How Media Shapes Faith and How We Learn to Walk Away

A conversation with The Exvangelicals author Sarah McCammon

Sarah McCammon, NPR’s National Politics Correspondent, represents what today might be seen as dueling experiences within American Christian evangelicalism. I’d argue her perspective is simply deeply informed.

She grew up a child of faith in a family that received James Dobson’s publications but also watched Meet the Press. She interned for Phyllis Schlafly when she was 16. During her time at a Christian college, McCammon began to struggle, witnessing the enthusiasm our evangelical president, George W. Bush, had over bombing Iraq. So began a theological fracture with her childhood ideology. Journalism became a place for her to seek objectivity.

Then she wound up reporting on the 2016 election, covering Donald Trump at a time when jeering at reporters was a fan-favorite activity at his rallies. Faithful people with whom McCammon would have identified as a kid, whose beliefs she understood in a fundamental way, could be skeptical of her. One-on-one some would talk to her, but others were angry, and as a group could wax disgusted with her kind—journalists.

Sarah McCammon

recently published her book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, which was an instant New York Times bestseller. The book itself is a window into the generations who have stepped away from the churches of their youth, with reportage folded through with McCammon’s own story. It’s a sweeping, compelling read, and I’m so grateful she took the time away from her book tour to talk to me about reporting the news, growing up faithful and how her beliefs evolved.

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Readers of In Polite Company are invited to comment on this post or email Sarah Stankorb at sarahstankorb@gmail.com to be entered into a drawing to receive a free copy of The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon. Please comment or email by June 11 at midnight to enter!

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The following interview has been edited for space.

Sarah Stankorb: I’m thinking a lot about the flow of information (and disinformation) in Christian communities lately. How would you describe your family’s news resources?

Sarah McCammon: We watched the nightly news quite a bit, but I was taught skepticism of it. Early on, I remember hearing my family talk about how the media would always underreport the size of anti-abortion protests. We watched the Sunday morning shows, but we spent a lot of time listening to Christian radio and conservative radio. There were a couple of Christian stations in Kansas City that were on pretty much all the time in the car or in the kitchen while my mom was preparing meals and things. We did sometimes listen to NPR. I have an anecdote in the book where I remember my father calling it “national perverted radio” making fun of it, but also listening to it. I remember this sense that it was very liberal, and we didn't really fully trust it.

I was born in the early 80s, so about the time I was hitting tween-age in the 90s was when my dad started listening to Rush Limbaugh a lot. He had a friend from church who was really into it, too. I remember being a little surprised because Rush seemed kind of crass. We weren’t even allowed to say like, farts, you know, but Rush sometimes cursed. It was kind of honestly fun to listen to. He had this singer that came on and would sing popular songs and parody them in the voice of Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton. It's not as if we were totally cut off from pop culture, but it was just really carefully curated, and there were lots of rules about what we couldn't see. Christian media was prioritized for sure.

Stankorb: I think you mentioned Brio magazine in your book? I wonder about media directed at you as a young, evangelical woman.

McCammon: Yeah! I started getting Brio magazine from Focus on the Family when I was probably 13 and was really excited about it. All through high school I looked forward to it every month and it pointed me toward other Christian media, like Christian contemporary music. And, of course, books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye from Josh Harris and Elisabeth Elliot's Passion and Purity. At home, we had lots of apologetics books, The Case for Christ, Evidence That Demands a Verdict. I think we had The Late Great Planet Earth eschatology books. And then there were a lot of classics like Little Women and Little House on the Prairie, you know, secular stuff from a bygone era that was seen as more acceptable. It’s not as if I wasn't allowed to be exposed to anything secular. But the lens we were seeing everything through rejected anything that didn't stand up to “biblical scrutiny.”

Stankorb: I've been thinking a lot about being a witness. There’s a religious sort of ‘witness to the world,’ but it’s also used in terms of witnessing history. You were part of this era of evangelicalism that was supposed to be the Joshua generation, populating halls of power for Jesus. And in many ways, you were there. You have those awkward 1990s memories of processing the Ken Starr report with your mother, and of volunteering in a pregnancy crisis center. Then you were there at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies as an adult reporter. I think it’s such an interesting perspective, growing up to be comfortable in these surroundings, raised to be skeptical of secular culture, but then winding up with the tools to be skeptical of those powerful leaders. What’s it like witnessing and experiencing all that?

McCammon: You know, I think for me, my disillusionment started long before Trump, but I think Trump has been sort of a catalyzing figure for these kinds of open reflections and conversations that I'm writing about.

First off, I got such mixed messages about what I should be and do as a woman. On the one hand, my mom really stressed being a traditional wife and mother, that was essential, I was encouraged to go to college. But sometimes when I threw out potential careers I wanted to do, there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm. It was kind of like, ‘Well, that might take away from your children and family.’ But the one thing I was consistently encouraged to be interested in was politics. And my dad encouraged me in journalism as well, because he was in the communications field. One review of the book noted, that for girls, and even in the evangelical world, there were such prescribed gender roles, but being part of this Joshua generation mission, being sort of a culture warrior, that was an avenue that was open to everybody.

Stankorb: So when did your faith perspective start to change?

McCammon: I think, in retrospect, by the time I got to college, and I did go to a Christian college, I was wrestling with a lot of things about both my theology and to some degree, my politics. The Iraq War started during the end of my college experience—

Stankorb: I am one year older than you. So, we have the same timeline here—

McCammon: So you know. I mean, I think the Iraq War kind of made me question. I was sort of naively surprised by the enthusiasm of our evangelical president for bombing people, and I didn't know much about foreign policy, but I remember struggling to know what to make of that. But I had lots of theological issues with evangelicalism and all of that taken together shook me.

I think a big reason I did go into journalism was to get away from being part of an ideological project. I didn't want to be a culture warrior. I didn't want to be in charge of trying to persuade people to think as I did, because I just really didn't know what I thought about a lot of things. I think I could see that by about 22. And so journalism felt like a safe space in a way because it was a space where I was supposed to listen to everybody's point of view, and ask a lot of questions. As much as journalism may fail at that sometimes, and I know, people will probably laugh, but I went into journalism, because I didn't want to be ideological. I know how, especially some people will hear that, but it's true. I saw it as a space that was supposed to be cordoned off from ideological objectives, at least the kind of journalism I wanted to do. I just didn't want to be in a space that was promoting a certain point of view, you know? And maybe it was naive to think that any media outlet does that perfectly. But I really wanted to be in conversation with all kinds of people.

Stankorb: Speaking of different types of people, well, this is only a semi-related tack, but your stories about your grandfather were such a beautiful part of the book. As a neurosurgeon and a scientist, he had a worldview different from your family. I thought it was a lovely bookend where you began feeling like you needed to be the one to save him and teach him, and you were the one who changes in the end. Can you talk to me about why knowing him and having him in your life was so important and pivotal?

McCammon: I mean, I was to such a large extent in a bubble. Pretty much all my friends were from church or Christian school. I didn't know very many people who didn't believe like us. And I knew that we believed we needed to share the gospel and help people find salvation. But the most urgent focus of that concern was our extended family on my father's side who were not “saved.” And for some reason, my grandpa got most of the attention. I think back to being a child in that environment, and it was really scary and stressful to be told that our relatives were basically in the hands of an angry God, and I did feel a lot of responsibility to pray them into heaven, so to speak. To behave in such a way that they would see how happy and joyful and together our lives were, and they would be drawn to Jesus. It was a heavy burden for a child. I know, my parents didn't intend it that way. They just believed this to be true, but that was the impact.

But my grandfather's existence, as truly one of the most exemplary people I knew—as one of the few who was not with the program—it forced this sort of fissure in my thinking. It forced me to be aware that there was another way to be and another way to see the world. I was being told that the reason scientists denied creationism was because they wanted to deny God and they were looking for an excuse to sin. But over time, it became clear to me that my Grandpa's point of view on science, for example, was the majority point of view. Even though I wasn't able to have a close connection to him as a child, I cared about him. He would come over when I was sick. I had asthma pretty badly as a kid, and I would sometimes be sick in bed, for a few days. I remember him coming over with games, and it was clear that he cared about me, even though we didn't spend a lot of time together. When I was on my own and able to forge my own independent connection to him, we had some really significant conversations about life and spirituality and how he saw the world. I think that connection just gradually opened my mind up a little bit—and my heart.

Stankorb: You did so much reporting for this book. I wonder in your opinion—and I have my own thoughts on this—but for exvangelicals, to what extent did the internet help people find words for their experience or find other people dismantling their faith? And how much did the internet allow journalists to understand exvangelicals?

McCammon: Oh, it's been huge. When I was growing up, if you were struggling with your faith, if you left a church, you would be labeled a backslider. We'd be talked about. And that was it. Maybe there were a couple of books out there on atheism, or walking away from the church, but there wasn't much in terms of resources. And I think the thing that the internet has made possible is this incredibly layered and nuanced conversation around deconstruction, which is, you know, a new term that I didn't have when I was, I guess, deconstructing?

People ask me, who are exvangelicals? Are they atheists? Do they find another religious tradition? And where do they go? What do they do? And the answer is all of the above. Everyone's journey is different. But I think that people who have come from this kind of subculture—evangelicalism—with its own kind of shared theology, shared media, shared experiences, and important figures, no one's experiences the same as another person's, but there's really an overlapping subculture that we all have come out of. To be able to talk about that and sort of feel seen by other people who have maybe the same fears, the same struggles with their families, the same theological questions, it’s meaningful.

I see online exvangelical and deconstruction spaces (and I use those terms interchangeably and loosely because it's all kind of a new language for this), but I see people saying ‘I'm uncomfortable with abortion, but I'm trying to figure out, you know, if I shouldn't be.’ That's not a question you can ask in some liberal spaces without getting shouted at. Or maybe questions about sexuality, from people who are just sort of stepping out into the dating pool for the first time after purity culture. Those are very vulnerable questions to ask and to be able to reach out to other people and say ‘how did you think about this,’ that’s something that just wasn't available before the internet in this way.

I first heard the term exvangelical (coined by

Blake Chastain

) when I was reporting a story at the end of the Trump campaign in 2016, about how evangelical women were responding to the Access Hollywood Video, and somebody threw that term out there. And I thought, wow, you know, that kind of says something very succinctly. Like, I used to be an evangelical, and for whatever reason, that word doesn't work for me anymore. I think just even having that kind of language now, which really did arise online, is pretty powerful for a lot of people.

Stankorb: You did a really beautiful job capturing the anxiety of evangelicalism, and a lot of that is fear of people you love or people you don't even know going to hell. But there’s the other side of the anxiety, which is building enough of a Christian population base by having as many Christian babies as you can, or fear over racial integration, or fear concerning sexual desire, and there’s just so much to worry about. I guess when so much is black and white and the risk of getting things wrong is eternal damnation, people will be worried. As you get to the later chapters and talk about exvangelicals deconstructing and dealing with religious trauma, can you talk a bit about how that anxiety peels back or reconstitutes as people reshape their beliefs?