Bizarre and hurt-filled: white evangelical culture lived

Louisiana's new law requiring all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments reminded me of an anecdote from NPR reporter Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

Raised in an insular mid-American white evangelical home and community, McCammon recounts a visit by a Holocaust survivor to her communications class at her Christian college.

Many of us in Dr. M's [Dr. Mendoza's] class were moved by [Felicia] Brenner's story of the horror her family endured after the Nazis marched into their home town in central Poland, forcing them into a ghetto. Near the end of the war, they were taken to Auschwitz, where her parents would die in the gas chambers. Out of a family of six brothers and sisters, only Brenner would survive the war ...

... Dr. M confided in me one day after class, some of her evangelical students seemed fixated on the fact that Brenner was Jewish and, therefore, according to our theology, not saved. Why invite her to speak to us as all, a student in one of the classes had later asked, if Jews were all going to Hell anyway? ... Dr. M watched in horror as other students chimed in to agree ...

... Brenner spent the last three decades of her life telling her story about the Holocaust and raising alarms about the dangers of antisemitism. In a grainy oral history video recorded in 1985, an interviewer asks her how she reflected on her experiences after many years. She's bitter, she says, not only at the Nazis but at the rest of the world who'd abandoned the Jewish people.

And she points to the Christians who've enabled and participated in those evils.

"We gave them the Ten Commandments. We gave them their Jesus. What do they want from us?" Brenner asks. "[They say], 'You killed Jesus,' which is wrong; we did not. But they crucify us and crucify us and crucify us, over and over again."

As Dr. M told me this story about my peers, I could feel that something had permanently shifted inside me. ...

Maybe force feeding kids the Ten Commandments might have, in a round about way, have taught this young evangelical some deep moral lessons, but this seems a vicious way to get there.

McCammon's Exvangelicals is a very intimate portrait of what it is like to grow up deep within the culture of white American evangelical Christianity. The author emerged to become a respected professional political and social journalist; she combines wide ranging interviews and sociological research with a memoir of her own experience of "unraveling." 

Her story is fascinating, as foreign to me as anthropologists' accounts of "primitive" cultures.

But, of course, the culture from which McCammon sprang is not at all foreign. It is very much a contemporary segment of this nation within which we live and in which we struggle to develop in competing directions.

Another anecdote from one of her interviewees:

Sheila Janca grew up as an "evangelical preacher's daughter" in what she describes as an abusive home in the Midwest in the 1960s and '70s. Any questions that bubbled up to the surface had to be quickly suppressed in favor of "blind faith." ... Janca remembers the humiliation of finally discovering, during a nursing school class, that men weren't actually missing a rib. Taking her cues from the creation story in Genesis, she'd believed that because God made Eve from Adam's rib, men had a different anatomy ...

That's pretty out there -- and still manifests itself all too often when red state legislators try to explain anything about female anatomy while prohibiting reproductive choice.

At once point, contemplating evangelicals' embrace of racism, Trump, and homophobia, McCammon finds herself wondering:

That made me think about my own parents, and [other] parents... How do you weigh someone's "good intentions" against the pain their actions cause? And when is it okay to be furious?

She sees child abuse in the strict parenting enjoined by evangelical leaders. She meets people who've left these faith byways -- the exvangelicals of the title -- who are recovering from religious trauma arising from apocalyptic vistas of Hell and a Last Judgment. Therapists report that an upbringing in this religious culture results in people who can never feel safe. However

... leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life's most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of "answers" -- about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you're sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It's often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve the community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world.

In this "wilderness," she finds new community among other exvangelicals. She reports that many reach a sort of truce with parents and other relatives who think they are going to Hell: they just avoid conversation.

There's a lot my own parents and I don't talk about, that we can't talk about. When we have tried over the years, the conversations inevitably end in misunderstandings, tears, and an everwidening distance. They spent years building a world for me that was intended to protect my spiritual safety and warning me not to leave it, only for me to feel anything but safe inside.

She goes on:

... Like so many exvangelicals I've spent much of my adult life slowly crawling away, trying to hang on to something for dear life, often feeling like a wrecked -- or shipwrecked -- soul, swimming for solid ground. Even now in middle age, nearly two decades out of that world, the nightmares still haunt me, as they do so many others. ...

... the evangelical impulse -- the idea that "people need the Lord," that we have been given a unique understanding of the Truth about the most complex questions about reality, and which we must impose through persuasion or coercion -- has never made much sense to me when I survey the complexities of the world, and the diversity of experiences and points of view. Even worse, that way of thinking seems to be at the root of so many evils that have been perpetuated throughout human history by religious fundamentalists and other extremist ideologues. I fear the same impulse is currently laying the groundwork for irreparable harm in our country and the world, and I fear that some of the people I have known and loved, and who've loved me, are being persuaded to aid and abet that evil.

... what mission can I subscribe to in good conscience, as an exvangelical? ... Grandpa noted that the purpose of life was something Jesus had also worried about. His advice was simple, even biblical: help others.

I'll give a plot point away here: it helps to have a gay non-believing grandfather.

This is a complicated, horrifying, and impressive book; highly recommended.