REVIEW: The Exvangelicals

There’s more than one way to deconstruct

The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon. St. Martin’s Press, 2024. 320 pp., $30.00

In a podcast interview in December 2023, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul reflected on the value of lived experience. Lived experience, she suggested, is just a new way of saying “experience”—or, as her interviewer Meghan Daum concurred, it is “anecdotal evidence.” Just because you lived through something does not make it authoritative. And yet, it doesn’t nullify it either. 

The question of the value of lived experience was on my mind as I was reading NPR journalist Sarah McCammon’s new book, The Exvangelicals. The book is, first and foremost, autobiographical. It is anchored in McCammon’s own lived experience of growing up in a conservative evangelical household in the 1980s and 1990s, attending a charismatic megachurch, and then walking away from evangelicalism as an adult when she concluded that the theological, scientific, and political views she was originally taught simply did not hold up to scrutiny. Complementing the story are extensive interviews that McCammon conducted with others who have had experiences very similar to her own. But is this vast body of collected experiences still “anecdotal evidence” or is it an authoritative portrait of a movement in irredeemable crisis?  

McCammon’s list of accusations against evangelicalism is lengthy. It includes anti-intellectualism and racism, which she documents in her critique of homeschooling curricula and apologetics arguments that she and others she knew had to memorize. She is also bothered by the exclusionary claims of evangelicalism—that only believers can be saved. She recalls a conversation with a Muslim friend who had immigrated to the United States from Iran. When he asked her point-blank one day whether she believed he would go to Hell because he is not a Christian, a shaken McCammon realized that while this should have been an easy question to answer based on what she had been taught, she did not believe that answer. “Suddenly, everything that felt wrong about the belief system I’d been told to promote crystallized in my mind.” On a related note, McCammon relates how much her church’s teaching about Hell, dispensationalism, and the rapture terrified her and others of her generation as children. These fears play a role in her discussion of religious trauma later in the book. 

She is likewise critical of evangelicalism’s teachings on sexuality, gender, and family. How, she wonders, could she condemn her kind but atheist and openly gay grandfather—the family member who most supported her as an adult and (unlike her parents) responded kindly to her divorce? Indeed, evangelicalism’s opposition to homosexuality, gay marriage, and abortion is one of McCammon’s recurring arguments against the movement. Also, McCammon is highly critical of a record of abuse in evangelical churches. Finally, while the election of Donald Trump in 2016 came long after she had left evangelicalism, it sealed the deal, in a way, for McCammon, by showing that only something rotten to the core could have produced such terrible fruit.

McCammon’s narrative and the personal stories of those she interviewed in the process of writing this book reveal real sorrow of real people who deserve compassion. But there is a conflation of categories in the accusations that McCammon and her fellow interviewees present against evangelicalism. This is important, because disentangling these categories allows for a more sympathetic reading of the book. Specifically, some of McCammon’s accusations involve categorical truths that are incontestable. For instance, abuse and abuse coverup of the sort discovered in the SBC in 2022 are morally wrong. These are not just theological issues, although they have obvious theological implications. Many of the wrongs documented in the SBC report, in fact, are illegal. And yet other accusations that McCammon levels against evangelicalism are not as clear-cut as she seems to think. 

She is no theologian, yet she takes a casually subjective stance on a number of important theological issues without even realizing that she is doing so. This is the case, for instance, with her claims about salvation or her support of abortion and gay marriage. Language of feeling rather than thinking permeates the book—the feeling she repeatedly brings up about different people, interactions with whom led her to conclude that contrary to the teachings of her childhood church, kind and good people who are atheists cannot possibly go to Hell. 

These are powerful theological claims that may make little to no sense to an unbeliever, but they are also basic claims of Christianity in general—not just evangelicalism. Christianity, whether evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, or even (to some varying extent) mainline Protestant, relies on historical truth claims that have always called believers to obedience and action. By opposing some of these theological claims McCammon is not just opposing evangelicalism but the fundamental claims of Christian belief. 

Separating these two types of arguments—condemnation of evangelicals for poor behavior and condemnation of theology with which McCammon does not agree—in a book that makes bold truth claims is important. After all, judgment is on the line: Is evangelicalism completely rotten? Does it just need to die already, so that something better might be reborn from its ashes with thoughtful exvangelicals at the helm, the way McCammon and those she interviewed seem to agree? Or, indeed, might some of the theological claims of evangelicalism and, really, Christianity be true, contrary to what McCammon thinks? Furthermore, could it be that another, healthier kind of evangelicalism is out there beyond McCammon’s familiar charismatic circles? 

McCammon’s experience of many facets of evangelicalism is a common one—no question about it. For analysis of the political connection of evangelicals to Trump, we need look no further than John Fea’s book on the subject, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Likewise for McCammon’s experience with dispensationalism. As Daniel G. Hummel argues in his recent book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, this doctrine and an obsession with the end times has held enormous sway over evangelicalism for much of McCammon’s life.

And yet, in my thirteen years in evangelical churches, I have never heard this particular teaching in church, except by way of criticism of an unhealthy obsession with the end times. The same applies, in fact, to McCammon’s other arguments. Evangelicalism is a big tent that encompasses more theological diversity than this book, which never even mentions the Presbyterian Church in America, for instance, suggests. The cultural uniformity that McCammon sees in evangelicalism is also less cohesive, if one looks at a broader array of church traditions. As a homeschooling mother and academic with an Ivy League Ph.D., I am about as far from anti-intellectual as can be. I also consider myself a conservative evangelical and have been happily a part of gender-complementarian churches now for the entirety of my life as a Christian. Most people in my conservative evangelical circle of friends are never-Trumpers and have been deeply worried about the anti-democratic tendencies of the Trump movement. Finally, the churches of which I have been a part have been devoted to care and service for each other—the opposite of a culture of power trips and abuse. Still, if lived experience is not authoritative, that is equally true for my defense of evangelicalism as it is for McCammon’s critiques of the movement. 

But I am not alone. Several leading evangelicals have published serious book-length condemnations of some aspects of evangelicalism just in the past year—yet they remain faithful believers, people who love God just as deeply as ever, even as they have been deeply hurt by other believers. Their ranks include Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief Russell Moore, literary critic Karen Swallow Prior, and beloved women’s Bible teacher Beth Moore. Fighting against abuse in the SBC and opposing Trump’s language and actions of abuse against women especially, all three found themselves pushed out of their former circles after 2016 by those who chose to embrace an orthodoxy of politics over an orthodoxy of theology. And yet, in their sorrow over this breaking of long-term relationships and friendships, each of these three has continued to cling to what they know is true: the gospel.

There is, it appears, more than one way to deconstruct one’s past. Born in 1981, McCammon is exactly my age. After her decades of deconstructing her evangelical childhood, she has now landed, through her second husband, in progressive Judaism—although, she notes, while she feels closest to God now when she prays in her husband’s synagogue, she has not formally converted. By contrast, while I grew up in a secular Jewish family, first in Russia and then in Israel, a period of crisis the year I turned thirty brought me out of secular Judaism into evangelical Christianity, where I have happily been ever since. It might be easy to brush aside my story as a bizarre exception that proves nothing. But to this I respond with another curious fact: McCammon and I are both also the same age as another individual born in 1981 and whose story, I think, is significant to bring into this conversation: the journalist, historian of evangelicalism, and recent convert to conservative evangelicalism—Molly Worthen.

Worthen’s highly regarded 2013 book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, is a hard-hitting critique of certain aspects of evangelicalism, including anti-intellectualism. Thus it is understandable that the news of her conversion made big waves in May 2023, surprising many. Why would a historian of evangelicalism, someone who had spent two decades researching the movement, warts and all—especially the warts, in fact—suddenly convert to evangelical Christianity? Presumably it’s the same reason I converted and the same reason that people like Russell Moore, Beth Moore, or Karen Swallow Prior continue to believe. So what is this reason?

In his breathtaking memoir, Everything Sad Is Untrue, convert Daniel Nayeri, who as child escaped from Iran with his sister and their mother under threat of death, when their mother’s conversion became known to the secret police, tries to explain why his mother would have renounced a comfortable and well-off life for her and her children in the country of her birth, just to become a destitute refugee in America: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it.” 

And that is the point. Every believer’s story hinges on it. 

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (forthcoming, IVP Academic, 2024). She is Book Review Editor for Current, where she also edits The Arena blog.