Wow, where to begin with this book? It was like looking into a time capsule of my childhood - I was fascinated and listened to the whole thing straight through.

The author takes her personal experiences as the primary illustration for each chapter, and the book is structured following the timeline of her life: the fear of hell is a strong early memory for her and the discussion of personal salvation in Evangelical beliefs is one of the first chapters, while sexuality in her teen years and the purity movement comes in the latter half of the book. McCammon is a journalist for NPR and the tone of her writing gives that away, meaning the book is less of a memoir and more of a sociology piece that uses a lot of first person narration.

If you are unfamiliar with the Christian world, I think the millions of sects can get real weedy, real fast. Let's start with the basics: there are three main branches of Christianity: Catholicism (lead by the Pope), Eastern Orthodox (lead by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople), and Protestantism (lead by chaos). Within Protestantism, there are lots of recognized denominations with their own leadership structures like Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc, as well as independent churches, but the defining feature of being Protestant is that they are not Catholic or Orthodox.

Evangelicalism is not a denomination, but rather a movement or subculture within Christianity that has four main characteristics: an emphasis on personal conversion, belief in substitutionary atonement (the punishment for sin is death and Jesus died in your place), reverence for the Bible (usually meaning Biblical inerrancy), and activism (missionary outreach and by extension, political involvement). Evangelicalism is primarily a Protestant movement, with churches either loosely falling into the category or not, even without their explicitly claiming to be evangelical, but I have heard of individual evangelical Catholics as well.

Evangelicalism is not united by a common theology. The author notes that for white US evangelicals, theology is increasingly less important post-Trump as the movement has morphed to be largely ethnopolitical, with the biggest growth in new adherents coming from formerly nominal or non-believers who identify primarily as Trump supporters and now see evangelicalism as a pillar of their pro-Trump identity.

The "Exvangelical" movement started among millennials during the Obama era, sparked by the personal dissonance between befriending LGBT+ folks and celebrating their increased civil rights and the doubling down by most evangelical churches on explicitly shunning both LGBT+ people and their allies. I, not the author, am defining the legalization of gay marriage as the flashpoint for the movement because it was the most open conversation that Christians were having about what they were being taught vs what their conscious was telling them. Many of us, for many years, were taught to ignore our conscious when it questioned church authorities, but millennials had finally reached an age of adulthood and autonomy when voicing those questions aloud to leadership was no longer such a scary thing to do. Once the gay question was asked, more questions were allowed to surface: science and evolution in particular, social welfare and the role of the state, the separation of church and state, structural racism and American history, clergy sex scandals (so many of our teenage selves had been held to higher moral standards than middle aged pastors, apparently) and spiritual abuse, and women in leadership. All this culminated in the realization that our beliefs about the most important cultural issues in our daily experience no longer aligned with what the church was teaching and acting on.

Detractors, church leaders who were seeing profits fall as pews emptied out, complained that exvangelicals were nominal to begin with and just hopping on the woke bandwagon. McCammon pushes back on this: Exvangelicals were the kids who showed up to every single youth group service because they wanted to be there, who were involved in leadership positions from an early age because of their spiritual maturity and dependability, who read the Bible from cover to cover multiple times and memorized verses in case one day the Bible was made illegal by atheist dictators (read: democrats), who studied theology books for fun and tweeted about it... No, exvangelicals are the opposite of nominal. It is precisely because they know their religion so well that they are able to use the Bible itself to question church teaching.

If you were an evangelical kid during the 90s, you doubtless remember the Starr Report and Clinton's impeachment. That was probably the first time I had heard talk about sex acts, not from my parents discussing it, but from the non-stop coverage on Rush Limbaugh's radio show and Fox News, the default media sources in my household. The "Monica Lewinsky Scandal" is a crystalized memory from that period, along with Columbine and 9/11. So when the Trump pussy tape was released, the thinking in my mind and that of so many other evangelical millennials was that Republican leaders, and especially church leadership, would treat him like they treated Clinton. When the response from leadership immediately came out as "Even King David, the Lord's anointed, had affairs, and worse, he was a murderer," "God uses flawed people to accomplish his purposes," and "He that is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone," there was a clear sense that we had crossed the Rubicon - the church was not a safe place for women and church leadership was no longer trustworthy. I have heard from multiple people, including the book, that they felt naive for not realizing that church leadership's encouragement of political involvement had been anything other than a lusty power grab, and this was the moment that revealed the truth to them. I don't think it was naivete: a wolf in sheep's clothing is engaged in an elaborate scheme to intentionally trick the sheep, to the depth that he denies his own wolfishness and may himself even forget his true nature for a time. We have a better saying for this situation: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. By leaving, many made sure there was not going to be a twice.

I grew up completely enmeshed in the American evangelical world and today I am very involved in an evangelical church (in Brazil, thankfully). I can't call myself exvangelical because 1) I don't consider myself to have ever embraced the core characteristics of evangelicalism since I reached the age of consent - meaning the age when I was no longer afraid to articulate to adults the doubts that I had always had about the beliefs and be able to say where I disagree with them - so technically there was nothing to really leave behind, and 2) I have not left the evangelical church. I am quite active and a regular volunteer, even in leadership in a basic capacity, but I am not a member and I know that my beliefs do not align with local and national church leadership. I hope people do not think I am being disingenuous, but also.... they haven't asked. I am thankful that I can rub shoulders with people who have different beliefs than I do and we are united around some core tenants and a common good. I can imagine how painful it is for people who have lost access to their support network, social network, and entire system of cultural touchpoints because of disagreements over Trump and Bolsonaro. I am glad that I grew up with this religious tradition and community that gave me such a rich global heritage to draw from: if evangelical beliefs don't fit any more, you can certainly find a flavor of Christianity that does.