(Sightings)– Calling a book “prompt” seems like a backhanded compliment. It appears to recommend that the book's biggest strength is its publication date. Let me be clear: Sarah McCammon's “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church” is both prompt and excellent.
Timely, since it handles the problems that will choose the 2024 elections– problems of spiritual power and physical autonomy. Superb, since it goes over those problems with level of sensitivity, elegance and no percentage of bravery.
McCammon was born and raised in America's conservative Protestant subculture; she is now a reporter for National Public Radio, an outlet her daddy when rejected as “National Perverted Radio.” “The Exvangelicals” is the story of her journey in between these 2 points. And it's the story of others who made comparable journeys; McCammon sprinkles her account with quotes from individuals in numerous phases of deconstructing their evangelicalism.
“The Exvangelicals” will undoubtedly be compared to Kristin Kobes Du Mez's “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” That, too, was a prompt book. Appearing simply a couple of months before the 2020 elections, it argued that Donald Trump attracted white evangelicals since his crude, misogynistic swagger embodied the sort of “manhood” preached by generations of evangelical leaders. “Real guys” must be difficult, aggressive, even violent. And if they occur to sexually attack somebody from time to time … well, we're all sinners. (“The Exvangelicals” prices estimate James Dobson, creator of the evangelical media empire Focus on the Family, protecting Trump's conduct by stating: “He's not a best guy, however I'm not either.”)
“Jesus and John Wayne,” as its title recommends, is mostly about males, and in specific guys with authority. It's about the preachers, pedagogues and political leaders who specified “scriptural” manhood and womanhood. By contrast, McCammon is worried about those on the getting end of these orders, individuals who needed to live out these visions of manhood and womanhood.
Living “biblically” took a terrible toll on lots of people. The exvangelicals McCammon profiles (herself consisted of) maintain some fond memories of their training, however the book's dominant tone is a mix of pity, remorse and anger. McCammon remembers being tortured by the worry that she may not be amongst the choose: “If you ‘d accepted Jesus into your heart, that was expected to settle it, I believed. Had I actually thought, and thought enough? What if I was amongst the lost?”
At one point, when she was 12 years of ages, McCammon's worry of damnation ended up being so strong that she got a knife and threatened to eliminate herself. Her moms and dads reacted by beating her– precisely as suggested by evangelical parenting specialists like James Dobson.
These sensations of regret and embarassment were especially intense when it concerned sex. Girls in the evangelical subculture were provided obligation without flexibility; they were to dress decently and act demurely, due to the fact that to do otherwise would lure males into the sin of desire.
