This book is about a topic I’ve been very interested in recently, Evangelical Christianity, specifically what life is like for those who choose to leave the church, many of whom call themselves “exvangelicals.”

I really enjoyed this one. I was expecting it to be more of a memoir than what it was, which was a lot more research and fact-based, versus her own lived experiences. To me, that would have a five star book, but I gave this 4 stars. It was very well-written, and I loved how much she highlighted that leaving the church is so much more than just not sharing these beliefs anymore, but potentially losing your entire community and support system. The author spends a lot of time covering the Trumpification of Christianity, and I found that to be specifically fascinating. An extremely thought-provoking and analytical look at the deconstruction movement!

I expected to relate to this book. I did not expect this book to take me on a whole journey. I expected stories of people leaving because of how political the church has become, of how it treats people of different gender identities and sexual orientations, and some other hot issues.

While those are all there, this book dives into so many more things. The lingering effects of purity culture and how it affected people in their future relationships. The anxiety as a child when you lose track of your parents and think you got left behind in the rapture.

Sarah was transparent with her own story and interviewed a mix of people. Some have left but still believe everything they were taught. Some just believe the church now is not the example of the lessons they learned. As well as those who have stopped believing all together.

I think if you are actively involved in church this could still be interesting as Sarah uses her journalism background to tell so many aspects of people’s stories, but it is possible it could feel a little drawn out. But it will never feel like an attack.

But if you are someone who has left or is someone who is still participating but with some reservations this book will give you stories you can relate to as well as maybe some things to think about.

Part memoir and part journalistic investigation—Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church is a powerful and thought-provoking study of the growing social movement of people leaving the white evangelical churches where they were raised. With the availability of social media and global connectedness, these people who may have been quietly experiencing this alone two decades ago are now finding a community of people who are experiencing the same “deconstruction” as they are.

McCammon brings a mix of her personal experiences and her years working as a national political correspondent for NPR to craft a book that is as poignant as it is thought-provoking. This is not an anti-Christian movement, McCammon clarifies from the very beginning. Many of the people who have gone through this “deconstruction” to exvangelical are still believers and participants in the Christian faith. Some have moved towards other mainline faiths (e.g., Protestantism, Catholicism), others are “reconstructing” the evangelical faith to better align with their beliefs and values, and others are leaving the faith entirely as they explore other faith traditions or spiritual practices. This is a story of the journey that has brought people with these shared experiences together.

Regardless of where their exvangelical journey takes them, many who have chosen this path have found a greater sense of peace. However, getting there often involves confronting years of religious trauma, as well as facing the challenge of learning to follow their intuition about morality and faith that violates the doctrine that once governed their life.

Throughout the book are personal anecdotes (from McCammon and others), but the majority of the first half of the book is more academic and investigative in nature. McCammon shares the deep research that can only come from background as a journalist (I come from a family of journalists and PhDs, so I can tell you that I have experienced firsthand being called out for not having a source!). An interesting thread in the book surrounds the paradox that as the number of people who identify as white evangelical in the United States decreased from 23% in 2006 to 14% in 2022, many of the political aspirations of this group became mobilized during the period (e.g., the overturning of Roe v. Wade, legalizing gay marriage). How can a movement be mobilizing as it is also decreasing in size?

The 2016 election and Trump’s victory (which McCammon covered as a political correspondent), Trumps presidency, and the subsequent rally to re-elect him in 2020 (and honestly in 2024) is discussed at length. One connection between the two seemed to be that as many people left the white evangelical ranks, others started to identify with it because they supported Trump. This shift isn’t exclusively related to Trump, but it is perhaps the most striking example of the shift we are seeing for Americans to choose their religious identification by their political views, rather than the reverse. For instance, people who practice Christianity but want to distance themselves from what was happening on the Right politically began to identify as “nones”—people who don’t identify with any specific religious ideology. The reverse was happening as well.

The point which confronts us directly while reading McCammon’s book is whether the goal of evangelicalism all along was as a political movement, disguised as a religious movement; politics dressed in religion’s clothing, perhaps. Meanwhile beliefs that were never part of evangelicalism in the past are now becoming part of it as the political movement shifts that direction. As all of this happens, monetization becomes a part of deconstruction in the same way that it was a part of evangelicalism in the past. People looking to deconstruct and find resources and coaching to support that transition are finding people who are making money off of those looking to leave the evangelical faith. At a certain point, people are being prayed upon no matter which direction they move. It makes one wonder whether this is a tactic to actually push deconstructionists back towards evangelicalism?

As the book goes on, it meanders to be much more about McCammon’s personal experiences and I felt some ambiguity in where her beliefs and stances are on this movement. Perhaps I’m expecting too much, because a good portion of this book is intended to be a memoir. At the same time, much of the early part of the book is devoted to fact finding and laying out how the religious landscape became the political landscape, and they switched places. I wanted more supposition (and perhaps this isn’t the right place to find it) on how this minority group has garnered the influence they have in the political landscape. In a country that operates on a two-party system, many republicans are being pushed much further towards the far right than they would otherwise be because the party leaders are leaning into that narrative. Meanwhile on the democratic side, younger generations who tend to be further left are being forced towards the middle because of an aging voter base who still seeks ways to be bipartisan.

I’m going to stop here because I am getting into a territory where I don’t feel I’m the right person to extrapolate on these points. Regardless of where you fall (Republican or Democrat)—I think you’ll find the information presented in The Exvagelicals to leave you with more questions to ponder than answers. I also wonder whether these experiences that many exvangelicals identify with may not be experiences that current evangelicals have also gone through. There is a question hanging over the book whether the far-right political party has replaced evangelicalism in many ways, changing the way current generations are experiencing the religious movement.

This is a good book for anyone who wants to dive into this topic in a way where the information is presented but conclusions aren’t yet drawn. This book may be controversial, but the execution of it stays unbiased (enough) to allow people from many viewpoints to find things to think about. I suspect many will not come to the same conclusions, though. The second half of the book is much more about McCammon’s own personal journey through the deconstruction process—what led her there, what challenges she faced, and where she has landed. Hers is only one of many thousands of experiences, yet it’s also one that took bravery to lay out for the world to see.

Thank you to St. Martins Press for my copy. Opinions are my own.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press for the copy of this book.

THE EXVANGELICALS is part memoir and part non-fiction read centering around a mass movement away from the White Evangelical Church. As a Christian myself, this was a really fascinating read, as many of the issues that she brought up, from politics to science and gender roles, are extremely relevant and cause a lot of tension within the church (and society as a whole). She made a lot of good points in the areas of religious trauma, what it's like to have and to leave a community of family and friends centered around specific viewpoints, and how church leaders often do a disservice to their congregations. I'll be thinking about this one for awhile - definitely worth the read!

I really appreciated this book that’s part memoir and part nonfiction exploration of the reasons people are leaving evangelical churches. As a lifelong Lutheran, this isn’t fully my experience, but some aspects were similar to my childhood faith formation.

Ms. McCammon is uniquely qualified to write on the subject because her parents were devout members of an evangelical church, and she’s a journalist reporting for National Public Radio. She grew up in Kansas City so I felt a connection as a fellow Midwesterner.

Blending personal experiences with facts and statistics kept me engaged in ways I haven’t found in other books on the topic. The author’s narration of the audiobook was like having an interesting conversation with a new friend.

The book includes a fair amount of political discussion so reader, know thyself.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio, Celadon Books, and NetGalley for the review copies of this thought-provoking book.

This was a really powerful read. A person's relationship with religion and faith is such a deeply ingrained part of who they are and Sarah really got to the heart of what a generation is now working through in deconstructing evangelical christianity and coming to terms with the current direction of the evangelical faith group as a whole.

There were so many parts of this book that gave me deep nostalgia. Starting with the fact that both myself and the author have the same first and middle name - based on the Bible and given by parents who are deeply evangelical and fit much of the description of their generation that is portrayed in this book. Beyond our names, there are many experiences that the author discusses in the upbringing of this generation that were very familiar and brought another perspective for consideration and validated a lot of what I myself have been working through.

I think this book really gave me a feeling of being seen and not alone in the journey that I'm on in reckoning with my upbringing, grounding myself in my faith and dealing with feelings of disappointment and hurt associated with the current evangelical landscape. I also struggle with how to raise my children and really appreciated the different book recommendations that popped up through the narrative in this book.

This was a pretty quick read - I read it over the course of a day - and it definitely gave me a lot to think about and continue to work through. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC of this book. All thoughts are my own!

This book is described as "part memoire, part investigative journalism" as McCammon herself was raised in, and left the White Evangelical church.
It was an interesting look at what it was like to be raised in this religion, as well as some of the reasons people leave. I guess I just expected more, this book did not tell me much more than I already knew, there was nothing shocking, or new.

It kind of just felt like this book skimmed the surface of many topics, without getting deep into any.

Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals is excellent. It is hands down the most reasonable and respectful examination of the exvangelical movement that I have read to date (and I have read at least a half dozen).

I sincerely appreciated the author's unblinking analysis of a complex set of topics, as well as how she repeatedly illustrated that the exvangelical movement is not a monolith, that not everybody who has or is in the process of deconstructing a white, evangelical upbringing is headed toward wither agnosticism or atheism.

This is one of those books that is not easy, but it is important. If you've found books by Nadia Bolz-Weber, Sarah Bessey, Rachel Held Evans, or even Peter Enns to be valuable and thought-provoking, The Exvangelicals should definitely make it onto your TBR list.

Just about every step of this book reflects the majority of my childhood: heavily involved in a charismatic church, private Christian school, and James Dobson. It also reflects a lot of my religious crisis over the last few years and why I find “church speak” so painful.

This also solidified that I have religious trauma. I always said I did, as kind of a throwaway line to explain why I avoid Christian things, but that chapter on religious trauma was validating. It’s not just an excuse; it’s an important piece of my mental health.

I found the book hard to read in a few spots: partly for the aforementioned trauma, but also it read like a newspaper article I had no desire to read. It felt like I finally saw the heart of the author near the end when she was talking about how she was healing and in a new marriage. Maybe that’s how she was able to write through her own trauma by stating facts and avoiding the vulnerability I was expecting from this book. I was also hoping for some answers to what I’ve been struggling with for years, but how can there be?

I immediately recommended this to my brother with the idea it could explain more fully what I’ve been trying to put into words for years.

(I did fact check once…I live near Kansas City and she mentioned meeting somewhere by the White Castle. I guess it closed down years ago, so crisis averted.)

I received this from net galley in exchange for a review.

- THE EXVANGELICALS is part research, part personal reckoning. I’ve read a few books about the rise and impact of evangelical culture, and this one brings in more voices and personal experiences than most others.
- McCammon guides us through each stage of her life, giving her story alongside others who had both similar and dissimilar experiences to her.
- One thing I found most enlightening in this book was McCammon’s insistence that growing up evangelical often wasn’t just a simply a specific way of life, but a traumatic experience. I grew up churchgoing but not evangelical - that culture was unfolding parallel to my experiences in the ‘90s, and this book has helped me to grasp what it was like on the inside on an individual level.

I was really looking forward to this book and enjoyed it.

I would love to give it a more detailed review on all of my book related social media platforms.

Unfortunately, I will be withholding my detailed review until the publisher, St. Martin's Press publicly condemns the queerphobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian speech exhibited by one of their employees.

Until then, I will be withholding more detailed review, and withholding public reviews from my book related social media platforms.

The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon is part personal memoir, part journalistic reporting of church and cultural history; it is also the support group I desperately needed but didn't know existed. I am so grateful that this book has been written and published. I no longer feel alone, and I can only imagine it will be just as helpful and welcome to many others in the same position as me. If you have left the church or know someone who has, this book will help you understand and better empathize with those on the "other" side of the aisle...both the church aisle and the political one.

Many thanks to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review an e-galley of this title.

the Exvangelicals was an excellent read and listen. I really appreciated the author's weaving of her own experience with evangelicalism with the power it holds over the political systems in this country. The indoctrination was eye-opening and the "world" these believers live in is so not "of this world." I have shared this book with a few friends who grew up like the author.

I really enjoyed this book. It was relatable and informative. I liked that it conveyed how nuanced the term exvangelical is, and that it includes people who have left religion altogether and people who are still trying to navigate having a relationship with God while denouncing what most churches promote (as in the promotion of conservative politics). The book seemed a bit unstructured and directionless at times, but because I identified with it so personally this didn’t bother me so much.

I loved this book and am so glad I received an early copy. This is a perfect book for someone like me - a current progressive activist who was born and raised in the Midwest in a deeply conservative, evangelical Christian household and community, and moved away from evangelical life after moving away for college. I found a lot of healing and affirmation in this book and enjoyed hearing personal stories of people who had similar upbringings to mine. I will say that I found there to be a bit of a weak thesis; I'm not really sure what the point of this book was from a research standpoint - did it serve to argue a certain point or make an assertion about evangelical culture? I'm not sure. But the format still worked for me personally as I related to many of the author's experiences and the experiences of her friends. It was engaging and easy to follow.

Thank you to the author Sarah McCammon, publishers St. Martin's Press, and NetGalley for an advance digital copy of THE EXVANGELICALS. All views are mine.

𝐼 𝑓𝑙𝑢𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑘𝑛𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑑𝑟𝑎𝑤𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑑, “𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑘𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑚𝑦𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓!” 𝐼 𝑑𝑖𝑑𝑛’𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑖𝑡, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑦 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑥𝑖𝑒𝑡𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡. ...𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑒𝑥𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐼 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟, 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑢𝑝𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑠 𝑖𝑛 [𝑚𝑦 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠'] 𝑏𝑒𝑑𝑟𝑜𝑜𝑚, ...𝑚𝑦 𝑚𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑠𝑜 𝑚𝑦 𝑓𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 ℎ𝑖𝑡 𝑚𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑤𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡. Loc.2812

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started reading THE EXVANGELICALS, but I was completely surprised, and at times appalled, at what I found in these pages. McCammon makes a lot of uncomfortable suggestions about evangelical Christianity culture, such as political maneuvering and child abuse so widespread it might as well be institutional. I was really taken up with the story when she discussed the families torn apart when a new generation decides to leave the church, usually for ideological reasons. I know someone who grew up Evangelical and she experienced a great deal of religious trauma as a child. She's still terrified she's going to go to hell at all times, even though she's now a liberal Christian. I understand her experience a great deal more because of this book. It's definitely a heart-rending read and I recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about Evangelical culture and Exvangelicals.

When people leave evangelical communities,... that loss means not only lost sinners but also lost cultural currency and political power. Loc.3595

Three (or more) things I loved:

1. So much of this book is the kind of information that just makes me cover my mouth and shake my head. I thought when I asked to read this book, that it would be mostly one woman's religious experiences, but it's the story of the intellectual and political theft of the US.

2. This is a really frightening book at times. I'm reading chapter 12, which covers the systematic abuse of children that occurs in evangelical Christianity. It's a hard read, being that I'm a child DV survivor. I experienced many of the same abuses detailed in this chapter, but it had nothing to do with God in my family. The fact is, people who want to abuse their kids, will, and they will find whatever justification they need to sleep at night. They won't have to look very far either. If it's not a religioun, it's an outlying psychologist, a radio or TV personality, a next-door neighbor or friend or relative, or an internet comment section. Child abuse is widely accepted in the US, and is unfortunately very much not an "Evangelical" problem alone. That being said, that child abuse is common in Evangelical families is a problem that needs to be addressed within that community.

Three (or less) things I didn't love:

This section isn't only for criticisms. It's merely for items that I felt something for other than "love" or some interpretation thereof.

1. This is all sort of meandering. I'm 46% of the way through and I'm not sure McCammon has a point to make.

2. This book reads more like a memoir to me than a piece of long journalism. It's not because the material is personal that I feel this way. It's because the author never directly accuses the church of anything. Everything she says is sort of offhand and she spends a lot of time quoting other Exvangelicals writers.

Rating: 🧒🧒🧒🧒 / 5 kids training up
Recommend? Yes!
Finished: Mar 21 '24
Format: Digital arc, Kindle,
Read this book if you like:
📰 nonfiction / journalism
📓 memoir
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 family stories, family drama
🧒 childhood development
💇‍♀️ women's reproductive rights
🇺🇸 identity politics in the US

Deeply fascinating and necessary book. Well researched yet approachable in the way it handled this topic, which is delicate and/or controversial to many. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free advance copy.

I can't review The Exvangelicals without first disclosing my personal perspective, which is that I grew up Seventh Day Adventist (its own kind of evangelicalism) in the 1980s and '90s and that although I would still consider myself a Christian, I am no longer affiliated with a church and strongly disagree with the evangelical stance on sociopolitical issues. (Thankfully, this did not cause me to lose family, which is sadly the case for many people who leave the church.) My personal religious philosophy is this, I suppose: Jesus loved and accepted everyone, so I'm going to do that too. Even the people who park like assholes and don't return their carts at the grocery store.

It took a long time for me to get here. There's part of The Exvangelicals where Sarah McCammon talks in great detail about childhood religious trauma, and it resonated with me. When you're a child in that sort of environment -- when you're constantly told that you are a sinner, you'll always be a sinner, and that God is watching everything you do; when your questions about the geographical locations of heaven and hell or how the Bible's teachings and the proof of dinosaurs can co-exist are disregarded or outright ignored -- that sticks with you, and you really can't see how it may have affected you until you're an adult and are no longer in that environment. At least, I couldn't.

The Exvangelicals is part memoir and part journalistic investigation into the white evangelical church, blending McCammon's personal experiences with the larger evangelical narrative encompassing political and social issues. The structure really worked for me, as the book read like both a cathartic experience for McCammon and a well-researched, insightful discussion of complex issues. McCammon successfully navigates several highly-charged issues with empathy and sensitivity in a thought-provoking exploration that encourages pragmatic dialogue and raises lots of questions, and admits that there are no easy answers. However, I feel like she does sometimes paint evangelicals as a whole with a pretty broad brush without acknowledging those churches or individuals that are more progressive in their mindsets.

The sad reality is that most white evangelical Christians are not going to pick this book up, because it overtly challenges the dogma of the church -- and exploring other viewpoints and perspectives is not something that most white evangelicals are comfortable with. But if you are interested in the Christian church or involved in evangelicalism yourself -- formerly, tangentially, or currently -- I highly recommend The Exvangelicals as a solid entry into a growing cannon of books that challenge organized religion.

The author examines the reasons so many people are leaving evangelical churches, especially young adults. The
reasons include the evangelical messaging on abortion, child rearing, LGBQ and gender issues and the evangelical support for Donald Trump.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC: The author is a political reporter on NPR who was catalyzed to write this memoir and exploration of evangelicals who have left their church after she covered the 2016 Republican primary. McCammon was raised by evangelical parents, educated in Christian schools through college and married her college boyfriend. She began to move away from her church, to "deconstruct" as she worked as a reporter. Her grandfather, a gay neurosurgeon, was not of the church and McCammon loved him but also felt he was doomed--her first cognitive dissonance with her church. I listened to her interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" and it clarified points that I somehow missed--her first husband deconstructed as well. I still am not sure about her relationship with her parents. The evangelical church, in all of its forms, represented up to a quarter of the population at one point and has had tremendous political power. I think the book explored the topic well, but I still remain a bit confused about the author's family history. It's an important force in America and this book contributes to understanding it. Highly recommended.