Sarah McCammon on covering evangelicals and ‘exvangelicals’

When Sarah McCammon, an NPR political correspondent and the author of the new book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the Evangelical Church, watched Chuck Todd and Kellyanne Conway’s infamous discussion of “alternative facts” on Meet the Press in January 2017, she found that the exchange reminded her of her upbringing in the white evangelical church. It was not only the invocation of competing “facts” that felt familiar, but also Conway’s threat to Todd to “rethink our relationship” when asked about matters that might have appeared unflattering to Donald Trump and his administration. The idea that inconvenient truths were out of bounds resonated with McCammon’s personal history. By the time she worked in her first newsroom, she “was exhausted from trying to get my brain to conform to the contours of the supposed Truth” that she’d been taught, she writes in her book. And she was “beginning to feel deceived.”

McCammon was raised in the eighties and nineties in a homogeneous white evangelical Christian community in Kansas City, Missouri. She was taught to fear God and not to question her faith, and that the consequences for those who didn’t fervently believe were, for now and eternity, “too dire to risk.” Such beliefs were then intertwined with politics, the Christian right having benefited from years of legislative success under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Indeed, the unwavering support of evangelical Christians helped create the powerful, entrenched Republican political engine that still pursues minority ideals, not least the overturning of Roe v. Wade, today.

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