Journalist offers an intimate look at her departure from evangelical faith
Book review: ‘The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church’ by Sarah McCammon, ★★★★☆
At the age of 17 in 1998, Sarah McCammon was a page in the U.S. Senate. As she recalls attending classes on Capitol Hill, she remembers that it was the first time she had gone to a school where the day did not begin with prayer and a Bible reading. It was the first time she remembers a science teacher casually mentioning evolution as if it were no big deal nor a lie from Satan.
And she felt as if she didn’t fit in, for McCammon was not only raised in the subculture of American evangelicalism, she was raised in a particularly insular form of it that sheltered her almost totally from the world around her. Her school, her home life, the music she listened to, the entertainment she consumed, everything she knew was centered on a form of Pentecostalism that saw itself as the only correct way to live and believe.
Looking back more than two decades later, McCammon can’t pinpoint the second the religious structure of her life began to crack, but one incident while working in the U.S. Capitol comes to mind. A Muslim classmate asked her, “Do you believe that because I’m Muslim, I’m going to hell?” Her response, as she recalls:
Suddenly, everything that felt wrong about the belief system I’d been told to promote crystallized in my mind.
I looked at Sina and thought about how much I liked him and respected him, and how grateful I was for his kindness. ... The answer, from what I’d been taught, should have been as simple and clear as the question. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it, because for the first time I really had to look squarely at the fact that I wasn’t sure I believed it. I couldn’t look at my friend and say, “I believe my God will send you to Hell because you don’t believe as I do.” He called my bluff.
I could only muster, “I don’t know. I think it’s between you and God.”
I worried, had I failed? Had I wasted an opportunity to save a soul? And yet, somewhere deep inside, my answer felt right.
And thus begins McCammon’s personal story of becoming an exvangelical. The word “exvangelical” hadn’t been invented yet, but by the the second and third decades of the millennium exvangelicalism had become a loose movement as former evangelical Christians connected with each other online and discovered they weren’t alone.
McCammon eventually became a journalist; she is a national political correspondent for NPR. Her book, Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church: The Exvangelicals, is part memoir and part her interviews with others who have left evangelicalism, most of them later than she did. In both cases, the examination of the effects of evangelical upbringing delves into the intimate details of life, including the sexual effects of the “purity culture” that dominated evangelicalism during McCammon’s formative years.
The exvangelicals she interviewed for her book had left the faith for no single reason. For some, it was because they or their friends came out as LGTBQ. For some, it was the conservative politics that has come to dominate white evangelicalism and displace traditional values. Some found that they were ostracized in their religious community simply for questioning the values, such those involving gender roles or the place of science, that they had grown up with.
None of them left because their churches were teaching the words of Jesus.
Leaving because of sin?
What she didn’t find as a common reason for leaving the faith is one that many current evangelicals are prone to believe: “The idea that people leave evangelicalism out of nothing more than a desire to ‘sin’ is frustrating to many of the people I interviewed — and to me,” she writes.
This book isn’t intended to be one of advice to evangelical pastors, but the advice is nonetheless there: Nearly all those she interviewed about leaving evangelicalism had found that their concerns were never really listened to in their faith communities. The ones she interviewed had been heavily invested in their faith and struggled with the decision to leave, doing so only when the answers they were seeking were nowhere to be found.
There’s no single destination for those leaving evangelicalism. Many end up among the “nones,” and some find themselves in the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. A few find their home in other branches of Christianity. Those McCammon interviewed didn’t find their spiritual journeys easy, and neither did she.
By the final pages of the book, it is clear that McCammon’s journey is still in progress. Instead of the certainty that her family’s brand of evangelicalism tried to give her, she now faces uncertainty. But it’s an uncertainty that allows her to embrace the full life that the evangelicalism of her upbringing never was able to give her.
Exvangelicals reading this book will find a kindred spirit. Those unfamiliar with evangelicalism will get a critical but not bitter look at a broken religious movement along with an understating of why it is being embraced by a diminishing number of people. Evangelicals could find the book an uncomfortable read, but they may be the ones who need the book the most if they care about the future of American religious life.