Sexvangelicals Newsletter 3/19: Interview with Sarah McCammon
Reflections on effectively describing the Exvangelical movement to insiders and outsiders
Happy Tuesday! Our Tuesday newsletters are free for everyone, but please consider subscribing and donating to ensure that Julia and I can continue to publish well-researched articles about relationships, sexuality, and communication.
This week, we have three additional articles coming out:
Wednesday: A review of our appearance on the podcast Sunday School Dropouts with Laura Anderson.
Thursday: Is leaving the Evangelical Church more similar to a divorce or a death? How the science of family process can help us make sense of the Exvangelical experience.
Friday: What does the Trumpian party really think about families? An exploration of the Project 2025 Playbook for future conservative leaders.
These articles will all have some content for everyone, but additional content for paid subscribers. Subscribe and donate today!
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I’m Jeremiah; my partner, Julia and I co-host the podcast Sexvangelicals: The sex education the church didn’t want you to have.
We’re both licensed psychotherapists and certified sex therapists who study the impact of Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal (or EMPish, as we say on the pod) religions on long-term relationships and sexuality.
We’re in a really interesting conundrum, as we’re trying to figure out how to intersect two important elements of our work:
Supporting and researching couples where one or both partners grew up in an EMPish community.
Providing affordable, accessible relational healthcare (without financially or emotionally bankrupting ourselves in the process). Insurance companies have created an awful ethical dilemma for therapists like us who specialize in working with relationships, making it unethical (from our perspective) to do relationship work via insurance companies. At the same time, the going rate for an hour of couples therapy is $200 an hour in Boston (and many parts of the East Coast), a number I’ve seen as high as $300/hour. Everyday couples cannot afford that.
Julia and I, along with our marketing and communications coordinator Maddie, have been talking for the last month about what our options might be for connecting these two extraordinary values of ours; in the coming months, we’re excited to share what these options might involve.
But in the mean time, please take a minute to do three things:
Subscribe to Sexvangelicals on Apple Podcasts—new episodes come out Monday morning.
Rate and review Sexvangelicals on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We’d love to hear your feedback about how we can improve the show.
Podcast Episodes
In the mean time, we’re in the middle of a podcast series called Banned Books: The literature you won’t find in your church library. And we’re thrilled to have Sarah McCammon, NPR National Correspondent and author of the new book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, which comes out today! Please buy it, and ask your local bookstore to carry it (if they aren’t already). I’ll give my review of The Exvangelicals below.
One of our favorite aphorisms is “You don’t have to have grown up in the church to have been fucked over by the church.” Sarah’s book speaks to the audience of folks who didn’t grow up in the church, but may find themselves asking “How did the US get to where we’re at?” “Why do Evangelicals love Trump so much, despite him quite literally being the Anti-Christ?”
Sarah grew up in an Evangelical community, and intersperses her own experiences with research and interviews from other exvangelical people. She talks with us about how she struck a balance between creating content for a national audience while simultaneously giving a nod to folks like her and us who grew up in these spaces.
“I wrote this book really both for people like us with evangelical religious backgrounds and for people like my husband and a lot of my good friends who are aware that this evangelical world exists, certainly, but find it in a lot of ways kind of mystifying.
And so for my husband, when we met, he had this impression of evangelicalism and knew certainly about the political project, which it's hard to ignore, but really had no idea what it's like from the inside or the degree to which it can feel like what I and others have described as a parallel universe with this whole subculture that creates this world that many of us grew up in.
So one of the things I touch on in the book is that I tried in my early part of my career to distance myself from my evangelical background. It wasn't something I wanted to lead with in mainstream newsrooms, but when I was assigned to cover the 2016 campaign and I was assigned to the Republican primary, not because of any particulars about my campaign background, just because I think mostly I had lived most of my life in the Midwest and South, and it seemed like a logical pairing for me, but it became unavoidable to talk about evangelicals.
It was sort of the question. And I also realized that as much as it was a little bit unsettling to come face to face with this part of my personal background that I, like any good journalist, to try to separate myself from when I thought about my work, I also realized that I spoke the language and knew the culture and understood the underlying theology and thinking in a way that many.
Many national journalists probably wouldn't have because they didn't have the same life experience, and so it felt in a way like an asset. And since then I've been asked so many times to explain by people who know this about me, like explain how Trump happened explain white evangelical support for Trump.
And I decided to write a book to try to answer those questions. So I hope for the quote unquote outsiders, it will help to explain that on a really granular level. And for those of us insiders, I hope that they'll feel seen by what I describe.”
A huge thanks to Sarah for all of her work and insight!
Banned Book Book Club
In 2024, we will have a book club with the books from the Banned Books series, as well as a few other gems that have come out in the last year. Our next book club, on Wednesday, March 27, will be The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw.
Each book club will be from 6-7:30 pm, and will be $25. We’ll talk about how the content in each of the books impacts relationships and sexuality, and we’ll close with a question and answer session with me and Julia.
Sign up on the Sexvangelicals website!
Books That We’re Reading and Shows We’re Watching
Jeremiah’s Recommendation:
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon. This is an outstanding summary of the last fifty years of the Evangelical movement. Consider this book to be a primer, or an overview of the many different layers of Evangelical thought, propaganda, and products/services into the larger American zeitgeist. I wish at parts that she went into more detail about certain things, but I also grew up in this movement. Sarah communicated to me and Julia (my partner and co-host of Sexvangelicals) that she was struck with the challenge of creating exposure to the movement to folks who were less familiar and giving a nod of acknowledgement and support to those who survived it. She did that exceptionally well with that. Highly recommend--there are lots of amazing references throughout. 5 stars!
Hey Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing by Emily Paulson. There’s been a lot of content produced about the dangers of MLMs, and why EMPish folks (women especially) are susceptible to their structures and psychology, from toxic positivity to capitalizing on the recruitment of humans, rather than the actual sales of products. Apparently, there’s a ton of alcohol present, as Emily shares throughout her story.
I was left with this thought, as someone who works both with folks in recovery from substance use and folks who leave religious communities. Emily left
Rodan and FieldsRejuvinat in 2021. The book was published May 30, 2023, which means that it was likely written right after she left the MLM. A common theme for folks in early stages of recovery, if that’s from substance use or from leaving a cult, is that they’ll use the language of the healing culture, but not have any process for deeply conceptualizing or embodying the terminology that they’re using. (We actually see this happening way too often on Exvangelical social media.)
The language that she uses to describe substance use recovery, the presence of white supremacy, and the messages around femininity mirrors that of someone who’s in their first year of sobriety. Which makes sense, because technically, when she’s writing this book, she’s in her first year of sobriety. I would be really interested to see how this book would have been different had it been published in 2028 or 2030. 2.5 stars of 5.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia