Worshipers attend a concert by evangelical musician Sean Feucht on the National Mall on October 25, 2020 in Washington, DC
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Worshipers attend a concert by evangelical musician Sean Feucht on the National Mall on October 25, 2020 in Washington, DC
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
NPR Political Correspondent Sarah McCammon grew up in Kansas City, Missouri in the 1980s and 1990s in an evangelical Christian community that taught him to fear God and never question his faith. She was “saved” at age 2, baptized at age 8, and grew up watching Christian movies and reading Christian books.
“The feeling was just that the secular world was full of sin and was lost,” she says. “I knew very few people who weren’t evangelical Christians.”
Then, in high school, McCammon participated in the Senate Page Program, which meant leaving home and living in Washington, D.C., for six months. One day, Sina, a Muslim friend and fellow page, asked him something that shook his belief: Did she believe he was going to hell because he wasn’t a Christian?
According to McCammon’s faith, the answer was yes, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her friend. Instead, she recalls, “I just said, ‘I don’t know. I think it’s between you and God.’ And I think in that moment, when I said that, I realized something about what I actually believed.”
In the decades that followed, McCammon gradually distanced herself from the evangelical Church. But his personal and professional lives converged during the 2016 presidential campaign. As an NPR reporter covering the Republican National Convention, McCammon was struck by the support Trump garnered among white evangelicals — about eight in 10 of whom voted supported Trump in 2017. 2016and again in 2020.
“There were all these questions around their support for Donald Trump,” McCammon says. “How would they deal with the cognitive dissonance, the apparent conflict between everything that Trump seemed to represent and what the movement claimed to represent?”
Sarah McCammon is a national political correspondent for NPR.
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These questions came to a head for McCammon on January 6, 2021, when she saw people with crosses and “Jesus Saves” signs participating in the insurrection at the Capitol. “It was the moment I really wanted and needed to say something,” she says.
McCammon’s new book, Exvangelicals: loving, living and leaving the white evangelical Church, is a deep dive into the social movement of young people – including herself – who have become disillusioned with the Church.
“We know that white evangelicalism as a movement is in decline,” she says. “According to the Public Religion Research Institute, approximately 14% of the population is now a white evangelical. If you look at the data from the early ’90s, when I was going into youth group, almost one in four Americans were white evangelicals. … So we know the numbers are down significantly.”
Interview Highlights
On the difficulty of defining “evangelical”
It’s a term that somewhat irks demographers, pollsters, and academics, and there’s some debate about what it actually means. But to me, as someone who grew up in this world, it refers to…a broad subculture that encompasses many different streams and trends of conservative Protestant Christianity. This can include charismatic worship, people raising their hands, worshiping, believing in miracles, and speaking in tongues. And this can also include… more strict, even fundamentalist approaches. …So this is a massive category. But the way I experienced it growing up was that we all united around a belief in Jesus and the Bible. We didn’t even call ourselves evangelicals. We simply called ourselves Christians. And we thought that meant something about the way we were supposed to live and also, for many of us, about the way the country should be.
Growing up with a Christian worldview
I was educated in private Christian schools, from kindergarten until my baccalaureate. This term, “Christian worldview” is something that we find… a lot in evangelical literature. There’s a real emphasis on this idea that we see the world differently. And in reality, the implication is that those of other faiths view it poorly. So it was important to our parents that the children – me, my siblings and my peers – were raised with a literal view of the Bible, with a very traditional view of family: one mother, one father, monogamy, faithfulness, sexual purity before marriage. And it was important that we share these ideas with the rest of the world. The evangelical has integrated into the word the idea of evangelization. We believed we had the truth and we had a responsibility to share it. And this had both spiritual and often political implications.
On her community’s beliefs regarding pregnancy and abortion
For us, abortion was considered real murder. This was considered the loss of a human life. And that’s something that I think is important to understand when you understand the politics around this issue, why there is such intensity. There are certainly people who support restrictions on abortion and who allow exceptions in certain cases. But the fundamental belief of many evangelical Christians is that from the moment of conception, a child is a human life and should have the same rights as any other person. And, as we see, this shapes not only how people view abortion, but also things like in vitro fertilization and potentially contraception. Of course, when I was little, I didn’t know any science behind it. I had no idea how complicated these decisions could be. I just knew what my parents believed and what my church taught.
About Kellyanne Conway saying Team Trump had ‘alternative facts’ about the crowd at the 2017 inauguration
What it reminded me of was sort of the refusal to absorb or incorporate information that contradicted the narrative that we believed in and that contradicted our ideology. I thought about the approach to science I saw growing up and the refusal to accept the overwhelming consensus around the history of the world and the age of the Earth. And there’s some really interesting research on this, reported by evangelicals. fewer factually correct answers on, for example, the history of religion in the United States and there are other polls which indicate a a greater opening thinking about conspiracy theory. And I think some of that may just be rooted in an approach to knowledge, and particularly a secular approach to knowledge.
On filling the gaps left by her upbringing as she moved away from the church
I think back to the beginning of my career, when I was writing one of my first science stories for Nebraska Public Radio, where I got my start in public radio. And it was this really cool story about this fossil of these two Ice Age mammoths that had been found in western Nebraska underground, like, locked together, fighting over a female. And I love this story because it was so cheesy and so interesting. But in reporting on this story, I had to talk about the fact that this fossil was 20,000 years old. At this point I had accepted that it was, but it felt really weird putting it into a script. It was like my parents were hearing that, and there were moments like that too, writing about viruses and talking about the millions of years of evolution that have shaped the way viruses replicate and change and mutate, just all these little things that are probably normal for most people and it felt like, “Oh yeah, that’s not something I’m supposed to believe in.”
Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
