“It’s often felt like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve that community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world and risking that loss.”
That’s how NPR National Political Correspondent Sarah McCammon discusses her painful break from the evangelical church community she was raised in. Her new book is called “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.” In the book, McCammon covers the political power of the religious right, the disillusionment of LGBTQ people raised in the faith, and her own familial struggles.
For people who haven't read the book yet, how do you define Exvangelical and how many of you are there out there?
In short, an Exvangelical is someone with an evangelical background who has left that background and reexamined their faith. Redefined it in some way. Some people, that means coming to no faith at all. Others, it means holding a deep faith but a different one than maybe they started out with. I first came across the term Exvangelical when I was covering the 2016 campaign and talking to evangelical women who were distressed about the release of the Access Hollywood video in which then-candidate Donald Trump famously bragged about sexual assault. And in talking with these women, one of them said that she’d heard the term Exvangelical and was talking about the pain of feeling like evangelical was a label that she couldn't carry anymore.
And I resonated with that in some ways because it had been a long time since I would have described myself in that way. I hadn't had my own sort of painful break from my own religious background for different reasons. But I think the reasons that people sort of reexamine their faith background and separate from it are ... there are commonalities, whatever the specifics may be. Usually, it's a sense of something not adding up, not aligning with your values and having to make a decision about who you want to be in the world. But with that, as you alluded to, there's often a very painful separation from a community of origin and from the people that you love and have loved you. And I've been seeing over the last several years, particularly since 2016, conversations around these themes playing out in online spaces, social media, podcasts, and some books. And it really felt like there had been an escalation of these kinds of conversations around that time, I think, in some ways, catalyzed by this moment where white evangelicals were so in the spotlight as they reckoned with the rise of Donald Trump.
Yeah, that's one puzzle that you try to confront in the book: how a lot of evangelicals made a moral compromise to support Trump's political rise. What kind of role do you see evangelicals playing in this election that we're now in?
A huge role. I mean, I think there was a lot of hand-wringing in 2016 about whether or not, and I did these stories to, what evangelicals support Trump? I remembered and I write about this in my book. I remembered the reaction by prominent evangelical leaders to then-President Bill Clinton's moral failings in the 1990s. And I think some people expected there would be a similar response to Trump, but he had an “R” by his name and he had promised to deliver on evangelical policy goals like overturning Roe v. Wade. And we saw evangelicals line up behind him. Many of these types of voters would tell me that they had to make a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It was a binary choice between someone who aligned with their policy goals and someone who didn't. And we saw in 2016 and again in 2020, about eight in 10 white evangelicals voted for Trump. This time around in the Republican primary, there was a huge slate of candidates, most of whom held essentially the same policy positions, particularly on these sort of moral issues or culture war issues that that evangelical voters tend to care about. And still, overwhelmingly, the exit polls from the early caucus states and primary states tell us that white evangelicals once again supported Trump and are arguably instrumental in his being the presumptive nominee at this point. And perhaps that's not a surprise. Trump did deliver on a lot of those policy goals, chiefly the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Evangelicals have decided to stick by him and I think they see him as someone ... while he may not model the kind of character as some people tell me that they would like to see, they also describe him as someone who will fight for their causes.
So, as you said a moment ago, breaks like the one that you've gone through and others who are chronicled in the book can be very painful because of the loss of family connections. How's your relationship with your family today? Your parents were very true believers and they raised you in sort of a very strict household.
I talk about my family in the book and that was a difficult decision in some ways to decide what to say and how much to say, but it's impossible to talk about my childhood and my evangelical upbringing without talking about my family. And so I tried to be thoughtful about what I said and the things I've said, some of them are quite personal and quite painful. But I said the things I think are most salient and the things that echoed themes I've heard from other former evangelicals. And yes, I think for my parents, becoming evangelical or getting saved, as they would have described it, was a pivotal experience in their life. They would say it made them better people and I think that they wanted to pass that on to me. From my perspective, it was just a different and more challenging intellectual and spiritual inheritance for me because one of the things I write about in the book is my grandfather, who was sort of the only non-Christian person I knew well. I grew up just a few minutes away from his house, but we spend very little time together. And I came to find out later, as I write about in the book, that that was because of his sexuality. He had come out late in life as a gay man. And in the 1980s, at a time when my parents had deeply embraced the evangelical movement and really viewed homosexuality as a sin against God. As an abomination was the word that was used in our church. And so, we spent many dinner table conversations, many dinner table prayers praying for his soul. And throughout my childhood, I remember worrying about him. Worrying that he was going to go to hell as I was told. And so, for me, accepting the evangelical worldview, it didn't feel peaceful and joyful, it felt very scary. And it felt like something that was dividing me from people that I loved and dividing people that I loved. That's certainly not the only reason that I moved away from the church, but it was a big factor in forcing me to really examine what I was being told and reckon with it and decide if it resonated with me or not.
So, as you write, you have remarried a Jewish man and you had kind of an unusual ceremony for that wedding. If you don't mind my asking, are you raising your own children with a specific faith today?
So, I write in the book, I married a Southern Baptist pastor's kid the first time that I met in my Christian college. We co-parent together very well. We've raised our kids with an awareness of our Christian background and also with as much compassion as possible, at least that's the goal. I've tried to be honest with my children about what I do and don't know. What I can and cannot assert about the world. I say in the book, I think there are many beautiful things I was taught that have shaped who I am and informed the way I think and I'm grateful for those and I've tried to share those with my children. I also expose them to their Jewish stepfather's faith, which has been really enriching for me as well. I feel like I understand Christianity better. Understanding more about where it came from. And yes, we were married in a sort of interfaith ceremony. Primarily a reform Jewish ceremony under a chuppah, which is not something I ever would have expected as an evangelical girl in Kansas City, but it was beautiful.
Do you expect that you'll get any sort of backlash from your old community with the publication of this book?
Absolutely. I would be shocked if I don't. I've seen the reaction by other women with evangelical ties who have written books, not exactly like this, but with sort of critiques within the family. I think of Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor at Calvin. A wonderful book that I cite in my book because it helps provide some of the intellectual infrastructure for what I'm talking about. Beth Allison Barr, professor at Baylor in Texas, who also wrote a book about gender and evangelicalism and others. It seems that women in particular who speak out and critique the movement ... the late Rachel Held Evans, who I write about as well, who wrote so beautifully and honestly about her struggles with spirituality. The backlash is often quite profound and intense and I don't look forward to it. I don't enjoy that kind of vitriol, but I am not unprepared for it. I will say, I do hope that people within the evangelical world who read this book will listen and I hope that I'm wrong about that. I hope there won't be a vitriolic backlash and I understand that people will disagree with some of the things I'm saying and see them differently, but so many younger evangelicals in particular are walking away from their churches or simply shifting their views and we know firsthand how painful that can be. And I hope that those who remain in the pews will listen and try to understand why and listen with some compassion.
