<\/p>\n
by Sarah McCammon \u2014 Library: Newbooks<\/p>\n
McCammon opens with a vivid childhood memory of a church Easter pageant where a bloodied Jesus stumbles under the cross, terrifying her four-year-old self. This scene crystallizes the book’s central tension: evangelicalism’s presentation of profound truth alongside viscerally frightening claims. She introduces the “exvangelicals”\u2014a loosely organized online movement of people deconstructing their conservative evangelical upbringings, catalyzed around 2016 by the term coined by Blake Chastain. McCammon, an NPR correspondent raised evangelical, narrates her 2016 campaign trail experiences and reflects on how the very teachings about loving enemies and seeking truth that she received from evangelicals ultimately led her away from them.<\/p>\n
McCammon traces her earliest formation within evangelicalism, beginning with childhood prayers for her grandfather’s salvation and the weight of evangelistic obligation. She describes saying the Sinner’s Prayer at age two-and-a-half, terrifying visions of Hell and the Rapture, and the anguish of doubting whether she was truly saved. Artist Stephanie Stalvey’s #exvangelical comics parallel McCammon’s experience of viewing every non-Christian as either a potential convert or a spiritual threat. Ethicist David P. Gushee estimates twenty-five million adults raised evangelical have left the faith, describing this exodus as “conscientious objection” grounded in specific traumas\u2014clergy sex abuse, anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, hypocritical leaders\u2014rather than mere generational rebellion.<\/p>\n
This chapter maps the curated infrastructure of conservative evangelical subculture that shaped McCammon’s generation. Born in 1981, she grew up inside a self-reinforcing media ecosystem\u2014James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Adventures in Odyssey, Christian textbooks from Bob Jones University and Abeka, creationist children’s books, and censored media. The chapter traces how this “parallel universe” was deliberately constructed after the cultural upheavals of the 1960s\u201370s, repackaging fundamentalism with modern gloss and political ambition. Televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker promised prosperity but delivered scandal, while Dobson provided a softer authority spanning parenting advice to political organizing. Statistics show white evangelicalism shrinking from 23% to 14% of Americans between 2006 and 2020 even as its political power persists.<\/p>\n
McCammon examines the contemporary exodus from evangelicalism, focusing on high-profile departures catalyzed by Trumpism. Promise Enlow, daughter of self-described “prophet” Johnny Enlow, describes how her family’s embrace of Trump shattered her faith. McCammon frames Trump’s 81% support among white evangelicals not as a cause but as a “bright light suddenly flicked on in a dark house, exposing every crack in the foundation.” DC Talk’s Kevin Max and Abraham Piper (son of influential pastor John Piper) exemplify public figures using social media to critique evangelicalism publicly. Derek Webb describes the painful loss of community that accompanies deconstruction but celebrates that there is now “somewhere for all the orphans” to land\u2014something unavailable a decade earlier.<\/p>\n
McCammon turns to her own gradual departure, emphasizing it involved “many tiny threads being pulled one by one, rather than a single cataclysmic breach.” A pivotal semester as a Senate page at sixteen placed her among secular peers for the first time. A Muslim classmate named Sina directly asked whether she believed he was going to Hell, and she couldn’t affirm evangelical doctrine. Later, at her evangelical college, a Holocaust survivor named Felicia Brenner spoke to her class, and fellow students callously questioned why they should listen to someone who was Jewish\u2014and therefore, in their theology, damned. These experiences exposed the moral rot at the heart of exclusive evangelical soteriology and made McCammon realize her unraveling was irreversible.<\/p>\n
This chapter tackles evangelical anti-intellectualism and science denial. McCammon recalls a church presentation mocking evolution with a caricature of Carl Sagan\u2014”MEEL-yuns and BEEL-yuns of years”\u2014insisting only God witnessed creation. The chapter traces Young Earth creationism from its origins through Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, showing how it provided the ideological backbone for an alternative educational system. Former evangelicals share lasting damage: Sarah Treadwell was told scientists were “actively lying” and NASA was “wasting its time”; Rebekah Drumsta discovered she had no real science foundation beyond creationist apologetics. McCammon recounts her own college encounter with a biologist-theologian who showed fossil evidence of transitional forms, contradicting what she’d been taught, and closes by finding her old science paper that shoehorned botany into spiritual metaphor\u2014now seeing such forced integration as “dead weight that stifles the growth of healthy branches.”<\/p>\n
McCammon traces evangelicals’ vulnerability to misinformation and conspiracy theories back to an epistemology that privileges “biblical truth” over secular expertise. She links this mindset to Trump-era “alternative facts,” QAnon, and COVID conspiracies through personal narratives. Former pastor Doug Geiger describes realizing that the same interpretive framework he once used to reject evolution now made him susceptible to COVID denialism. Pastor Jared Stacy explains how evangelicalism’s “authority-driven epistemology” leaves people unable to evaluate competing truth claims once a trusted leader is discredited. The chapter shows how deconstruction from one form of misinformation often cascades into questioning the entire system of authority.<\/p>\n
This chapter exposes the hypocrisy of evangelical leaders who condemned Clinton’s moral failures but embraced Trump, documenting how Dobson, Franklin Graham, Falwell Jr., and Tony Perkins rationalized Trump through biblical analogies and pragmatic arguments. Evangelical leaders argued that God used flawed biblical figures like David and Nebuchadnezzar, so Trump’s personal immorality was irrelevant to his divine appointment. Exvangelicals like Stephanie Stalvey and Chrissy Snidow saw this reversal as revealing evangelicalism’s true priority: political power over moral consistency. McCammon argues that the “character matters” standard was never sincerely held\u2014it was selectively deployed against political opponents while being suspended for allies who delivered policy wins.<\/p>\n
This chapter centers Black Christians like Tyler Burns and Jemar Tisby who created the #LeaveLoud movement after Trump’s election and George Floyd’s murder. Burns describes growing up in a white evangelical church that taught him to internalize anti-Black messages\u2014his mother once told him he couldn’t play a white Jesus in a church play because of his skin color. McCammon contrasts her own white obliviousness with the experience of Black evangelicals who were always told that discussing race was “divisive.” The chapter critiques superficial “racial reconciliation” efforts that ask people of color to share painful stories for white education without demanding genuine systemic change, and documents how white evangelical institutions have repeatedly chosen political power over racial justice.<\/p>\n
McCammon interweaves her family story\u2014discovering her grandfather was gay\u2014with classmate Daniel Doss’s experience growing up gay in evangelicalism. The chapter documents the harm of anti-LGBTQ+ theology through figures like Jeff Chu, David Gushee, and Chrissy Stroop. McCammon recounts how her family only learned of her grandfather’s sexuality after his death, reframing decades of distance from him in heartbreaking new light. Doss describes the devastating experience of hearing from his youth pastor that being gay was an “abomination” while simultaneously experiencing same-sex attraction he was told to suppress. The chapter traces how evangelical teachings on homosexuality created a culture of secrecy, self-loathing, and family rupture that continues to wound LGBTQ+ people and those who love them.<\/p>\n
McCammon provides a personal account of evangelical purity culture’s harms: modesty rituals, sexual shame, fetishization of virginity, and impossible standards for both men and women. She describes the courtship model, “modesty codes” that policed girls’ clothing, and the emotional manipulation of “true love waits” campaigns. The chapter traces how these teachings warped sexuality\u2014shaming desire before marriage while expecting it to magically function after vows. McCammon shares her own experiences of sexual repression within courtship and marriage, and documents how exvangelical women are now rejecting these frameworks, recognizing that purity culture’s promise of blissful marital sex was a form of control that left lasting damage.<\/p>\n
McCammon explores the aftermath of purity culture on sexual relationships, arguing that evangelicalism’s emphasis on premarital abstinence created deep shame and dysfunction even within marriage. Through personal stories\u2014Emily Petrini realizing she never had autonomy over her sexual choices, Jocelyn Howard discovering their queer identity only after years in the closet, and “Louise” not experiencing her first orgasm until her mid-thirties\u2014McCammon illustrates how the fusion of sex and shame persisted long after wedding vows. The chapter culminates in McCammon’s own divorce: after following all the purity rules, she and her husband found that “we’re hurting because we followed the rules.” She ultimately finds healthier intimacy in her second marriage, noting the contrast between evangelical sex-negative messaging and her Jewish husband’s tradition of celebrating sexuality.<\/p>\n
This chapter examines how evangelicalism directed women toward motherhood and domesticity as their highest calling, using specific examples like Dobson’s\u00a0<\/span>Dare to Discipline<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>advising girls that their “sex appeal” was “bargaining power” for securing a husband. McCammon recalls her own childhood book\u00a0<\/span>When I’m a Mommy<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>and her mother’s embrace of Phyllis Schlafly’s vision of traditional gender roles. The chapter connects this ideological framework to the anti-abortion movement, tracing McCammon’s experience volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center as a sixteen-year-old\u2014where she was trained to show women\u00a0<\/span>The Silent Scream<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>and pressure them to continue pregnancies. Decades later, as an NPR reporter covering the overturning of Roe v. Wade, she meets a young mother in Louisiana who cannot endure another pregnancy\u2014offering no answers, only questions, in a poignant reversal of her earlier role.<\/p>\n McCammon confronts the evangelical culture of corporal punishment rooted in literal interpretation of Proverbs, documenting how leaders like Dobson and the Pearls promoted spanking as divinely ordained discipline\u2014in some cases leading to child deaths. She shares her own experience of being spanked with various implements throughout childhood, culminating in a traumatizing incident at age twelve when her parents held her down and struck her during a panic attack about going to Hell. She reveals she sent these details to Focus on the Family, who declined to comment. Emily Joy Allison describes being hit with a “sanded-down two-by-four with Bible verses written on it.” Trauma therapist Hillary McBride notes that nearly all her patients report lasting damage from Dobson-style discipline. The chapter traces how exvangelical parents like Rebekah Drumsta are breaking the cycle\u2014her daughter’s question “Why did you hit me?” became a turning point.<\/p>\n This chapter tackles the concept of religious trauma through both clinical frameworks and vivid personal narratives. Bethany Johnson recounts her mother staging fake Raptures to test her readiness, and McCammon recalls her own childhood terror of being left behind, fueled by films like\u00a0<\/span>A Thief in the Night<\/em>. McCammon’s brother Danny describes intrusive panic attacks about eternity that still plague him decades later. Therapists Andrew Kerbs, Laura Anderson, and Marlene Winell explain how religious trauma functions physiologically like other forms of PTSD, even though the clinical field has been slow to recognize it\u2014partly because religion is assumed to be positive. The chapter also covers the Southern Baptist sex abuse scandal, financial trauma from prosperity-giving pressure, and the difficulty of finding therapists who take religious trauma seriously. McCammon and her brother both try ketamine therapy, acknowledging that healing is ongoing.<\/p>\n McCammon explores the disorienting aftermath of leaving evangelicalism\u2014the loneliness, identity loss, and social ostracism that exvangelicals face. Promise Enlow notes that evangelicalism “consumes everything,” making departure akin to losing an entire way of life. A 2022 survey found former evangelicals report loneliness at higher rates than those leaving other faiths. Focus on the Family’s email targeting estranged parents provoked D. L. Mayfield’s viral response: “your kids don’t want to talk to you because your love is conditional.” McCammon’s friend Daniel Doss navigates an invisible boundary as a gay man who never discusses his sexuality with his evangelical family. The chapter also captures the awkwardness of secular assimilation\u2014Jocelyn Howard describes having to fake knowledge of pop culture references, feeling like “an alien sometimes.” Jeff Chu and Abraham Piper model different paths forward, with Chu co-leading Evolving Faith for spiritual wanderers and Piper warning against replacing one fundamentalism with another.<\/p>\n McCammon frames the exvangelical experience through the metaphor of spiritual warfare that evangelicals themselves deploy\u2014depicting the movement as locked in battle against both secular culture and its own dissidents. She details the vicious response to Rachel Held Evans’s death, with evangelicals declaring she was in Hell, and recounts how leaders like Matt Chandler dismiss deconstruction as “sexy” rebellion rather than genuine pain. Sociologist Christian Smith’s research shows evangelicalism thrives on a sense of being embattled; Kristin Kobes Du Mez traces this militant identity through decades of culture-war rhetoric. Promise Enlow warns that evangelical communities are “tightening their circle” and interpreting others’ departure as persecution. The chapter also covers infighting among exvangelicals, including criticism of Joshua Harris’s monetized “Deconstruction Starter Pack,” and Nadia Bolz-Weber’s caution against replacing one fundamentalism with another.<\/p>\n The final chapter circles back to McCammon’s grandfather’s death and her evolving understanding of faith, love, and integrity. Sitting at his bedside\u2014years after childhood prayers for his salvation\u2014she simply rubs his feet and silently prays for peace. His request for no religion at his memorial, and a rediscovered letter expressing his philosophy (“I am quite willing to admit and live with the fact that I do not know all the answers”), crystallize her own stance. McCammon visits GracePointe Church in Nashville, where pastor Josh Scott creates space for exvangelicals to explore faith without dogma. She finds community alongside her Jewish husband, connecting with Kol Nidre’s themes of released vows. Exvangelicals like Jocelyn Howard and Mel Kulenski describe building new identities through hobbies, art, and chosen community rather than replacing one “hive mind” with another. The book closes with McCammon accepting that she doesn’t have to solve the riddle of the universe\u2014that her task, as her grandfather wrote, is simply “to help our fellow man.”<\/p>\nChapter 13 \u2014<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Suffer the Little Children<\/h2>\n
Chapter 14 \u2014<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Broken for You<\/h2>\n
Chapter 15 \u2014<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Into the Wilderness<\/h2>\n
Chapter 16 \u2014<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Wrestling Against Flesh and Blood<\/h2>\n
Chapter 17 \u2014<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Into All the World<\/h2>\n