The Exvangelicals review: fine study of faith under fire in the age of Trump

Sarah McCammon’s new book about “exvangelicals” like herself is a powerful memoir of her complicated journey away from Christian fundamentalism. Because she experienced it from the inside, she is also able to give the rest of us one of the best explanations I have ever read of how so many Americans became part of the non-reality-based cult that remains so stubbornly addicted to the insanities of Donald Trump.

Brought up by rigorous evangelicals equally opposed to abortion and in favor of corporal punishment of their children, McCammon grew up inside a religious bubble supposedly designed to protect everyone within it from the evils of a secular world.

Now 43 and national political correspondent for NPR, she was born at the dawn of the Reagan administration, which also marked the beginning of the alliance between religious extremism and the Republican party.

The number of Americans who identified as evangelical or born again peaked in 2004, when it reached 30%. McCammon’s parents, though, came of age at the height of the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution. Like millions of others who felt unhinged by the chaos, they cast aside the “love ethos” of their youth, replacing “drug culture and anti-war protests” with “praise choruses” and the teachings of religious reactionaries such as James Dobson.

The McCammons took Dobson’s teachings very seriously, especially his book Dare to Discipline, which taught them to spank babies as young as 15 months and to use “a small switch or belt” which should be seen by the child as an “object of love rather than an instrument of punishment”.

As the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has explained, McCammon’s generation grew up during the creation of “a massive industry of self-reinforcing