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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Yesterday on the show, we did a call-in for folks who have, contrary to the current national trend, returned to a religious faith. I mentioned that we would be talking to NPR national correspondent Sarah McCammon today about her new book that traces the opposite journey, and one that statistics show is more common in America right now, moving away from organized religion. Her book is titled, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. We'll hear her story and some of yours. Hi, Sarah McCammon. Welcome to the show.

Sarah McCammon: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Since this is your story and that of other exvangelicals who grew up during this period of such a rising preeminence and prominence of the white evangelical movement in the United States, tell us a little bit of your story.

Sarah McCammon: I grew up in the '80s and '90s in the Midwest in a very intensely conservative Christian evangelical family. We would've just called ourselves Christians at the time. In retrospect, we were definitely evangelical. I went to an evangelical college, and for us, Christianity was the center of our lives and a very specific form of Christianity that focused on a personal relationship with God, with Jesus, a literal view of the Bible.

We believed that the Earth was created in six days as described in Genesis about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. We believed it was our job to share that message with the rest of the world, and there was a very strong political overtone. This was the time that the moral majority was rising, that the evangelical movement was becoming more and more aligned with the Republican party. In many ways, being a Christian and being a Republican were synonymous for most of the people that I knew.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You were part of a trend in being raised at the peak of what you call the white evangelical movement. Do you have stats on that?

Sarah McCammon: Yes. Looking at a variety of statistics from groups like Pew and other surveys, and I rely heavily on Robert Jones from the Public Religion Research Institute for the data because he's been looking at-- different groups have collected different data at different times, but he's, I think, one of the best pollsters looking at religion and politics in America today.

His assessment, which I cite in the book, is that at the peak, which would've been around the early '90s when I was about 12, at the peak, about one in four Americans were white evangelicals, more if you include evangelicals of color. That number bounced around a bit from the '90s to about the mid-2000s when it hit that peak again. It's been declining since then. From about one in four Americans being white evangelicals to around 14% today. That change is due to a lot of different factors. Some of it is just demographic change. The country is more diverse than it used to be.

I should say the decline in religiosity isn't unique to evangelicalism. Other Christian groups, Catholics, in particular, are seeing this as well, but evangelicals are, first of all, that's the community I came from, and so that's who I focused on, and they're uniquely unified and influential voting block. They vote for Republicans in much larger numbers than, for example, white Catholics. Their participation rates are very high. That's why even as the number of evangelicals in the population has declined, their political power has remained really strong.

Brian Lehrer: You specify white evangelical church in your title. Why is that an important distinction in this context?

Sarah McCammon: It's important because we really cannot talk about American Christianity without talking about race for a variety of reasons. If you look specifically at evangelicalism, there is a long and ugly history of racial division, racism, segregation. The Southern Baptist Convention in particular was created as a result of segregationists wanting to split off from northern churches who did not want to accept slavery. Now, the Southern Baptist Convention has apologized for that in the 1990s, but that is a part of the history.

Dr. Martin Luther King, famously in the 1960s, talked about how segregated the Sunday Morning Hour was, and it still is to a large degree for a lot of cultural reasons and, to some extent, political reasons. When you talk about evangelical voters, often what people are talking about, often what journalists are talking about is really white evangelicals, because white evangelicals vote very, very differently from, for example, Christians of color, particularly Black Christians who might hold very similar theological views on paper, an emphasis on scripture, an emphasis on Jesus and on salvation, maybe even similar worship styles from overlapping traditions. Their voting patterns are very different. White evangelicals overwhelmingly vote for Republicans, and that's far less true for Christians of color, particularly Black Christians.

Brian Lehrer: Are there less Black evangelicals or other evangelicals of color leaving the evangelical church than there are whites?

Sarah McCammon: The data on that, I have less expertise on. I think the numbers, I would want to double-check that. I think when I was writing the book, the numbers I saw suggested relative stability among the Black church and maybe some growth in the Latino church. There's been new data that's come out in the last few weeks since the book was published. I'm not 100% sure what the latest data says about that, but it's fair to say that white Christianity, I think, is seeing the most precipitous decline.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your stories as we hear Sarah McCammon's. My guest is NPR national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, who has a new book titled The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. It is her story as well as a reported story. We invite yours.

Have you grown up in the white evangelical church and eventually decided to leave it? 212-433 WNYC. For that matter, have you grown up as a person of color in the evangelical church and decided to either stay or leave it yourself? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Has that church and your upbringing in it, whatever branch of evangelism you happen to have been brought up in, affected your politics as well as your idea of God, your idea of faith, your idea of your place in the world spiritually? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, call or text.

We're actually going to take a short break here, and Sarah, when we come back, we're going to get more into your story of leaving the church, how you wound up as a journalist coming up with that background in faith as opposed to facts, if I can put it that way. How you were a page in the Senate, the United States Senate in high school, and the role that played in your decision about your relationship with religion as you were becoming an adult. Listeners, we'll take some of your stories, 212-433-9692, right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with NPR's Sarah McCammon, her new book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. I see you were a page in the Senate during high school, getting warned about Strom Thurmond, and that had an effect on how you saw the world. Tell us that story.

Sarah McCammon: Yes. I was fortunate to have the opportunity in 1998 to go to Washington, D.C. for a semester and work in the Senate. This is a program that still exists on the Senate side. I don't think it exists on the house side anymore, but if you look at C-SPAN during the day and you see those people in blue suits walking around, sometimes sitting on the steps leading up to what's called the rostrum, which is where senate business is administered. Those are pages, and I was one of those.

I was there serving my senator at the time, Kit Bond from Missouri. That was an eye-opening experience for me. I read about in the Exvangelicals about growing up in an almost entirely evangelical Christian bubble, [laughs] as one of my friends called it. Everybody that I knew was an even evangelical Christian. I went to Christian school. I spent a lot of time at church. A lot of the media that came into my home was from Christian publishers and broadcasters.

I was limited in my exposure to pop culture, but as a high school junior, I went to Washington, D.C., lived with a bunch of students from all over the country. There were a few dozen of us, different religions, different backgrounds, and in many ways, I really felt like a fish out of water. I felt like I was around kids who were going to parties and doing things that I wasn't allowed to do. I also was meeting people who had a different belief system from me. I knew that that existed. I talked earlier in the book about being told in church and Christian school that it was really important to share our faith with our friends and just the urgency we felt because we really believed that everybody who didn't believe what we believed was going to hell and we had to urgently share the good news with them.

I talked in the book about this encounter I had with a friend who was the son of Iranian immigrants and had grown up in a Muslim family, lovely person, really kind, someone I really admired and respected. We got to talking one day as we were sitting on those steps in the Senate waiting for a vote or a speech to conclude, as we often did. We got to talking about our backgrounds, about our family's religious faith. He just asked me, point blank, "Do you think I'm going to hell because I'm a Muslim?" I knew that my pastors would say that I should say yes, but I felt in my heart that I couldn't say that.

That was a real moment of truth for me when I realized that a lot of the things that I felt like I was supposed to believe, I wasn't sure if I really believed them or wanted to. I said to him, "I don't know. I think that's between you and God." It's one of those moments that sticks out in my mind as a moment that really forced me to contend with difference, which is something that, in my evangelical bubble, I really hadn't had to do very much.

Brian Lehrer: What was the Strom Thurmond factor there? For people who don't know, Strom Thurmond, who died more than 20 years ago, was a US Senator from South Carolina. He was originally a Democrat when the Southern Democrats were against the civil rights laws, then he became a Republican. He had a lot of what I think we can call racist baggage. What was the role of Strom Thurmond in your experience in the Senate?

Sarah McCammon: I'm not sure it's that central to my decision to leave the evangelical church, but it is a memory that I share, just some of the texture of daily life working in the Senate. We were around all 100 senators. We were assigned to our particular party, and so I was working on the Republican side, and yes, Strom Thurmond, the famous segregationist, was still in the Senate. He was, I think, at that point, in about 96 years old. I just remember him still flirting with the girls. He would tell me every day just about that I had pretty hair. It was an unusual exposure for me as a 16, 17-year-old, but at that time, this was long before Me Too, and people just whispered about it but knew that that was common knowledge that he would speak to girls that way. We laughed about it because of his age, to be honest.

Brian Lehrer: That was the warning you had gotten about the way he might treat you as a young woman or a girl-

Sarah McCammon: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: -because you were in high school. Sarah in Boonton, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: You have a story?

Sarah: Yes, I do. I was raised Born Again Christian. My mom turned to church after my parents got divorced, and then I went overseas for school and was exposed to a lot of different cultures and religions, and then served in the Peace Corps in West Africa in a Muslim community where I had to figure out how to reconcile, how to bring my faith to a Muslim environment. I prayed the Muslim prayer, but with my Christ in my heart, even though I had still waned against the church, and being in that really intense religious environment and the Peace Corps actually brought me closer to my faith, which is really interesting, just seeing the power of faith.

Then I came back and got a PhD and really wandered away from the church. Then Tim Keller, I'm sure you remember him, he brought me back to my faith in 2009. Basically said, "If you're wrestling with God, you're in the right place." I thought, "Great, I'm wrestling with God. I've got a lot of questions." That's really been my journey. It's just like this awesome permission to say I can still be a Christian, wrestle with God, have really deep arguments and frustrations and confusions and doubts, and that's okay.

That I think in this political moment we're in right now, as a white privileged woman, a Christian, I feel so responsible to stay in my faith, to defend it from what I feel like is really being co-opted in a really sinister and unhealthy way. I just feel this freedom, I guess, in both staying, I consider myself a post-evangelical in my faith, staying critical, open to doubt and debate and questions, but also really recognizing that we really need to expand and interrogate how Christianity is being used in the political space in the United States right now.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah, thank you very much. Garfield and Hackensack, you're on WNYC. Hi, Garfield.

Garfield: Hi, Brian. I just wanted to share briefly that my relationship with the church started in college, and it's a time where you're trying to discover yourself. I got involved with this evangelical group and I made a great friend within that community, and as we got closer, he started to reveal, and I discovered that he was gay and he was hiding it while he was in the church. This created a dilemma with how he could reconcile being a Christian and also being gay.

Ultimately, when he came out, he was excommunicated from the church, and as a friend, there's a pull of wanting to be with your friend, but feeling like, well, he's not doing the right thing based on what you believe. Ultimately, I started looking deeper for myself and reading. Eventually, I left the church myself and connected with him when he found a healthy way to express his identity. Then that also became a way for me to find a healthy way to express my own identity. In some ways, I feel like being in a church can be like being in the matrix, and you aren't really aware that there is another way until someone shows you. I think even for my friend, he had someone who showed him a different way.

Brian Lehrer: Garfield, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that call. Did you have anyone like that, Sarah?

Sarah McCammon: Absolutely. I would love to respond to both of those comments. First, to Sarah who talked about herself as post-evangelical and is wanting to retain her Christian faith. I've heard that term and it's one I use in the book as well, post-evangelical, which is interesting because for a lot of people I talk to that the term evangelical, because it has become so politicized and associated with things like the other caller was just saying like anti-gay sentiment, that label for a lot of people doesn't work for them anymore. For many people, that doesn't mean leaving behind faith. For some, it does. For others, it means an evolution or reshaping of their faith.

I think Sarah made a really important point there. Certainly, when it comes to gay evangelicals, people growing up LGBTQ in the church, that there's a whole chapter about that, about a couple of friends of mine, including one who has become a minister, has gone to seminary, and again, has held onto his faith, whereas another said he just couldn't remain in church. I think for some people that leaves them in an ambiguous space, if they felt rejected by their parents or their churches or their congregations, and I want to be clear that my book, it's not anti-faith, it's not anti-Christianity. It's really about the experiences of a lot of people, including myself, who have had to make sense of their religious background and rethink what that label means and what they want it to mean going forward.

Brian Lehrer: Do you label yourself religiously in any way today?

Sarah McCammon: I'm not a huge fan of labels. I still place myself very much in the Christian tradition, and I talk about this in the book. It's what shaped me, it inspires me. I'm very inspired and moved by the story of Jesus and the idea of self-sacrifice and suffering and the idea of redemption. I think those are really important ideas for me.

I also have moved into a place where I really want to embrace and include people who don't see the world the way I do, who don't come from my tradition. I talk about now being in an interfaith marriage. My husband's Reform Jewish, and that has been really fascinating for me and really enriching for my own spirituality and relationship to God to be in relationship with someone who has come up with a different tradition and a different point of view, which isn't something that I was really taught was okay, but I am much more okay now with, I think, more ambiguity than I once was.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get one more caller in here with a story. Daniel in Yonkers, you're on WNYC. Hello, Daniel.

Daniel: Hi, Brian. Hi, Sarah. Thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to add, I was raised in the Baptist Church but out in Long Island, and growing up in a very multicultural school with lots of different religious and different diversity backgrounds. By high school, it was very hard to rationalize these two things of I'm friends with a lot of people who are Muslim or Jewish in their background, and how do I reconcile the fact that I want to be friends with them, but I don't know. They don't follow the same religion as I do, and by college, really had given up on going to church.

In my 20s, I actually, I had issues with addiction and I became sober, and in my sobriety, wanted to reclaim my faith and found a really great home in a more progressive church in the Evangelical Church of Lutheran Americans, which is a much more progressive and open church set up. They're affirming of LGBTQ pastors and they don't have always hangups. When I see headlines about the evangelical church, I just can't believe how unaccepting and in a faith that really promotes forgiveness and understanding. It's hard to look at a lot of the evangelical church.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Sarah, as we head toward the end of our time, some people may be wondering, was there something about your becoming distanced from the evangelical church that you grew up with? Something relevant to your becoming a journalist? There might even be a stereotype, maybe we should call it, in some quarters that if you're a person of faith, then you can't be a person of facts.

Sarah McCammon: Yes. I think that's something that I really wrestled with, and I think as I've given this more thought and learned and grown more, I think for many people, melding faith in science, or religion in science or faith in facts is possible. I think there's this idea in that some Christians hold that all truth is God's truth, which I think is a really beautiful idea that we shouldn't be afraid to learn and to study things. If that forces a shift or a faith change, then that's okay as long as our hearts and minds are open.

I think in many ways, in retrospect, although I would not have articulated it in this way at the time, journalism was, for me, a place where I could ask questions. I wasn't expected to start with an answer, but really to start with questions and to try to understand the world and understand different points of view. For me, that was very exciting having grown up in a space where the answers were a bit confined and constrained. To have that freedom was really exhilarating, and I think that kind of curiosity still drives a lot of what I do today, or at least I hope it does.

Brian Lehrer: Some people might call you a seeker, which is a very religious term, and we leave it there. Thank you, Sarah McCammon, NPR national political reporter, co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast, by the way, and now the author of The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. Thanks so much for sharing your book with us.

Sarah McCammon: Yes, thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More in a minute.

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