“For All Of The Pain Of That World You Came From, It's Still Home”

Haley Swenson: I’m coming to this book as an ex-Mormon—another high-demand religion—so a lot of what I read resonated and felt very familiar to me. Especially as somebody who has taken a lot of peace from interacting with the ex-Mormon community, I could relate to what you’ve written about exvangelicals and the communities they’ve formed.

But you also seem to have written this book for people who are outside the religion, who don't have as much familiarity with high-demand religions, exvangelicals, or evangelical Christianity. What are you hoping people looking at this issue from the outside-in will take away?

Sarah McCammon: I want people from outside the evangelical world to take away a deeper understanding both of what it's like on the inside, in an intimate, granular, personal way, and also develop a better understanding of why things are the way they are.

I’ve spent a lot of time outside of the evangelical world, privately figuring out my own beliefs before I wound up staring down the faith’s barrel as a reporter covering the 2016 campaign. I was face to face with a lot of questions: Who are Evangelicals? Why are they so influential? Why do they believe what they believe?

I’ve read it argued recently that the evangelical movement has become as much a political movement as a religious one. I’m curious if you agree with that and can say what is at the core of evangelical thought in 2024.

There's been a political project attached to evangelicalism for a long time—certainly my entire life. I start the book in the early eighties when I was born, and also when Reagan took office, and the Moral Majority was on the rise. But politics wasn't always the center of evangelicalism, not by a long shot.

Evangelicalism is by nature a decentralized, non-hierarchal movement and, therefore difficult to define. It’s long been a contested term that pollsters, sociologists, historians, and journalists continue to debate. It has cultural and political overtones in addition to theological ones. And, as Kristin Kobes DuMez has written, evangelicals themselves, or those who call themselves such, have debated how central theology should be to that definition versus cultural and demographic factors like race. When I talk about evangelicalism, I’m talking about theologically conservative Protestants. They’re people who believe in a direct relationship with the Bible, in reading the Bible for yourself, and understanding it for yourself. That's a very Protestant idea, but it's one that evangelicals embrace very strongly.

Now, that's the official line. In reality, if you come up with an interpretation that strays from mainstream thought in your church or evangelical community, there might be consequences for that. From that, there is a strong emphasis on evangelizing, on spreading the Gospel, the “good news,” as it's called, to other people.

All of those things are quite different from a specific policy position on, say, abortion or gay marriage, but those ideas have increasingly become fused in it in a way that a lot of people—observers, academics, and people I interviewed for the book—would say, has become almost inseparable from a political project at this point.

Bottom line—definitions are murky and messy, religious movements interact with and overlap with one another, and there is variability and a spectrum of practice and belief within any large movement or group of people.

Most people are familiar with the default evangelical positions on gay marriage and abortion. At the Better Life Lab, we cover the intersection of work, gender, and family policy. There’s been a renewed effort these past several years to build a big tent to win policies the U.S. is behind on, that advocates see as very pro-family: affordable child care, paid family and medical leave, for example.

I'm wondering how you think the evangelical experience fits in with those conversations. Is there potential for these two worlds to interact?

Recently, we have seen more conversation around the idea of Republicans [and] conservatives supporting some of these policies. Now, often there are limitations to that, and there are differences of opinion about how to do that. I wrote about how after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, there’s been an increase in messaging from some in the anti-abortion movement about the need for funding child care, postpartum care, and services for women and families after birth. But there were often really deep ideological differences about how to do it. For example, some of those proposals would fund crisis pregnancy centers, which counsel women against abortion, rather than, say, funding public health centers.

To step back from that, it's worth understanding how the evangelical movement that I grew up [in] regarded gender and the family. It was fundamentally a throwback, traditional view that would not have been that outside the mainstream decades before I was born. But by the eighties and nineties, the country was rapidly evolving, and in many ways, evangelicals were trying to hold on to a bygone era.

There was great emphasis on the family, much of which could be very wholesome, but [it] also came with a lot of strings and a narrow definition of what the family was. It meant a man and a woman who were married who didn't have sex before they were married, who produced children. Typically the father was the leader of the home, and he was seen as the spiritual leader as well as the financial provider. The mother was the nurturer, the caregiver, the homemaker. There wasn't an out-and-out ban on women working in the circles I grew up in, but it was secondary to motherhood and discouraged.

The goal was for women’s work to support this larger family project, and not that the woman herself was experiencing self-actualization or achievement. Growing up, I wanted to have children, and I do have children, but I always knew I wanted to do other things, too. That's one of the tension points for me. The book is really organized around these points of cognitive dissonance and tension that many people feel wind up pushing them out of the evangelical space.

Right. And the book is not just about evangelicals, but specifically about evangelicals who have left the faith like yourself, the ex-evangelicals, or exvangelicals. Who are exvangelicals, and what’s going on in these emerging communities?

I define exvangelicals loosely, in the same way I define evangelicals as conservative Protestants, as people who've moved away from that world for one reason or another. Most of them have had some moments, or many moments, of cognitive dissonance, where something just doesn't add up. Something doesn't feel right morally, ethically, or even just factually.

I organized the book around various themes. One of those is science. I write about my own experience, going to creationist church seminars and classes at school, and gradually coming to realize that didn't align with what most people, including scientists of all religions, believed or thought to be true. For exvangelicals, there are these moments, whether it's meeting somebody who's gay, or meeting somebody of a different faith, or just that something doesn’t feel right. It doesn't feel like who I am or who I wanna be.

Exvangelicals that I've met had these experiences throughout their lives. And what's different today is that the internet makes it possible to find one another and talk about these things. That wouldn't have been possible when I was in my early twenties and trying to figure out what I really think. What I discovered in recent years, long after I initially went through that experience on my own, was that people from the evangelical world were having these kinds of conversations out loud and in public, using hashtags like exvangelical and deconstruction.

A lot of it was catalyzed by the Trump movement. That moment forced a big conversation about what evangelicalism was and where it was going. This is happening at a time when the country as a whole is becoming less religious, when white Christianity is on the decline, and evangelicals are definitely a piece of that.

I was really interested in exvangelicals’ attempts to strike a delicate balance with regards to family, keeping some connections to their past through their relationships with them, as well as forging something new in their own family lives. That feels just like such a familiar story, even beyond people leaving high-demand religions, and I think many of our readers have similar stories. What have you learned about that journey in your reporting?

I really appreciate you recognizing that because I think it's harder for people on the outside to understand. I mean, some people look at evangelicals and go, “Why do these people act or believe this way?” And that’s easy to say if your entire community isn't the evangelical community, if you don't risk losing the affection of your parents and your friends, and maybe your spouse and your church, by breaking from the fold in some way.

There is a lot of fear of leaving or of going against the community, and [it’s] because that often comes with repercussions and a lot of pain. People navigate it in different ways. Some people do become fully estranged from family members, which is very sad.

More often what I found is that there's a boundary setting that happens. It might mean that you just have to tell people in your life there are certain things I'm really not comfortable talking about with you. I love you, but I can't.

Some of the folks I talked to in the book, especially queer folks, come to difficult compromises with their parents. Jeff Chu, who's a friend of mine and a writer whom I wrote about in one of the chapters, talked about going to his graduation from seminary and having his parents on one side and his husband on another because his parents were unwilling for them to be in the same place. That's a compromise some people would not be willing to accept, and I understand that. But I also don't judge how anybody navigates that really difficult and painful boundary,

Many exvangelicals and others who leave religious communities do so because they feel compelled to because they cannot continue to be their authentic selves; they cannot be aligned with their values and their sense of right and wrong, and their sense of what's true. But leaving means leaving behind a part of yourself, too. Leaving behind the people that formed you, that loved you, that nurtured you. For all of the pain of that world you came from, it's still home.

I’m curious what it’s like for you not to be able to fully walk away from these big questions because of what you report on. I know you’re reporting on the Republican primaries right now. How does your relationship to this religious community and this identity change moving forward?

I love that question, Haley, because it's something I truthfully wrestle with a lot. Like I said, I didn't intend to cover Republican politics. I really became a reporter because I wanted to get away from spaces where I felt like I had to reach a certain conclusion. I was exhilarated in my early twenties by a field where the whole objective was to ask questions and try to understand things. And you were required to seek out multiple points of view.

That was so freeing and exciting, and something I craved after so many years in an environment where our theology was predetermined for us, and you had to work really hard to get your head around it, even if you didn't really feel like you believed in everything.

For many years of my career, I was at local NPR affiliates and covered all kinds of things: water quality in Nebraska, coastal environmental issues in Georgia, and, yes, politics in Iowa.

But in 2015 I got assigned to the Republican primary. Suddenly, I was covering this really historic and surprising primary in which the evangelical vote is the story, and I have not been able to get away from it ever since. Something keeps pulling me back. I'm fascinated by it. I feel like I know what questions to ask. I understand the theology, so I feel like sometimes I can bring a nuance and a level of just deep knowledge that I believe makes me a better reporter.

But there are times I want to go cover, I don't know, is there a puppy beach somewhere? At some point, I’ll need to move on to something else. It is a lot to think about all the time. But for this stage of my career, this feels like where I'm supposed to be. It's where the universe, or God, or whatever, put me, and it's what I'm doing.