Flipping the Script: Evangelicals Then and Now

[June 2026]

One of the strangest experiences of being an ex-Christian isn’t just that I no longer believe the same things. It’s that the entire vibe of the culture I came out of has changed so dramatically that sometimes I feel like I imagined it.

In the 1990s, when I was growing up in evangelical Christianity, everything was squeaky clean. And I mean squeaky clean. Youth group wasn’t just about believing the right things, it was about presenting yourself the right way at all times. At church, guys wore button-down shirts and chinos, sometimes even ties or blazers if their parents were especially invested. Gals wore maxi skirts or dresses, blouses that were feminine but not revealing, makeup that was “natural” to the point of near invisibility. If you got to wear non-dressy clothes outside of church, and not all households did this, you'd see a lot of Christian-themed T-shirts (especially ones appropriating brand logos, like Coca-Cola changed to "Jesus - He's the Real Thing!").

And swearing was completely off-limits. Not just frowned upon—unthinkable. You didn’t say “fuck,” you didn’t say “shit,” you barely even said “crap” if you were really trying to be a good kid. There was this constant sense that you were being watched, evaluated, measured against an invisible standard of what a “real Christian” looked like.

And then there was purity culture.

Promise rings, courtship, lectures about modesty, endless warnings about temptation. The message was clear: your worth, especially if you were perceived as female, was tied to how well you could present yourself as pure. Not just in behavior, but in appearance. A skirt that was too short, a neckline that was too low, makeup that was too obvious—any of that could get you judged, corrected, quietly shamed.

What’s wild, in hindsight, is how much of that was about optics.

Because the reality underneath it didn’t match.

People were still having sex. People were still breaking the rules. People were still messy, complicated human beings. But as long as you looked the part—clean, modest, wholesome—you could maintain the illusion that everything was fine. The system wasn’t built around honesty. It was built around presentation.

Fast forward to 2026, and the aesthetic has flipped so hard it’s almost disorienting.

Now some of the most visible “born-again Christians” look like someone straight out of a completely different cultural universe.

Take Jelly Roll, for example—face tattoos, rough, working-class aesthetic, openly swearing, talking about addiction, prison, and a messy past. The kind of person who, in the 90s, would have been held up as a warning—or, if we’re being brutally honest, the kind of person who would have been trotted out on daytime TV as a symbol of everything that had “gone wrong.”

And now he’s not just accepted. He’s embraced.

He’s framed as authentic. Real. Raw. His messiness is part of his testimony. It's OK that he swears in his music, that every song isn't about Jesus, and he has secular influences, which would have been unthinkable in the 90s when Amy Grant, of all people, was accused of Satanism. The narrative has shifted from “I’ve always been good” to “I was a disaster and G-d saved me and I'm still a rough-around-the-edges work in progress,” and that story plays extremely well in a culture that distrusts anything that looks too polished.

At the same time, a lot of the things that were treated as catastrophic moral failures in the 90s—divorce, having kids outside of marriage, complicated relationship histories—are now, if not exactly celebrated, at least widely accepted in many evangelical spaces. The same culture that would have scrutinized someone to death over visible makeup is now much more willing to extend grace to situations that used to carry enormous stigma.

And on the surface, you could look at that and say, well, that’s growth. That’s compassion. That’s people realizing that life is complicated and extending a little more mercy.

But here’s the part that sits wrong with me.

Because the shift doesn’t feel like a consistent, principled reevaluation of values. It feels like a change in what kind of image is marketable.

In the 90s, the ideal Christian image was middle-class, clean-cut, respectable, controlled. It fit neatly into a certain kind of white suburban aspiration.

In 2026, the ideal Christian image is often “edgy but redeemed.” Tattooed but transformed. Rough and righteous. Someone who looks like they have a past, who feels relatable in a culture that values vulnerability and authenticity.

And what makes that especially jarring, at least for me, is remembering how rigid and unforgiving the old system was when I was living inside it.

I got more scrutiny for something as small as the wrong color lipstick, than a lot of people today get for life circumstances that would have been considered scandalous back then. You could barely say "gosh darn" or "H-E-double-hockey-sticks" in 1996. In 2026, you have born-again Christians peppering their speech with f-bombs in public. To watch that same culture go from squeaky-clean all the way to embracing a completely different aesthetic, without really acknowledging the harm it caused in its previous form, is… disorienting.

It’s not that I think people should be shamed for being messy. Quite the opposite. I’m genuinely glad that there’s less stigma around things like divorce or complicated life paths. I’m glad that people aren’t being policed as aggressively for every tiny deviation in how they present themselves. And I’m certainly not about to throw stones about swearing. I have a colorful vocabulary and I’m not giving it up anytime soon. (Not to mention that I'm not even Christian these days. Not my monkeys, not my circus.)

But if a system can swing that dramatically—from prim and proper to rough and “real”—without fully grappling with what it did to people along the way, then it raises a question that’s hard to ignore:

Was it ever really about morality in the first place?

Or was it always about the performance?

_____

​One of the things that still strikes me, coming from that background into Judaism, is how different the relationship to appearance actually is.

Because Jews are not a monolith. Not even a little bit.

You’ve got Jews who are Orthodox and dress very modestly according to halacha. You’ve got Reform Jews who wear whatever they want. You’ve got queer Jews, tattooed Jews, secular Jews, frum Jews, Jews who swear like sailors, Jews who don’t. You’ve got people in suits and people in ripped jeans sitting in the same room, sometimes at the same table.

There isn’t one single aesthetic that signals “this is what a Jew looks like.”

And more importantly, there isn’t the same obsession with micromanaging every tiny aspect of personal presentation in the way I experienced in 90s evangelical spaces.

No one is pulling you aside because your makeup is too noticeable or your shirt is the wrong cut or your vibe isn’t sufficiently wholesome.

That doesn’t mean Judaism has no concept of how we present ourselves. It absolutely does. But the framework is different.

There’s the idea of mar’it ayin, which literally means “appearance to the eye.” It’s about not doing something that looks like wrongdoing in a way that could mislead others. And then there’s the Yiddish concept of being a shanda fur di goyim—a disgrace in the eyes of non-Jews.

But here’s the key difference: those ideas are not about maintaining a hyper-specific, sanitized aesthetic of middle-class respectability.

They’re about ethics and communal responsibility.

They’re about not acting in ways that bring real harm, or that reflect badly on the community in a meaningful sense—cheating people, behaving dishonestly, abusing others, acting in ways that reinforce harmful stereotypes. They’re not about whether your eyeliner is too bold or whether you said “fuck” in casual conversation.

Coming into a Jewish space after growing up in that Christian environment, what I felt wasn’t pressure to conform to a narrow image. It was something closer to room to breathe.

Room to be a person.

Room to be complicated, to be imperfect, to show up as yourself without constantly scanning for whether you were violating some unspoken dress code of righteousness.

And honestly, that diversity is part of what makes Jewish culture feel so alive to me.

Because instead of one rigid template, you have a people who have survived for thousands of years across different countries, languages, and cultures, carrying shared traditions but expressing them in wildly different ways. There’s an understanding, whether explicit or not, that there are many ways to be a Jew, many ways to live a Jewish life.

Which, after growing up in a system where so much hinged on getting the performance exactly right, feels like stepping out of a costume and into your own skin.

And maybe that’s the contrast that keeps coming back to me.

Not that one system has rules and the other doesn’t.

But that one system trained me to constantly ask, “Do I look right?”

And the other invites a very different question: “Am I living right?”