
The Exvangelicals
Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
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Narrated by:
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Sarah McCammon
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By:
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Sarah McCammon
About this listen
Long-listed, Audible.com Best of the Year, 2024
This program is read by the author.
"An intimate window into the world of American evangelicalism. Fellow exvangelicals will find McCammon’s story both startlingly familiar and immensely clarifying, while those looking in from the outside can find no better introduction to the subculture that has shaped the hopes and fears of millions of Americans."—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne
The first definitive book that names the massive social movement of people leaving the church: the exvangelicals.
Growing up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Sarah McCammon was strictly taught to fear God, obey him, and not question the faith. Persistently worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach him, or that her Muslim friend would need to be converted, and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough, McCammon was a rule-follower and—most of the time—a true believer. But through it all, she was increasingly plagued by fears and deep questions as the belief system she'd been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.
After spending her early adult life striving to make sense of an unraveling worldview, by her 30s, she found herself face-to-face with it once again as she covered the Trump campaign for NPR, where she witnessed first-hand the power and influence that evangelical Christian beliefs held on the political right.
Sarah also came to discover that she was not alone: She is among a rising generation of the children of evangelicalism who are growing up and fleeing the fold, who are thinking for themselves and deconstructing what feel like the “alternative facts” of their childhood.
Rigorously reported and deeply personal, The Exvangelicals is the story of the people who make up this generational tipping point, including Sarah herself. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, this is the first definitive book that names and describes the post-evangelical movement: identifying its origins, telling the stories of its members, and examining its vast cultural, social, and political impact.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.
©2024 Sarah McCammon (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"With sensitivity and candor, Sarah McCammon offers readers an intimate window into the world of American evangelicalism. Fellow exvangelicals will find McCammon’s story both startlingly familiar and immensely clarifying, while those looking in from the outside can find no better introduction to the subculture that has shaped the hopes and fears of millions of Americans. Filled with humor, insight, and hard-earned wisdom, The Exvangelicals is a gift to all who find themselves on a spiritual journey."—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne
"No one else could have written The Exvangelicals but Sarah McCammon. The way she seamlessly weaves together her own journalistic expertise and deeply personal experience of leaving evangelicalism to explore this moment in American history is stunning. Immediately after reading this book, I found myself already excited for her next one."—Nadia Bolz-Weber, New York Times bestselling author of Accidental Saints
"The Exvangelicals is a sensitive, informed exploration of what is often most personal and perplexing to us—our faith. McCammon takes the scramble of thoughts, feelings, and fears that characterize this era of religious re-examination and makes them legible. This isn't just a book about what evangelicalism has become, it is also about the ways people are trying to find what comes next."—Jemar Tisby, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism
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Overall
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Dr. Laura Anderson takes an honest look at a side of religion that few like to talk about. Drawing from her own life and therapy practice, she helps listeners understand what religious trauma is and isn't, and how high-control churches can be harmful and abusive, often resulting in trauma. She shows how elements of fundamentalist church life—such as fear of hell, purity culture, corporal punishment, and authoritarian leaders—can cause psychological, relational, physical, and spiritual damage.
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Harmed by Church of Christ beliefs
- By Bryan Wade on 04-14-24
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Star-Spangled Jesus
- Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding a True Faith
- By: April Ajoy
- Narrated by: April Ajoy
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Social media influencer and podcast host April Ajoy wouldn’t have called herself a Christian Nationalist when she performed her original song “America Say Jesus” on the Jim Bakker show, or when she participated in Jesus Marches across America, or when she posted cringe-worthy videos on YouTube to campaign for Mitt Romney. April just considered herself a good Christian: faithful, Republican, and determined to make America a Christian nation once again.
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Kinda helped me out
- By carl zayas on 01-19-25
By: April Ajoy
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Baptistland
- A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation
- By: Christa Brown
- Narrated by: Soren McKay
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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When Christa Brown first spoke out about the sexual abuse she endured in her Texas childhood church, she never imagined it would expose the ethical chasm at the core of the Southern Baptist Convention: male religious leaders so focused on institutional protection that they sacrifice the safety of children. A book about speaking out and speaking up, Baptistland weaves together Christa’s revealing story of hope amid Southern patriarchy and religious fundamentalism.
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It was very boring.
- By Randall Sink on 07-24-24
By: Christa Brown
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You Are Your Own
- A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity
- By: Jamie Lee Finch
- Narrated by: Jamie Lee Finch
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Rooted in her experiences growing up in an evangelical Christian family, Jamie Lee Finch’s You Are Your Own offers an overview of evangelicalism and the painful confusion and anxiety experienced under its demands. Finch explores the mechanisms of trauma and how fundamentalist denominations match the patterns connected with PTSD. She elaborates on the doubt, guilt, fear, and grief that haunt those leaving the evangelical faith and offers an approach to help them recover healthy self-worth and resilience.
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great content.
- By Corey Moore on 11-19-19
By: Jamie Lee Finch
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The Woman They Wanted
- Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife
- By: Shannon Harris
- Narrated by: Shannon Harris
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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As a twenty-three-year-old singer and the soon-to-be wife of youth pastor Joshua Harris, nothing in Shannon Harris's secular upbringing prepared her to enter the world of conservative Christianity. Soon Joshua's bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye helped inspire a national purity movement, and Shannon's identity became "pastor's wife." The Woman They Wanted recounts Shannon's remarkable experience inside Big Church—where she was asked to live within a narrow definition of womanhood for almost two decades—and her journey out of that world and into a more authentic version of herself.
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Her Story is Our Story
- By Amazon Customer on 11-04-23
By: Shannon Harris
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Faith Unraveled
- How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions
- By: Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey
- Narrated by: Rachel Held Evans
- Length: 4 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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From New York Times best-selling author Rachel Held Evans: a must-listen for anyone on the journey of doubt, deconstruction, and ultimately faith reborn. Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial made a spectacle of Christian fundamentalism and brought national attention to her hometown, Rachel Held Evans faced a trial of her own when she began to have doubts about her faith. Rachel recounts growing up in a culture obsessed with apologetics, struggling as her own faith unraveled one unexpected question at a time.
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Recharging my faith
- By nitasue11 on 09-07-20
By: Rachel Held Evans, and others
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Testimony
- Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation
- By: Jon Ward
- Narrated by: Jon Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Jon Ward's life is divided in half: two decades inside the evangelical Christian bubble and two decades outside of it. In Testimony, Ward tells the engaging story of his upbringing in, and eventual break from, an influential evangelical church in the 1980s and 1990s. Ward sheds light on the evangelical movement's troubling political and cultural dimensions, tracing the ways in which the Jesus People movement was seduced by materialism and other factors to become politically captive rather than prophetic.
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True Unbiased Journalism
- By S. Schneider on 06-03-23
By: Jon Ward
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A Well-Trained Wife
- My Escape from Christian Patriarchy
- By: Tia Levings
- Narrated by: Tia Levings
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles—a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.” A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable memoir about a woman's race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.
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A review from a chronic non-reviewer
- By T. L. P. on 08-11-24
By: Tia Levings
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Out of Focus
- My Story of Sexuality, Shame, and Toxic Evangelicalism
- By: Amber Cantorna-Wylde
- Narrated by: Amber Cantorna-Wylde
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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When a mass shooter killed five people in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, grieving people graffitied James Dobson's Focus on the Family headquarters with the words "Their blood is on your hands." Such an accusation comes as no surprise to Amber Cantorna-Wylde, whose father is a Focus on the Family executive and cast Amber out of her family when she came out in 2012.
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Deeply Insightful
- By randal b. on 09-13-24
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Kingdom of Rage
- The Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace
- By: Elizabeth Neumann
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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When Elizabeth Neumann began her anti-terrorism career as part of President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Counsel in the wake of the September 11 attacks, she expected to spend her life protecting her country from the threat of global terrorism. But as her career evolved, she began to perceive that the greatest threat to American security came not from religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan or Iraq but from white nationalists and radicalized religious fundamentalists within the very institution that was closest to her heart—the American evangelical church.
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Insightful
- By Anonymous User on 05-04-24
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The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
- American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
- By: Tim Alberta
- Narrated by: Tim Alberta
- Length: 18 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement.
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Looked forward to this a long time and wasn’t disappointed!
- By Josh Hulbert on 12-08-23
By: Tim Alberta
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Buffalo Dreamer
- By: Violet Duncan
- Narrated by: Ashley Callingbull
- Length: 2 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer and her family always spend relaxed summers in Alberta, Canada, on the reservation where her mom’s family lives. But this year is turning out to be an eye-opening one. First, Summer has begun to have vivid dreams in which she's running away from one of the many real-life residential schools that tore Native children from their families and tried to erase their Native identities. Not long after that, she learns that unmarked children’s graves have been discovered at the school her grandpa attended as a child.
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Finally a book a Native kid/adult can relate too
- By Amazon Customer on 12-12-24
By: Violet Duncan
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Searching for Sunday
- Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
- By: Rachel Held Evans
- Narrated by: Rachel Held Evans
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals - church culture seemed so far removed from Jesus. Yet despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing her back. And so she set out on a journey to understand the Church and to find her place in it.
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Don't bother
- By Andi Andrzjewski on 12-05-16
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The False White Gospel
- Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy
- By: Jim Wallis, Eddie Glaude Jr.
- Narrated by: Jim Wallis, Leon Nixon - foreword
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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It is time says Jim Wallis, to call out genuine faith—specifically the “Christian” in White Christian Nationalism—inviting all who can be persuaded to reject and help dismantle a false gospel that propagates white supremacy and autocracy. We need–to raise up the faith of all of us, and help those who are oblivious, stuck, and captive to the ideology and idolatry of White Christian Nationalism that is leading us to such great danger. Wallis turns our attention to six iconic texts at the heart of what genuine biblical faith means and what Jesus, in the gospels, has called us to do.
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The importance of love and kindness to build people and relationships up, instead of using hate to divide and tear down.
- By Amazon Customer on 05-11-24
By: Jim Wallis, and others
Interesting and helpful
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Excellent
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The story of an amazing journey!
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The author speaks from personal experience as the child of an evangelical family, and addresses the serious social consequences of a country whose religion has gotten mixed up with its politics.
A measured, articulate and gripping account.
must read
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This is the best book from a first-hand narrative (my opinion) with history and valuable insights. I just wish I could have met her fascinating grandfather and discussed philosophy.
I know many, many who have struggled from religious toxic patterns and would benefit by reading to the end. Almost cried tbrough Chapter 13. Take breaks, if you must, to process. The last chapter was as valuable as the first.
Honest, Helpful, Hopeful
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Freedom of choice! Praise God!
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I can’t recommend this book enough!
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Multiple Reasons
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Accepting that’s there is good and bad in all of us and that there is good and bad in most circumstances has lead to a story where many of us can find ourselves.
Black and white are relative and shades of grey are where we live our lives. We need to experience the world for ourselves and develop a broader viewpoint and this book fully embraces that ideology.
Coming together through shared experience
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spot on accurate and (eventually) optimistic
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