The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The author read this audiobook herself and did a good job. It recounts her own history being raised by parents in the white evangelical Christian church. Her childhood sounds like an absolute nightmare, one of constant fear: fear of doing something, saying something, looking some way, even thinking about something that somehow will cause her to prevent her from going to heaven, or maybe sending someone else to hell or cause some other form of torment. She later, as an adult, left the evangelical church, hence the title of the book, but the teachings she had have clearly caused her lifelong pain and stress, not to mention loss of normal family relationships. Yet she hasn’t left Christianity. In this respect it resembles another book I read a few years ago: Educated a book written by a woman raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family.
This book, though, is more than that. The author is an NPR reporter and the book is to a large extant an investigative report. She has interviewed many other exvangelicals and religious scholars and reported on their experiences and opinions. The overall message of the book is an important one – that the evangelical doctrine is harmful and now even more dangerous due its linking itself to the far right white nationalist movement, especially to Donald Trump. This message seems to be universal from everyone who left the evangelical movement and from outsiders who have studied it or otherwise experienced it firsthand through family, etc.
While I applaud the the message and the generally excellent writing, I find the style of writing a bit preachy (note of irony there) and a bit too “woke” sounding, which can be offputting. She uses words or terms that one hears all the time on NPR but almost nowhere else and seems unaware that it sounds that way. One such example is saying LGBTQ every single time instead of gay or bi. Five syllables instead of one. It sounds ridiculous when spoken, and (gasp!) she leaves off the +! Heaven forbid (pun intended) that she should leave off some self-identified sexual minority even once. The book also becomes quite repetitive because the stories of her interviewees or sources are so similar. Still, it’s an important book for its content and I found it fascinating while at the same time horrifyingly sad.