New Book “The Exvangelicals:” Inside the Church and The Movement to Leave It

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, next to the United States for an intimate look at the religious group that helped put Donald Trump in the White House back in 2016. White evangelicals. As a political correspondent for NPR, reporter Sarah McCammon has dug into this transformative group and its growing impact on right-wing U.S. politics. In her new book, “The Exvangelicals,” she reveals why a generation of evangelicals are growing up and fleeing the fold, just like she did. And she tells her story to Michel Martin.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Sarah McCammon, thank you so much for joining us.

SARAH MCCAMMON, AUTHOR, “THE EXVANGELICALS:” My pleasure.

MARTIN: One of the things that, you know, fascinated me when I read your book is that — until I read your book, I had no idea of your background. I think, like, you know, most classically trained reporters you don’t put yourself at the forefront of the story. How did it come to you that you had a story, that your own sort of personal journey was part of a bigger picture?

MCCAMMON: I mean, you’re right. And I thought hard about whether I wanted to talk about my personal story. But, you know, I kind of accidentally found myself, in 2016, covering the evangelical movement, which is the movement that I came from, that shaped me. And in many ways, I went into journalism because I wanted to keep myself out of the story. You know, I had grown up in an environment where a lot of people around me, to be quite honest, had a lot of confidence about the answers. And I didn’t always have that same confidence. And I think journalism, in retrospect, was a place where I could ask questions and look for answers rather than try to start with them. So, I want to say that, first of all. But, you know, when I was assigned to cover the 2016 election, I was assigned to cover the Republican primary by NPR. Donald Trump, of course, was, throughout most of that race, the front-runner, even though a lot of people didn’t believe that he would really stay in that position, and so much of the story wound up centering around the white evangelical Republican base. You know, would they accept this, you know, thrice-married, rather brash, often crass person who seemed so antithetical to everything the movement said it stood for? And I did those stories, you know, our colleagues, and I think you did some of those stories about how were white evangelicals responding to Trump, and I covered them just as a journalist, as we always do. But over time, as I thought more about that election and the white evangelical movement and sort of watched the aftermath of that election unfold, I realized that I had a story to tell, and that I had been seeing things throughout that campaign and in the years that followed that resonated with and reminded me of things I saw as a child. And so that’s really, you know, what this book comes from is a desire to integrate my personal story with my professional story, two things that ran headlong into one another in 2016.

MARTIN: So, tell a little bit about how you grew up.

MCCAMMON: Evangelicals really stressed a one-on-one sort of relationship with God, a relationship with Jesus, looking at the bible, opening it up, reading it for yourself, and we believed that we had a message that we needed to share with the world, and we had sort of a vision for how the family should be, and in many cases, how the country should be. You know, that was a lot of the messaging that I heard growing up. And, you know, we saw most people, frankly, as lost, as fallen. We believe that, you know, there are verses in the bible about only, you know, a narrow path to heaven, and we really believed in that literally, and we believed that most people were not on that path, and it was our job to help them find it. And so, for me, you know, and I should say that evangelicalism is a very big movement. A lot of different types of churches fall into that, and it’s — there’s a spectrum of belief in practice, and so what I’m saying might not apply to everyone. But I think most of the evangelical kids at my generation grew up with similar influences, a similar sort of concept of the world, similar views of human sexuality. And, you know, we were taught that marriage is between a man and a woman, that the rise of gay rights was sort a sign of a falling away of the country from being a Christian nation. Certainly, abortion rights and the changing roles of women were part of that. And that was something that many evangelicals in my community were actively fighting against. And that message was very much tied up with the spiritual and religious message that I was hearing in church and in my Christian school, for example.

MARTIN: You talk about being afraid a lot. Like what were you afraid of? The — you — sort of this sense of living well on earth was also infused with fear. What was the fear of?

MCCAMMON: You know, again, there’s this very sort of black and white, literalistic, you’re in or you are out, kind of very binary view of your world in many ways. You know, we had the absolute truth from God and we knew it for sure, and that meant that people who didn’t agree with us or see the world the same way, that was described in a lot of different ways. It might be described as not having their heart right with God, as having not accepted Jesus, of not following the right path, not walking with the lord is even a phrase that be applied to people who were, you know, sort of in the church but maybe not expressing it enough or not showing through their behavior in ways that people in that church thought was adequate, that they were part of the — you know, in-the-fold. And so, there was a lot of fear. There was a fear of stepping out of line of angering God, of displeasing God and ultimately, of going to hell. I mean we — you know, that hellfire and brimstone imagery that you associate, you know, maybe with sort of old-timey creatures, that was a big part of my life. And, you know, something I talk about in the book is the fact that while most people I knew were evangelical Christians, I was kind of deliberately and intentionally surrounded by evangelicals at my Christian school and my church and so forth. One of the few people I knew who was not was my own grandfather, and we were very worried for him. I would lie in bed at night. I talk about this in the book, just, you know, fearing for his soul, afraid that he was going to go to hell forever. And that — you know, I think that kind of thinking, it shaped a lot of us who grew up in this movement.

MARTIN: So, fast forward, when did you see cracks in the dam? When did it start to break for you?

MCCAMMON: You know, people often ask me this, like, what was the moment? And there wasn’t one moment. And I think for many of the people I interviewed, it was the same. There were many moments. There are many little things that just kind of felt like they didn’t add up or moments of exposure to people who were different, who didn’t quite fit the mold of what we were told the world should be like or was like. And again, my grandfather was a really big part of that for me. I always struggled with the idea that there was something wrong with him, you know, both because he wasn’t a Christian and also because, as I talk about in the book, he had come out — after my grandmother passed away in the ’80s, he’d come out as gay, late in life. And that was a source of a lot of conflict and tension in my family. You know, this was, again, a time when, you know, the moral majority was on the rise, the Christian right was rising. My parents were very influenced by people, by, you know, right-wing leaders like James Dobson and Gary Bauer and Ralph Reed and others, and, you know, people who were fighting against same-sex marriage and fighting the abortion rights. And so, the idea that my own grandfather was living in this “lifestyle,” I think was very difficult for my parents. It really clashed with their beliefs. And it meant that we were — my siblings and I didn’t spend a lot of time with him because he was seen as sort of a threatening figure. But I think over time, as I thought more about that and really just kind of felt a pull to have a relationship with my grandfather, and also through, you know, interactions with other kids here and there who were not evangelical Christians.

MARTIN: Like for example you were a Senate page, and talk about that. Like you met a kid there when you are a Senate page. Talk about that experience.

MCCAMMON: Yes, it was a big deal. And in many ways, I — you know, I’m kind of amazed my parents let me do it. I am grateful that they did because I was so sheltered and yet, they let me go off to Washington, D.C. and live in a group of, you know, maybe 40 or so, other Senate pages. And I was, for the first time, in really what was a public school, a small public school provided by the Senate, surrounded by kids from all over the country of different faiths or no faith. I had a Muslim friend for the first time. And that was also a pivotal conversation for me. You know, I talk in the book about this moment that we’re sitting on those Senate steps, and he and I were just sort of sharing about our family backgrounds. His parents had come as refugees from Iran, as immigrants from Iran. And you know, he had grown up in a Muslin family. I grew up in an evangelical Christian family. And we were just kind of trading notes. And, you know, he just looked me in the eye and asked me if I thought that he was going to hell because he was a Muslim. And this was somebody who was my friend, who I cared about, who was just a really lovely person. And I could see even then that he believed what he believed because how he was raised and I believed what I believed as a product of my own culture and community. You know, I could sense that. And it felt wrong to tell him that I thought he was. And so, I just kind of said I didn’t know because I wasn’t ready to answer that question. And I think when I was put with it that directly by somebody I cared about, it really forced me to think about what is it that I really do believe? And so, as I got older, I had many more moments like that. Some of it was around science. You know, I was taught young earth creationism, and that became increasingly hard to believe and to hold on to, even though I was taught that systematically, you know, through textbooks and everything, and my world reinforced it. And it really felt kind of like a betrayal to abandon that idea. But as I learned more about the world, it just became harder and harder to hold on to so many of those ideas. And that’s what I — you know, that’s the experience that many of the ex-evangelicals I interview describe is the sense of cognitive dissonance of trying to align what they experience, perceive, and feel about the world, you know, with this belief system that doesn’t always match that.

MARTIN: But there is a significant group of people that you describe as ex-evangelical for whom Donald Trump was the crisis. Can you talk about that?

MCCAMMON: I think for many people in the movement or with ties to that movement, for whom evangelicalism was their community and their culture, it’s forced a lot of soul searching and it’s catalyzed conversations that, you know, for one thing are possible today in a way they weren’t in the past. You know, something I talk about a lot is the fact that if you left a religious community 20 or 30 years ago, you know, there might be a few books out there, you probably would run into other people who’d had a similar experience, but there was no major organized way to find other people who’d been on that journey, which can be very disorienting and isolating. And today, because of the internet, there are Facebook groups, there are podcasts, there are hashtags, there — you know, ex-evangelical is a hashtag I first came across when covering the 2016 campaign and talking to some white evangelicals who were feeling a bit disillusioned with the alignment of evangelicalism and Trump. But that has — you know, that hashtag has kind of blown up online in recent years. And there are conversations going on around religious disaffiliation across the board. This term deconstruction is kind of a similar related idea that people are talking about. It’s become a language, really, for this experience of rethinking one’s faith background. And I should say that, you know, evangelicals are — evangelicalism has been on sort of a long-term downward trajectory as a percentage of the population for the last 20 years or so. It used to be about one in four people were white evangelicals. Now, that’s more like 14 percent. But that is not unique to evangelicalism. White Christianity as a whole is on the decline, and the country is becoming more secular, perhaps more like Europe. And so, there’s a lot of shifting that’s happening. There’s also some evidence that some people are actually attracted to the evangelical label because of Trump. And so, what seems to be happening is there are a lot of risks in churches and a deepening of some of the sort of political polarization that goes with the evangelical label.

MARTIN: This lingering question exists for many people, which is, how is it that the white evangelical movement can broadly define, understanding everything you said, lots of different people, churches, et cetera, as a part of that. But as a group, hew so closely to somebody who would seem on the surface to be so antithetical to the things that they claim to profess.

MCCAMMON: I think there are two major answers to that question. The first is pragmatic and instrumental. Evangelicals in 2016 saw Trump as someone who would deliver on their goals. And he did in many cases, right with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and so forth. And they see him as someone who will continue to stand up for them, to stand up for their movement. The second part of that answer, and it’s related to the first, is the fact that, you know, if you look at some of the messaging around America, and I outline a lot of this in my book, the idea that evangelicals — many evangelicals hold and have for a long time, is that America is a Christian nation. It was founded as a Christian nation and it has moved away from God and from Christianity. And so, you know, when recently Trump held up that bible that he was hawking on Truth Social and said, we’re under siege, we’re going to bring Christianity back, that message resonates with evangelicals. They don’t care too much, I don’t think, about the fact that Trump is obviously not a deeply religious person. Now, there’ve been some attempts to suggest that he is, but I don’t think most evangelicals believe that. And if you look at polling by groups like Pew, most white evangelicals who support Trump don’t see him as deeply devout, but that’s not the point. The point is that he is a champion for their movement. He speaks their language and he has, from the beginning, sought them out, made them a priority and said what they wanted to hear. And in many cases, delivered on what he wanted them to do. And that seems to be enough for a majority of white evangelicals.

MARTIN: Are exvangelicals, as you’ve described them and as others have described them, do — are they emerging as a political force in any direction?

MCCAMMON: I think they could be. I think it’s early to say, and I think people who have left religion in part because of disaffection with some of the politicization of religion, both ex-evangelicals and some former Catholics, they form a pretty big group of people. And there’s a host of reasons why people leave. A lot of it — some of it has to do with just simply not believing the things that their churches teach. But the polling I’ve seen from groups like the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that particularly the treatment of LGBTQ people by much of the Christian right is a major factor for particularly a lot of younger people disaffiliating from their churches. And, you know, if you take this group on the whole of people who call themselves Nones, N-O-N-E-S, or nothing at all, they are a group that leans left. They tend to vote for Democrats, but they’re also less politically engaged than white evangelicals. So, what you have is maybe a big group of people that’s sort of loosely connected in the sense that they’ve left religion maybe partly for political reasons, but they don’t seem to be organized yet around a common goal. I think that’s the challenge for political organizers, you know, that white evangelicals, while they are a shrinking part of the population, remain a very politically engaged and unified voting bloc. And that’s really what Donald Trump saw and tapped into. Now, where that goes long-term, I think is a fascinating question because there is so much that’s in flux right now when it comes to American Christianity and American religion in general.

MARTIN: One of the other things that can be really intense is that interior world of disengaging from what you know and what you grew up knowing and believing. I just wanted to ask, if you don’t mind, like, is that a continuing source of struggle?

MCCAMMON: Well, I think the tension is sort of sorting through the things that you love and believe and then sifting through those things and preserving them while also opening, you know, and expanding. I mean, I think, for me, my own religious sort of identity has changed because I wanted to be able to include people that I felt I couldn’t include in the world that I was brought up in, people like my grandfather and like my friend who came from a Muslim family. I wanted to include those people. I wanted to love them. I wanted to see them as just as valid as me. And that necessitated a shift in my own thinking, but that shift, and not just for me, for many people I talk to, it can be very isolating and scary because it means — you know, it sorts of leads to the question of, well, if I change this part of me, then what else changes? And then what do I really know? What do I hold on to? And, you know, I think that, yes, to answer your question, it’s still — there’s still attention for me. But ultimately, you know, that question of what do I think and how do I want to live is between either, you know, us and ourselves, or maybe ourselves in God, if you’re somebody who believes in God. But that’s, I think one of the things that I hope to accomplish with this book is just describing the fact that this journey is a challenging one for a lot of people, and that finding other people who are on a similar journey, regardless of where they arrive at the end, can be very empowering and very comforting.

MARTIN: Sarah McCammon, thank you so much for talking with us.

MCCAMMON: Thank you.