Contextualization and winsomeness are about presenting the gospel and biblical message in the language and forms that are intelligible and compelling to people in our cultural moment. But successful and faithful presentations do not mean that arguments understood will be accepted. Sometimes they will be rejected, not out of intellectual ignorance or obstinance, but reasoned disagreement. It is a disservice to exvangelicals like McCammon to conclude that if we simply cleaned up our presentation and behavior that they would be persuaded of the gospel. In our cultural moment the simple truth is that many evangelical doctrines, no matter how they are shared, will be barriers to conversion to outsiders and sources of embarrassment for some of our kids.

I grew up in a subculture that was evangelical and fundamentalist. Many of my childhood friends have deconstructed, dechurched, and deconverted. So it was with great interest that I read Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangalicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. McCammon, now a correspondent for NPR, grew up evangelical, with all the right bona fides. Exvangelicals is one-part reporting on why some evangelicals dechurch, one-part memoir of McCammon’s own process of leaving evangelicalism.

I come from the same world as McCammon, although her background had a Charismatic inflection absent from my own, and I even knew some of the people she interviewed. Her experience of and insight into evangelicalism from the late 80s to the early 2000s rang true. I could quibble with some of her descriptions and emphases (she takes some extreme examples from her own experience and makes them normative for all evangelicalism; does she have a non-patronizing explanation for the tens of millions of kids who grew up like her and stayed evangelical?), but on the whole I found her work valuable in providing deeper insight into the experience of my friends. Every generation of evangelicals has a group that moves on; rather than dismiss the exvangelical narrative as the same tedious story, those of us who stayed behind should listen with a sympathetic ear. As an evangelical pastor, McCammon’s work gave me better tools to compassionately understand my exvangelical friends and how to think about the posture and expectations of gospel communication.

Salvation Under Duress

“Yeah, I grew up with God. He’s a douchebag, alright? Did he tell you that you were broken and that you need him? Yeah, that’s his move.”

This line from exvangelical, Millennial comedian Taylor Tomlinson’s (crude) stand-up routine encapsulates the flavor of McCammon’s experience with the evangelical church. While full of sincere, if misguided believers, the church expressed a manipulative understanding of God that left people traumatized. And it is explicitly trauma, not ideology or exegetical differences, that forms the matrix of McCammon’s ex-evangelical account.

She opens by recounting an Easter reenactment of the crucifixion she attended as a child. She observes that the evangelical story of the crucifixion “was meant to illustrate a deeper reality: that lurking beneath the veneer of our comfortable, suburban, midwestern American lives was a threat so severe that God had to send his only son to brutally suffer and die to save us from it. The blood might be fake, but the danger was not. That threat informed every aspect of my life.” Her portrayal of evangelicalism is a life policed by fear: fear of hell, fear of the world, fear of transgressing boundaries.  

Her experience, like so many other Millennial evangelicals, is one where the church blended the law and gospel, the indicative and imperative of the Christian life. Ethics did not flow out of gratitude to Christ in communion with him, but the motivation for obedience and good works was fear. Making our calling and election sure was done through conformist, good behavior, not faith in the gloriously unmerited grace of Jesus. Instead, fear of going to hell, of losing our purity, of being hoodwinked by a crafty world, of God’s anger, was normative.

The misery of this is not insignificant; religious trauma occupies a whole chapter of the book. Perfect love is supposed to drive out fear, but for many exvangelicals the “fear of falling out of favor with God” terrified them, lest a forgotten sin keep them from salvation. McCammon describes still waking up in the middle of night in a panic about God’s (damning?) purpose for her.

Karl Barth once attended a Billy Graham rally in Switzerland, and described Graham’s preaching as

the gospel at gun-point…He preached the law, not a message to make one happy. He wanted to terrify people. Threats–they always make an impression. People would much rather be terrified than be pleased. The more one heats up hell for them, the more they come running.”

Fair or not to Graham, this description of “gospel” preaching summarizes what was heard by McCammon and millions of other exvangelicals: a gospel at the end point of a hellish pitch fork held by Jesus, as salvation is received under duress.

This leads to an evangelical culture that might preach love, but really is more about boundary-policing, especially with purity culture. This posture of fear leads to an overemphasis on how the world outside the church’s doors is terrible. I often have conversations with high school students confused since their secular, non-Christian friends are genuinely nice and well-adjusted people. “We were told how ‘the world’ is an evil place, and you have to stay out of it…I found the opposite to be true. I found that ‘the world’ was a much more loving place, and much more comfortable to be part of than a strict religious bubble.” McCammon quotes her friend Daniel here, and this stands as a representative perspective of the exvangelicals. When the church is supposed to be the good guys and shouldn’t cross the line into the terrible world, but the “terrible” world is pleasant and much nicer than the church, it seems like the church was wrong about all kinds of things, including God and the gospel.

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