The Center for the Study of Evangelicalism and the Department of Anthropology hosted author and journalist Sarah McCammon for a public lecture and book signing at Shove Memorial Chapel on April 10.
McCammon published “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church” in 2024. The book discusses political division and rising rates of religious disaffiliation in the United States.
McCammon is a national political correspondent for NPR and co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast. She is the recipient of the 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award, the 2023 Wilbur Award and a Gracie Award for her reporting on abortion issues and religion.
McCammon was born and raised in an evangelical community. In childhood, she consumed media from Christian broadcasting networks, attended a Christian school and participated in missions. “Evangelicalism was my culture,” McCammon said.
Prominent figures like Bob Jones and James Dobson helped to reinforce evangelical beliefs through religious organizations like Focus on the Family. McCammon described visiting these institutions and being “swaddled into a carefully curated evangelical subculture.”
“We were encouraged to think of ourselves as set apart unto God, as standing for truth in a world that was morally fallen and getting worse,” McCammon said. In McCammon’s experience, separation from others and a moral responsibility to preserve religious values were fundamental parts of evangelicalism.
McCammon discussed her choice to leave the Evangelical Church. “I no longer felt like the ideas I was being asked to embody, endorse and promote made sense when weighed against the complexity of what I was seeing in the world,” she said. Like many evangelicals, McCammon found that separation from the larger world became unsustainable.
Politics have played a major role in the exvangelical movement. Evangelicalism “represents a vision for the family and society that translates into a political project, which is becoming increasingly aligned with the right-wing of the Republican party,” McCammon said.
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump secured 81% of the white evangelical Christian vote. Trump’s success with evangelicals speaks to broader trends of polarization and changing religious identities that have the potential to transform American politics.
“For many evangelicals, Trump’s promise to ‘make America great again’ seems to point back to an earlier era,” aligned more closely with evangelical values like patriarchy, tradition and a dominant white Protestant culture in politics, according to McCammon.
McCammon encountered the evangelical community again as a reporter in 2015, when she was assigned to cover the Republican primary. At a Trump rally in South Carolina, she recalled enthusiasm from the crowd regarding Trump’s messages.
“They didn’t just like his policies. They liked what they saw as a rejection of political correctness that was hamstringing the country,” McCammon said. Evangelicals were drawn to Trump’s pushback against mainstream media, which they believed opposed and threatened their values.
Following the release of the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, in which Trump admitted to inappropriate behavior toward women, the evangelical cohort divided. “I spoke to several women who were wrestling with their movement’s continued embrace of Trump. Some said that women who had experienced sexual harassment and abuse were finding the moment particularly distressing,” McCammon said.
Nichole Nordeman, Chrisitan singer and songwriter, expressed frustration at evangelical support for Trump in 2016. “I find it sickening that these men can face their congregations and their families and their college campuses and feel OK trusting Donald Trump with their voice and their vote,” Nordeman said in an article McCammon wrote for NPR.
Nordeman introduced McCammon to the term exvangelical. “We are trying to find new language to define us as followers of Christ, because this old term has felt unbelievably compromised by the election,” Nordeman said.
A charge to leave the Evangelical Church was led by women online, McCammon said. On Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, women discussed the meaning of evangelicalism and the evangelical identity. For many, their views on social issues like feminism and abortion were no longer compatible with the white Evangelical Church.
McCammon covered the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022. The decision was considered a win for the evangelical community, for which abortion is a top issue. Trump’s role in appointing conservative Supreme Court justices earned him further support from religious groups.
“Trump appears to be expanding his appeal beyond white Christians,” McCammon said. Trump secured larger percentages of women, Latino and younger voters in the 2024 election. “Republicans and Trump gained ground with those groups in a way that I think many observers did not expect.”
After the election, McCammon interviewed non-white voters who voted for Trump. “It’s about a broader perception among some Americans with deeply held religious beliefs that their beliefs are being sidelined in the name of tolerance,” she said.
This realignment has consequences for the historically white makeup of the Evangelical Church. According to Pew Research, 70% of evangelical Protestants are white. According to McCammon, shifts in the racial makeup of the Evangelical Church challenge the longstanding, exclusive views of evangelicalism. “Our changing demographics are reshaping the Evangelical Church and complicating our understanding of the interactions between race, religion and politics,” McCammon said.
The decline of religion also has the potential to change politics in the U.S. “That trend, disaffiliation, has been the biggest trend in American religion,” McCammon said. Religiously unaffiliated voters, or “nones,” are overwhelmingly liberal. However, they are harder to mobilize than their religious counterparts.
According to McCammon, “Religion is so central to identity and has become so central to the way we think about politics.” As the population of nones continues to grow, traditional political labels will take on new meanings.
Sarah McCammon. Photo courtesy of WAMC.