Sarah McCammon's "The Exvangelicals"

The Challenge of Rigid Plausibility Structures

It was about ten years ago that I started arguing that evangelicalism was splintering. I had noticed that the millennial generation of white evangelicals was shifting in significant ways and moving away from establishment views¹. Some of this shift was in reaction to the establishment’s culture war and boundary maintenance approaches. Some was certainly encouraged by the rise of the internet and the potential for the younger generation to find kindred spirits asking similar questions.

This led me six years ago to a focus on millennial evangelical memoirs. A number of books came out that had millennial evangelicals navigating their own spiritual journeys out of the more rigid environment of their upbringing. They struggled to hold tight to their faith in Jesus even while the larger world was provoking questions their prior background was uncomfortable with.

Every time another book in this niche is released, I’ve been eager to read it. Over the last year and a bit, I read Sarah Billups’ “Orphaned Believers” and Jon Ward’s “Testimony”. And so I was very excited to be able this week to read a review copy of Sarah McCammon’s “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church”. You can pre-order it here. It will release on March 19th.

If you’re even a sporadic listener to National Public Radio, Sarah should be familiar. She’s been a correspondent, a podcaster, a campaign reporter, guest host for All Things Consider and Morning Edition. Even then, you may not know that she grew up in an evangelical family in Kansas City², attended a conservative charismatic congregation, went to Christian school (with Bob Jones and Abeka textbooks), and graduated from a Christian College. She is also part of that first wave of millennials who had to struggle to navigate faith and culture.

Sarah’s book is one part memoir, one part reporting on leading exvangelical figures, and one part social history drawing from the leading scholars of evangelicalism. I told her that her reference list looks like my personal library. As I was reading, I would think “she should have included so-and-so” and then they’d show up in the next chapter.

Like those other memoirs referenced above, Sarah narrates the pieces of her evangelical upbringing that proved challenging: the gloss in her school textbooks and the material ignored, the impact of James Dobson’s theories of child-rearing (which have damaged at least one generation of adults), suspicion of those outside the bubble.

Her first excursion outside “the bubble” was as a US Senate page during a semester of her junior year of high school (which may have laid the seeds of her future career). Contact with those on the outside challenged her prior beliefs.

Her years at Christian College (naturally, I wanted more about this!) were also catalysts for change. Like my other memoirists, it was the critical thinking and liberal arts of the college environment that fostered a casual critique of past formulations.

Sarah relates the stories of other exvangelicals. Like her, life had presented certain challenges to the prior worldview. For some it was LGBTQ+ support, for others, science, for some race, for still others sexual abuse in the church, for yet more, patriarchy. Some came through this process more of less healthy (after therapy) while others have responded with anger and a “burn it all down” sentiment. I found Sarah between these poles, but closer to the healthy-with-therapy end.

As I have written in earlier pieces, when evangelicals tried to create an all-encompassing plausibility structure to protect their children, it proved far too rigid to incorporate the complexities of the modern world or shifts in personal biography. For far too many millennial evangelicals, they find themselves confronted with a choice to ignore the challenges or to reject the prior plausibility structure. Far better to have provided more space to operate by trusting parents who would stand alongside children as they come to develop their own perspective.

She keeps both her story and those of her interviewees in the context of the larger scholarship on evangelicalism in the 21st Century. References to Kristin DuMez, John Fea, Molly Worthen, David Gushee, Isaac Sharp, and Robert Jones run throughout the book. As a solid piece of journalism (which also includes a memoir), she seeks to understand her journey and not simply to complain about her upbringing.

Her reporting for NPR plays a key role as well. She reported from Charleston following the Mother Immanuel murders. She was at Liberty when Trump gave the commencement address. Remarkably, she was in the room when Trump had his big meeting with evangelical leaders.

There are personal parts of her story that I’ll leave alone for now. They are important but they are hers to share, not mine.

In summary, The Exvangelicals adds to our understanding of the evangelical movement at the end of the 20th Century and how it has been reinterpreted in the last twenty years.³ Preorder your hard copy now and you can get a signed nameplate!

There’s a great deal more to explore in the book. Sarah and I have discussed doing to kind of online interaction closer to the book’s release and then sharing the transcript. Also, if you want to know more, you should follow her Substack!

1. These shifts have motivated both my 2014 book and my current one.

2. Her parents were part of the Jesus Movement of the 1970s. As it happens, this is also true for both Sarah Billups and Jon Ward. After my book is finalized, I need to dig more deeply into the linkage between the Jesus Movement and 1980s evangelicalism.

3. She makes frequent use of the word “seismic”, which always reminds me of the earthquake and aftershock analogy used by Robert Putnam and David Campbell in “American Grace.”