The EXvangelicals and Their Ways of Engaging Culture

And What Immigrant Communities Have to Teach Us?

The book The EXvangelicals by Sarah McCammon is a classic telling of one woman’s story of growing up in a white conservative evangelical (WCE) culturally enclosed family in the Midwest. Her parents, her church and her school were all white conservative evangelical. The WCE community, she describes, is defensive, stressed, worried about a surrounding culture gone secular. As a result, the community is insular, espousing a narrow version of Christianity, unexposed to other traditions of Christianity. An inherent part to her story is that she was never exposed to secular culture, or secular persons, who were viewed with fear, sometimes even disdain. There was a certain coerciveness embedded in McCammon’s WCE church and school. Many years later, now exposed to the secular cultures of Washington DC and elsewhere, McCammon reflects back, trying to make sense of the narrow Christian faith she grew up in.

EXvangelicals offers a real window into what it’s like to grow up in WCE. The book helps us all understand a little better the massive migration of younger persons out of the evangelical church. It’s a good read for Christian parents who think inoculating your kids from the secular world is the best way to disciple them into living a life with Christ after they leave home. Even if you think you understand everything I just said, reading this book will add to your depth of understanding.

I run into a lot of students, friends and pastors in the 25-40 age range who align with McCammon’s take on white middle class conservative Christianity (WCE). It is not the version I grew up with, nonetheless I’d say it is extremely common. McCammon’s WCE is insular, defensive, myopic and has many bad traits, including closet racism, an unwillingness to engage sexuality mores outside itself, with a protective, even coercive attitude towards protecting its children in its own way of life.

But is this all that unusual? Don’t these adjectives – insular, myopic, defensive, and has many bad traits - apply to many immigrant groups including Muslim immigrant communities, Asian Christian immigrant church communities, Orthodox Jewish communities, etc. in that they all become protective (and even authoritarian) with their children? (Have you ever seen the streaming show “Ramy” on Hulu, about a Muslim teenager emerging into American mainstream adulthood from a very religious Muslim family- I highly recommend it – for adults only). Is there an analogy here between immigrant minority communities and WCE communities who find themselves to be a minority now in a wider secularized culture?

The Analogy Between White Christian Evangelical Communities and Immigrant Communities

It’s a risky question. Looking for a likeness between CWE and immigrant communities? Given today’s problematic claims of many WCE communities for being a persecuted minority while living a quite comfortable middle class lives (due to inherited privileges), I could be easily misunderstood (and stigmatized) as using the analogy to justify WCE claims. But if we can look past this for just a moment, I’d like to look at the cultural dynamics of being a minority community, and explore how these dynamics might explain some of the behaviors by WCE parents located in McCammon’s book as well as the children of the WCE (now known as ex-vangelicals). I grew up WCE, not as a minority (although I was called ‘Yankee’ growing up in Canada). I’ve had numerous students from minority communities, but I do not know this first hand. So I offer these thoughts tentatively, looking for a conversation.

First things first, I think it is possible to claim a minority status (versus majority status) for White Conservative Evangelicalism (WCE) in North America today, at least in some parts of North America. In 50 years or so the dominant majority culture of North America has shifted from a being a majority white middle class conservative Christian majority culture (WCE), to becoming a secular, post Christendom culture. Regarding economics, it is true that most white educated Americans, especially males, hold on to privilege and majority control in the U.S. economy. But in many other ways, in regard to ethnicity, gender mores, sexuality, economic beliefs, religious beliefs and more, WCE either is, or soon shall be, a minority in relation to the rest of the US (and Canadian) culture. In addition, there’s a very real residual resentment towards WCE from the surrounding culture (even if deserved?) for the ways it has presumed hegemony these past 50 years. I say all this with the caveat that this may be less true in parts of the southern USA. Nonetheless, the loss of cultural hegemony by WCE is evident pretty much everywhere in North America.

Immigrant communities, by definition, already find themselves a minority from the moment they land  in USA culture. Some Hispanic and Asian immigrant communities may be more practicing Christian than WCE peoples, but regardless of their religious beliefs, immigrant communities carry inherited gender norms, sexuality, language, economics, religious beliefs, etc. all of which they find challenged in the broader USA/Canada culture. Like their WCE neighbors, they find their cultural mores, by which they held their lives together previously, now challenged by the surrounding culture.

The Big Difference Between Immigrant and WCE Communities

The significant difference, of course, between the two kinds of communities, WCE and immigrant, is that immigrant communities to N. America come expecting hardship, expecting to have to learn a language, adapt, suffer through the multiple challenges of living in a foreign land. The WCE communities, on the other hand, seem to expect the opposite. They seemingly are surprised to be challenged by the surrounding culture. There is a sense of privilege/presumption that inhabits the WCE communities. And it affects children of WCE communities as well. The children of WCE seem to have been over-protected, and so they are surprised when engaging secular culture. It’s as if they thought people would naturally accept them and their beliefs.

The children of WCE parents seemingly expect the privilege of universal acceptance as part of this. Whereas the white Christian evangelical parents sometimes claim they are persecuted by the wider culture, and have become its victims, the children of these WCE parents turn the claim toward their parents, claiming we have been persecuted, misled, even spiritually abused by our WCE upbringing. There is a bit of a sense of “you didn’t prepare me for this!!!” “How dare I be challenged!”. This appears again and again in the book EXvangelicals. To me, it smacks of a sense of privilege that the immigrant communities don’t have.

The WCE subculture was shaped from a culture where (as recently as) fifty years ago their churches and belief systems carried significant cultural power, where they were much less challenged on their morals, beliefs. The public school systems, the village sports programs, the ethics of the workplace, were all very much in sync with the WCE churches. But that rug got pulled out from under many WCE communities in the last fifty years. This new post Christian secularized culture has disrupted the comforts of the previous monolith and exposed much of its inherent problems. This appears to be a surprise to the children of WCE? This is what I read from chapter to chapter in McCammon’s Exvangelicals. Do I have this right??

And so, I suggest, the WCE defensiveness comes from this place of privilege, of entitlement. Whereas the immigrant communities have had no such sense of entitlement? The WCE communities are asking “why is this happening to me”? while the immigrant communities, especially first generation, come expecting this stuff to happen to them. And it is not only the WCE parents and established churches coming from this place of privilege. I suggest the resentment of the children of WCE towards their parents, asking “why did you not prepare me for this?” is also part of the residuals of this same sense of entitlement.

The Residual Privilege in the Children of WCE Communities?

I’m not making excuses for white conservative evangelicalism (CWE), its inherent racism, grab for power ala Trump and state legislatures, or its cultural presumptiveness. Rather, I’m trying to explore the resentment, that is often (not always) aimed by the post-ex-evangelicals at their parents, churches, schools. How and why is it different than the attitudes of immigrant children towards their parents/houses of worship/schools? who BTW have to go through similar challenges without the resources of the WCE.  

Again, since I’m a child of a WCE community, and not an immigrant community, these are my own limited observations, and I’m testing these observations out here (I wish I could do an ethnography like my doctoral program teaches, but I don’t have the time). But I do notice this kind of residual privilege in McCammon, and by default, the post/ex vangelicals that sound like her.

In chapters two through four, McCammon narrates her first forays into Washington DC as a college student, then as an adult, and how awkward she feels at times with her lack of experience in sexual situations, how she has never had alcohol, how she was sheltered from this world. There’s this sense that her upbringing did not prepare her for this, that this feeling is unusual. That if she’d gone to a public school, she would know better how to navigate this world.

All of this is probably true. Many of us can relate. But, feeling awkward, sheltered, unprepared for the real world, is not that uncommon, especially if you’re from an immigrant family. And perhaps feeling awkward is good in some situations (like being with a sexually aggressive male for instance). For those of us raised in Christian families, entering the secular world, either in college or post college, is a time to figure out who you are, what are your values, convictions, and beliefs. You’re taking the best of what you were given, and translating, owning and discarding. For sure, there are those around who live the American sexual revolution, who presume to be “cool,” who portend to be experienced in the ways of the world. Whatever the case, unless you’ve been raised within a secular family, with very little guidance regarding sexuality, gender, alcohol, presented with only self expressive freedom as your values, you’re going to have to navigate these areas of your life in dialogue with your inherited values. And it’s better to start with something than nothing? Isn’t it? If we come from immigrant families, or Christian enclaves, we by default enter the world unprepared, and have to navigate our way. Some of our churches gave us was minimal and legalistic foundations for this journey. But navigating this, is part of life.

McCammon talks about the parochial ways of WCE talking about certain beliefs that make no sense outside the WCE world. The “inerrant” Bible, ”what about those who have never heard?,” “do you know where you’re going when you die?” got formed in a way and with language that once made sense, within a monolithic Christendom world, but can not be easily defended once you arrive in a secular world. To me these were shorthand beliefs that require much contextual explication to make sense. Often they get “reified” over time in our WCE commmunities, as if they are ontologically and universally true, in language that made sense a century ago.

These ways of thinking, however, desperately need to be deepened, given historical context and depth, in order for them to make sense, be owned, lived into as a Christian of the 21^st century, or even discarded entirely. We might even call it ‘deconstructing’ the faith. But the WCE gatekeepers get defensive and even coercive if any of these ways are challenged or questioned. Giving in to their own privilege or fear, they don’t know how to allow space for this growth and development to take shape by the Spirit. And if this growing and deepening of belief does not happen, the community will die (read Alasdair MacIntyre eh?).

But these are the dynamics of a community in a new found minority position. These reified beliefs, cultivated in narrow protected communities, will have to be challenged, developed and navigated as the children go out “into the world.” But do not these same social cultural dynamics happen in immigrant communities as well, even more so? So, instead of being angry or shocked by this, why not engage the world as the children of immigrants do, as a necessary journey to maturity? It is, in essence, a right of passage that we must go through to live in the world?

Chapter ten deals with the purity culture practices of WCE. There’s a lot to dislike about purity culture. There’s guilt and responsibility and even objectification laid upon woman growing up in this culture. There’s a consequentialist ethic that promises a good marriage if you stay chaste. This ethic is not only coercive, based in fear and judgement, but it buys into all the worst romanticist self fulfilment experientialism of the secular culture. It is an oversimplified, inadequate, attempt to protect growing up children from the worst abuses of sex and sexualization that is more and more prevalent in our culture. It is poorly done because it does not engage with any depth of experience the inadequacy of the secular sexual ethic. As a result, it appears that when children of purity culture get out into the world they are unprepared to participate in the secularized hedonism and self-fulfilment romanticization of the secular scripts we see, watch, read and consume every day as part of American culture.

But is this unusual? Cultures for centuries have tried legalism on children, and women in particular to instill a set of values, especially in regard to gender and sexuality. Sharia law, with its restrictions on especially women and their dress, is notorious for this. And so, for centuries, children of cultures, when present to a pluralist culture, have had to navigate, develop convictions, make mistakes, try to figure it out. For centuries Christian churches, especially in America, have gotten by with the minimum in sex education using these techniques, because Christian values were majority culture values, enforced by majority culture. But that ain’t true anymore. And churches, as well as parents in these churches, are totally unprepared, scared and freaking out. And so we’ve got work to do.

Children of WCE seem to be extra angry about all this? Whereas say the children of Muslim communities seem to seek some wisdom in their culture’s sexuality practices, before navigating, children of WCE seem ready to throw it all out? Although McCammon does mention some positive parts to purity culture, by and large she tells the stories of sexual awkwardness, failed expectations, sexual shame, upon getting married. But is this at all unusual for communities which find themselves to be foreigners in a broader culture? Post sexual revolution, our WCE parents were caught flat footed, much like minority parents are when they come here from tradionalist cultures. Our parents tried and failed. Shouldn’t we now accept the calling, amidst these failures, and instead of throwing out the entire baby with the bathwater, get to work forging the what’s, how’s and why’s of a sexual ethic that can shape people into the depths and wonders of what has been made possible in Jesus Christ, that can hold gravitas amidst this culture?

The WCE moral scripts she describes in ch. 5 would not be controversial pre 1962? No sex before marriage. Sex reserved for marriage. Make these kind of commitments before God. The family (yes often the patriarchal dad becomes the protector of the woman) It’s the culture that changed dramatically, and the coercion, consequentialist ethics, guilt inducing tactics are all a response to now having to defend the ethics. Admittedly the purity culture is full of bad tactics and a very bad response to the cultural challenge.

But notice: This chapter in McCammon’s book is lacking entirely in engagement, critical or otherwise, of the shift in secular culture, discerning the substance, or lack thereof, of the sexual mores of our culture? Surprisingly, new wave feminists are doing a better job of critiquing current sexual mores of liberative self expressive culture than the ex-post evangelicals (read Louise Perry , Amia Srinivasan for example). Children of WCE seem naively ready to accept secularized liberative self expressive experiential sexual ethics as the way it is, and should be.

I’m not blaming McCammon for this. I think we should blame the CWE churches for dropping the ball on discipleship regarding sex. But is it unusual for such a vacuity to exist in a minority culture, where the culture’s sexual mores are being challenged in these areas in new and different ways for the first time? I suggest “no.” Normally it is the second generation that needs to ‘step up to the plate,’ navigate what their culture’s sexual ethic must be to maintain faithfulness and yet cultural engagement. So can we smile generously at the naivete of our parents, and get to the business of grappling with the depths of our traditions to faithfully take the learnings of our faith into the new territories of the world? (this is the work of our Theology and Mission/Contextual Theology programs at Northern Seminary)

On Modeling Our Lives as Immigrant Communities

Please let me state this clearly: there are good reasons for the children of WCE to be angry at their parents and their churches. The alignment of WCE people with Trump is gag-worthy. The spiritual abuse, patriarchy, and multiple other kinds of abuse by high profile WCE pastors is disgusting. I have no problems with the anger and resentment of those abused by leaders in WCE churches. Many of this generation are walking away from WCE church, shaking their heads, with good reason.

But I don’t believe these excessive maladies are inevitable to all WCE churches. I believe there is a remnant, a large remnant, of faithful, justice/kingdom of Jesus seeking, (what could be described as) conservative white evangelicals, who are seeking to be faithful, who are not buying in to the Trump bandwagon, who are seeking to engage. Maybe the sons and daughters of these communities can lead us in the work of engaging culture for a faithful way of life out of evangelicalism?

Whoever leads however, must take the avenue of giving up the privilege – and the residuals of that privilege – the defensiveness and coercion of the parents, the anger and resentment of the children toward the parents, in order to take on of the mantle of being an immigrant community that must now navigate the new seas of pluralism, challenged morals, and reified doctrines that make no sense anymore in the worlds we live in? Perhaps, as immigrant communities have for centuries, Christians can set about forming a way of life under Christ’s Lordship, that can give witness to the Kingdom coming, be a multi ethnic community of reconciliation, and engage the cultures of America all over again. Set free from resentment, as immigrants in a foreign land, we can do this work as part of the maturing of our faith and not be resentful about it?

I am not saying immigrant communities are perfect. Please don’t misunderstand the message here. I’m only describing the way immigrant communities expose the privilege inherent in the response of WCE/children of WCE, and some Ex-vangelicals to the engagement with post-Christian culture. Through their eyes, maybe we can see past the defensiveness, the resentment and reified belief systems, to seek what lies beneath these things, unwind them, and deepen them out of a history that goes back longer in Christian tradition than 1962? If we stay in our resentment, anger, and privilege, we shall remain stuck, unable to engage the culture, and lost in its seas without an anchor. If we can move forward, and realize we are immigrants, then, perhaps our engagement with culture can be part of our growing into maturity, deepening our faith not walking away from it. There are many groups doing this already. Kudo’s to you. Move into your calling.

I am open to your comments. This needs other voices. I am sure. So engage? And I shall try to respond within the time I have.