Empty the Pews: Using the Power of Stories to Effect Change
Channel: American Atheists
Date: 2020-07-27

Following the 2016 election of President Trump, Stroop coined the hashtag #EmptyThePews on Twitter as a call to take a moral stance against the kind of fundamentalist, authoritarian, or otherwise conservative churches that helped bring about the current political situation and all its cruelty, division, and hate. The hashtag continues to circulate with the eye-opening and often heartbreaking stories of those who found the resolve to leave evangelical, Mormon, Catholic, and other religious communities. Empty the Pews continues this campaign by sharing the unflinchingly honest stories of those who escaped hardline religious ideology—and how it failed to crush their spirits.

Our Presenters: 

Chrissy Stroop is a prominent ex-evangelical writer, speaker, and advocate and is coeditor of Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church. She is the creator of the viral hashtags #EmptyThePews, #ChristianAltFacts, and #ExposeChristianSchools Chrissy's writing has appeared in Playboy, Foreign Policy, Religion Dispatches, Political Research Associates, Dame Magazine, the Moscow Times, EurasiaNet, and other outlets. 

Tom Van Denburgh is American Atheists’ Communications Director, where he oversees American Atheists’ media relations, marketing, and social media strategies. Tom is a multilingual communications expert, who has worked in translation, education, press relations, and digital marketing. A native of New Jersey, Tom spent 6 years living in Belgium and Germany. While there, he worked in the press office of the Fédération du Tourisme de la Province de Liège and in the tourism department at the Belgian embassy in Berlin.


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