This past May, I found myself in the packed auditorium of the First United Methodist church in downtown Austin, listening to Bible stories. The creak of the wooden pews and the smell of hymnals summoned a rush of memory. Yet the hundreds of mostly young, tattooed people surrounding me suggested I’d ventured far from the old religion. The tales about Elijah, Mary, and the Roman centurion that evening were part of a live recording of The Liturgists, one of the country’s most popular podcasts on spirituality, with over four million listeners per month. Its creators, Michael Gungor and Mike McHargue, both based in Los Angeles, are former evangelical Christians who had abandoned their faith only to return via the teachings of mystics, and by embracing science, philosophy, and social justice. While they insist their show isn’t explicitly Christian, McHargue told me, “Helping Christians deal with feelings of marginalization, oppression, and alienation is part of our work.” It explains how I came to find them, and why I still felt itchy in the pew. For me, to sit in a church is to be vulnerable, and no passage of time could stop that.

A couple of years earlier, after a decade of estrangement, I felt a tug to reconnect with organized religion. My two oldest children started having questions. When my daughter asked, “What is God?” we gave the kids a book that said God is everything, which led to my son telling my mother that God was our Honda. So, I started looking for a church. There was no rock band playing slick praise-and-worship music at Trinity Church of Austin, and certainly no speaking in tongues. During services, I saw gay couples and transgender people sitting alongside white-haired Methodist women. The pianist shared that it was the anniversary of his coming to this church, and then explained how his last congregation had ostracized him for being gay. He began to cry as he spoke, and I felt my own tears running down my face.

At Trinity, I realized I could be both liberal and Christian—that the church could be an affirming and reconciling place for gay and transgender people, along with advocating for the poor and oppressed. It was liberating. Mainline Protestant denominations such as the Episcopalians figured this out years ago (if not on an institutional level, certainly in many of their churches), but growing up I was always taught these people were going to hell. Somewhere within me, beneath the scar tissue, was a child who’d once believed that Sunday school lesson of universal love and was waiting for it to be true. He clung to the verse about seeking justice and loving mercy and remembered what Jesus said about “Blessed are the peacemakers.” I followed that child, running.

When Donald Trump ascended to the White House, evangelical Christians suspended their moral convictions, and followed him like a dime-store messiah.

Despite my newly found church community, claiming faith in the Donald Trump era still amounted to an existential quandary—one the Liturgists have tapped into. They’re part of a wave of liberal Christianity that’s emerged since the 2016 election—an event that saw their audience more than double. It’s a wave that rippled when Trump ascended to the White House, and evangelical Christians, like the ones who’d taught my Sunday school classes and stood at our pulpit, suspended their moral convictions, and followed him like a dime-store messiah. We watched Jerry Falwell Jr. tell Fox News, “I think evangelicals have found their dream president” and Franklin Graham tweet in April, “Progressive is generally just a code word for someone who leans toward socialism, who does not believe in God.” The photos of them jostling to lay their hands on him to pray, calling him a “baby Christian,” and telling us that God had answered their prayers was disingenuous. But what hurt the most is watching our family and fellow church members not just vote for Trump, but continue to support him through his racist, xenophobic rhetoric, his ramped-up policy of separating children along the border, his tax cuts for the wealthy and proposed cuts to Medicaid, and, most recently, his pandering to a Russian regime that jails gay people and actually persecutes Christians.