Sarah McCammon is an NPR journalist who was assigned to cover the Trump campaign in 2016. The Exvangelicals is part memoir and part reporting about that state of the church and why so many are leaving. I identified with the book all the way through, as I grew up in the church as well and left for similar reasons, though mine involved actual conflict rather than a quiet departure.
The author begins with reflection about growing up in the church, and describes the religious trauma that comes when you worry that when you prayed the sinner’s prayer when you were a few years younger didn’t “count.” “I didn’t think I felt any different, and I wondered how I could know for sure that I was saved, that God had definitely heard my prayer. So, two years later, I asked my mom to help me pray it again, just to be safe.” p. 21
Nights laying awake in bed, worrying about your soul and those of your loved ones…
Fear of hell, and worrying about assurance of salvation are examples of trauma that’s not inflicted by an external abuser, but just comes from being part of the religion and growing up reading the Bible every day. Then there is the particular dispensational eschatology (doctrine of the end times) taught from many pulpits. “There was still so much to fear. We lived each day with the knowledge that Jesus could come back at any time… If, and only if, we were ready, Jesus would take us up with him, into the clouds. ‘The trumpet shall sound,’ the verse from Matthew promised… The sound of a train whistle, or a loud car horn, was enough to send me into a panic…” pp.22-23
Chapters 5 and 6 deal with science denialism and the “alternative facts” that fly in the face of the fight against “relativism” which Christians have fought for so long. Is truth true or is it not?
“To compromise our understanding of the literal truth of the Bible in any way, we were told, could threaten everything. If there was no direct creation in the Garden of Eden, and no literal Adam, did that mean there was no sin? And if not, then why did Jesus come to save us? We knew we were sinners and he’d come to save us, so there must have been an Adam and there must have been a garden.” (p. 64) If the Garden of Eden didn’t happen, what then is the premise for Jesus dying on the cross?
We were taught to bring “every thought captive to Christ”… “For many evangelicals, the expectation to constantly be comparing what was learned and observed from the outside world with evangelical teachings eventually created an insurmountable cognitive dissonance.” p. 71
McCammon talks about conspiracy thinking and Trumpism and the hypocritical juxtaposition of the way Evangelicals treated President Bill Clinton compared to how they glorify Donald Trump.
The middle of the book is about purity culture, including sections on LBGTQ+ issues and abortion. Chaste courtship is taught, and then, once you are fruitful and multiply, Evangelicals then require you to use the rod of discipline on your progeny.
She mentions Michael and Debi Pearl, who treat spanking as a sacrament. In my own town, a decade ago, a child died at her parents’ hands as they followed Pearl’s spanking manual verbatim. I used to go to church with these people, and it breaks my heart that we were ill-equipped to recognize the red flags. She then shares stories of exvangelicals brought up in this way choosing to listen to their intuition about how treating an infant as a sinner is wrong, and hitting them is, too.
The author then digs into all the specific religious traumas associated with evangelicalism: the fear of being left behind in the Rapture and facing beheading during the Great Tribulation, the body shame caused by purity culture, the incapacitating fear of hell and eternity, and financial stress related to tithing. These experiences often lead to a profound sense of disconnection—from oneself, from others, from the outside world, and, I would add, from living in the present moment and planning for a real future as opposed to a pretend one. Chronic stress is instilled at a young age. This even has effects in the nervous system similar to PTSD.
So many of us have chosen to walk away from the hypocrisy of the evangelical church. Now where do we go from here? For evangelicals, church is their entire life. How can you walk away from that?
Perhaps not surprisingly, a 2022 survey published by the American Enterprise Institute found that while evangelicalism has for years enjoyed one of the lowest disaffiliation rates for people raised in any faith, those who leave report feeling lonely or isolated at higher rates than people who’d left other faiths. (p. 220)
How do we get along, if we can, with our Trump-supporting parents? Boomers who have tried to bring up their kids following the advice of evangelical powerhouses like Focus on the Family, see their exvangelical children as backsliders living a sinful lifestyle. As D.L. Mayfield says, “People don’t have the emotional energy anymore to lie to their parents to get love and acceptance, and to get a slightly less awkward holiday.”
We have to find community somehow, and for many of us that has come in online spaces as we’ve discovered others with shared experiences. There was a thriving exvangelical community on Twitter, but I deleted my account when Elon Musk took over. I’ve looked for the same thing on Mastodon and Threads (it’s not quite there on Bluesky, or I haven’t found it yet). There are a couple Discord servers I like, but it’s not the same. Being able to gripe to internet strangers about things doesn’t have quite the same effect as calling your closest friends for support.
Once a member of my family told me I was going to hell. I don’t talk to him anymore. But now I wear the title “apostate” as a badge of honor.
There’s probably nothing more aggravating than the typical evangelical response to the deconstruction movement: that we weren’t saved to begin with or that we are backsliding and choosing to live a worldly life.
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. People with little investment in the church are likely to simply walk away, like someone ghosting a party they didn’t really feel like going to. But for those of us who took it seriously—who read the apologetics books, did our devotionals, and prayed for clarity—being told to try harder to make all the puzzle pieces fit together feels like a deliberate refusal to truly listen. (p. 239-240)
We gave our lives to the church, spending 12+ hours every Sunday serving, playing music, running sound or Powerpoint. Then Tuesday night home fellowship and Wednesday night youth group. Street witnessing or going door-to-door to invite people to church. Reading the Bible through every year. We didn’t give up without a fight. Leaving the church was something we agonized over. After so much sacrifice, it hurts to just be dismissed as if we never counted and nothing we did even mattered.