I Feel Seen
A Feature Review of
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
Sarah McCammon
Hardcover: St. Martin’s Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Cara Meredith
There’s a phrase you’ve probably seen floating around on social media, particularly when it comes to a connection with an idea, concept, or image: I feel seen. The simple, three-word sentence is often offered as both an exclamation and an aside, as a way of offering solidarity and togetherness. Hilarious memes and quippy explanations often accompany the phrase, rendering the point hard to miss.
The singular phrase is a statement, in and of itself, the same sentiment exploded in my mind upon reading Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. Equal parts journalistic investigation and personal memoir, McCammon, a National Political Correspondent for NPR and cohost of The NPR Politics Podcast, examines an increasingly relevant subculture of Christianity that begs for closer examination and analysis. After all, those who identify as exvangelicals (or who would be identified as part of the exvangelical movement, even if they wouldn’t use the moniker themselves) no longer find a home in white evangelicalism. But the effects of their upbringing and involvement, particularly when it comes to thinking, being, and doing on the other side of it all, cannot be ignored.
For McCammon, participating in a world marked by white evangelicalism meant embracing a lifestyle marked by action. This particular brand of an “individualistic, emotional, relational faith” (19) wasn’t merely marked by believing all the right things (even if said belief in all the right things was often rewarded), but was instead marked by doing activities that showed a righteous commitment level. Just as she found herself “rightly cocooned within conservative Christian institutions” (53), just before her seventeenth birthday, McCammon spent one semester working as a US Senate page in Washington, DC. As the author reflects back on the experience now, she sees how the mission fit into the larger picture of “building up God’s kingdom here on Earth and, in particular, restoring the greatness of ‘this Christian nation’ that God had blessed but which had gone so terribly awry over the past few decades through the embrace of feminism and the sexual revolution via the political process” (54).
I may not have spent several months in Washington, DC, but I did participate in phone banks and picketing, in email forwards and worship gatherings meant to garner participation in something bigger than myself. These tasks were, after all, rewarded by our peers, our leaders, and as we believed it at the time, our God.
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But participation in the tenants of white evangelicalism wasn’t marked merely by action, it was also marked by specific ways of thinking. Like McCammon, I no longer call this particular branch of the Christian tradition home – but the white evangelical church is ingrained within me. For one interviewee, a religious trauma life coach from California, “When you are indoctrinated into religion from a child or for a significant amount of time, religion becomes associated with every part of your life, with everything that you do, with everywhere that you go, with everything that you say, with everything you think, with everything you feel” (207). Readers who also identify with sentiments of loving, living, and leaving the white evangelical church, as McCammon’s subtitle suggests, may not want to be found remembering Scripture verses from the sword drills we performed as children, but the very words really did become drilled into our memory banks. Try our hardest, we can’t escape their influence. They ooze through our fingers, bleeding onto the page; they pop into our brains, filling our brains when we are most unaware. Like McCammon, it’s often not until we step away from those places of extreme influence – including families of origin, educational institutions, and even marriages of youth – that new ways of thinking begin to emerge.
After all, white evangelicals are marked by a special sort of being that is often only understood on the other side of it all. It’s only after leaving that exvangelicals realize how clinging to a belief that “eternity hung in the balance, with seconds to spare” (26), for instance, might also genuinely affect how they interact with the world around them. As one of McCammon’s interviewees noted, “everyone who was not a Christian was either a potential convert or a potential stumbling block” (27). There was no in-between– not for McCammon and not for people like me who only understood life through a black and white lens of understanding. Because what happens when gray starts to wriggle into the picture? How do we respond when the answers that once worked no longer do the trick, when the staunch beliefs that once marked not only a people but an entire way of being and operating in the world no longer hold true? To McCammon, only a single question remains, but it’s one she asks herself everyday: “Once you’ve discovered that the world you called home is no longer a place you can comfortably reside in, where do you go?” (217)
As one reviewer noted, The Exvangelicals is “an elegant testament to how well McCammon has learned her craft.” She took a slice of white evangelical pie, from her own story, no less, dished it up, and gave it to the rest of us – once again offering camaraderie to millions of exvangelicals like her. Through her words, many of us feel found, left uttering the phrase, I feel seen.
Cara Meredith
Cara Meredith is a writer, speaker, and part-time development director. The author of The Color of Life (Zondervan) and the forthcoming Church Camp (Broadleaf), she gets a kick out of playing with words. A lot. You can connect with her on her website, CaraMeredith.com.
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