When Sarah McCammon was rising up within the Midwest within the ’80s and ’90s, each side of her life was ruled by her household’s evangelical religion, a religion underscored at her sprawling nondenominational church and her Christian faculty with expectations of an obedient childhood and “pure” younger maturity that forbid intercourse and, basically, relationship till marriage. Within this sheltered realm, the likelihood of everlasting damnation was ever-present. “The thought that there was something I could do that was beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness terrified me, and often kept me awake at night,” McCammon writes. “Intrusive thoughts would slip in randomly, at any moment . . . and suddenly I’d be gripped by fear.”
In The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, McCammon particulars her journey away from this upbringing, right into a life as a questioning grownup after which a journalist protecting the 2016 Trump marketing campaign and the reproductive rights beat for NPR. Mixing memoir and reportage, McCammon focuses on the rising quantity of younger individuals who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a brand new world, typically with ambivalence, a bunch loosely generally known as exvangelicals.
McCammon describes the combo of consolation, worry and trauma she skilled rising up: her confusion about her mother and father’ rejection of her surgeon grandfather, who got here out as homosexual after his spouse died; her first encounter with secular teenagers throughout a stint as a Senate web page; the shock of the bodily punishment her mother and father administered after she had a panic assault in highschool. She weaves her story round these of her interviewees and the bigger historical past of the evangelical motion’s quest for political ascendance; for example, Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-women’s rights e-newsletter knowledgeable her mom’s activism, and McCammon labored as a highschool intern for Schlafly. Though her personal exodus got here years earlier, McCammon notes that fervent help of Trump is the issue spurring the bulk of younger folks to exit the evangelical religion.
McCammon renders exvangelicals’ seek for life after evangelicalism with sensitivity, displaying the troublesome stability of gaining self-acceptance and a broader understanding of the world whereas typically dropping the consolation of households and worship, particularly for LGBTQ+ folks. The Exvangelicals is a welcome addition to the story of religion in 21th-century America.
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