"Why I no longer call myself a Christian"

Or "Things you can't do and say you are following Jesus"

By The Rev. Ken Howard

Several years ago, I stopped calling myself a “Christian” and began calling myself a “Christ follower” or “Jesus follower.”

People often ask me, “Why?”

It’s a part of a longer story (which I will greatly condense), which might be called…

How did a nice Jewish boy become an evangelical, an Episcopalian, an exvangelical, and an Episcopal Clergyperson, who stopped calling himself a Christian?

So, I grew up Jewish:

The grandson of a Rabbi’s daughter, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Tsarist Russia. The son of a Jewish mother and a backslidden congregationalist father, I grew up in Los Angeles, where my mom was born, amongst my mother’s extended family. I wasn’t very observant, mainly because my mother and father fought over religion.

When I was 18 years old, a college roommate, a drug-freak-turned-evangelical-Jesus-freak (popular in the 70s), took me on as his personal evangelistic project (much to my annoyance, I might add). He was a member of a local “Foursquare Gospel Fellowship” church (doesn’t get more evangelical than that). He began continuously telling me that, as a Jewish person, one of the “Chosen People,” I was special to God. Of course, I shot back with the typical, smart-ass Jewish responses (e.g., “Chosen for what? The Inquisition? The Holocaust?”).

But he was persistent. For nearly a year, he badgered me constantly. Then I came up with what I thought was the perfect response, which was:

If I can prove to you that Jesus was not the Messiah, will you leave me alone?

He said, “Yes,” and for almost a year, I searched the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, trying to prove him wrong, but eventually came to realize that I was on the verge of convincing myself that Jesus was, in fact, the Messiah. So I tried a last desperate ploy to extricate myself from the bind in which I found myself. What I told my evangelical roommate was this:

I may not be the most observant Jew, but I know the “Shema”…
There is one God, and I cannot worship a human being.
I could not worship this Jesus unless he were God.

His response was, “He is.” And that was my undoing. I became a Jewish follower of Jesus, or as some would say, a “Jewish Christian.”

What caused me to part ways with evangelicalism?

In a word: Betrayal.

The evangelical church taught me some essential things, which I still believe. One of them was this:

When it comes to choosing who to vote for,
CHARACTER COUNTS

More specifically, they taught me that choosing who to vote for was a matter of spiritual discernment and that evaluating a candidate’s character was more important than any other consideration.

They also taught me that the crucial criterion in that discernment was how closely that person modeled themselves after Jesus’ life and teaching.

For every election in which I’ve participated in the 50 years I’ve been a follower of Jesus, I have done my best to base my vote on candidate character as measured against the life and teachings of Jesus.¹

Unfortunately, my evangelical forebears abandoned that teaching.

I began to notice that “Character Counts” only applied to Democrats, never Republicans.

Finally, I concluded that for evangelicals, the most important thing was not following Jesus, but the attainment and exercise of political power. To put it bluntly:

Evangelicals betrayed Jesus for political power.

It was this betrayal that drove me to part ways with evangelicalism and become an exvangelical.

This is why I became an exvangelical

This betrayal has not waned over the decades. Instead, it has grown stronger every year, reaching its apotheosis in their undying faithfulness to Donald Trump, expressed in their becoming his largest voting bloc (82% of evangelicals in 2016, 2020, and 2024)—the same Donald Trump who is the antithesis of Jesus by every measure.

Evangelicals also betrayed Jesus for Christian Nationalism, the beliefs of which are an abomination to the teachings of Jesus and Constitutional Democracy.

Why I stopped calling myself a Christian

This is also why I stopped calling myself a “Christian” and started calling myself a “Christ follower” or “Jesus follower instead. Because of the hypocrisy and betrayal of evangelicals and “Christian” Nationalists, you can call yourself a “Christian” and participate in or support all kinds of attitudes and behaviors that Jesus would have called “evildoing” and its participants “evildoers.”

But you cannot do things that Jesus would not do and claim to be following Jesus:

You cannot be cruel to immigrants or support those who do
and call yourself a follower of Jesus.

You cannot lie profusely or support those who do
and call yourself a follower of Jesus.

You cannot falsely imprison people or support those who do
and call yourself a follower of Jesus.

You cannot abandon the hungry or support those who do
and call yourself a follower of Jesus.

You cannot ignore the unhoused or support those who do
and call yourself a follower of Jesus.

I think you get the picture.

This is why I no longer call myself a Christian.²

1. Sometimes, it boiled down to who was the least unlike Jesus, but that’s politics.

2. Obviously, I remain a Christian in the truest sense of the term. And I have always thought that placing an adjective (“conservative” or “progressive”) in front of Christian is near-heresy. But if I hope to connect with those of other faiths or those who have been badly hurt by the church, I find it easier to use a term that carries less ugly baggage.