Fear and Loathing and Evangelicalism
My review of Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals
My review of The Exvangelicals is out! I had a fairly good time reading this book, and then writing about it. I’m always a little afraid a deconstructer will say something new that I’ve never heard before, but so far that still hasn’t happened. This is book was to type, but well written and easy to read. Here it is:
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Since the infamous moment when the votes told that Donald Trump had won the 2016 presidential election and that he had been carried to power on a tide of “white evangelical voters,”1 evangelicalism in the US has been undergoing an uncomfortable reckoning it was ill-prepared to endure. This reckoning includes sizable numbers of church-goers not returning to in-person observance following lockdown,2 headshaking scorn across social and mainstream media, and a slew of tell-all memoirs, sociological analyses, and attempts to detail the historical record. Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024) represents, for me, the apex of the genre. Narrating relevant anecdotes from her evangelical childhood, McCammon skillfully weaves her story together with sociological data and interviews of former evangelicals. Her emphatic conclusion: American evangelicalism actually causes harm.
What to Do about the Lost — Declare There Aren’t Any. McCammon grew up in Kansas City, one of four children to parents who belonged to a charismatic congregation called Full Faith Church of Love.3 The picture McCammon paints of her childhood will be largely recognizable for most evangelicals who’ve lived through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. She attended Christian school and Christian college. Her parents read Dare to Discipline4 and consumed a steady diet of Focus on the Family. She wore a purity ring, memorized Scripture, was dedicated as a baby, learned about the dangers of believing in evolution, and felt a constant sense of guilt for not sharing her faith with the lost.
McCammon’s world was narrow. Between church and school, she did not have many opportunities to encounter people who were not already believers. Once she agonized over bringing up the question of faith with a friend in her ice skating class (p. 26). Much later, as a Senate page in DC, she felt alone as a professing Christian and endured the shame of being discovered reading her Bible (58). But it was her parents’ posture toward her unsaved grandfather, who she discovered to be a practicing partnered homosexual (123), that ultimately brought about her exit from evangelicalism.
McCammon, as a child, didn’t understand why her family prayed so anxiously for “grandpa” night after night, nor why they saw him so rarely. She loved his beautiful house and knew he was a successful surgeon and accomplished musician. How could he be “lost” when he was so happy, especially, as she discovered much later, having found love with another man following the death of her grandmother?
Trying to make sense of how people could be “lost” from God forever ultimately proved too difficult. It was a relief, McCammon writes, to let go of any need to share news about Jesus with anyone. She reconciled with her grandfather before his death, communicating this decision to her parents in a series of painful interactions.
What to Do about the Fear of Hell — Decide There Isn’t Any. When asked by a friend, “Do you believe that because I’m Muslim, I’m going to Hell?” McCammon suddenly discovered that she didn’t. She writes:
I looked at Sina and thought about how much I liked him and respected him, and how grateful I was for his kindness. I thought about what every major authority figure in my life had told me, again and again: that Jesus says, in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” The answer, from what I’d been taught, should have been as simple and clear as the question. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it, because for the first time I really had to look squarely at the fact that I wasn’t sure I believed it. I couldn’t look at my friend and say, “I believe my God will send you to Hell because you don’t believe as I do.” He’d called my bluff. I could only muster, “I don’t know. I think it’s between you and God.” I worried, had I failed? Had I wasted an opportunity to save a soul? And yet, somewhere deep inside, my answer felt right. (60)
Being able to trust her own feelings, her sense of things, was part of McCammon’s work of deconstruction. As an evangelical, she had been taught not to lean on her own understanding. Her mother sang a simple chorus as she kept house and took care of Sarah and her siblings — “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart” (Proverbs 3:5) (79). This verse, writes McCammon, and others like it, made her feel like she was being “asked to perform a total system override, to ignore and silence the blaring alarms and hand over the keys to my mind to an outside authority. I would always come back to the idea that these doubts were simply ‘my own understanding’ getting in the way” (81).
McCammon, though, wasn’t equipped to work through the apparent contradiction, nor cognitive dissonance, of trying to map her internal intuition over unseen spiritual truth claims. The question of truth ultimately became subservient, for her and many others, to her feelings….
And check out the podcast I did with Melanie:
Have a wonderful day!!
Brilliant essay. What I've observed so far about the deconstructionists is that they seem never to have encountered the real personal Lord and Saviour. The slope into unbelief is quite a lot more slippery when "belief" begins, and is based, in a system of "rules" rather than in a Person.
Since McCammon’s book dropped, I’ve had a number of people ask me if I’ve read it, or have I listened to her interview here or there, and can I relate, or I thought of you when I read her book. Of course, I have to let them know that I don’t read those kind of books. Perhaps the more horrible thing than discovering that no matter whether I liked it or not, I believed in Jesus, was the simultaneous realization that I was a liberal Christian. Scrolling through the comments, I’ll also have to admit to being one of those deconstructionists too (but, come on, I did all that in the 90’s when we had to af least try to read Of Grammatology before laying claim to the self description). Reading your review reminded me that I am by default part of the sort team McCammon in a sort of way but also not really at all. There is a sort of privilege that exists in calling belief in hell “trauma” that truly rankles me, but also, like reading Crime and Punishment, I have to accept the sort of realization that while I scoff at such hyperbole and odd sense of self-absorption, I’ve probably said something similar at least more than once. Anyways, I thought you dealt with her writing rather gently, perhaps in a more mournful way than say with Sheila Gregoire. Perhaps I’m just more critical because being part of the exvangelical camp, it seems a bit cringe to read the “testimonies” of others, and I have to ask myself, “goodness, is that what is sound like too?”