Episode #63: Banned Books: The Exvangelicals, with Sarah McCammon, part 2 of 2
There's a lot of memoirs, social media comments, and dialogue about leaving the evangelical church. However, as our guest, NPR National Correspondent Sarah McCammon, says, "you can't really understand the leaving without understanding loving and living the evangelical church."
Sarah is the author of the new book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. She talks with us about:
The History of Evangelical Christianity and Politics (3:58): Sarah starts us off, “As s I talk about in the book that meant that had implications for queer people. It had implications for how we were taught about science and about sexuality. And so I've organized the book around all of these themes that for me and a lot of others were tension points, or points of cognitive dissonance or breaking points in some cases.”
What Religion May Offer (6:13): Sarah says: “It never left me. I think about these questions and this is actually something I'm mostly grateful to my parents and my religious upbringing for, is that I feel like it taught me to think about important things, like what's true, what's good, how should we live, what is our obligation to one another?"
Bill Clinton Era and Purity Culture (13:22): uded to in our first interview was the following of rules in the conversation we're having right now. You're talking about a pastor who broke a sexual rule. And you also mentioned that in that Bill Clinton era during the scandal, you were being told to dress modestly, do this, do that, primarily, don't do this.”
Evangelical Relationships (15:30): Sarah says: “Evangelical Christianity treats relationships like they're a formula. Do X and Y will come out. And that's not just that's not how human beings are."
Performing Gender (18:00): Jeremiah offers: “What we've discovered is that evangelicalism is almost exclusively about how well you perform gender.”
Breaking Down the Title (23:00): Sarah breaks down the title of her book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. “The title highlights the nuance of all of this because for good reason, it can be easy to demonize the entire system and the entire system of white evangelicalism has caused all kinds of harm for many different people from many different groups.”
Grief (24:30): Jeremiah says: “That's also the hard choice that a lot of folks are left with. It's really hard to move through talking about deconstruction sociologically, therapeutically, without talking about grief and without constantly that some of the hard decisions that we've all faced.”
Connection and Trauma Bonding (30:30): Sarah shares: “You meet the other person who grew up Southern Baptist or grew up evangelical or Pentecostal or whatever, and you wind up like in a corner somewhere like, you know, trauma bonding. And I hope that this book will make it a little bit easier for people to feel like they don't have to hide in the corner. They can just talk to each other and also their nonreligious partners or their colleagues in an appropriate way about who people that you run into who might not understand what this is.”
Healing Through Storytelling (32:00): Julia says: “I am thankful that you, to repackage some Christian language, decided to hold on to the calling and to tell your story, but also allow folks like me to have my own story seen and reflected by someone else. I personally am a fan of live storytelling events, and that's because I believe that so much healing occurs through the power of the human narrative.”
Let's heal together!