnography, to use a kind of technical academic word. I know that I am writing about my own lived experience, and it’s ethnographic in the sense that I also take in social context. I read a lot of data, I pay a lot of attention to Pew and PRRI and that sort of stuff.

It seems like evangelicals and other right-wingers don’t even know that transgender men exist. It’s all just about “men in dresses sneaking into bathrooms.” That is the story they like to tell. And I think the reason for that is that the patriarchy is threatened, obviously, by women’s bodily autonomy. One of the scariest things for people with patriarchal values is what they see as the feminization of men. So, that is what it is. And transgender Americans and trans people in general, and especially trans people of color, are often subjected to violence.

Toward the future

How can we look ahead to the future and work for a more democratic America against these anti-democratic forces that should have been prevented from taking over by the wall of separation of church and state, but were not prevented?

The essay collection “Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church” was published by a small press based out of Indianapolis. I’m kind of happy about how that worked out. Being from Indianapolis, I first used the phrase “empty the pews” on Twitter as a hashtag in 2017 after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where, you may recall, Trump said there are very fine people on both sides. And major right-wing Christian figures like Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress were just right behind him saying things like, “Oh, Trump doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”

I knew these guys. They don’t listen to the opposition. That is one of the ways in which they control the narrative, as they just don’t give any space for oppositional voices. But I thought the one thing they are scared of is losing the youth. My dad’s a music pastor, so I also got all these pastor narratives growing up and one of the things that I understood that churches were very concerned with constantly is how to reach the kids and keep them in the church.

I came up with the hashtag #emptythepews to throw in their faces and say, “Look, America is secularizing, and you guys are losing the youth. Suck it, pastors.” Can I say that?

Anyway, later, as Lauren O’Neill and I were working on this essay collection, we realized this could be a good title for our essay collection. In fact, the pews are emptying, and yet the public sphere is still very much pro-religion, very afraid that secularization is going to be a bad thing for America, even trying to blame the illiberalism of the current moment in some cases on secular people, which is absolute nonsense.

Conflict intervention specialists Bernard Meyer and Jacqueline Guzman, authors of “The Neutrality Trap: Disrupting and Connecting for Social Change,” point out that counter stories can be very powerful. They can bring people together and help foster understanding and empathy.

A counter story is, for example, when people talk about sexual harassment or racism or other kinds of marginalization; they often result in backlash. I think that makes it more important to get counter stories, like exvangelical stories, out there to challenge what’s going on in contemporary America.

There are many people in the chattering classes who think secularization is a bad thing. I think they are wrong. It used to be the evangelicals would laugh at the mainline churches because they were losing members, whereas evangelicals were not losing members. Well, now they are. And you can kind of take as an approximation here the Southern Baptist Convention; its numbers have been going down and down in recent years.

The last thing I want to say, though, is that demographics are not destiny. We do have to keep fighting, and democracy requires pluralism.

But stories have a chance to reach people. If you want to be treated with respect, you also have to be respectful. Now, I don’t mean the people who are completely unreachable, but people of faith who are on our side, we need to work together.

If you want to have everyone be nonreligious, that’s going to take coercion, too. Just look at the Soviet Union as an example and how well that worked out for them. The Russian Orthodox Church, this is actually my area of expertise, is now back. And, it’s basically in the same position of power it was in during the Tsarist empire.

So, use cooperation where we can stay away from coercion. Let’s build a better pluralist future and let’s help get there by getting counternarratives out there. In this case, particularly the counter narratives from people who grew up evangelical or from similar hardline Christian backgrounds. Many of us are queer, many of us are women or otherwise marginalized.

And that’s why that faith doesn’t work for us. That’s why I think we leave it. Let’s get those stories out there.

Thank you.