The Exvangelicals Quotes

“What kind of scripture and, really, what kind of God, can't stand up to the questioning of mere mortals like us?”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“One of the most challenging things for a nervous system is when your caregiver is a source of some support and connection but also a source of abuse and neglect.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“It is easier to blame the person who is leaving the environment than it is to self-reflect,” she said.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Howard thinks the rejection of science, combined with apocalyptic beliefs about the future of the world, has real consequences, not only for what evangelicals believe but for how they take care of the Earth. “When you’re taught that science is basically a fairy tale, and you’re taught not to trust scientists, then why would you care if the world is burning around us?” Howard said. “It’s about this heavenly battle, and it’s about winning souls to Christ, and that’s what’s important, right? So the world around us doesn’t matter, because this is all going to burn like in Revelation anyway.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Ask THEM the question—the people, the human beings who were treated as litter by evangelical leaders and institutions on a crusade for religious, social, and political power, a quest that wrecked their souls and their sanity. Spend three days with those wounded, joyful thrivers, those who were kicked out, fled, crawled out, or backed slowly out the rear door. Those who are hanging around the edges for dear life, those deconstructing and reconstructing their lives, those who are still haunted by nightmares of heresy trials, purity culture, and rapture fears. Go ask them if there’s any good in evangelicalism.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“They act like the people who deconstruct aren’t the ones who were first in line for every single church thing ever, who’d pored over every theology book, and who really wanted to follow Jesus—the kids who came to youth group every single time,” Petrini said. “They act like it’s a bunch of people who were really gullible, or who were never believers in the first place, instead of people who were in church leadership, people who went to seminary, people who were raised in this and who had very similar experiences to them.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“This is the one thing that brings the most meaning and satisfaction to existence,” Grandpa wrote. “I think we are here to help our fellow man,” he said. “To do this we must be accepting first of ourselves and our imperfections, and then, of other people and their differences. To overcome our intolerance and fear of others, and to appreciate and even emulate their good qualities, gives us a feeling for the fullness of”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“I think it’s time to focus on finding and creating church among its many refugees—women called to ministry, our LGBTQ brother and sisters, science-lovers, doubters, dreamers, misfits, abuse survivors, those who refuse to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith or their compassion and their religion.… Instead of fighting for a seat at the evangelical table, I want to prepare tables in the wilderness, where everyone is welcome and where we can go on discussing (and debating!) the Bible, science, sexuality, gender, racial reconciliation, justice, church, and faith, but without labels, without wars.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Power is not in stopping or quitting; spiritual power is the ability to be in your agency and realize that you don’t have to go along with that deal that was made on your behalf by someone else.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Since the dawn of the Moral Majority, Merritt wrote, evangelical leaders “have claimed it is about character. They have claimed it is about values. They have claimed it is about biblical principles.… But evidence indicates that evangelical political engagement is really about cultural influence, social dominance, and power.”11”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Peace, when I have found it, has come from accepting that I don’t have to solve the riddle of the universe or uncover any magical answers. That life isn’t an elaborate calculus problem, and that God isn’t waiting to punish us if we make an error. I don’t have the answers, but I’m not sure I’m meant to.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Perhaps the best statistical evidence for this shift lies in the 2021 Pew Research Center survey that found a growing tendency among white supporters of Donald Trump to newly adopt an evangelical identity. “In the end, their own movement was redefined as a reactionary, angry, white Christian, storm-the-Capitol movement,” Gushee said. “People who don’t have any idea about classical evangelical doctrines, but by God, they like Trump and they’re white, so therefore they’re evangelical. That is a complete collapse of moral and religious identity that evangelicals brought on themselves.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“If Christians in America are serious about helping people see Jesus and what he’s about and what he claims, then the label ‘evangelical’ is a distraction because it bears, unfortunately, the weight of a violence,’” he said in the NPR interview. “I would not use that term because of its association with January 6.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“I was taught to believe that people like me—the spiritually withered—are the unfruitful branches that Jesus warned about, who deserve to be cut off. But I’ve come to suspect that maybe such pruning is intended for ideas like the ones taught in our church sanctuaries and homeschool classrooms—ideas that close off inquiry and confine us to narrow ways of seeing the world. The pruning is for getting rid of dead weight that stifles the growth of healthy branches, which can spread and reach toward the sky, and whatever is beyond it.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Dr. M told me her time in those evangelical classrooms included many similar moments: “I wondered, if Christianity doesn’t produce better moral beings, what good is it?”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“This, Gushee writes, goes well beyond the typical process of adults growing up and charting their own life course, as humans have always done to some extent: “What we are seeing is not just rebellion against parents or normal ebb and flow. We are witnessing conscientious objection. Ex-evangelicals are leaving based on what they believe to be specific offenses against them personally, or against their family and friends, and specific experiences of trauma that have left lasting damage…” Those experiences, he says, include a host of ills within the evangelical community: clergy sex abuse, bigotry against LGTBQ+ people, hypocritical leaders, and more.12”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“cognitive training to reject expert knowledge and to seek alternative, more amenable explanations has helped disarm the capacity for critical thinking”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“This, I was taught growing up, is what we are called to do: to try to mimic Christ, to love generously, even at great cost. Even when people don’t deserve it. Even when they hurt us. I was taught to pray, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And I was taught to speak the truth. I was taught this, and much more, by evangelicals.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Exvangelicals, ex-fundamentalists—we know the text. We know the tradition. I sometimes say you have to hate the tradition to love it properly, to really see what’s wrong.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“It’s a slightly different form—and probably a healthier form, I can acknowledge that—of ‘just go talk to the pastor,’” Peck said. “If that’s helpful and useful and is consistent with what the person needs, that can be a really amazing resource. But when that’s a way of not addressing health concerns, or not getting the depression treatment that you need, it can be counterproductive.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“While it did not break down the data by religious affiliation, an NPR analysis in December 2021 found that counties that voted heavily for Trump experienced COVID death rates nearly three times higher than those that voted heavily for Joe Biden32—a grim illustration of the dangers of making decisions based on a set of “alternative facts.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“I have stood in a church singing a worship song that I didn’t believe in,” Stalvey said, “and kind of feeling this ache and wanting to believe in the words, and it feels like you’re the only one.… That doubt is really isolating. You’re like, ‘What’s wrong with me?”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“In this epistemic approach, Roberts said, "Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe's values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“But 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 that 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 have loved me, are being persuaded to aid and abet that evil... To subscribe to such a project, even out of a desire to maintain family and community ties, would be a betrayal of one's own integrity.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Hearing these things from the lips of not only my mother but from all of the adults I trusted, I often doubted my own mind. As I matured into a teenager, I noticed more cracks in the intellectual foundation that had been laid for me.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“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.”7”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“I believe God gives us the tools,” he always tells me—and that includes our minds. “It’s up to us to use them.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“There will be those who emerge from that but have a deeper appreciation that there’s a way of loving sacred scripture without viewing it as your property, with which you can judge other people.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“I find it sickening that these men can face their congregations and their families and their college campuses and feel OK with trusting Donald Trump with their voice and their vote and their country—and still somehow explain it away through the lens of the teachings of Christ. It boggles my mind.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

“Like so many exvangelicals I’ve met, 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. And it’s all made so much worse by the feeling of being seen as the problem, as evil or foolish for not remaining within those walls. But we are holding on and reconstructing our lives—finding each other and, maybe, God.”
― Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church