Elsewhere today: my review of Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals
My conclusion: there is more than one way to deconstruct.
Sarah McCammon is a journalist, working for NPR. Hers is an important book that has gotten a lot of attention this spring, and as someone who converted to conservative evangelicalism as an adult, I wanted to understand her perspective and arguments for deconstructing. So, I appreciated the chance to review it for Current today. You can read my review here. Here is a taste from my concluding reflections on this book:
There is, it appears, more than one way to deconstruct one’s past. Born in 1981, McCammon is exactly my age. After her decades of deconstructing her evangelical childhood, she has now landed, through her second husband, in progressive Judaism—although, she notes, while she feels closest to God now when she prays in her husband’s synagogue, she has not formally converted. By contrast, while I grew up in a secular Jewish family, first in Russia and then in Israel, a period of crisis the year I turned thirty brought me out of secular Judaism into evangelical Christianity, where I have happily been ever since. It might be easy to brush aside my story as a bizarre exception that proves nothing. But to this I respond with another curious fact: McCammon and I are both also the same age as another individual born in 1981 and whose story, I think, is significant to bring into this conversation: the journalist, historian of evangelicalism, and recent convert to conservative evangelicalism—Molly Worthen.
Thank you for that review. It does indeed seem that the "big tent" of evangelicalism is being reduced to its worst components in these kind of accounts of deconstruction and leaving the faith; but, as you say, those accounts are not the whole story. I'm a member of a PCA church and what you say about your own experience is very similar to my own. I will try to get a chance to read McCammon's book, but even more so, the book by Nayeri that you mention—thanks for the recommendations!
As for the last part of your quote, I remember listening to an interview Molly Worthen gave about becoming a Christian, and it blew me away.