Leaving the Evangelical Bubble

My Question for Sarah McCammon

Back in 2018, when I was working on what I now call “The Book That Died”, I did a content analysis on a set of Millennial Evangelical Memoirs.¹ The project grew out of a SSSR presentation I did a couple of years earlier where I contrasted Mark Driscoll’s “Confessions of a Reformation Rev”² with that of Addie Zierman’s “When We Were on Fire”. The idea was to distinguish between an institutionally framed identification with evangelicalism with a testimony based frame.

By my 2018 sabbatical, the focus had clarified somewhat and was contrasting an evangelicalism based on maintaining historic boundaries with a more permeable approach in which younger evangelicals were more culturally engaged.³ Triangulating with some survey data I had gathered, I was arguing that the latter approach might make up a third of young evangelicals and that these memoirs could paint a picture of how things might move going forward. Unfortunately, those I was studying found that there was no longer room for them in evangelicalism and were not going to be coming back. Which is why the book died.

The book chapter with the content analysis of Millennial Evangelical Memoirists (MEMs) explored the connections between the perspectives of seven authors: the late Rachel Held Evans, Jonathan Merritt, DL Mayfield, Sarah Bessey, Zach Hoag, Amy Peterson, and Addie Zierman. Some of that work made it into my current book but most of it is still waiting for me to figure out if anyone would find the analysis valuable.

Since then, I’ve kept up my interest in the MEMs. While I haven’t done the deep analysis I did seven years ago, I’ve enjoyed reading newer arrivals in the genre. I’ve enjoyed reading books by Jon Ward, Sarah Billups, Erin Lane, Zack Hunt, Linda Kay Klein, Cara Meredith⁴, and Sarah McCammon.

Last Thursday, the Center for the Study of Evangelicalism at the University of Colorado — Colorado Springs hosted a talk by Sarah McCammon. We have connected by phone and social media over the years but had never met in person. We even did an email interview about her book, “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church”, when it first released last year (it just came out in paperback). I heard last fall that she was coming to the Springs and have been eagerly awaiting her visit.

We were in the beautiful chapel at Colorado College but there were lots of shadows.

Her talk was good, which was no surprise. She wove themes from the book with her experiences covering Trump 1.0 in the run-up to 2016 and what we know about evangelicals today. She was well-versed in the right data that defines our current reality.

When we got to the question-and-answer period of the evening, the questions ranged from ideas about religion to family to personal work-life balance. Since I’ve never been bashful about Q&A times after speeches and always wanting to explore the sociology within whatever we talked about, I knew I wanted to ask a question but it took me a while to frame it. Here’s what I asked (as best as I remember):

I have a shelf of Millennial Evangelical Memoirs in my library and your book is among them. You are all roughly the same age. So what was there about the broader culture when you hit your twenties — like 9/11 — that made the previous evangelical structures difficult to maintain?

Thankfully, she said that it was an interesting question. Her initial answer had to do with the rise of the Internet and then specifically mentioned the writings of Rachel Held Evans. This is consistent with what I was arguing in “The Book That Died”. People like Rachel were able to operate outside the privileged spaces that were controlled by the Powers That Be. And they more they tried to rein her in (impossible!) the more people followed her. Then she began promoting the work of other writers, who built their own followings.

There were likely other factors I could have mentioned as well. These, in turn, showed up in the content of those writing the various blogs, which eventually led to books, which led to conferences and more people expressing their not-quite-evangelical views. One key factor has to do with LGBTQ+ inclusion. The 2004 George W. Bush campaign made the push for Traditional Marriage Amendments a key point of division within society. These young adults (at the time) knew queer people and reacted to seeing them vilified. The foundering of the Iraq War no doubt created another point of fracture. Smart Phones were invented in 2007, which allowed all kinds of networking that threatened the evangelical infrastructure even further.⁵

A recurring theme in my book is that Gen Z has taken these various themes and pushed them even further. One can no longer assume that they are all safely tucked away in the evangelical bubble. Some are, and will have continuity with the past. But many, perhaps most, have a much more developed sense of diversity. They will not only follow in the paths of these Millennial Evangelical Memoirists, but broaden and deepen those paths, and probably blaze entirely new trails.

1. A couple of the authors were technically very late Gen Xers.

2. My eyes only recently stopped bleeding!

3. If you’ve read my book, you’ll recognize this contrast. If you haven’t, WHY NOT?

4. I just finished Cara’s “Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, & How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation”. That’s Friday’s SubStack.

5. If you have other cultural shifts that help explain the changes, let me know in the comments.