Exvangelicals

 

I've just finished reading The Exvangelicals by 43-year-old Sarah McCammon, a national politcal correspondent for NPR. It is part critique of the Evangelical movement in the United States and part memoir, with McCammon having grown up in an evangelical home and ecosystem. 

As the title suggests, there is a steady exodus from the Evangelical movement in the United States, predominantly younger people, although there are some high profile refugees such as writer/speaker Beth Moore who left the Southern Baptists when she criticized support for Donald Trump and was vilified for doing so. The exes have departed over women's rights, including church leadership roles, the demonization of LGBTW2S persons, race issues, and a bunch of other issues. Some still love Jesus and have found other church homes while many others have given up on Christianity because of the toxic environment in which they were were raised.

 In an review from the Guardian Charles Kaiser offers:

Sarah McCammon’s new book about “exvangelicals” like herself is a powerful memoir of her complicated journey away from Christian fundamentalism. Because she experienced it from the inside, she is also able to give the rest of us one of the best explanations I have ever read of how so many Americans became part of the non-reality-based cult that remains so stubbornly addicted to the insanities of  Donald Trump.

Brought up by rigorous evangelicals equally opposed to abortion and in favor of corporal punishment of their children, McCammon grew up inside a religious bubble supposedly designed to protect everyone within it from the evils of a secular world.

McCammon uses the term deconstruction to describe the process by which many former Evangelicals are unravelling the oppressive and often hypocritical environment in which they lived, where home, school, church was everything allowing little interaction with other viewpoints. The threat of hell for those who strayed was pervasive. The irony was and is that witnessing to others was expected yet fear of the stranger, including people of other religions, was strongly inculcated.

From her early teens McCammon was uncomfortable with this worldview, even as she absorbed it. She got to know a Muslim teen while doing a Senate internship and was unsettled by his question about whether she thought he was going to hell. In her twenties she married an earnest young Evangelical man she really didn't know and they ended up divorced, to the dismay of their families. She is now married to a Jewish man and her parents didn't attend the wedding.

Many people who claim to be Evangelical in the United States no longer attend worship, unthinkable a generation ago. Increasingly the movement seems to have more to do with affiliation with the political right than Christian devotion based on scripture or the embracing love of Jesus. Perhaps not surprisingly. since 2006, evangelical Protestants have experienced “the most precipitous drop in affiliation” among Americans, according to the Public Religion Research Institute shrinking from 23% in 2006 to 14% in 2020. 

I found the book worthwhile and it certainly provided plenty of flashbacks to the evangelical milieu we found ourselves in as teens. It was an earnest and in some ways nurturing environment but ultimately the control and anti-intellectual, anti-science perspectives sent us in back to our mainline church roots. 

God help us all if this more extreme quasi-religious "base" for Trump, which some describe as Christo-fascism leads to another dystopian presidency. We should also be aware that there is a vocal Evangelical movement in Canada determined to influence the outcome of our next election.