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The Exvangelicals - A talk with author Sarah McCammon

Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

Sarah McCammon, a National Political Correspondent for NPR, will share her experience growing up as an evangelical and discuss the cultural and political power the Christian Right wields in America.

Booked, Stead Center, and Evanston Public Library are partnering together to bring you this wonderful author visit with Sarah McCammon. Join us for a fascinating discussion, refreshments, and book sales and signing.  

ABOUT THE BOOK

In The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, Sarah McCammon presents the first definitive book that names the massive social movement of people leaving the church: the exvangelicals. Blending memoir with investigative journalism, McCammon shares her own experience growing up as an evangelical and combines it with an incisive examination of the cultural and political power the Christian Right wields in America. Throughout, she presents the deeply personal stories of others navigating their way out of not just a religion, but a way of life.

Raised in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the ‘80s and ‘90s, 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.

McCammon 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 movingly told, The Exvangelicals is the story of the people who make up this generational tipping point, including Sarah herself. At a time when white American Christianity is experiencing a precipitous decline, McCammon’s book is a must-read to understand this unique moment in American history.

Pre-order the book from Booked here. Place hold on library book here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah McCammon is a National Political Correspondent for NPR and cohost of The NPR Politics Podcast. Her work focuses on political, social and cultural divides in America, including the intersections of politics and religion, reproductive rights, and the conservative movement. She is also a frequent guest host for NPR news magazines, and has appeared on the BBC, CNN, PBS, and MSNBC. During the 2016 election cycle, Sarah was NPR’s lead political reporter assigned to the Donald Trump campaign and previously reported for NPR Member stations in Georgia, Iowa and Nebraska. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia with her husband and two children.

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