Booted from evangelicalism, a progressive, ‘post-evangelical’ church blooms in Texas

When Mariah and Michaela Montgomery-Lindsay moved more than 150 miles from Houston to Austin with three cats and two dogs in tow, it wasn’t for a job or family, but for church.

“I was just aching for a community of people who understood this transitionary pain that I was experiencing in my life, and this deconstruction that I was going through,” Mariah said.

She and her now-wife, Michaela, had been watching Sunday services of the Austin church, Restore, on YouTube for years. After growing up in a charismatic church and suppressing her gay identity for most of her life, Restore Austin, which offers a rare blend of progressive theology and evangelical expression, was the first church Mariah encountered that understood her exit from evangelicalism and was LGBTQ-affirming. After learning about Restore’s LGBTQ social group, the couple wanted in.

Many of Restore’s roughly 1,200 members are religious exiles who’ve left conservative evangelical churches — often citing an emphasis on Christian nationalism. They’ve come to Restore looking for a church that both worships Jesus as a savior and follows what they describe as his model of radical love. They’re hoping they don’t have to give up their jeans, church coffee and worship music to find it.

Religion & Politics

Photos of the Week: Paraguayan procession, Lindsey Graham's funeral

Parishioners wearing birdlike costumes dance in the annual procession honoring 16th-century St. Francis Solano in Emboscada, Paraguay, Friday, July 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)

In Opinion

And finally, (VIDEO) Raphael Warnock says the US is a freedom train. People need to get on it.

When he was 12 years old, the Rev. Raphael Warnock said, he was frisked and patted down at a grocery store between Sunday services, accused of shoplifting alongside his friends. After nothing was found in his pockets, he and his friends were dismissed without an apology. “That was one of my earliest encounters with what it means to be perceived as the other,” Warnock said.

Decades later, that child, who grew up in a public housing project, is a sitting U.S. senator and senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the pulpit long associated with Martin Luther King Jr. One of a few ordained pastors serving in Congress, the Georgia Democrat frequently cites his faith as a moral framework for his legislative work. Warnock, who holds a doctorate in systematic theology, has been outspoken about what he considers misinterpretations of Scripture to justify immoral politics and has criticized lawmakers, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, over his use of Matthew 25.

Given his roles as both preacher and policymaker, Warnock was a natural subject for the RNS video series created to mark America’s 250th: “What does it mean to belong in America?” In the fifth and final episode, released Thursday (July 23), Warnock spoke about growing up the son of Pentecostal preachers, the social gospel of Martin Luther King Jr., what the Bible says about immigrants and why he has faith in the American experiment.

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