NPR's Sarah McCammon out with 'The Exvangelicals'

S1: Welcome in San Diego , it's Jade Hindman. Today , NPR's Sarah McCammon joins us to talk about her new book on the evangelical movement. We'll talk about what that is and talk about her own personal story with the evangelical church. This is Midday Edition , connecting our communities through conversation. Welcome back to Midday Edition. I'm your host , Jade Hindman. There's a growing movement of millennials raised in evangelical families who are leaving that world behind to build new identities and belief systems. Sarah McCammon is the first author to explore that generational tipping point. Her new book , The Evangelical Is Loving , Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church , is out now. If you're a frequent listener of ours , you'll probably recognize Sarah's voice. She's a national political correspondent for NPR and co-host of the NPR politics podcast. She joins us now. Thanks for joining us , Sarah.

S2: Thanks so much for having me.

S1: So glad to have you here. So , Sarah , take us back to the beginning. Tell me about your early childhood growing up in Kansas City , Missouri , where your story begins.

S2: So I was born , um , two weeks after Ronald Reagan was sworn in , approximately. Um , this was kind of the height of the at a moment when the evangelical right was on the rise and when there was just a a huge array of evangelical books , magazines , radio shows , TV shows , an entire subculture available to families like mine. And that was really what shaped my childhood. I went to Christian school. I went to an evangelical church. I really knew hardly anybody who wasn't an evangelical Christian , except for some members of my extended family who I was very concerned about because they weren't in line with our beliefs. And the , you know , the evangelicalism that I grew up in , the church I grew up in was it was charismatic. We believed in speaking in tongues and and we believed in miracles. The school , the Christian school I went to was a little bit different. There are lots of different sort of strands within evangelicalism , but we all adhered to basically the same idea , which is that we needed to we had the truth from God and we needed to reach the world with it. Wow.

S1: Wow.

S2: Um , the idea that God loved us , that Jesus loved us , that we could go to heaven and be with God after we died , and that there was sort of a path for how to live a good life. All of those things were very appealing to me , but there were a lot of things that were really scary , too. And the idea that if you didn't believe , truly believe , if you didn't believe the right things , um , that you would be condemned by God and that there were lots of people , maybe even most people who were in that category , I found that very upsetting. And one of those people was my grandfather. He's a central character in this book , and he was one of the few people I know , I knew growing up who didn't share our faith. I talk about in the book. You know , almost every night at dinner , we would pray over our spaghetti or lasagna or whatever my mom had made. And we there was a good Midwestern meals , and we would pray for grandpa's soul. We would pray that he would get saved. And that was a source of a lot of fear for me and a lot of anxiety. The idea that my grandpa was going to hell if we didn't persuade him to accept our faith , and that lots of other people were too. And I talk in the book about , you know , evangelicals believe in evangelizing , in reaching out and sharing their faith. And as a child , I felt a lot of pressure to do that. You know , even with the occasional other , you know , people of other faiths or no faith that I would run across at the skating rink or through a program I was part of in high school. And that created a lot of tension and cognitive dissonance for me. There was something about that that never felt quite right. And as I got older , there were other things. Yeah.

S1: Yeah. You mentioned you were born a couple of weeks after Reagan was sworn in.

S2: Um , you know , the majority of the country for , for many years had been white Christians , and that was starting to decline. It's declining much more precipitously now. And. You know , there had been in fairly recent memory moments like the sexual revolution , um , the , the Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion in 1973. And all of those things were of concern to , um , to some evangelicals and something that that many evangelical leaders began to focus the movement on and mobilize them as a political force. And that was certainly a theme of my childhood. Um , it was particularly complicated for my family , given that my grandfather had , uh , come out as gay in around the same time in the 1980s. So my parents were working , you know , for policies that were diametrically opposed to really his wellbeing and , and , and to , um , you know , to , to everything that he stood for. And so for me as a child , it was very confusing to see , uh , to see those tensions and those , those extremely different worldviews in my own family.

S1: Yeah , that's something I can still relate to. But okay , so from this growing movement , right , of evangelicalism , um , to today , where there's this growing movement of evangelicals , which is what your book focuses on , can you define that term and its origins ? For me.

S2: It started out as a hashtag around the time of the rise of the Donald Trump movement. Now , it wasn't just responding to Trump and isn't just responding to Trump. But I think that's been kind of a catalyzing moment as as white evangelicals rallied around Donald Trump , who seemed to stand for things that were so antithetical to to what Christianity and evangelicalism has , has claimed to stand for , including family values. Um , I began noticing people speaking out , usually an online spaces , and talking about how they were processing that evangelical identity that they'd been raised with. And , you know , I just started paying attention to these online spaces more and more because I had my own backstory with evangelicalism , you know , many , many years predating that moment. And I just became fascinated with the way these conversations were playing out in public. Some of them did center around things like LGBTQ identity. Others were around things like , how do you think about people of other faiths or no faith at all , and many other issues. But there were all of these sort of , um , sources of cognitive dissonance that were driving people to reexamine their faith. And the internet social media podcast provided a place to have those conversations that really hadn't existed , uh , before.

S1:

S2: I mean , some of the people I talked to are a bit older , some are younger. But I think as we look at data around , for example , the religious nones in O ness , the group of people who define themselves as nothing at all. That is a trend that is sort of a generational trend. So the younger you get when you look at Americans , the less religious they become. And that's affecting , you know , across particularly across white Christianity , across , I think many religions , it's certainly affecting evangelicalism. But for , for , for this generation , in this moment , I think one thing that's happened is that while 30 years ago , if you left a religious community of any kind , you were kind of on your own. Um , I remember people who had left the church or questioned the faith being described as as backsliders , as , as walking away from God. And in reality , a lot of people , um , are , are simply wrestling with really sincere questions and trying to make sense of what they've been taught and who they want to be. And the internet has provided a space for that. Yeah.

S1: Yeah. And on that point , this concept of home is a theme throughout your book. You write that being an evangelical means leaving behind a community , quote , a home that was our source of comfort as well as pain. I mean , tell me more about that experience.

S2: Well , for me it was it was a really long , slow process. There was not one moment where I said , I'm not an evangelical anymore. There were just a lot of moments where I felt. I felt like I had questions that no one had an answer for. I felt like I had unresolved conflict inside of my soul , really , that I couldn't resolve by just continuing to to ascend to a certain set of beliefs. And I , I wanted most of all to include people that I felt were excluded by my community. And , you know , part of that was my relationship with my grandfather. That was certainly not the only thing , but that was , um , he's a person that humanized for me. He was the first person I knew well who was gay. He was the first person I knew well who was secular. And , you know , he and I had various conversations throughout my , my life. And thankfully he lived a very long life. So I was able to have a relationship with him as an adult and get to know him a little bit better and ask him some really honest questions about his beliefs and his background. And , um , you know , it was it was eye opening for me to discover that even though he didn't believe what we believed , he had thought hard about these things and and had come to his own conclusions. And I think that was something that I just didn't have a category for , because , you know , the idea I was presented with was that people were actively rejecting God , that they wanted to send , that they wanted to rebel. And , you know , for my own experience , it didn't feel that way. I can't tell you how many times in my own life I've prayed and ask God to show me what's true and what's real and , um , have tried to , you know , tried to align my life with what seems true to me. You know , I'm one person. I don't claim any special insight , but I do think that one of the challenging things about some religious communities , certainly not all , is that sometimes questions and dissent are shut down just by the very nature of having having a theology that everyone's supposed to unite around. And so I think that's one of the challenges is sort of figuring out how do you , um , you know , I think we all are trying to make sense of the world in one way or another. I think that's a really common human experience. And if you look around the world , right , there are so many different answers to these big questions that religion poses. And so the tension is between having a community that unites around some shared values and ideas and also having , I think , freedom for individuals to to be who they are and , and , and believe what they believe and be true to that. Um , and that , you know , for me in many ways is still an ongoing process , but I think it's one that that most human beings , if they're thoughtful , have experienced wherever they land , a religious leader spiritually. Yeah.

S1: Yeah. You have quite an impressive career.

S2: And not all religious people think the same way. But , um , certainly how evangelicals think. That was very helpful in my , uh , coverage , I believe , of the 2016 campaign. I felt like I , I knew the questions to ask. I sort of spoke the language of many of these voters I was talking to. And I also think , you know , one of the values I was raised with that I still hold to is the idea that , um , and I'm going to use religious language here , but that everyone is made in the image of God. That is a central belief of Christianity and also of Judaism. And this idea that everyone is important , everyone is special , everyone has value , is something that I hope drives me and that I still believe , however you want to language that idea. Um , and so I , I think that , you know , people , even people I disagree with , even people who've made mistakes are valuable and important. And , um , I hope that informs the way that I approach people when I meet them. And I talk to them and have the privilege of telling their stories.

S1: Your book also discusses racial divisions within evangelical spaces and the evangelical movement.

S2: And , you know , there's some very sad and ugly history , unfortunately , in American Christianity , um , around race and there's , you know , the Southern Baptist Convention , um , was created in part in response to a split in the church over whether or not slavery was okay. Now , the Southern Baptist Convention eventually , I think , in the 1990s , apologized for its support for slavery. But that is a part of the history that's undeniable. And , um , I think that the lived experience that people have obviously shapes the way that they see the world and also the way they see their faith. So , you know , I interviewed people like Doctor Martin , who is a who is a pastor and podcaster and writer and , um , and others who had sort of led this movement called Leave Loud to , to walk away from , from evangelical spaces that felt like they weren't prioritizing issues of racial justice. And this was particularly in response , you know , in partly in response to the Trump movement , but also in response to the the death of George Floyd and and other moments in recent years. Um , and I just felt like it was important to talk about the fact that , I mean , the word white is in the subtitle of my book because black Christians and white Christians , white Christians and Christians of color who may share similar theological beliefs often if you look at , you know , voting data have very different political priorities. And I think that is because of those very different lived experiences.

S1: You know , when you're talking about decolonizing Christianity , um , there are some historians who say that much of it is is rooted in white supremacy.

S2: And , you know , Doctor Thisbe told me that people in his circles talk about decolonizing rather than deconstructing. You know , a lot of white Christians talk about this sort of it's sort of this self-reflective , maybe internally focused process. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But decolonizing has more of an idea of looking. I think it's systems and structures and looking at ways that maybe , um , maybe Christianity is used to prop up an or not necessarily Christianity , but ways that religious ideas can be used to prop up unjust systems. And also , I think on the same token , asking this question of who's voices are we platforming in religious spaces ? And therefore , how are we understanding our theology differently than we might have if we were giving equal voice to everybody ? And I think this is a question that comes up with gender , too. A lot of a lot of evangelical spaces are very male dominated and white male dominated. And so I think intrinsically , when you exclude or marginalize certain voices , you miss out on a , on a big piece of the conversation. That's something some of these , you know , evangelicals are realizing and talking about and thinking about , um , as part of this larger process of rethinking their faith.

S3: Sarah , I feel like our conversation is.

S1: Is just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much to dig into with this book. Uh , thank you so much for joining us.

S2: Thank you so much for all your great questions.

S1: I've been speaking with Sarah McCammon , author of The Evangelical Loving , Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. Her book is out now. Sarah is national political correspondent for NPR and co-host of the NPR politics podcast. Sarah will also be joining us here at Kpbs in the Conrad Priebus Media Complex on Wednesday , April 24th at 6 p.m. to discuss her book , followed by an audience Q&A. It's something you won't want to miss , so please join us. You can find details at pbs.org.