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May 6, 2024 - Straight White American Jesus
01:04:05
The Exvangelicals w/ Sarah McCammon

SWAJ Premium IS ON SALE! $50 for the whole year! Subscribe to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
- - Axis Mundy.
- Evangelicalism was my life.
I was a Christian.
It was my entire identity.
It was my entire life.
It was my purpose.
It was everything to me.
And I thought that when I left, when I left the community and separated myself from the sexual shaming that I had experienced, that I would now suddenly be free.
That I would no longer struggle with sexual shame and fear and anxiety.
And much to the contrary, what actually happened is that those things did not go away.
It can't be just about a handful of individuals.
It has to be about all of us talking back about what we went through.
And that's the only way that we're going to be heard and get representation.
Those are the voices of writers Linda K. Klein and Chrissy Stroop from a 2008 documentary by CBS.
It's titled Deconstructing My Religion and also includes figures like Blake Chastain and Dr. Julie Ingersoll.
The award-winning piece, produced by Liz Kinnicky, chronicles what was then the budding ex-evangelical movement.
One that had gained traction in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 victory.
For many, the dissonance between the figure of Trump and what they were taught in church was just too much.
An exodus ensued, leading to books, podcasts, and hashtags.
One of those, hashtag exvangelical, went viral.
It became a place for the leavers, those cast out into the desert, to gather, to grow community, and to heal.
Today I present my interview with Sarah McCammon, National Political Correspondent for NPR and co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast.
She's the author of the new book, The Exvangelicals.
We discuss the reasons that she, a cradle evangelical from the Midwest, left the faith and why she felt the need to write a memoir encapsulating her journey.
We also discuss the wider issues at play in the exvangelical movement and whether it's a movement at all.
The this moment, the 2016 campaign and the rise of Trump and the alignment with evangelicalism, it seemed like it was kind of a catalyst for a lot of these conversations, because, you know, the white evangelical base of the Republican Party had been a critical part of the GOP for a really long time.
But I think.
That moment, that alignment with a candidate like Donald Trump forced some self-reflection and some reckoning for people in a in a new way.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Today, we have a great episode.
Going to be talking, as I just said, to Sarah McCammon.
And for subscribers, I have something from the Wayback Machine.
An episode I did with Blake Chastain about ex-evangelicals and why no one will listen to them.
It's a great piece that contextualizes everything I'm talking about with Sarah today and the history of the hashtag exvangelical.
Before I get to the interview, though, I want to provide two pieces of just absolute praise for her book and put it in context a little bit.
And then I want to add what I think are some slight criticisms of the book and some pushback.
As always on this show, we are always trying to achieve nuance and complexity, always trying to break things down in ways that don't follow the either-or program of most media and thinking in the United States.
Let's start with what I think are just absolutely wonderful aspects of Sarah's book.
And if you don't want to hear me talk, if you're like, hey man, I came here for the interview, not for your soliloquy, all good.
Just hit the fast forward machine about 10 or 12 minutes and you'll arrive at our discussion.
But I do want to say to start that I think one of the most dazzling aspects of this book is its vulnerability.
Sarah is a national figure.
Sarah is somebody who has been at Trump campaigns being jeered at as the enemy of the people along with other members of the press.
Somebody who is in our earbuds a lot as a national correspondent for NPR.
So I think it takes a lot of courage to be as vulnerable as she is in this book.
She describes everything from important scenes of growing up, of falling in love, of trying to figure out how to talk with family members who her family considers not Christian and therefore damned to eternal torment.
There's insight into her first marriage and when it fell apart and her understanding of faith and how it changed.
I think vulnerability, as many of you know, is key to any memoir.
And there's no faux vulnerability here.
There's no pretending.
And I think the scenes that she gives us come off as just so authentic.
There are times when when you read memoir, it feels stylized as if somebody is doing their best to conjure a dramatic effect.
You don't get that feeling with this book.
And so I just want to say that it's something that I think required a great amount of courage and it comes off as truly an opening into her life and her experiences.
The other thing that I think Sarah provides us is something that we've seen with a couple of other books that have come out recently, and that's John Ward's book and also Tim Alberta's book.
All three of them, Tim and John and Sarah, are correspondents for national media.
They're people that have done things like fly on Air Force One or, again, be at Trump rallies being jeered at.
Interviewed everybody from a person on the street to the vice president or a member of congress or someone else.
These are folks that have high-profile jobs and they're all ex-evangelicals and those books have all appeared on the scene here in the last six months to a year.
I think what Sarah does is helps link her journey from being a Midwest evangelical to Washington DC.
And I think all three of the books together, but I think Sarah's book in particular really shows us the ways that kind of emerging into this larger political arena.
Helped expand her world to a place that she started to see more complexity and more just difficult questions to ask.
She talks in the interview about meeting people that disagreed with her for the first time and how that was not a moment that sent her back into her shell, but one that opened her horizons and started questions and a sense of questioning.
I think anyone who's left a high demand religion knows that feeling and you know what it's like to feel a sense of vertigo.
And I think that one of the real essential parts of this book is the ways that you can kind of see Sarah go from somebody who grew up in a essentially sheltered Midwest evangelical life to somebody who became a national reporter for one of the biggest outlets and one of the most important outlets in our country, and that's NPR.
It can kind of be hard to understand how that would happen, but the journey, as she tells it, makes sense.
I think finally, we do get to hear in this book from many voices and folks who I've interviewed on this show, folks who many of whom are colleagues and friends, who are ex-evangelicals, who have various journeys from faith to no faith, faith to a different kind of faith.
And we see how evangelicalism, especially in the wake of Trump's victory, really Impinged upon them and caused a sense of crisis, whether that was surrounding issues of sexuality or gender or race or hypocrisy or simply a craven desire for power.
And we are introduced to so many voices and so many people here because Sarah did interview so many folks from the ex-evangelical community writ large.
This does lead me to a couple of comments, though, about things that surprised me in the book and things that I thought might be missing.
And once again, every time I give this kind of feedback on the show, I want to say that in this environment, none of this means You shouldn't buy the book.
Doesn't mean that I'm canceling the book.
It doesn't mean any of that.
It means with any kind of work of art, any kind of work of the intellect, any kind of work of memoir, memory, literature, we are going to find ways to learn from it and also to say, here's a criticism.
I learned a lot from Sarah's book.
It's a really great read.
She's obviously a fantastic writer and somebody who put, as I mentioned at the top, so much of herself in this book in a way that's so vulnerable.
And I think that is clear on every page.
I think a lot of you learned from this book.
I think a lot of you might have been healed.
Or are in the process of healing by way of books like this one.
And so, if that's you, none of this is to say, I hated the book, and you shouldn't buy it, and you shouldn't read it, and you should change your complete... None of that.
But, as I just said, we do have three books out by folks with big national platforms.
Books that are largely memoir, in the case of Tim Alberta, less so, but nonetheless, Tim Alberta's book, John Ward's book, Testimony, Tim Alberta, the Uh, the, the book, The Power, The Glory, I'm going to mess up the title.
Anyway, Tim Alberta's book and Sarah McCammon's book, which we're talking about today, The Exvangelicals.
Uh, one of the things that surprised me about Sarah's book was the, the title.
And I, I do mention this in the interview, so you'll hear me ask her about it, but the title is The Exvangelicals.
And when I saw the title, I thought, oh, okay, I'm going to jump into a book that is going to introduce me to an array of characters.
Who are all ex-evangelicals, and they represent some aspect of the ex-evangelical paradigm.
Whether that be somebody who left evangelicalism after the murder of George Floyd, or somebody who had a kind of confluence of Me Too and Church Too, and decided that they could no longer abide by the Southern Baptist Convention.
Someone like Krista Brown, Uh, maybe it would be somebody who, in the ways that Lena Kay Cline talked about at the top of the show in the documentary, about sexual shame and about the ways that the figure of Donald Trump, who gained so much support from evangelicals, was just too much to bear.
I thought we would get these kind of in-depth stories.
And don't get me wrong, if you've read the book, you know that there are voices who, who explode into the book, into the narrative.
At every turn, but the way I would put it is they're voices and not characters.
If this book was turned into a play, I think we'd have one character who was on stage the entire time and that would be Sarah.
This book really is a memoir in the truest sense.
I don't know.
I'd have to count up the words and the pages, but My gander is that well over half of the book is about Sarah's story.
And so, I guess for me, the idea that it would be called The Exvangelicals was something that caught me off guard, because I think memoir, at its best, introduces us to somebody's life and their story, some aspect of their experience.
And that's often a prism.
It's often a prism for wider human experiences, whether folks who've experienced something similar or folks who haven't experienced that at all, but nonetheless find there a touchstone or a way that part of the human condition is refracted into the work of art that is a memoir.
But to call the book the ex-evangelicals means that the refraction, the prism, touches on all ex-evangelicals.
And it somehow is something that tries to reach every one of them.
And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of ex-evangelical voices in the book.
But none of them are characters.
We don't really get introduced to an origin story or an adolescent story or a coming-of-age story other than Sarah's.
And so I was a little bit caught off guard by the fact that the book is called The Exevangelicals, and you'll hear me talk about it with her in the interview.
I think one more aspect of this that I just wanted to make sure to get into today's episode and on this book is that there is a history to the idea of the ex-evangelical.
Ex-evangelical is in some sense a proper noun.
It, of course, is a descriptive word.
It's a common noun.
I'm an ex-evangelical might just mean that I'm describing myself as somebody who used to be evangelical and who is not.
But it's also a proper noun in the sense that it, it corresponds to a particular history of a hashtag of a community of a group of, of something of people who started to congeal in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in 2016.
So let me use an example that, that might be a little jarring, but hopefully will make sense by the end of what I'm going to say.
We know all of us do about Black Lives Matter.
Now, Black Lives Matter, they could just simply be descriptive.
Hey, here I am saying Black Lives Matter.
I'm describing something.
I'm describing the fact that if you have a black person, their life matters.
Okay, very simple.
But as soon as I say Black Lives Matter, I think all of you know that there's a particular history.
That there's actually a proper noun here.
There's a group, an organization called Black Lives Matter.
There's a movement for black lives.
There are people who help to launch, to gather, to organize, to mobilize Black Lives Matter.
Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and others.
There's a particular history.
We can talk about the murder of Trayvon Martin.
We can talk about so many other lives that have been lost over the last decade and a half and the ways that those events triggered and really set into motion what we now understand is the Black Lives Matter movement.
Hashtag ex-evangelical, there's a resonance there.
Now don't get me wrong, they're not the same.
Do not walk away from this saying that I think they're the exact same kind of phenomenon or anything like that.
But I make the comparison because there have been a lot of people who over the years have left evangelicalism.
Whether that was in 1880, whether that was in 1920, whether that was in 1960, or 1990.
1920, whether that was in 1960 or 1990.
I left in 2005 and there was certainly no, we didn't know what a hashtag was yet, but there was really no community for me to join.
And I think so many people out there have echoed this experience.
Hey, I left in 1994.
I left in 2005 and I didn't have anywhere to go.
I didn't have anyone to join.
I was alone in the wilderness, a cast off and exiled from the community that raised me.
And because of that, to be an ex-evangelical or an ex-evangelical might just mean you're describing something.
But nonetheless, in 2016-17, we really get a movement that is starting to congeal.
We're getting hashtag ex-evangelical.
And that hashtag, I think for at least one of the first times, if not the first time in American history, provided a place for those who are leaving evangelicalism to gather, to share their stories, to work through their trauma, but also to start to build a certain cultural cachet.
And a certain political potency.
We see that in the evidence of the documentary that I played at the top.
2018 CBS does an entire documentary about Exvangelical and folks who are leaving that movement.
Exvangelical has been kind of part of the larger Christian ether going back to those years.
And I guess here's my point, and I'll try to wrap this up, is that If I picked up a book that was say about Black Lives Matter, or let me use another example.
If I picked up a book that was about Me Too, hashtag Me Too, and I didn't find any sort of unfolding of how Me Too got started, of the folks who started to first use that hashtag, a tweet that went viral, people that worked together to really make it something that had a kind of enough weight and enough togetherness to make a difference.
That would feel like something was a little missing.
Like, hey, where was that?
The same with Black Lives Matter, the same with anything.
And so I think when I think of hashtag ex-evangelical, I think of a very particular history where Blake Chastain coins the term.
There are many others in those years, 2017, 18, who are working together to use that hashtag.
And they're getting flack and fire from all over the place.
They're getting people criticizing them, whether that's their family, but also just in the larger Christian ether.
These are the years when megachurch pastors and Focus on the Family and Al Mohler and many others decided they needed to start squashing this deconstruction thing because it was getting out of hand.
These are the years when Me Too happened.
There was also Hashtag Church Too, and Emily Joy Allison and many others really helped to build a kind of movement of those who were saying, what you're talking about with Me Too happens in church as well.
It's church too.
So I guess I hoped that there would be a sense of Hey, it's one thing that people have been leaving evangelicalism for a long time, and they have.
But we wouldn't have a book in 2024 called The Exvangelicals without a group of people, many of whom are not podcasters, don't have a platform, who are everyday people who are tweeting, gathering, trying to help each other in 2016, 17, 18, that really made hashtag Exvangelical a category That many people now who say jump into the conversation in 2023 have no idea about.
They don't know that there's this whole history.
They don't know that there's this whole kind of movement that happened, that this whole prequel to where we are today.
And that's OK.
I'm not saying that anyone who uses a hashtag needs to know that.
But I am saying this is not something that came out of nowhere and that there wouldn't be a category exvangelical.
And I'm not even sure that there would be a place.
And this is me going out on a limb.
Four books by John Ward and Tim Alberta and Sarah McCammon to jump into a conversation like we're having today in the United States without the work of Hashtag Exvangelical and all of those people who put in that work in Facebook groups and on Twitter and on Instagram and in many other places going back eight, ten years.
And so I guess for me that was something that I really would have loved to see in the book and really gets left out.
That's my praise.
That's my criticism.
As I said, don't take anything in terms of my criticism as a, well, of course this book is not something you should, of course you should read it.
If it interests you, you're always going to learn something from a book like this.
And I learned a ton.
I learned a lot talking to Sarah.
I always appreciate Sarah and what she has to say.
And so I think that for me, as always, I'm always trying for us to be adults.
Adults who can have conversations about things we appreciate.
Things that we want to push back on, things we learned, things we could have learned, and so on and so forth.
So, with no further ado, thanks for listening.
Here's my conversation with Sarah.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Joined today, as you all know, by a well-known, distinguished, and fantastic guest, and that is Sarah McCammon.
So, Sarah, thanks for joining me.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So, obviously going to talk about your brand new book.
The book that's traveling far and wide.
Every time I look up, you are somewhere.
The book is somewhere.
It's all over and it's doing great.
And this book is so personal.
This book is so vulnerable at times.
And there's a page that really caught my attention that I wanted to start with, and that's page 12.
And you describe your family.
And I'm going to read a bit, which I'm sorry if it embarrasses you or you don't like hearing your own writing read.
And then I want to just try to draw out a point.
I think it's really important about the story you tell.
I was the oldest of four.
We were the kind of family of blonde, well-behaved children that strangers complimented in restaurants.
What a beautiful family, they'd tell my parents, who would beam at us.
Three girls, spaced three years apart, in smocked dresses and shiny black patent leather.
Mary Janes, the youngest, a little boy with thick glasses and a shock of white blonde hair in front and cheeks like those Hummel figurines we sometimes saw in antique stores.
You just give us such a vivid portrait of what I would call the Midwest evangelical aesthetic.
Those of us who know the evangelical cosmos know there is the West Coast megachurch aesthetic, there is the Southern Baptist country church aesthetic, but you give us the like Midwest Darling Christian evangelical family picture.
Can we use that just to kind of ask about your church life growing up, your family life, and how it really did fit into this quintessential Midwestern evangelical charismatic kind of ethos?
There was such a sort of fine and almost invisible line between evangelical and fundamentalist.
It was kind of hard to know where one began and the other ended.
And I mention this because I think some of the I don't know, some of the focus on children and families, particularly among the more kind of fundamentalist wing of the movement, took that to a place that meant having lots and lots of children, you know?
I mean, you see this in a lot of conservative religious movements across the board, but I mean, I just remember there was such an emphasis on that kind of aesthetic of the wholesome, beautiful family, everybody dressed up for the Church photo album pictures.
And I think like the family that I used to hear a lot of people just kind of gush about had 10 children, you know, in my in my church.
And they were a beautiful family and always seemed very well behaved.
And that was, you know, that was I mean, obviously, it's something that parents were proud of.
Right.
And all parents are proud of their kids and particularly when they behave well.
But For a lot of us, I think it was also sort of an expression of our faith, like this idea that we needed to be a light to the world was a language we would hear a lot, or we needed to be a good example.
And I think this is an idea that permeates a lot of the rhetoric even today.
And in some ways, it's not too far removed.
From some of the rhetoric about building a Christian nation, you know, there's this idea of the Christian family and the Christian nation, and that if you orient things properly, if there's the right set of hierarchies in place, the right principles, the right beliefs, the right behaviors, the right attitudes, that things will work out well, that there is a way things should be, and if you Conform to that ideal as closely as possible.
Things will go better.
And if you don't, things will go worse.
And if we if we follow those rules, everything will work out well.
And conversely, when things aren't working out well for people, it's usually because they're not following those rules and principles and structures.
That was kind of the idea.
You write so much about feeling the pressure to witness to your friend when you were at roller skating and just the ways that you felt this need to be a light to the world, even though you were not really allowed to exist outside of a self-contained universe, which is the result of so many evangelical upbringings.
If we jump ahead, though, you land in Washington, D.C., unexpectedly, at age 17.
And there's some sticker shock there, living in a dorm with other pages, hearing other teenagers talk about their lives and experiences, running into lascivious congressmen.
How did that experience shape your understanding of politics, but also faith?
Well, I always have to say, like, in some ways I look back and I'm really amazed and kind of impressed that my parents let me go to DC and be a page for a semester because I, you know, they, they placed such a priority on protecting us and guiding us and shaping us.
And this was kind of, you know, completely the opposite of that.
I was, I was able to go at, you know, 16 and then turn 17 while I was there.
You know, I live with a group of kids from all over the country with all kinds of different beliefs and ideas and experiences.
Now, we were pretty closely protected.
We had, you know, lots of rules and curfews and adults who were watching over us, but it was a lot of freedom for a teenager.
And, you know, for me, it was really Eye-opening because for the first time I was around, I was around kids who some of them were openly talking about having had sex, which is, you know, not something that anybody at my Christian school would ever have admitted to, even though I'm sure some people were.
And it was something that, you know, in my youth group, we talked about as kind of one of the worst things you could do before marriage.
And not just sex, but no political beliefs.
I mean, there would be robust debates in the, in the back of the, It was just sort of this back room, not the there's a cloak room where everybody kind of prepares.
The senators can make phone calls and this is back in the day before cell phones, at least at the time, they could make phone calls and sort of arrange meetings and things like that.
And then there's this other area on the other side of the chamber where we would also sometimes hang out and we would have these robust debates about whatever was being discussed on the on the Senate floor and whatever the current political issues were.
And I just remember, you know, for the first time I was around people who disagreed with me.
And once more, I was in I was in class with these kids and we were talking about things like evolution as if it were just no big deal.
And so I knew that there was a larger world that existed.
I'd been kind of warned about it, but I hadn't really seen it up close or known very many people who didn't believe like I believed.
And in retrospect, that experience was really formative for me.
You said something there that just sparked so many thoughts in my brain.
You said, you know, for the first time I was around people who disagreed with me.
And when I think about anyone I've ever interviewed about being in a high demand religion, including evangelicals and growing up, that moment seems to be a moment where the thread gets pulled or where people kind of double down on who they're going to be.
It's impossible to talk about exvangelicals.
It's an it's impossible to talk about your story without what one person in the book calls the Trump thing.
Yeah.
And I want to talk about the ways that the Trump thing spurred what we now know as hashtag evangelical.
But before that, I would be remiss not to ask you about your experience with the Trump thing, because you had, of course, A singular view on it as somebody standing in the back of rallies being jeered and called the enemy of the people throughout that whole first Trump run.
What was that like?
And more specifically, how did that play into the unraveling of the faith that you grew up with as you talk about in the book?
Yeah, I mean, I should probably be pretty clear.
I did not consider myself an evangelical when I started covering the Trump campaign, and I had not used that terminology for a number of years, probably at least more than a decade at that point.
But it was hard not to think about my evangelical Upbringing when I would, you know, do stories about how evangelical voters were making sense of Trump's character and particularly how a lot of people were noticing the contrast between how evangelical leaders talked about Trump's behavior, you know, his alleged affairs and so forth and his just sort of way of talking.
How evangelical leaders talked about that versus how they talked about Bill Clinton.
And I, you know, I write about this in the book, just remembering very vividly the response of not only evangelical leaders like James Dobson and others to that moment, but also the response of my family and my community and even my own self.
I was writing in my journal about how horrified I was at what the president was doing.
Because that's what I was hearing from the people around me, you know, and so fast forward 20 years or so, and it was a very different tone about some kind of analogous concerns.
So I was thinking a lot about that.
I was reporting on Some particularly after the The Access Hollywood video, you know, was released right before the November election.
A lot of people thought that would be the moment when evangelicals said, OK, this is too much.
We can't can't get behind this guy.
But of course, it wasn't.
And I was doing a story talking to some evangelical women, including sort of well-known.
I didn't interview Beth Moore, but I was talking about the reaction of well-known women like Beth Moore and others.
to that moment and sort of the cognitive dissonance they were feeling, the frustration and betrayal some of them were expressing.
And one of the people we interviewed for that story, the singer Nicole Nordeman, used the word exvangelical and said that Some people were not wanting to use the word evangelical anymore because of what it's become associated with.
And so, you know, I started kind of paying attention to that hashtag.
It's mostly what it was at the time.
It was a word that was being used in some social media groups.
And of course, it was, as I'm sure you know, it was coined by Blake Chastain, who has a podcast by that name.
And I think, and I interviewed Blake, you know, and others who started using that hashtag, like Chrissy Stroop.
And they said, this moment, the 2016 campaign and the rise of Trump and the alignment with evangelicalism, it seemed like it was kind of a catalyst for a lot of these conversations because, you know, the white evangelical base of the Republican Party had been a critical part of the GOP for a really long time.
But I think That moment, that alignment with a candidate like Donald Trump forced some self-reflection and some reckoning for people in a new way.
And, you know, as I started observing some of these conversations that were happening around this idea of exvangelicalism, I noticed conversations around a whole bunch of themes that had nothing to do with Donald Trump, but that Were a lot of issues that I myself had wrestled with, you know, whether it was, you know, not just politics, but sexuality and science and pluralism and a whole bunch of other issues that for me had been part of what pushed me out of the evangelical movement many years before.
It does seem that the Trump phenomenon in 2016 will go down as a kind of historical catalyst, as you say, of not only an exodus from certain Christian spaces in the country, but the formation of a gathering in the wilderness that was perhaps not available before to prior generations.
I want to come back to that and talk about it, but I want to hit two more things before we circle back.
One would be, you know, again, this book is so vulnerable, it's so personal.
You write about purity culture, and you already mentioned something that I think has been really important to my work on this show, which is that purity culture is really about a pure individual, like a young teenager, being pure sexually, quote unquote, but it's also about a pure nation.
It's the idea that if you can have the right kind of relationship, the right kind of patriarchal family, then you can have the right kind of church, and then you can have the right kind of society, and then everything will be as God wants.
I'm wondering, you know, not only how your experiences in period culture were refracted into the Trump thing, as you talked to all of the bloggers and the ex-evangelicals for the book and their experiences, but also how you write about, you know, your own journey.
I, like you, was married very young to my high school, I married my high school sweetheart, someone I'd been with since I was 14.
We got married at 20.
A thousand people came to our wedding at our mega church.
Wow.
That's a big wedding.
That's an expensive wedding.
Except maybe cheaper if you didn't have alcohol, right?
We did not.
They did not all eat dinner on our diet.
They just came to this church and then they went home.
Got it.
And we had the reception.
And there was no alcohol, which was, you know, that was not even a thought.
And a lot of blenders.
You get a lot of blenders when a thousand people come.
All of that to say you write about that journey for you, you know, your first marriage, divorce.
That's a journey for those of us who've lived this.
It's a lot to kind of process.
And for me, it was a kind of life altering thing to happen.
So the personal, the national, the political, the individual, how do those all play together for you as you think about these experiences in these last few years?
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to purity culture, I think, I mean, I never saw any political connection to it about it when I was growing up.
I never made the tie in my mind, but people say that the political is personal.
And I think I understand that a little bit better now because, you know, often policy Public policy affects people's personal lives.
It affects the choices they can make.
It affects the way that they live.
It can affect very intimate decisions, as we've certainly seen the last several years when it comes to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
But even setting that aside, you know, the sentiment that I heard from People I interviewed and also, you know, a number of my personal friends in response to the Access Hollywood video and the rise of Donald Trump was, I think, a lot of anger, particularly from women who had been, you know, essentially told by evangelical leaders for a long time to cover up and keep our legs together.
And then, you know, and we were told that at the same time that, you know, the Josh Harris's book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, that came out in 1997.
That was the year, basically, Before or leading up to the Clinton Lewinsky scandal.
So this was all in the air at the same time.
Right.
This idea that.
I mean, it wasn't a new idea.
People like Elizabeth Elliot and Josh McDowell and others had been writing about sexual purity for a long time.
And admittedly, it's a longstanding part of the Christian tradition, at least, you know, the modern Protestant tradition that sex should be saved for marriage.
It wasn't a new idea.
But this kind of emphasis on it and the sort of brand of it or in-branding of it that, you know, there were purity rings and conferences and, you know, these sort of metaphors that so many of us heard in our youth groups about Not wanting to be like a dirty tissue or a chewed piece of gum if you had premarital sex.
So the fact that that was the culture for a lot of us in our adolescence.
And then again, you know, the same movement responded to Donald Trump in such a different way that his personal failings, his sexual exploits or whatever you want to call them, didn't seem to be a deal breaker or really a cause for a whole lot of alarm.
I think for a lot of people that felt like a real That was a confusing and frustrating and I think offensive juxtaposition.
I mean, that's the sense that I heard from a lot of people.
Particularly if you followed all the rules and felt like maybe those rules weren't to your benefit, you know, to find out that they didn't seem to matter that much.
It seemed like they didn't matter that much to some of the same people who had been perpetuating them.
Now, maybe that's unfair.
You know, I also recognize that everybody has priorities.
Everybody has a hierarchy of priorities.
And the way that evangelical leaders would respond to that, because I've asked this question, and others have too, is that the idea that everybody sins, everybody fails, and they were not electing Trump to be, you know, a pastor or a spiritual role model, but to be a president and to implement policy goals.
And, you know, I do understand that, but I think Once again, the sentiment that I heard from several people I knew and others that I spoke to for the book was this idea that, wow, this character doesn't seem to matter as much when you're talking about a powerful man as it does when you're talking about the behavior of a young woman.
You write so wonderfully about how, in one crucial scene in the book, about how Following the rules, you know, we did that.
And this is where it got us to a place that was hard and arduous and painful.
And the response is, well, it seems like following the rules is what hurt us.
And yet, when you don't follow the rules, you do everything the rules say not to do, like Donald Trump.
It helps you, and so one can see on display that dissonance so clearly, I think, in these examples.
I want to just come to a character in your book that is running throughout as just such an important thread, and that's your grandfather.
You talk about your grandfather as a very accomplished man, a surgeon, somebody whose house was Full of various cultural dimensions and ways you weren't used to, you know, cooking and cats and artwork and things.
And you write near the end of the book, I think about what grandpa's own journey of self-discovery and acceptance must have been like from a closeted medical student in the 40s to a retired physician in a partnered relationship, volunteering to help AIDS patients during some of the worst years of the crisis.
I think back over the years I'd spent trying to understand and accept my family with all of our imperfections and differences, and to love and feel loved by them.
I think about my struggle to overcome my own intolerance and fears of hurting people through selfishness or ignorance, of losing the love of my family, of getting it all wrong, of angering God.
And I hope that struggle to overcome will be enough.
And I think for many people, these words are so moving because you come to see your grandfather as this man who had so many struggles you didn't understand when you were younger, who seemed nonetheless to strive to help.
To improve and to cultivate a community that was all around him in ways that were completely unacceptable for the most part to your immediate family.
Just wondering about your grandfather and the ways that he changed from someone that you were praying for to someone that it seems as if you might want to emulate as someone who is working in the world to do good things.
Yeah, I mean, he was one of the few people that I had regular, you know, contact with growing up who wasn't an evangelical Christian, and he was like kind of the symbol of the unsaved.
You know, we devoted so much energy toward praying for him.
Trying to, you know, my dad would go over to his house periodically, I think, at least once that I remember, and I think it was more than that.
And, you know, try to witness to him, try to share his faith with him.
And, you know, my grandpa wasn't interested.
And I, when I was growing up, you know, this was such a big part of my life and our lives, and I couldn't understand why he didn't, you know, he didn't want to accept Jesus.
You know, I didn't understand at that point that he was a gay man.
I didn't understand what the evangelical Christian right was saying about gay people.
There was just so much I didn't know.
I just only knew the world that I knew.
You know, I think as I got older and had some time to reflect and think, I came to just realize what an incredible person he was and really to, you know, wish that I had a closer relationship with him.
He was, all of my other grandparents died before I was bi or before the time I was about five.
And so he was really the only one that was a big part of my life for very long.
You know, that's that's something special.
That's something I I didn't want to just give up the opportunity to have a relationship with him.
And, you know, again, I think the kind of person he was, the caliber of person that he was, was someone that I aspired to be like.
And it it really forced me at a pretty young age just to reflect on some of the things I was being told, not only about him, but about anybody else who was who was different, who was gay or different in some other way from what I was told was the The quote-unquote right way to be.
Just strikes me how often as an evangelical I heard that we're not of this world and the goal was to really save as many people as we could before we left it.
And your grandpa in this book seems to emblematize the kind of person who does everything he can to make the world better in big and small ways, whether that's through helping a patient or through Uh, volunteering at a clinic or just cooking a really good meal for somebody that might be coming over that night.
And there's a, there's a difference there in terms of ethic.
And there's a difference there in terms of the way we look at being a good person.
There is.
And I, you know, and I found myself as I got older, even though, you know, I've maintained a much Stronger connection to Christianity and spirituality than my grandpa had.
I have found that even that I think that that approach to life has shaped my spirituality.
You know, like I am such a huge fan of the poet Wendell Berry and, you know, one of his most famous poems you probably Probably read.
People love to put it on their, you know, Twitter profile.
So it's not really, uh, unique, but I love the, the Mad Farmer manifesto.
And there's this line in it, you know, where he says, I think he kind of, the, the, the poem is so deeply Christian, first of all, I mean, with its metaphors and everything, but he takes this idea of loving, you know, not being of the world and inverts it.
And he says, love the Lord, love the world.
You know, take all you have and be poor.
And this idea that, I mean, the Bible says different things about that, right?
The Bible talks about not being of the world, but it also talks about Jesus loving the world.
And, you know, I think I've come to have this idea that I can That being a person of faith, whatever that means to me today or to anyone else, it doesn't exclude.
In fact, in many ways, it compels me to care about this world, you know, because this is, I don't know for sure what comes after, but I know for sure that I'm here now.
And I think that making this world as good as it can be, being as kind to people as we can, you know, trying to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be, that to me seems Honoring to God, you know, if you believe in God.
And I don't, you know, I don't demand that anybody does, but I do have still a pretty strong, I think, spiritual sensibility.
And so for me, that has become part of almost the way that I almost feel more spiritual when I'm opening myself up to other humans and to the world and to things I don't know.
Yeah, if you believe that God is the source of everything, then you believe that God is the source of everything.
And I think about it differently now, obviously.
I want to zoom out, if we can here, and go from some of the main characters and themes and experiences you relay in the book to some broader themes that are surrounding it, I think.
One question that gets asked a lot, whether by journalists who have a certain perspective about things, or just everyday people, is, is there an exvangelical movement?
And I've been part of those conversations for a long time.
But I'm just wondering, after interviewing so many folks and reflecting on these things, What does that mean to be an exvangelical?
Does it mean to be part of something or does it mean simply to have experienced something that others have without necessarily implying a sense of community or togetherness?
It's a good question.
I think, I mean, I think there is a movement in the sense that people are hungry for a place to gather around these themes, and more and more people are.
You know, there have been a couple billion, at least before they stopped taking the numbers down, TikTok impressions just for the ex-evangelical hashtag.
You know, there are all kinds of podcasts and Facebook groups and All kinds of social media conversations around the themes that I talk about in the book.
Now, is it an organized, united, collected, you know, movement in that sense?
No.
I mean, I think you're talking about disparate people from disparate backgrounds.
I mean, similar backgrounds, but people from all over the country, sometimes other parts of the world.
But I think that there is a shared experience because I mean, when I started paying attention to the ex-evangelical hashtag, I just started seeing these conversations, you know, and again, in private Facebook groups and on Twitter and everywhere else, I'm sure you've seen them too, just around this shared experience of, you know, American evangelicalism in particular really is kind of a specific subculture with a specific mindset and language and media landscape.
People who come up in it have, and particularly people who leave it, have a shared experience.
And I mean, it really is like it is leaving a culture in many, many ways.
And I mean, if I if I'm part of any culture, it's the evangelical subculture.
You know, I mean, I'm I'm a mix of German and Italian and And a bunch of other European stuff, but not closely tied to any of it to have a sense of what that culture means.
I guess I'm a Midwesterner, that's part of my culture, but that means a lot of different things.
But evangelicalism and the ideas and the metaphors and the songs, that is what shaped me more than any other identity that I can think of.
But to leave that identity means leaving behind a community But you can't fully hold on to that identity if you don't believe the quote unquote right thing.
So it's this really, I think, kind of paradoxical, painful experience that a lot of people have gone through.
And, you know, I've been amazed since I wrote the book.
I mean, just about every day.
Sometimes several a day and sometimes there'll be a couple days that go by without it.
But just about every day, I would say I get messages from people who are like, thank you for writing this.
This is my experience.
I can't believe how well you described what this is like.
And a lot of people have said, you know, some people were well aware of the groups out there and other people weren't.
They're like, I'm so glad to know that I'm not alone.
So I think there's something happening.
And that's why I wrote the book.
Where it goes, ultimately, I don't know.
I mean, I think, you know, and as part of my research, I talked to some people about this.
And one of the things that a couple of people pointed out, I think quite accurately, is that a lot of people who've grown up in evangelical spaces are dealing with trauma.
A lot of them are very triggered by anything religious or even political.
Sometimes you can tend when you've grown up sort of absorbing what I call alternative facts.
In some cases, you know, a whole different epistemology almost about how to know what's true.
You can be.
Hesitant to either afraid of, you know, sort of joining another team or maybe too quick to join another team.
And so I don't know how you organize people who have that much trauma and complexity, but I do think that there is a unifying experience that people really want to talk about, especially as so many people who grew up in, you know, the culture of the Evangelical, moral maturity, 80s, 90s, early 2000s, purity culture, all of that.
So many of us have come of age and are now sort of figuring out what this all means for our own families and adult lives.
You mentioned being a Midwesterner.
You mentioned being a person of, you know, you're a white person who has European heritage but is not necessarily shaped by it.
The subtitle is Loving, excuse me, Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.
And so you do name the White Evangelical Church here.
I'm wondering if there's any sense that the whiteness here plays an important role because, as you said, you left the culture that gave you songs, it gave you rituals, it gave you Ways to dress, ways to be a family.
When I think about my Asian-American family, my Japanese-American family, there are folks there who are Buddhist.
There's folks there who are Christian.
And when some of those folks have moved either closer or further from those traditions, They've always still had at their fingertips this really, really intimate relationship with our Japanese American heritage, our family's history in Hawaii, and the ways that that gave us food, that gave us songs, that gave us Clothes to wear.
Like, when my family goes to a funeral, we wear Hawaiian shirts.
There's no ties.
That gave us ways to be in the world.
I'm wondering if, not only in your own experience, but in the people you've talked to, when you leave, and you leave the white evangelical church, and you're a white person who's like, I don't know what to grab onto next.
Is that a particularly unique experience?
Whereas the black person who might leave, the person who has other cultural resources at their fingertips, but whereas whiteness historically has been a category that has done away with the particularities of Irish and German and Flemish and Belgian and, you know, on down the line, European kind of particularity.
You're left with where do I go next?
And I apologize for an extremely long question there, but I'm just wondering if that if that makes any sense to you in terms of the white evangelical.
No, it does.
I think like I love the question and I am thinking hard about it and I feel like I could talk about it for a long time.
You know, in some ways, I think it's it's It's sad that that people of European descent, maybe because maybe in this sort of, you know, really sick competition for for obtaining quote unquote whiteness, have sort of erased all of our specific subcultures.
You know, like my Italian great grandfather wouldn't have really been seen as white when he came over here.
But because of white supremacy, people, you know, I think often have adopted whiteness if they possibly could.
And so I, you know, I'm not, I'm no sociologist, but I suspect that a result of that is some of some, you know, loss of cultural specificity.
There's a trade-off that happens there.
I mean, I have some relatives a little farther back who are still in touch with their Italian heritage or have learned Italian.
But like, to me, that's sad.
It would be really cool to feel, you know, like I knew something more about that part of myself.
And I even see like my middle school son who's Dad is of, you know, Irish-American derivation, getting really fascinated with Irish stuff.
And it's like, you're not Irish!
You've been here for how many generations?
But I think it is this desire to like, be like, well, what am I?
You know, who am I?
Which is such a human desire.
And so, no, I think it's an interesting question.
And I think about sometimes, you know, I still, I still sort of speak the language.
Sometimes I, you know, talk about something as a blessing.
I even, you know, I've never ever had short hair, which is not, you know, like I don't know if that's because I grew up evangelical, but I mean, I think the shortest I've ever gone is like to my like just below my chin when my babies were little and I hated it.
And so I let it grow long again.
And I love wearing dresses like I hate being forced to do any of that stuff.
But but like I just kind of if I'm given the choice, feel more comfortable doing those things.
And it's probably because that's how women presented themselves around me growing up.
And that's what I identify with.
You know, femininity and, and so, but like, I think that's fine.
I think it's, you know, we all, we all sort of, I think, have to do that synthesizing of whatever you grow up with and figure out like what works for you and what doesn't.
You know, I talk, I talk at the end of the book about, you know, I'm remarried, my husband's Reformed Jewish, and I really enjoyed sharing his traditions with him because He has a very robust culture with its own traditions and rituals and foods and vocabulary.
And, you know, it feels like a real privilege to share that.
And in some ways, it makes me see what I've never really had, you know?
Yeah, we all want a story, and when a lot of us leave evangelicalism, we leave the story that we had, and we don't know which one we're going to find again.
And that's just so harrowing, I think.
You are a Midwesterner?
I mean, there are so many Midwesterner things, I'm thinking, I don't know.
That's true.
No, there are.
You know, sayings and being willing to drive 12 hours to see friends and, you know, just being super nice at the airport.
And oh, my gosh, Midwesterners are.
And it's so nice.
I wasn't roast.
Yes.
I was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for the Iowa caucuses, and people were so nice.
I couldn't believe how polite people were.
I was like, oh, I miss this.
But there's also just like more time and space.
And it's you know, it's harder to be nice when you're in a crowded city, I think.
But I love that about Midwesterners.
I was in the Twin Cities and I was blown away at how nice people were.
It was a little bit overwhelming.
I thought I was in a simulation or something.
Just two last questions here.
So the book is called The Exvangelicals, and this is where I'm going to just admit a little bit of surprise.
This is really a book that follows your story closely.
You know, I think if we made it into a play, it'd be the kind of play that followed you on stage and you would be on stage How did you arrive at the title?
their voices jump in, right?
And they're all informing, they're all expanding, they're all providing their own kind of mosaic of the evangelical, ex-evangelical universe.
How did you arrive at the title?
Because it really is a book that's mainly about one ex-evangelical, but it is called The Ex-Vangelicals.
And so I know that the titles are always a negotiation between publisher and author, and there's a marketing team that wants to call it this or that.
But wondering how you and everyone else arrived at this title for this book.
Well, I I mean, it was the title that I pitched.
The subtitle came later, but I, you know, I wanted to, I decided to use my story kind of as a connective tissue to sort of draw together all of these different themes I wanted to talk about.
But I never wanted to do a pure memoir because I don't know, I'm, I'm a journalist.
I like telling people's stories and I was really fascinated to see so many really interesting conversations going on, you know, among people with, with a similar, who'd walked a similar path.
Some of those were with ex-evangelicals and some with experts.
So I did a lot of research and a lot of interviews for the book.
And you're right.
I mean, my story is sort of the skeleton, the structure for it.
But I think in every chapter, you meet other people as well.
And so it was, you know, for me, that balance was fun.
I loved the experience of sort of being in conversation and dialogue with a lot of different people who'd had similar experiences.
You know, I mean, it's funny because some people said they thought it was too much memoir and other people thought it was not enough.
But, you know, ultimately, I felt like I with this technique, I was able to say what I wanted to say.
And and again, I've heard from so many people who've said, thank you for writing this.
It really is so similar to my story, like strangers.
Yeah.
And that was that was really what I hoped to achieve.
The one thing that I'll say that I was hoping to see that did not, and this is where I'll just push you a little bit, is, you know, that there have been folks leaving evangelicalism, the Latter-day Saints, Catholicism for A long, long, long, long time.
It's been very difficult for those folks to gather in any meaningful way because once you're out of a community like this, as you've described so beautifully today and in the book, you really are deprived of the only community you've probably ever had.
So how do you go find anyone else that's had your experience, your story?
And then how do you gather enough people that you have any...
Cultural cachet, that you have any political potency.
It's really difficult.
In 2015, 16, 17, there really was, for the first time at least in modern American history, the ability for that to happen under the hashtag Exvangelical.
And so by the time a lot of people jumped in and noticed the hashtag, there had been folks like Blake Chastain, like Chrissy Stroop, but like so many other people who are not on documentaries, who are not, who do not have podcasts, who do not have book deals, who had just been tweeting and gathering in Facebook, you know, private groups who had just been tweeting and gathering in Facebook, you know, private groups and huddling anywhere they could find, whether it was Discord or other online spaces to create what became
And so I'm just wondering if there was any consideration to some of that prehistory, because while people have been leaving and becoming ex-evangelical for so many years, something did happen.
It wasn't just the Trump thing, but the ex-evangelical thing did happen right after.
And there would have been no category to actually analyze without the tireless work of the people in the trenches who kind of put life and And reputation on the line to make that a thing.
And so I was just kind of curious about if any of that factored into interviews or if any of that factored into putting together the story or the arc and, you know, kind of the underbelly of the Trump thing was a lot of people feeling vulnerable but trying to find each other.
Yeah.
Eventually landing on a hashtag that's become really important.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think I talk about this in the book, just the fact that, you know, Trump catalyzed this conversation that wasn't new.
That, you know, for a lot of people, it sort of was this defining moment that sort of, I think, gave people the courage and the need to speak out and find someone and gather.
And, you know, what I argue in the book, and I think this is true, is that, you know, this was, I think multiple, I mean, multiple things were happening at once.
One, the Trump movement, the Trump moment and the Trump movement, It created this, I think, this energy around this issue of, like, what is an evangelical?
What does this identity mean?
And for a lot of people, it created this really profound discomfort with the label.
Or it just gave them a reason to talk about the discomfort they'd been feeling for a long time.
And I say this in the book, and I talk to people who fall into both categories, and the fact that social media existed at this point, right?
And that social media wasn't new, but it had sort of reached a place where there were Lots of different platforms where people could find each other.
There were ways to organize yourselves.
Hashtags were a thing.
I mean, they're relatively new thing, you know, and in 2016, maybe they maybe what, 10 years old, something like that.
So I think I think you put those trends together along with.
A longer term arc, declining arc of American religion, including evangelicalism, but not limited to it.
You put all of that together and you get this, this movement and this moment, you know, such as it is.
But that's also why I talk to, I mean, I write about high profile people and I interviewed some high profile people, but I also interviewed a lot of just You know, ordinary rank-and-file people that I met in these spaces, of course, only with their consent.
I would see people say interesting things and I would reach out to them and just say, hey, you know, I'm writing this book about this experience.
Can I talk to you?
And most people were happy to talk and happy to share.
Well, last question's a really hard one, an important one.
Does your way of being Midwestern involve hot dish and how so?
Is that something that's, or is that just like not, that's completely off and you're like, you know, no comment.
Interview's over.
We say casserole where I'm from.
Casserole.
I don't say hot dish.
My former spouse who's Southern would say covered dish.
Or soda.
I grew up saying pop.
When I became a page, everybody from the East, mostly, there were a lot of them from the East Coast, so they said soda, and I adopted that.
But no, my mother was a champion, is, I think, still, of making lasagna, and that's what she would take you if you were sick or had a baby.
That's still what I try to do, although, unfortunately, I do a lot of, you know, DoorDash and Uber eats cards when my friends have babies because some of them live in other parts of the country and other times I'm just too busy.
So I literally have like a friend in a friend I think in Illinois recently had a baby a few of my friends had babies lately but one of them I I sent her a gift card and I said I'm sorry this is not a casserole because she's also midwestern but it's the best I can do.
Sarah, I appreciate your time so much.
I appreciate your work and all of the tirelessness and vulnerability that went into creating this book.
You're popping up all over, but I'm sure there's folks out there that would like to see where you're going to be and see if they can link up with stuff you're doing or new events or new pieces out from you.
So, what's the best way to do that?
Probably my Substack.
It's just called, it's substack.com slash Sarah McCammon, and it's just called Off the Air, A Journalist's After Hours Thoughts.
I tend to update my events there or on Instagram.
I'm Sarah McCammon, journalist.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
As I said at the top, for subscribers, I have a way back machine interview our conversation with Blake Chastain, who was mentioned here a bunch today.
And it's about ex-evangelicals, ex-evangelicals, and why no one would listen to them in church, outside of church.
It's really interesting to pair with what we just heard.
So if you're a subscriber, stick around.
If you're not, Now is the time to subscribe so you can get bonus content like this every Monday and a bonus episode which we just published every month along with ad-free listening and so many other great perks.
It's all in the in the show notes.
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