The Exvangelicals
Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"An intimate window into the world of American evangelicalism. Fellow exvangelicals will find McCammon’s story both startlingly familiar and immensely clarifying, while those looking in from the outside can find no better introduction to the subculture that has shaped the hopes and fears of millions of Americans." —Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne
The first definitive book that names the growing social movement of people leaving the church: the exvangelicals.
Growing up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Sarah McCammon was strictly taught to fear God, obey him, and not question the faith. Persistently worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach him, or that her Muslim friend would need to be converted, and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough, McCammon was a rule-follower and—most of the time—a true believer. But through it all, she was increasingly plagued by fears and deep questions as the belief system she'd been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.
After spending her early adult life striving to make sense of an unraveling worldview, by her 30s, she found herself face-to-face with it once again as she covered the Trump campaign for NPR, where she witnessed first-hand the power and influence that evangelical Christian beliefs held on the political right.
Sarah also came to discover that she was not alone: she is among a rising generation of the children of evangelicalism who are growing up and fleeing the fold, who are thinking for themselves and deconstructing what feel like the “alternative facts” of their childhood.
Rigorously reported and deeply personal, The Exvangelicals is the story of the people who make up this generational tipping point, including Sarah herself. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, this is the first definitive book that names and describes the post-evangelical movement: identifying its origins, telling the stories of its members, and examining its vast cultural, social, and political impact.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
One part investigative journalism, one part personal spiritual memoir, this is a timely and important listen even if you’ve never belonged to an evangelical Christian church. Journalist Sarah McCammon did grow up in that culture, and her in-depth examination of why she and so many others have left it is eye-opening. She persuasively argues that the conservative politicization of white evangelical churches—starting more than 50 years ago as a response to the Civil Rights era—has created generations of people with questions about and emotional responses to what they were told to believe about everything from science, politics, and purity culture to homosexuality, immigration, and homelessness. Along with her own experience of leaving the church, McCammon tells the stories of her fellow former evangelicals. They range from spiritual disillusionment and political awakening to shocking revelations of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. McCammon welcomes us into the narrative and makes each person’s difficult journey stick with us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
NPR political correspondent McCammon debuts with a clear-eyed look at the mass disaffiliation from evangelical churches and culture in recent years. Drawing on her experience growing up in a deeply religious evangelical family in Kansas City, Mo., as well as interviews with former evangelicals, McCammon charts conservative Christianity's explosion of cultural power in the late 1970s, '80s, and '90s, as the evangelical movement veered into fundamentalism, aided by seismic cultural shifts and accompanied by a sea of televangelists who preached a prosperity gospel. In more recent years, evangelical support for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and intolerance for other groups have caused growing numbers of believers to break off into a group of "exvangelicals"—loosely defined here as millennials and Gen Zers raised in white evangelical Christianity who are now "trying to make sense" of a more interconnected world, and "who they are in it." Chapters cover the evangelical movement's flash points, including its failures at racial reconciliation; rejection of the LGBTQ community (including the author's grandfather, who came out as gay as a widower); and strict parenting advice that included corporal punishment. McCammon carefully dissects the lasting emotional impacts on those who've left the church and the role of social media in helping former evangelicals to deconstruct their prior beliefs. It amounts to a lucid picture of life inside the evangelical community and the complicated choice to leave.