The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
(St. Martin’s, $30)
Sarah McCammon is a uniquely qualified guide to American evangelicalism, said Charles Kaiser in The Guardian. Today she’s an NPR national correspondent. But “McCammon grew up inside a religious bubble,” and eventually realized that the teachings inside that bubble had exacerbated America’s current political divide. Using a term coined by a podcaster, McCammon now refers to herself as an exvangelical, counting herself among millions of defectors who’ve contributed to an overall decline in the country’s white evangelical population, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14 percent today. Because she experienced the bubble from the inside, “she is also able to give the rest of us one of the best explanations I have read of how so many Americans became part of the non– reality-based cult that remains so addicted to the insanities of Donald Trump.”
Though McCammon purports to be telling a story shared by millions, “this book is really autobiography with a few cameo roles,” said Randall Balmer in the Los Angeles Times. Fortunately, her personal story is “captivating,” unfolding as “a series of steps on a descending staircase toward disillusionment.” Raised in Kansas City in a Christian fundamentalist household, McCammon was taught to fear God and read the Bible literally. But during her years studying at a Christian college, doubts set in. She grew skeptical of concepts such as creationism and female submission. Later, she became estranged from her parents when they rejected her paternal grandfather, who had come out as gay.
McCammon capably describes the trauma of growing up in a community that polices a rigid worldview, said Sarah Jones in The New Republic. But focusing on exvangelicals’ shared pain is “a mistake.” It would have been more useful if she had shown readers the power and money behind the perpetuation of evangelical culture and its direct interventions in politics. Beyond that, the portrait she offers of her fellow exvangelicals is “far murkier than it should be.” Is there a center to exvangelicalism, a set of shared goals and beliefs? “If it exists, McCammon hasn’t discovered it.”