Former Savannah reporter examines leaving the white evangelical church in "The Exvangelicals"

For a brief time in 2015, Sarah McCammon reported on local and state politics for WSHV 91.1, Savannah’s Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) affiliate. Then in 2016, National Public Radio (NPR) tapped her to cover the Republican primaries in the lead up to the Presidential election. She was headed back home to the Midwest, where she had covered the Iowa caucuses for public radio in 2012.

McCammon initially thought she’d be covering the Jeb Bush campaign, but in Iowa things unfolded differently and she found herself watching the meteoric rise of Donald Trump within the Republican Party, largely fueled by people she knew and had been raised around.

“I probably should have expected it more, but I just found myself going, ‘Wow, wait, evangelicals are the story,’ and I know a lot about this world,” said McCammon, who started taking notes like any good reporter would do. “I became fascinated with it, both professionally and personally, kind of going, how will my once-community navigate this moment?”

Those notes served a greater purpose when, “pushed over the edge” by Trump supporters storming into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, she pulled together a book proposal that ultimately resulted in her debut work of nonfiction, “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church” (St. Martin’s Press, 2024).

“I think it was seeing those images from the Capitol with people carrying these Christian slogans — ‘Jesus Saves’ — and bearing crosses,” recalled McCammon. “I’ve been thinking for a long time about saying something about the world I came from and what it was like to kind of find myself accidentally covering it … I don’t ever want to overreach as a journalist and, I guess, draw lines or connect dots that aren’t necessarily there, but the lines were so clear. There was no mistaking there was a religious motivation for what was going on.”

Deep insight into the white evangelical subculture from a former insider

Part memoir, part journalistic inquiry, “The Exvangelicals” — a hashtag she started seeing across social media — offers riveting insight about a subculture that has transformed American politics over the last 40 years and that has entrenched a sense of both ideological and political purity into debate. The book is narrated and reported by McCammon, who was once on the inside and who continues to grapple with questions of faith, family and the nature of truth. McCammon never sneers at her evangelical upbringing, instead she leans into compassion while also acknowledging the harm, and sometimes trauma, caused by its tenets and its "carefully constructed and curated" lack of intellectual curiosity and questioning that is often informed by fear.

McCammon admits to “struggling a bit” with how to balance journalistic objectivity and training with her own private process of leaving the church. Ultimately, she organized the book around political and ideological themes, such as education, science, sexuality, purity culture and abortion. Woven among data, research, reporting and interviews are her own experiences growing up the “willful child" of strict white evangelical parents in an insular Kansas City, Missouri community. She said she tried “not to share more than I feel is necessary.”

But the fear she felt is palpable as she prayed for the salvation of her grandfather, whom she later learned was a closeted homosexual, as is the heartbreak she endured at the end of her marriage to her college sweetheart. The misguided innocence of college students asking whether there were things they should not learn about because it might threaten their faith as if the very idea of ideas is dangerous, said McCammon, “says something about the intellectual community I grew up in.”

In the end, the process of “deconstruction” she and others she interviewed for the book have gone through led her to a certain peace of what to keep and what to let go of that was not meant for her. It also clarified for her that “we had to deconstruct because we were taught to seek the truth.”

She examines how the exodus from religious institutions in American is fueling a hardline grasp for power among white evangelicals who see their culture diminishing with shifting demographics, while also leaving young adults and mid-career folks untethered of community and connection. Thankfully, she does not offer easy, pat answers, instead calling for more inquiry and examination.

“The world is a complicated place, and making sense of it is difficult,” McCammon said, admitting that she doesn’t have certainty, only questions. “We have to give each other the room and the grace, to use a spiritual word, that in a way that is sometimes messy, right? That’s something I didn’t feel free to do growing up.”

Amy Paige Condon is a content coach and editor with the Savannah Morning News. You can reach her at ACondon@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: NRP correspondent Sarah McCammon on leaving the white evangelical church