“I thought we were the good guys.”

Samantha Laruso (Mary Mouser) shares her disillusionment with her dad, Daniel (Ralph Macchio) in the first episode of season three of the Netflix series Cobra Kai. Her hopes and ideals have crashed in flames due to a violent confrontation at her school that leaves one friend injured, another on the run from the police, and those she cares about in utter despair. The former Karate Kid responds to his daughter’s lament, “We are. At least we try to be. That’s what’s most important.”

Sam’s plaintive rhetorical statement echoes the cries issuing from the hearts of many people raised in conservative evangelical subcultures who find themselves rising from the wreckage of traditions that, for all their virtues and promise, have left many of their most dedicated offspring burdened with emotional, spiritual, and, sometimes, physical baggage. The promises of grace and peace resulted instead in obsessive guilt and legalism. The call to loving community and covenant relationships dissolved in judgment, abuse, gaslighting, and exclusion. And the reason for exclusion was not some scandalous sin or blasphemy on the part of the excluded. Irony of ironies, the reason is that we became exactly who conservative evangelicals taught us to be....