[[link removed]]

AMONG THE EXVANGELICALS: SARAH MCCAMMON ON FAITH, TRUMP AND LEAVING
THE CHURCHES BEHIND  
[[link removed]]


 

Martin Pengelly
March 17, 2024
Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ In her first book, the NPR political correspondent examines a
growing movement away from the rightwing Christian church _

,

 

For Sarah McCammon, “it was really January 6, watching people go
into the Capitol with signs that said ‘Jesus saves’ and crosses
and Christian symbols” that made her finally decide to write about
her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.

“I wanted to tell my story,” she says.

Trump called Iowa evangelicals ‘so-called Christians’ and
‘pieces of shit’, book says
Read more

As a national political correspondent
[[link removed]] for NPR,
McCammon tells many stories. Her first book, The Exvangelicals, is not
just a work of autobiography. It is also a deeply reported study of an
accelerating movement – of younger Americans leaving white
evangelical churches.

McCammon grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Kansas City, Missouri, then
went to Trinity College, an evangelical university in Deerfield,
Illinois. Now, she chronicles the development of her own doubts about
her religion, its social strictures and political positions, while
reporting similar processes experienced by others.

For many such “exvangelicals”, things began to come to a head in
2016, when Donald Trump seized the Republican presidential nomination
with a harsh message of hatred and division – and evangelical
support.

McCammon says: “When I was hired by NPR to cover the presidential
campaign, I found myself pretty quickly at the intersection of my
professional life and my personal background, because I was assigned
to the Republican primary. I was happy about that, because I kind of
knew that world.

It made sense. I figured I’d be covering Jeb Bush, his waltz to the
nomination. But it didn’t turn out that way.

“So much of the story of the Republican primary became about Donald
Trump and white evangelicals. What were they going to do? How were
they going to square evangelical teachings with his history and his
character?”

As McCammon watched, those evangelicals embraced a three-times married
icon of greed, a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women while
demonising migrants, Muslims and more.

For McCammon, evangelical support for Trump was then and is now a
matter of simple power politics – about how he offers a way to
maintain a position under fire in a changing world – buttressed by
the appeal of Trumpian “alternative facts
[[link removed]]”
familiar to churches that have long denied the science of evolution,
ignored the role of racism in American history and taken myriad other
positions at odds with mainstream thought.

McCammon had “this whole connection to this world”, having grown
up “in a very evangelical, very conservative family, very
politically active”. But “in a lot of ways, I think I got into
journalism to get away from some of that. I didn’t want to work in
an ideological space, theological or political. I didn’t want to be
an advocate, I felt very uncomfortable with the pressure to make
everybody believe what I believed. And I did not even feel sure.”

Nonetheless, as Trump tightened his grip, McCammon was drawn back in,
becoming “fascinated because I was in my mid-30s, I had some
distance from my childhood and I felt I knew what questions to ask and
anticipated some debates that would come up.

“So after 2016, I spent a few years reflecting on where the country
was and what had happened: on the evangelical embrace of Trump. And as
I thought more about it, I thought maybe there’s something I want to
say about this. I wanted to tell my story.”

As it turned out, a lot of former evangelicals of McCammon’s
generation were telling their stories too.

Like other modern social and political labels – Black Lives Matter
and MeToo, for example – the term “exvangelicals” first came to
prominence as a hashtag around 2016, the year the writer
[[link removed]] Blake Chastain launched a podcast under
the name. Much of McCammon’s research for her book duly took place
on social media, tracking down exvangelicals using Facebook, Twitter
and Instagram to share and connect.

But McCammon’s own story forms the spine of her book. Her parents
remain in the church. She and her first husband married in the church.
It wasn’t easy to sit down and write.

“When I was finishing the draft, I sent [my parents] several key
sections,” she says. “Frankly, the sections I thought would be
hardest for them. I wanted to do that both as their daughter and as a
journalist, because in journalism, we usually give people a chance to
respond. And so, they didn’t want to be quoted.”

In the finished book, McCammon’s parents _are_ quoted, one
striking example a frank exchange of messages with her mother about
LGBTQ+ rights.

“They’re not thrilled,” she says. “But I did take their
feedback into account. They didn’t fundamentally dispute anything,
factually …

“I hope it comes through in the book that this is not an attack on
my parents. I talk about my childhood because I want to illustrate
what it was like to grow up inside the evangelical milieu of that
time. And based on my conversations with lots of other people, I
don’t think my experiences are unique.”

McCammon’s grandfather
[[link removed]] was
surely close to unique: a military veteran and a neurosurgeon who had
three children before coming out as gay. At first largely excluded
from McCammon’s life, later a central influence, he died as McCammon
was writing.

She says: “I make him such a central character because he was a
central part of my experience of realising that there was a bigger
world out there – when he was one of the only non-evangelical or
non-Christian people I had any regular contact with, growing up. For
my family he was always a source of concern and consternation and
worry and prayer but also he was an incredibly accomplished
individual, and he was somebody I think my whole family admired and
was just proud of – at the same time that we prayed for his soul.

“And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being
told.”

McCammon still believes, though she does not “use a lot of
labels”. Her husband is Jewish. Shaped by her Christian upbringing,
she has “slowly opened up my mind, as I’ve gotten older”,
through talking to her husband and to people in “the progressive
Christian space”. She can “read the Bible when I want to”, and
does.

Asked how she thinks The Exvangelicals will be received, she says
“there are kind of three audiences for this book.

“For exvangelicals, or people who have wrestled with their religious
background, whatever it may be, I hope that they will feel seen and
validated, and feel like there’s some resonance with their story,
because I think there is kind of a common experience, even though the
details are different.

Mike Johnson, theocrat: the House speaker and a plot against America
Read more

“For those like my husband, who when I met him had very little
connection to the evangelical world, and are maybe a little confused
by it, or maddened or frustrated by it, I hope the book will provide
some insight and maybe even empathy, [helping] to understand how
people think, why they think the way they think, and also the fact
that evangelicalism is a massive movement and within it there are lots
of different people with lots of different experiences.

“The most difficult one is evangelicals. I hope those who are still
firmly entrenched in the movement will read it with an open mind, and
maybe some empathy. I think there are a lot of boomer parents out
there, not just mine, who are trying to figure out why their kids have
gone astray.

“And I don’t think being an exvangelical is ‘going astray’. I
think it’s about really trying to live with integrity. In some ways,
it’s like: ‘You taught us to seek the truth. And so it’s what a
lot of us are doing.’”

*
_The Exvangelicals is published in the US
[[link removed]] by
St Martin’s Press_

_Martin Pengelly is breaking news editor for Guardian US.
Twitter @MartinPengelly. Click here
[[link removed]] for
Martin's public key_

_Choose from 52 available newsletters. The best Guardian journalism,
free to your inbox [[link removed]]_

* evangelicals
[[link removed]]
* religion
[[link removed]]
* Religion and Politics
[[link removed]]
* theocracy
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]