CBS Airs Documentary Featuring the Stories of Ex-Evangelical Christians
By Hemant Mehta, December 6, 2018

CBS recently aired a short documentary called “Deconstructing My Religion,” focused on people who left their faith and how it may have traumatized them. While a subject like that could take much, much longer to explore, the focus here was on evangelical purity culture with the main voice being Linda Kay Klein, the former abstinence-only believer whose book Pure details the problems with the Purity Movement.

Get Religion, a website whose writers get upset whenever the media says harmful Christian beliefs are harmful, suggests the documentary is unfair because it’s somehow anti-evangelical and didn’t cover the full spectrum of Christianity in 26 minutes.

But after sitting through the presentation and re-watching parts of it, I realized it wasn’t news, it was simply a diatribe with three talking heads talking about how they left white evangelicalism. I say “white,” because no ethnic minorities are featured. There’s the requisite academic patched in near the end and a few snatches from people at conferences and panels.

A narrator intones:

“Sex outside of heterosexual marriage in evangelical culture is considered a sin. In the 1990s, an entire industry was created to support this message and it continues today.”

Lord, are they kvetching about purity-themed Bibles, purity pledges and the like again? That complaint was run into the ground some time ago. The “True Love Waits Bible” was published in 1996, 22 years ago. Get over it.

That’s the sound of people who think culture war issues are only relevant when they’re personally affected.