“How did we go from ‘grab ‘em by the’ – I don’t know if I can even say that word, but you know what I mean – to images of him being [almost another] Jesus. I don’t understand it.

It’s one thing to say, ‘Okay, so he’s the closest we can get to protecting our interests in the nation.’ But I will never understand how these people have elevated the man to saviour.” – Amy Snidow

Another damning memoir from a former born-and-raised evangelical Sarah McCammon.

“I think it has hit critical mass because many of us have realized that we have perpetuated or abided a network of bigots – abusive people. I think that Trump is kind of an apocalypse because it unveiled something that was there all along. A lot of people younger than me found out their parents, who held a certain moral line, have abandoned that moral line in the name of this movement.” – David Dark

McCammon, now with a career in journalism, provides a sensitive but trenchant account of her own experience & trauma from an upbringing in the bosom of movement, & a mass of fellow voices issuing frank collateral from the “parallel dimension of American fundamentalist christianity”

It is described as – “not only a religion but a subculture, an entire way of seeing the world.“

“The seeds of this were laid in the eighties and nineties with the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, when they attached themselves o Ronald Reagan’s campaign, it created what we are seeing the after effects of now.” – Charla Arnold

the “subculture” is struggling at the moment, as it is badly haemorrhaging members, particularly the young, who have become repelled, harmed or betrayed by the “prosperity gospel”.

“ – there was something deeply broken about white US evangelicalism….Since then, I have looked around a bit more and seen the signs of distress everywhere. One might even call it a movement.”

as it contracts, its also deforming.

“in a society that is both increasingly polarized and nonreligious, evangelicalism is morphing into an “ethnoreligious” category, defined far more by race and ideology than theology.” – Samuel Perry

if you have been paying any attention to this preposterously distorted & contaminant social abnormality, you may have noticed for yourself. Particularly with the adoption of the positively ungodly, scum-stain obscenity Donald Trump, the “unlikely champion of their outsider movement”.

“the rejection of science, combined with apocalyptic beliefs about the future of the world, has real consequences”

“The waning of the Cold War, she argues, gave way to “a new war – a culture war – demanding similar militancy…. For conservative white evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present sense of threat.” a “sense of embattlement” – Kristen Kobes Du Mez

a monumental mockery of everything the “subculture” declares sacred? You betcha’! But as Jerry “Jerk for Jesus” Falwell Jr., the disgraced, adulterous & onanistic alcoholic cuckold & former president of Liberty University succinctly puts it –

“Because the ones that you think are so perfect and sinless, it’s just you don’t know about it,” Falwell told me. “They’re all just as bad. We all are, and that’s the bottom line. – Jerry Falwell Jr.

“- and then this guy with not an ounce of integrity or character to be found was being called God’s Chosen One.”

More fodder for the bonfire, with a tentative & delicate, but extremely revealing, reflection & broad inquiry into others who are utterly disillusioned with the movement.

“I think things are actually getting more culty, because as they shun people and feel shunned by people that have left, their kind of tightening their circle up.”

Sarah also writes very candidly about the difficulties, some lasting, of her sexual development under such a repressive & unnatural curbing. She explores these scars with others, who have faired even worse under this repressive miseducation & displacement.

“It leads to people who don’t know what consent is; they’re most worried about harming God, because your taught that sexual sin is first and foremost against God, not against other people.”

“spanking was embedded in the culture of our evangelical community”

“for some, particularly women, the intertwining of love and pain – inflicted on an intimate area of the body – produced confusing, shameful feelings. Allison described the ritualized nature of the abuse as having a “psychosexual” undercurrent.”

a real mess.

& of course, it’s not only sexual.

Misshapen, radicalized in some subcultural substrata that probably seeped from a CIA social experiment program, the beast from the basement has interbred with components of the nationalistic fringe & “identitarian” movement.

“Given my upbringing [in evangelicalism], I worry that neither the white evangelical church nor the public at large understand the danger that Christian nationalism poses to democracy.”

it’s high time the shit show comes crashing down, & ironic that it seems it will implode on itself, after abusing it’s heirs so pervasively, along with further alienation & exodus due to the incessant sexual & fraud scandals that dog the movement non-stop.

“The cognitive training to reject expert knowledge and seek alternative, more amenable explanations has helped disarm the capacity for critical thinking and analysis.” – Christopher Douglas

“Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. ‘Good for our side’ and ‘true’ begin to blur into one.” – David Roberts

Sarah’s book (there are so many spilling out on this subject now) takes a gentle, highly humanist approach to the quagmire, & her clemency & sensitivity makes some of the horror she is examining even more in focus. She also brings a very wide range of voices, stippling the book with a rich dynamic of personal testimony & insider analysis. Many of them are dealing with “religious trauma syndrome”.

“People of faith believe there is a divine plan – that there are forces of good and forces of evil at work in the world. QAnon is a train that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place.” -Ed Stetzer

“ – a social system to keep people committed over and over and over again.” – “this is their entire life.”

the “abuse survivors” are finding their voice, & they have a lot to tell us about this terrible & awful maltreatment/movement.

Sarah McCammon, St. Martin’s Press, 2024, 267 pages.