Her allegations brought down megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey. Then the anonymous trolls came for her and her family. Now, a court ordered the anonymous trolls to stay off of her Facebook and Twitter accounts. The next day, she got an email that, according to her, was from her “bishops.”
That was the moment that Julie Parker decided to leave her husband and join the Christian National Movement. The CNM, the first ever Christian online community, is a place to find and connect with other believers.
Parker and her husband, Andrew, are members of the CNM’s first family, and their marriage, marriage counseling and child custody battle has been a story of “struggle and triumph,” she said.
Then, like any married couple, they parted ways when their son turned 11.
“I was crying, and Andrew said, ‘What is wrong with you?’ He was like, ‘Julie, look at yourself. What is it that’s wrong with you? You’re not the Julie I married.’”
Parker began to reflect on her life and found it was a reflection of evangelical Christianity—an over-reliance on emotion and a failure to recognize the power of God to change people. She realized she wanted a change, and that was the “reason I started to write”—to share something about the message of the CNM with others and encourage them to follow her example.
She says there were some things she did wrong in the past, but “no one came to me to tell me that I had failed or they had failed.”
The CNM is a Christian community started in 2003 by Dave Dailey, one of the founders of the Christian Right, and his wife, Anne. Dailey had been a member of the Christian Right movement and helped found the Christian National Movement because he thought the CNM would be a “safe place for people of conscience.”
After the CNM’s website launched, the movement received positive press from some Christian leaders and many media outlets. But it also faced criticism for promoting a “post-Christian” political agenda.
Dailey left the CNM and the movement in 2011 upon a disagreement with the leadership’s “anti-gay” platform, and Parker says a lot of Christians left
