Photo: The cover of 'The Exvangelicals' by Sarah McCammon.
The Exvangelicals: Loving, living, and leaving the white evangelical church
By Sarah McCammon
Whatever plagues me in life, I can gain Light over darkness when I have the opportunity to hear someone share their own story of challenges and recovery. Sarah McCammon’s book is such an opportunity.
Born into a deeply evangelical family in the US Midwest, McCammon was taught to obey and fear God. She constantly worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach and save him, or that a Muslim friend would need to be converted; and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough. The belief system she had been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.
Sarah’s early success in education brought her to Capitol Hill as a sixteen-year-old, to serve as a page for a Republican senator. She saw for the first time how politicians behaved out of view of the voters back home. She later became a journalist for National Public Radio, and was assigned to cover the first Trump campaign, where she witnessed the power and influence that white evangelical Christian beliefs held on the political right. She experienced directly the venomous hate against journalists that Trump unleashed and encouraged through the crowds that came to his campaign events.
McCammon’s story of her life helps me understand better the Christian church that I grew up in. It offered me a judgemental, punishing God, and, as a military officer trainee at a university of that church, how to kill enemies with a rifle, bayonet, and nuclear weapon. I reject such teaching today and seek to practise positive spiritual principles in all my affairs, such as the golden rule and the beatitudes that Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount.
McCammon’s final words inspire me to continue life’s journey of lifelong seeking and learning: ‘We’ve been given minds that can reason and inquire, but that can only understand so much. We have hearts that can feel compassion and empathy but are always constrained by the limitations of our own experiences and observations. I’ve asked God again and again to “open the eyes of my heart”, as we used to sing in one of the praise choruses projected on the big screen at church. But those can only see so far and I can’t pretend to know with certainty what’s beyond my field of vision.
‘Peace, when I have found it, has come from accepting that I don’t have to solve the riddle of the universe or uncover any magical answers. That life isn’t an elaborate calculus problem, and that God isn’t waiting to punish us if we make an error. I don’t have the answers, but I’m sure I’m not meant to.
‘I’ve relaxed, most of the time, into the understanding that I didn’t have to save Grandpa, and I don’t have to save anyone. That I, like everyone else, was somehow born naked into this world, knowing nothing, a tiny bundle of flesh and blood and bones pulsating with needs and desires – and that someday, if I’m fortunate, I will be lying in a quiet, sunlit room, in a withering body, holding the hand of my grandchild, gently fading away.’
