I grew up evangelical. If you'd asked me back then, "are you religious?" — I would have said no. Not because I didn't believe in God, prayer, the Bible, salvation. I believed all of it. I would have said no because in evangelical culture, "religious" is basically an insult. It means you're going through the motions. It means you don't have the real thing.
It took me years — and a PhD studying the ancient world — to notice that this isn't just a quirk of vocabulary. It's a defense mechanism. And once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere: in how evangelicals talk about "conservative Bible scholars" as if that's a neutral category, in how they treat historians who study the resurrection, in how they frame prayer as something categorically different from what every other religious person on earth does when they pray.
In this video I break down the two core strategies evangelicalism uses to avoid admitting it's a religion like any other: rewriting history and science to make faith look like the product of neutral inquiry, and rebranding ordinary religious experience — hearing from God, feeling saved — as a unique phenomenon nobody else has access to. Both strategies point to the same underlying fear, and understanding it will change how you read a huge amount of apologetics, online debate, and evangelical self-description.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMuxsFj-_qs
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