The book I'm responding to is Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon, an author in my generation. Overall it's both thorough and heartfelt. The thoroughness resulted in more chapters than I would've expected. Each one is devoted to a different topic and does an admirable job at covering it. Rather than speak in generalities, the book contains direct quote after direct quote expressed in actual interviews. (This has the side effect of displaying the value of expert hard-working journalism.) It strikes from many angles, all of which are worthwhile.
At the same time, this book's heartfelt nature stands out. While this is more than a memoir, the author is impressively blunt about her personal background and long journey. Her story rises to the front time and again, and it's always relevant when it does. Yet she also brings in concrete stories from a wide range of people who have different experiences than hers. It's striking how emotional it all is.
After reading these accounts, I find myself surprisingly grateful for the middle-of-the-road evangelicalism I came through. (I'm going to use "evangelicalism" to mean "typical U.S. white evangelical Protestantism".) I wasn't part of theologically-liberal, metaphorical-Bible, Northeast-respectable Christianity. Nor was I part of an ultra-conservative, literal-bible, Southern-country-fried Christianity. My family was in the conservative but somewhat laid-back camp, as paradoxical as that might sound. Hell for the unsaved was there, the distrust of modern culture was there, the belief that real miracles took place in olden days was there. But I wasn't taught in a school with a dubious "Christian" curriculum, or forbidden from the local library, or kept completely isolated from mass media, or attacked by "physical discipline".
I even was permitted to ask honest questions about what I had been taught—although years later I tore apart the standard evasive answers to these questions ("free will *mumble mumble* ", "God's mysterious ways *ahem ahem* "). Furthermore, I'm not part of a minority group that would've resulted in knee-jerk mistreatment by this culture. In a nutshell, my evangelical story was just far less traumatic. This is partially why it took me longer to exit the beliefs, of course. In that way I was privileged by comparison. I remember reading once that the unplugged people in the Matrix movie trilogy tended toward minority groups because they were the ones who were less likely to find the Matrix's reality acceptable...
I had the luxury of not being shocked into moving on from evangelical faith-beliefs. I gradually discarded them based on my own growing awareness and internal realizations. Because of this important difference, I suppose I'm in a closely related but distinct category to most of the people McCammon is fixated on. Several other differences spring from that one. Perhaps the most obvious is that I feel that the word "deconversion" fits me (the reversal of conversion i.e. de-conversion), where the book consistently uses "deconstruction". Along the same lines, I wouldn't particularly mind the label "atheist" or "agnostic", where the book is abundantly clear that exvangelicals, such as the author, are frequently settling down in flavors of Christianity that suit their taste better: flavors with loose and/or progressive-compatible beliefs.
Let me emphasize that I'm not strongly opposed to these flavors. And I'm fine with exvangelicals drawing vaguely defined inspiration or comfort from these sources. They may claim that they derive a few beneficial moral teachings from these, too. I'll roll my eyes a bit but won't complain; I know there are many devotees of many religions throughout history who've preached wisely sometimes. The vital point is that exvangelicals have moved to the driving seat of their brains and lives, rather than following inaccurate ideas. They themselves are filtering out inaccuracies, rather than trusting in religious authorities and texts to do the filtering for them. In fact, my suspicion is that more than a few evangelical church attendees, especially in popular megachurches, quietly take this approach. They attend out of family pressure or a lingering appreciation for the rituals, for instance, but their own stances and behaviors don't align with the church's official standards (and they like it that way).
I can't help thinking that a crucial philosophical difference is at work. "Exvangelicals" in my mold haven't reacted to the evangelical mindset by adopting softer (or "more flexible" if you prefer) definitions of religious "truth". Nor do we start worshipping questions and declare that real answers are impossible. Nor do we replace one set of premodern doctrines with a set of postmodern doctrines. We're much less determined to salvage or adapt the faulty belief system we were raised in. A zealous few pour effort into undermining it and pursuing deconversions—I don't do that myself but I certainly care about stopping its policy ideas from affecting the rest of society. Naturally, the people who actively "de-evangelize" are a small subset of us, similar to the small subset of evangelicals who actively evangelize.
Our discarding of the mindset was accomplished by adopting harder (or "more substantiated" if you prefer) definitions of the accuracy of ideas. We re-weighed the accuracy of the ideas we'd followed, and the ideas simply and honestly didn't measure up. "The love of Jesus is bigger than conventional religious concepts have said" isn't equivalent to "Whoa, every religion including mine has consisted of a massive self-perpetuating loop of disinformation". We're "exvangelicals" insofar as we share a past, because we were once part of that evangelical culture as well.
Yet the distinction in where we ended up is illustrated by the statements of some exvangelicals in the book that atheism is nothing more than another "rigid perspective". I'd counter that I might or might not be atheistic; we should proceed as we would with any question, by laying out the practical boundary tests for what counts as atheism and comparing those stark specifics to the details of my beliefs. Words can be annoying, but my mold of exvangelical reacts to that by firming up a word to make it more useful instead of pretending that words don't serve purposes.
Fortunately, philosophical disagreement isn't a barrier to allying with each other on U.S. politics. This book is upfront about the major boost to exvangelicals' numbers by recent political shifts. As evangelicalism's totalitarian (or "Christian nationalist" if you prefer) impulses have risen to the surface, it has driven away the people who've never wanted their religion to be a force of oppression. I appreciated the focus on this phenomenon, which I hadn't noticed. I'd only noticed how blatantly satisfied most evangelicals appeared to be—from the famous leaders at the top all the way down to the high-turnout voters in the pews—with idolizing politicians who promised unmerciful control, and revenge against ideological enemies, and the rollback of cultural advancements.
It makes sense that the sharpening of this knife-edge in the culture would prod people to finally make some hard decisions about what they're willing to be part of. My own exvangelical views had blossomed years before the present era, around the midpoint of Obama's first term. Disillusionment with W.'s terms had played some relatively minor role in the process. I was repulsed by two things. First, evangelicals proved themselves to be unconditionally supportive of multiple drawn-out wars. Second, they were enthusiastic to cast all Muslims, at home and across the world, as not merely the "tolerated believers in false religion" they were before but now as demonic tools. So the ugliness of the politics had already begun to show, but of course there was much more to come. All it took to push the ugliness further were politicians who have no capacity for shame.
Thus the exvangelicals have my earnest sympathies. It's awful what they've had to endure, but I'm glad they've escaped. I'd consider them as being on my side...to the extent that's meaningful for either of us. The deconverted and the deconstructed shall get along just fine. And they'll have very familiar stories to exchange.
