Of course, evangelicals are complaining about Stranger Things

“Being gay is not a superpower,” one person wrote on social media. Immediately, my heart sank.

Although I was still catching up on Stranger Things episodes, my gut told me we were on the precipice of yet another conservative panic attack over the existence of gay people in a Netflix series.

“I have exactly zero headspace right now for evangelicals complaining about Stranger Things,” I posted on Facebook.

Then I sat on the couch to catch up and eventually finish the series. Spoiler alert: Stranger Things revelations ahead.

One reader pointed out to me the irony of today’s evangelicals watching a show about kids in the 1980s playing Dungeons and Dragons and portals opening for dark forces, when in the 1980s, evangelicals were swept up in the Satanic Panic fear of kids playing D&D and opening portals for dark forces.

“We love the kid-eating monsters, the teen sex, the lesbian disc jockey, the government hunting kids and evil scientists doing experiments on kids and pregnant women,” the reader joked. “But a group of kids loving their friend and hugging him when he comes out as gay (even though there have been obvious signs of it since season one) … that is TOO far … that is it, that is an evil too great to overlook. This show is clearly out to persecute Christians.”

Coming out

The scene opens with the main characters, a group of friends including children and adults, gathered around on couches and chairs, much like a scene many evangelicals have experienced in small group or Sunday school settings. Sensing the weight of the moment, they all listen attentively with care for their obviously nervous and deeply vulnerable friend.

“I haven’t told any of you this,” Will begins, sitting alone on the edge of the couch while rubbing his hands together. “Because I … I don’t … I don’t want you to see me differently. But the truth is, the truth is I am, I am different,” he confesses, struggling to catch his breath as his friends watch with welcome and his mom focuses on his eyes with deep concern.

“I just pretended like I wasn’t because I didn’t want to be.”

Will begins to relax and gently smile as he continues opening up, sensing safety. “I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be like my friends and, and I am like you. I’m like you in almost every way. We like playing D&D late into the night. And we like that old-person smell in Mike’s basement. And we like biking to Melvald’s for malted milkshakes. And we like getting lost in the woods and getting lost in Family Video and arguing about what to rent and settling on Holy Grail for the millionth time.”

His friends are all smiling with knowing care, while evangelicals in their living rooms are beginning to squirm, hoping their kids are too unaware to realize what’s going on.

“And we like Milk Duds in our popcorn with extra butter. And we like drinking Coke with Pop Rocks. And we like bike races and trading comics and NASA and Steve Martin and Lucky Charms and literally all the same things,” Will races as the tears begin to well up in his eyes.

Then comes the moment of truth.

“I just … I just … I … I just … I …” Will struggles while catching his breath and looking down at the floor. “I … I don’t like girls.”

He glances around the room. His mother stays focused and tense as his friends offer nods and smiles of reassurance and welcome and evangelicals’ worst nightmares are realized.

“I mean I do. Just … just not like you guys do.”

Will continues: “I had this … this crush on someone, even though I know, I know they’re not like me. But … but then I realized he’s just my Tammy. And by Tammy, I mean it was never about him. It was about me. And I thought I was finally OK with myself. But then today, today Vecna showed me what would happen if I did this, if I told you guys the truth. He showed me a future, and in this future, some of you are just worried for me. Worried that things will be harder for me. And it just makes me feel like something’s wrong with me. So I push you away.”

His tears deepen.

“And for the rest of us, we just drift apart more and more and more and more and more until I’m alone. And I know none of that has happened and Vecna can’t see into the future. But he can see into our minds and he knows things. And it just felt so real. It felt so real,” he struggles through sobs.

“Will,” his trembling mother interjects, leaning forward and grabbing his knee. “You gotta listen to me. That will never ever happen.”

Will turns to see her face.

“You will never lose me,” she says. “Ever.”

“OK,” Will cries. “OK.”

“And you’ll never lose me,” his brother, Jonathan, joins in as he stands, walks across the room, and embraces him.

“Or me,” adds a friend. “Or me,” says another, each one rising up to embrace him.

“Or me.”

“Or me.”

“Or me.”

With everyone’s arms around Will, weeping with love for him, his brother, Jonathan, kisses him on the cheek.

His friend Max calls to him from her wheelchair across the room, unable to move. Will walks over to her, leans down and wraps his arms around her as she says, “Just imagine I’m hugging you really tight, OK?”

And just like that, evangelicals logged onto social media in full fury mode.

They’ll never know true relationship

White evangelicals never will know this depth of community. They never will be able to tell their children, “You will never lose me” in a relational sense because reality to them is a hierarchy of authority and submission with straight men at the top and because justice for those who don’t bend the knee is eternal conscious torment alone in hell. So if their child admits to being gay or lesbian or transgender, the parent would be required by God eventually to turn their face away as God torture’s the child’s body.

“Evangelicalism is the upside down of human decency.”

Although conservative evangelicals may have cozy conversations about Christ and community in their small groups gathered in living rooms or around dinner tables, the bones of every meeting are skeletons of power and violence.

And amidst the laughter, the tears and the clinking of plates and cups in those spaces are the silent hidden cries of LGBTQ people who know they can’t speak the truth and receive the kindness and care demonstrated in Stranger Things.

Evangelicalism is the upside down of human decency. And their presence is the presence of Vecna.

Evangelicals as Vecna

Will spoke of Vecna, the Stranger Things antagonist, warning of a future that would cause Will and his loved ones to worry for him. That’s exactly what evangelicals feel about their LGBTQ loved ones: Worry.

Will spoke of Vecna’s lies that they would all drift apart until Will would be all alone. That’s exactly what evangelicals believe is justice.

“Everyone in hell is screaming and crying out as they are in this lake of fire, in this furnace of fire as they are under torment as though they are stretched out on a rack to the breaking point, yet never breaking,” the disgraced evangelical preacher Steve Lawson imagines. “And this word ‘torment’ in the original Greek language refers to the rack or instrument of torture by which one is forced to give an answer. The stretching rack that they would put a body on and, ‘We’re going to get the answer out of you one way or another and we’re gonna tighten the screws and we’re gonna stretch you out until you tell us what we need to know.’”

Conservative evangelicals think that’s justice. They have no self-awareness of how much they sound like Vecna.

It felt so real

Those of us who grew up in this world and finally faced our fears to the point of coming out and walking away get it. But as we look back, as Will said about Vecna’s lies, “It just felt so real.”

There’s a moment in every ex-evangelical life where you wake up to the inhumanity around you. I was sucked into their mind so early that I remember hearing bedtime stories at age 4 of eternal conscious torment, with my 2-year-old brother in the room. My life as an independent fundamentalist Baptist was filled with terror until I became a conservative evangelical Calvinist numbed to the horror of our gospel-shaped worldview. Like Vecna, evangelicals consumed me into their mind to where they could see into my mind and know things because they were the ones putting the nightmares in.

“Our theology was the very embodiment of hell on earth.”

But then my heart began to soften when someone introduced me to the concept of self-awareness, which became a portal to neighbor awareness. And then one day, I sat in our cool conservative Calvinist community church’s boardroom across from one of my pastors and told him the truth.

I told him about a news story I had read of a high school cheerleader who was burned to death by one of her classmates. In the story, a fireman who found her dead was so overcome with grief that he laid down in the dirt next to her charred body. As I recounted this story to my pastor, I told him, “According to our theology, as this teenage girl was burning, Jesus’ posture toward her in that moment was, ‘That’s sin that she’s being murdered. But just wait for another two minutes until I can give her the burning she really deserves.”

My pastor was speechless. My point was made. Our theology was the very embodiment of hell on earth.

And perhaps that’s why evangelicals resist these LGBTQ Netflix narratives the most. These scenes are not revelations of how far gone our culture has become but are revelations of how far gone their gospel is.

But no matter how certain evangelicals are about their afterlife scripts, like Vecna, they can’t see into the future. No matter how real they make it feel, they have no idea what they’re talking about. They resist stories like Will coming out in Stranger Things because they’d rather stay plugged in to the mind of darkness than to wake up to the reality of their lives.

So instead, they fight a culture war, threatening to tighten the screws on the torture tables they build.

Honoring relationship

The hell we’re experiencing on earth today is the merging of evangelicalism’s Vecna-like world with ours, where they destroy all relationships with their demands for submission and their threats of violent punishment while promising to make all things new if we just submit and plug ourselves into their dark minds.

So while many people will debate the ending of Stranger Things and the writing of the Duffer Brothers who created it, there is a sense in which for many of us, the healing of relationships in Stranger Things through love of self and neighbor is exactly what we needed to hear after everything our country went through in 2025 and is still going through today.

As Jemar Tisby wrote on social media: “After sleeping on it, here’s what I’ve decided about the Stranger Things finale: The writers treated the audience with the same care they gave the story and its characters. I don’t know if they fully grasped how fragile our collective hearts are in this moment, but the ending felt gentle, attentive, humane and deeply considerate. They didn’t go for shock value and thus create a type of cinematic trauma. Instead, the writers honored not just a narrative arc, but a relationship: with characters we watched grow up and a story that kept us company for nearly a decade. For that reason, Stranger Things won’t just be remembered. It will be revisited — in moments of nostalgia, grief, comfort — and talked about for decades to come.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.