Identity, Trauma, and Cultural Change in Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals
Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church is more than a memoir. It is a cultural document, a psychological case study, and a map of a movement that has no headquarters, no creeds, and no formal membership — only a shared ache. McCammon traces how a generation raised on purity culture, end times fear, and political absolutism has begun to unravel the worldview they inherited.
Read alongside Daryl R. Van Tongeren’s Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion (2024), the picture becomes even richer. McCammon shows what is happening culturally and relationally; Van Tongeren explains why it feels the way it does psychologically.
Together, they illuminate the inner and outer landscapes of leaving a totalizing religious system.
A Childhood Formed by Fear, Love, and Certainty
McCammon’s early chapters capture the emotional atmosphere of evangelical childhood: salvation prayers at age two, fear of hell, rapture anxiety, and a constant sense that the world was spiritually dangerous. Her story mirrors the broader evangelical ecosystem of the 1980s and 1990s:
1. James Dobson as a “de facto evangelical Vatican” shaping parenting and gender roles
2. Christian schools designed to shield children from secular influence
3. Curricula from Bob Jones and Abeka that fused biblical literalism with right wing ideology
4. Purity culture that framed a girl’s body as both sacred and dangerous
McCammon writes with compassion for her younger self — a child trying to be good in a world where goodness was defined by fear.
The LGBTQ+ Thread: Her Grandfather, Hidden Lives, and the Cost of Silence
One of the most moving threads in the book is McCammon’s relationship with her grandfather, a gay man whose existence was largely kept at the margins of her childhood. She had been taught that homosexuality was an abomination, a rebellion against God’s design. Only later did she learn that her grandfather had lived much of his life in secrecy, cut off from a core part of himself during crucial developmental years.
McCammon uses this family story to illuminate a broader pattern:
1. LGBTQ+ people in evangelical contexts often live split lives, hiding essential parts of themselves to survive.
2. The psychological cost — shame, delayed identity development, relational rupture — is profound.
3. Many exvangelicals leave not because they reject faith, but because they refuse to reject the people they love.
Her grandfather’s story becomes a quiet indictment of a system that demands emotional and relational sacrifice in the name of doctrinal purity.
Deconstruction Before It Had a Name (?)
Long before “exvangelical” became a hashtag in 2016, McCammon was quietly unraveling. Not through rebellion, but through encounters that contradicted the worldview she had been taught:
1. A Muslim friend
2. A Holocaust survivor’s testimony
3. The realization that secular people could be ethical and kind
4. The cognitive dissonance of creationist arguments like “Were you there?”
These moments accumulate into what she calls “tiny threads being pulled one by one.” Her story mirrors the broader movement: people discovering that their questions are not unique — and that others have been carrying the same tension in silence.
Politics as a Breaking Point
McCammon’s reporting on the 2016 election gives her a unique vantage point on the political realignment of white evangelicalism. She documents:
1. Evangelical leaders comparing Trump’s impeachment to the trial of Jesus
2. Women like Beth Moore reaching a breaking point
3. Black Christians launching #LeaveLoud to name the racism embedded in white evangelical spaces
For many, politics didn’t cause deconstruction — but it revealed what had been there all along.
Purity Culture, Sexual Shame, and the Body
McCammon’s chapters on purity culture are among the most psychologically rich. She draws on authors like Linda Kay Klein and Jamie Lee Finch to show how evangelical teachings fused sexuality with shame, often producing long term trauma.
Her own story — from reading The Act of Marriage in secret to navigating an early marriage shaped by purity expectations — illustrates how deeply these messages shaped identity, desire, and self worth.
Religious Trauma and the Long Work of Healing
McCammon includes stories of:
1. Corporal punishment justified as “biblical discipline”
2. Anxiety and intrusive fears of hell
3. Therapists treating religious trauma with EMDR and other modalities
4. Adults rebuilding a sense of safety after high control religious environments
Her own childhood moment of suicidal panic is handled with clarity and compassion, not sensationalism.
Where McCammon Meets Van Tongeren: A Psychological Deepening
Van Tongeren’s Done provides the psychological scaffolding for the experiences McCammon narrates. His work helps explain the emotional, cognitive, and relational patterns that emerge when people leave high control religious systems.
1. Trauma and Residue
McCammon’s narrative is filled with lived examples of religious trauma — fear of hell, corporal punishment, purity culture shame, and the emotional cost of LGBTQ exclusion. Van Tongeren explains how trauma erodes trust in self and others, and why “religious residue” lingers long after belief fades.
His research clarifies why McCammon still wakes at night wondering whether God is angry with her: residue is sticky, especially for those raised in fear based systems.
2. Identity Reconstruction
McCammon shows the relational and cultural dimensions of identity loss — losing community, family tension, and the struggle to define oneself outside evangelical categories. Van Tongeren complements this by warning against replicating fundamentalist patterns in secular spaces: rigidity, purity tests, and new ideological dogmas.
His framework helps contextualize the exvangelical movement’s internal debates about deconstruction, reconstruction, and authenticity.
3. Meaning and the Existential Chasm
McCammon’s story is threaded with existential questions — What if I’m wrong? What does God want? Van Tongeren explains why these questions persist: religion provides coherence, significance, and purpose, and losing it creates an existential vacuum.
His emphasis on distress tolerance, curiosity, and gradual meaning making offers a psychological counterpoint to McCammon’s cultural narrative.
4. Relationships and Social Fallout
Both authors highlight the relational cost of leaving. McCammon documents the loss of community, the fear of speaking openly, and the backlash faced by LGBTQ affirming Christians. Van Tongeren adds empirical clarity: Dones are often mistrusted by both religious insiders and lifelong nones, caught between two worlds.
His “reverse ABCDs” (denial, conversion attempts, belittling, avoidance) mirror the interpersonal dynamics McCammon describes in her own family.
What Comes After Evangelicalism?
The final chapters of The Exvangelicals explore the wilderness many exvangelicals enter: the loss of community, identity, and certainty. Some reconstruct new forms of faith; others leave religion entirely. McCammon herself finds grounding in her interfaith marriage and in Jewish practices that offer a different relationship to tradition, doubt, and belonging.
She captures the lingering questions that haunt many who leave:
1. What if I’m wrong
2. Is God angry with me
3. What does it mean to live a good life without the old map
These questions are signs of growth.
Concluding Thoughts
Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals provides insight for individuals who have left, or are contemplating leaving, evangelical traditions by examining the complexities of navigating beliefs and practices that contrast sharply with those found in progressive Christian and non-Christian contexts. Her work presents narratives that illustrate how the worldview differences discussed in Worldviews Apart manifest in personal experiences.
The Exvangelicals further offers readers a nuanced perspective on the “Dones” as discussed by Van Tongeren in his 2024 publication, Done. While McCammon delivers the stories, cultural context, relationships, and lived realities, Van Tongeren explores the psychological factors, behavioral mechanisms, patterns, and pathways toward flourishing.
Reference
McCammon, S. (2024). The exvangelicals: Loving, living, and leaving the white evangelical church. St. Martin’s Press.
Brief Author Bio
Sarah McCammon is an award winning journalist and National Public Radio (NPR) political correspondent. She has covered major national stories, including the 2016 Trump campaign, where she observed firsthand the political influence of white evangelical Christianity — a theme that later shaped The Exvangelicals.
McCammon grew up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest, an experience she draws on in her reporting and in her book. Her work blends memoir and investigative journalism, documenting the growing movement of people leaving white evangelical churches and exploring the cultural, emotional, and political forces behind that shift.
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Find chapters and essays on Substack. [ @GeoffreyWSutton ]
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