I used to think there could be no such thing as a lukewarm Evangelical. By definition, by constitution, to be an Evangelical was to commit fully to every implication of your beliefs. T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012) confirmed the “intense inner attention” at the heart of Evangelical experience. James Wood has written that an Evangelical upbringing, like the one he had, promotes a “suspicion of indifference” and an abiding sense that nominal belief is “insufficiently serious.” In what is still the most eloquent record we have of an Evangelical childhood, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), Gosse writes that his young self, supervised in every way by his father’s biblical commitments, was planted not in an “open flower-border” but on a ledge “split in the granite of some mountain.” The source of this unyielding, granite Evangelical attention is the New Testament itself. “We take captive every thought,” Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “to make it obedient to Christ”—every inward thought, not every outward act. Lukewarm seekers need not apply.
When there’s such intensity in the way you’re expected to belong to a community, you can also expect intensity to mark the breaches and separations when they come. Four recent memoirs trace exactly that fraught journey away from Evangelicalism: Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, Anna Gazmarian’s Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, Jon Ward’s Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, and Charles Marsh’s Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir. All four writers grew up in Evangelical households. The fathers of two were ministers. All four books present Evangelical experience as heavy and burdensome, often suffocating, sometimes even traumatic. All four writers experienced what they describe as distorted understandings of therapy, sex, gender, politics, and knowledge-claims. All four books are written in the shadow of the first Trump era. The two journalists among these authors, Ward and McCammon, try to make some sense of suddenly fervent Christian nationalism. Remarkably, all four writers hold on to a religious commitment at memoir’s end. They have let go of inherited frameworks. They have had to reconstruct their faith. But when they wrest themselves free of Evangelicalism as they knew it, they do so without a renunciation of Christianity. These are hard-won confessions, not bitter denunciations.
In his earlier study Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (2008), David Hempton called stories of Evangelicals leaving their tradition behind “disenchantment narratives.” That framing language works well for these recent memoirs, too, but in Hempton’s portraits of famous figures (Vincent van Gogh, Edmund Gosse, George Eliot, and others), there is a sense of limitation being cast aside. Evangelicalism, for these earlier writers and artists, was not enough. In these new Trump-era memoirs, there is, instead, a whiff of exhaustion. Evangelicalism has been too much.
I said I used to think there was no such thing as a lukewarm Evangelical, but there are good reasons to question whether devotion and inner seriousness remain the hallmark of this kind of belief—or of what is often named Evangelical anyway. To the public eye, the tradition that fostered relentless inner watchfulness and a totalizing biblical view of the world created conditions for all kinds of undesirable things to emerge, from sex scandals and Manichaean politics to authoritarian leadership and public hypocrisy. In The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (2023), Tim Alberta argues that the word “Evangelical” is now so wrapped up in culture-war associations that it is no longer useful apart from them. Himself the son of an Evangelical minister, Alberta says the connections between Evangelicalism and Christian nationalism have simply become too deep. He points to a “rebranding” already going on, especially among younger believers.
But Evangelicalism has always been more fleet than flagship. It is not one big, now-captive thing. These recent disenchantment memoirs show the complexity and variety of actual Evangelical experience—the experience of people struggling through one form of belief into another. We may want them to confirm what we think about a tradition gone off the rails (and that may be one reason for the presence of these books in the market), but the authors’ lives are not just instances of a familiar cultural phenomenon. Our philosophies, Nietzsche wrote, are unintended memoirs. But the reverse isn’t quite true: our memoirs are not simple philosophies. These four writers narrate what it was for them to grow up Evangelical, then move on to other frameworks while reckoning with what was left behind. That there is pain during these transitions, and a peculiar melancholy after them, makes these books human confessions. They are not manifestos or battle cries.
Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and author of an acclaimed biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, offers the most complex portrait in this group of memoirs. He begins Evangelical Anxiety with a description of a panic attack he experienced as a student at Harvard Divinity School. It is a signal that his memoir will be a study of the mind as well as the soul, an exploration of health as well as faith. But Marsh’s breakdown also exposes a glaring limitation of his Evangelical upbringing. A Baptist preacher’s son from the Deep South, Marsh had just one lens for interpreting his divinity-school panic: pain like this “was a kind of blessing, something that might draw me, like a medieval saint, to the suffering of my Lord.” He goes on, poignantly: “This attempt to receive suffering as a gift was the only story available to me.” The path of Evangelical Anxiety leads not so much to healing and wholeness as to the gathering of other narratives that will complicate Marsh’s understanding of being a Christian in the world. “Must play the instrument I’ve got,” Saul Bellow’s narrator concedes at the end of Herzog. That may be true, but you do get to add other strings to the instrument you’ve got. The young Marsh is desperate to do just that.
His memoir moves back and forth between adult life and childhood, and this narrative motion nicely embodies his ongoing ambivalence and unsettledness. Divinity school is followed by more graduate work and then a job at a Catholic university in Baltimore, marriage and children, a first book, long forays into both psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and eventually a return to the University of Virginia to teach. But the narrative everywhere pulls threads of childhood forward, and Marsh can’t—or won’t—untangle the ongoing influence of his Southern roots, his Evangelical conscience, his guilt over all things sexual, and the abiding, often confounding presence of his pious parents. In this sense, his memoir looks back to Gosse, whose father functioned as a kind of smothering second conscience. For Marsh, the heavy role belongs especially to his mother. In his twenties, living a thousand miles from home, trying to become a writer, and trying to muster the courage to give eros a turn, he explains the trap he’s in: “What I knew, those nights with the poet and the booze, is that if I had sex, my mother would know, and she would somehow be undone, this woman whose mental equilibrium seemed to demand the purity of her only child. What I knew is that such transgression would remove me from relationships I felt I could not live apart from.” His conclusion is conflicted, and he shows more generosity to his parents than many of us could muster: “I was oppressed by their protection, and I hated it, but their presence was also a necessity.”
Still feeling the pressure from his parents to stay faithful to their brand of Evangelical religion, while recognizing new pressures that were now his own internalized conflicts, Marsh refers, in a lovely phrase (the memoir is beautifully written), to “the elemental choreography of it all.” The easy dynamic of a disenchantment narrative is to let every pressure accelerate you to a liberating release. But Marsh’s memoir remains tense, not triumphant. He’s going to move on from Evangelicalism without condemning it, which only adds to the stress of moving on.
More than the other three memoirs here, Marsh’s book recognizes that Evangelical intensity is a feature, not a bug. The comforts of the Bible and of the Evangelical life necessarily come “wrapped around anxiety.” The tension between comfort and anxiety is an integral part of belief. Reading Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest, Marsh notes in this canonical book of Evangelical devotion a kind of fetish for suffering—for being hurt, persecuted, and crushed. He summarizes Chambers’s piety this way: “Depletion, ruin, your ash-heap life, the filth exposed—I am vile, God be praised.” We are a long way from the triumphalist rhetoric of Christian nationalism, in which depletion, ruin, and filth are the other guy’s problem. Marsh knows that self-abnegation can lead to gratitude and song, but he is right that this intense concentration on how far from the mark your inner world really is makes the young believer vulnerable. “When such heaviness becomes your hermeneutic,” he writes, “it’s not long before any devotional ardor is crowded out by anticipatory dread, because its pages can only remind you how far you have fallen short, how infinite is your failure to properly receive the superabundance of God’s grace and mercy and love and judgment.” For him, that heaviness was too much.
The kind of critique Marsh offers in this book is more damning than any charge of hypocrisy or coercion. The intensity, the constant watchfulness, the expectation that sin or distraction or backsliding is right around the corner, the “life-or-death struggle to be holy,” all mark fidelity to Evangelicalism. Obviously, not everyone is overcome by this struggle. Some find a calibration that lets them function and flourish. Still, it’s impossible to read Marsh’s account without feeling the anguish of his younger self. For a nonbeliever, the answer might look simple: just let go. Get away from what oppresses you. But for one who has believed, the intensity of the disenchantment will have to equal the intensity of the previous enchantment. Living anguish is a tribute to dying faith.
Marsh grew up in Mississippi at the height of the civil-rights movement. With jolting candor, he recalls that when the principal came on the loudspeaker to announce that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, the class broke into applause. I confess I had to stop for a moment here to register what I’d read. Marsh shares the shock of it but affirms what happened:
Often, when I have remembered that moment, I have paused, because I find it so incredible. I pause to say to myself, That couldn’t really have happened, Charles, only to remember with incredible vividness that my classmates did erupt in cheers, and I may have too.
Marsh’s early academic work focused on this period and this struggle in the South, but as he recalls his personal experiences, there are strange hints of the paranoia and panic that Tim Alberta has reported among contemporary Evangelicals in thrall to Donald Trump. It’s worth noting these quiet connections. Alberta has done important work to show the roots of Evangelicalism’s recent political turns. Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) offers even more theological and cultural context. Marsh’s book is deeply personal; it is not a platform for political commentary. But that only makes his confession more revealing. Here he is commenting on the anxieties of the pious world in which he was raised:
You couldn’t have found a safer neighborhood in those years; no one ever recalled a break-in. Yet we lived, mother, father, and only child, with the certainty that we’d be invaded. Communists, Leninists, Stalinists, unions, beatniks, peace groups, SCLC, SNCC, COFO, CORE, GROW, NAACP, Northern clergy, ecumenical councils, globalists of all sorts—they had us in their sights.
Looking back, Marsh writes, “I was struck by how our siege mentality had become so pervasive, so complete as to constitute an epistemic foundation upon which rested our entire worldview.” What is that worldview? That “no people in history had ever been persecuted like white segregationist Christians.”
At one level, this all seems like straightforward paranoia or white supremacy. But it’s worth exploring the connection between Evangelical religious piety—nonpolitical piety—and the kind of mean suspiciousness Marsh describes. It’s not a necessary connection. The piety doesn’t entail the politics. But it’s useful to see the reverberations of one in the other. The reverberation, I think, is one of intense watchfulness. The Oswald Chambers volume Marsh read faithfully at a hard point in his life repeats over and over the language of being careful. If you’re an Evangelical, the world is Satan’s minefield. You are called to watch out for false gospels and false prophets, for lies, for counterfeit leaders. The world is spiritually alive at every point. Christian nationalism lifts this framework out of the prayer closet and carries it into political rallies and the voting booth. But there is another place you can take all that apocalyptic energy, all that unchanneled intensity, and that, as Marsh shows us, is the therapist’s couch.
Therapy is not an easy step for an Evangelical. Marsh acknowledges a suspicion of mental-health treatment rooted in his inherited faith: “I’d long since formed the notion that Christians didn’t need secular psychology, because we had been given the Holy Spirit, who was the ultimate Healer.” He knows he obviously needs professional help, but there is just too much theological inertia against making a therapeutic move. He describes a cousin announcing that she was seeing a counselor and drawing this very lively rebuke from his grandmother: “You best put an end to that right now, missy! All that’s just going to mess you up more.” The idea that prayer offered access to healing grace was, Marsh writes, “unaccompanied by respect for the mind’s intricate dramas.”
In the end, though, plagued by what he decides is an anxiety disorder, Marsh does reach out for help. His description of his experience of therapy at a university clinic is charged with Evangelical intensity. The stammering language in this section of the book wonderfully enacts the drama of faith and doubt, hope and hesitation:
I would have said—did say, still might—that these words felt like an answer to prayer. I would also have said—still might—that they were better than prayer, they relieved me from prayer. They relieved me of the burden to turn inner torment into a sacrament. The language of the therapeutic hour felt like prayer reciprocated.
What therapy seems to offer Marsh is the mundane sense that he is not alone in his suffering and that he won’t be destroyed by what he’s afraid of. Fear, like desire, is just part of what we are. From viewing his body as “ground zero in a warfare between holiness, on the one hand, and the world, the flesh, and the devil, on the other,” he accepts the terms for participating in “the human situation.” He’s not healed exactly, but now he finds that he can “barrel through.” The symptoms, he concludes, “less and less organized me.”
There is something languid and melancholy about this memoir, especially as it tries to draw to a close. It’s as if Marsh can’t quite figure out how to communicate his hard-won resolution—because it’s not a simple resolution. It’s not an instance of what his hero Bonhoeffer would criticize as cheap grace. Some of the resolution involves recognizing mortality. Some of it is love for his children, and also his anxiety about that love. So much of it involves memory. There is gratitude everywhere, but it is sober. We have passed through many rapids in this memoir. The river is, finally, reasonably calm.
Anna Gazmarian takes up the therapeutic thread from Marsh. Her memoir, Devout, is even more centered on mental health. Having been raised Evangelical, Gazmarian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a college student. She calls her book “a prayer and a lament.” It is also a confession of determination not to let go of religious belief entirely, though she experiences her inherited frameworks for faith as not only inadequate but actually part of the problem.
Like Marsh, Gazmarian grew up suspicious of therapy. Evangelicalism taught her that “depression could be alleviated by a simple change of mindset” and that mental-health struggles were signs of Satan trying to gain control of you. T. M. Luhrmann elaborates helpfully on this kind of understanding. Evangelicals don’t just have beliefs, she writes. They have a “theory of mind,” an interpretive framework for describing inner experience theologically. Like Marsh, Gazmarian had only one narrative to help her. But eventually she found it wasn’t enough. So she tried medication, with its tortuous trial-and-error dynamic. “None of this is predictable,” her doctor tells her—not exactly words of comfort for an anxious Evangelical.
As with Marsh’s memoir, what is moving about Gazmarian’s book is the persistent ambivalence. She knows she needs more than what Evangelicalism has provided, but she doesn’t abruptly abandon Evangelical communities and structures. When she moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, she seeks out a Christian therapist. In Raleigh she also finds a small Christian community through an Evangelical organization familiar to her. Her experience there is painful. The college girls in her small group (and in this very gendered world, it’s only girls—and they’re called girls) bluntly summon the only solutions they know: they quote the Bible and say things like, “What about praying? Maybe your depression would subside if you asked for more help.” This advice lands like the consolation of Job’s friends.
Therapy helps, but it’s the discovery of poetry in a college class that finally gives Gazmarian not only a worthy project but a feeling of location and self-confidence. “[P]oetry gave me the freedom to question, to doubt, to lament—to engage with God as the person I was,” she writes, “not as the person I thought I had to be.”
Late in the memoir, after Gazmarian has married and settled in a new church that she describes as a place of healing, a therapist uses the language of “religious trauma” to describe her experience. Sarah McCammon uses that language in her memoir, too. It’s worth noting the distance between this kind of interpretation and earlier interpretations of Evangelical crisis or disenchantment. For Edmund Gosse, writing at the end of the nineteenth century in England, Evangelicalism was leaving out too many dimensions of the world and our experience. It was insufficient. For Gazmarian in contemporary America, Evangelicalism smothered her sense of who she was.
This Evangelical trauma plot looks back to Christopher Lasch’s argument about the twentieth century’s “psychological man” seeking peace of mind rather than transcendence. “Even when therapists speak of the need for ‘meaning’ and ‘love,’” Lasch writes in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), “they define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements. It hardly occurs to them…to encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause or tradition outside himself.” As much as one may feel for Gazmarian and want her to experience wholeness—and I very much do—it’s also hard not to feel that when meaning is reduced to well-being, something essential to Christian faith has been lost. Where Gosse craves liberation, Gazmarian wants to be healed.
Sarah McCammon, a national political correspondent for NPR, also grew up immersed in an Evangelical culture that organized every aspect of her young life. One of the reasons the Evangelical inner life is so intense, her account suggests, is that the outer life is so thoroughly controlled. McCammon’s own experience of Evangelicalism informed everything from how she viewed her body to the books she was allowed to have to the ways she was punished. (In one hard-to-read scene, she’s held down by one parent so the other can hit her with “some kind of wooden implement.”) Most heartbreaking of all is how she was protected from the influence of her own grandfather, who had come out as gay late in life.
A career in journalism led McCammon away from this narrowness, though she still carries the imprints and, yes, the trauma of her Evangelical upbringing. Her description of feeling “shipwrecked” nicely captures the disorientation as well as the disruption of losing a totalizing commitment. McCammon’s most moving confession involves her divorce, with all the guilt that entailed, and the fear of her parents’ judgment. At one point, after remarrying, she has a conversation with her ex-husband about the pain she feels for having deprived their children of an intact family. “We followed all the rules,” McCammon says, tearing up. “They told us to follow the rules so we wouldn’t get hurt.” Her ex-husband, a preacher’s son, replies: “We’re not hurting because we broke the rules. We’re hurting because we followed the rules.”
But McCammon is a journalist, and her book is as much a reporter’s account as a memoirist’s confession. She wants to say something about a larger movement of disenchanted Evangelicals: the “Exvangelicals” of her title, a name taken from a podcast launched in 2016 by Blake Chastain. That date is not a coincidence. McCammon’s reporting confirms that the “tipping point” for many younger Evangelicals was the support (and adulation) of so many in their community for the candidacy of Donald Trump. She cites Trump’s infamous sexual boasting on the Access Hollywood tape as a Rubicon moment for many young Evangelical women. How could they not feel bewildered that Trump was getting a moral pass (a “mulligan,” in the folksy analysis of the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins) when the message of their entire upbringing was that every choice they made, small and large, needed to align with biblical morality, that not only every deed but every thought needed to be “taken captive” for Christ? McCammon reminds us how unequivocal Evangelical leaders such as James Dobson and Franklin Graham had been in condemning Bill Clinton’s immorality. The cynicism involved in Evangelical leaders going on to defend and champion Donald Trump was just too much for this group of Exvangelicals. Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne helps us understand the historical context for the cynical sleight of hand that led to this disillusionment. But if the past shapes the present, the present can also pivot in a new direction. McCammon is presenting the case for a conspicuous pivot of younger Evangelicals away from the framework they inherited. She agrees with Tim Alberta about this: there’s a major rebranding underway.
The role of technology in the regrouping of Evangelicals is central to McCammon’s story. She points again and again to the power of the internet and especially of social media to organize and also minister to disenchanted Evangelicals. If Anna Gazmarian wants to be healed, McCammon’s Exvangelicals want to be heard. The figures in her stories use social media to find, console, and validate each other. In McCammon’s telling, they have not become cynical or nihilistic; instead, they’ve rearranged the categories of belief. “Whatever their new path,” she writes, “a commonality that many deconstructing evangelicals share is a sense that the very tradition they were raised with—the emphasis on seeking ultimate Truth and taking seriously the biggest questions in life—have ultimately led them to an unexpected, often difficult, but more authentic journey.” As with Gazmarian’s memoir, we’re left wondering if those biggest questions are even still in play. Have they all been dissolved by authenticity? Do authentic former Evangelicals reckon differently with those big serious questions, or do they conclude that the very way those questions were formulated was part of the problem?
Like McCammon, Jon Ward is a professional journalist. He worked at the Washington Times, served a stint with Tucker Carlson (who was “not yet a right-wing demagogue,” Ward assures us), wrote for the Huffington Post, and now serves as the chief national correspondent at Yahoo News. Ward is a minister’s son; his father was a product of the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. In Testimony, Ward describes the same kind of youthful intensity that Marsh, Gazmarian, and McCammon report. He has a chapter called “Suffocation,” where, sounding a little like Marsh, he writes: “There was never an end to the spiritual hamster wheel we were taught to stay on, always measuring our intensity of feeling and spiritual vigor…. I was drowning in introspective self-loathing.”
As Ward tracks his journey, trying to escape the suffocation without abandoning his faith, he watches and reports on the growing politicization of Evangelicals. He is especially shrewd about how pious professions of being nonpolitical can become so obviously political by obscuring the meaning of “spiritual warfare.” He is good on the distinction between New Calvinist Evangelicals, focused on doctrine and history, and Moral Majority Evangelicals—fundamentalists, really—for whom Supreme Court nominations and patriotic gestures are forms of piety. He reminds us of the impact on Evangelicals of the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate, which hinted at the populism to come. He monitors all these shifts even as he reckons with how he was raised. The narrowness of his upbringing, he concludes, entailed a damaging inattention to lived experience.
The quest for what Thoreau called a “broad margin” to a life is the natural arc of the Evangelical disenchantment narrative; it’s a quest for expansion, not escape. But what stands out in Ward’s memoir is his determination to remain generous to Evangelicals, even as he moves beyond his inherited tradition. He does everything he can to avoid resentment. “I wrote this book out of love,” he tells us. It is a conflicted, anguished love, and he sometimes vents anger at his own family, but his memoir is not an exposé, and it scrupulously avoids easy accusations. “This is not a tale of growing up amid corrupt charlatans who used the name of God to amass riches,” he writes. “The leaders in my world were true believers whose intensity of belief blinded them to their errors.” That’s already large-hearted, but then, careful to avoid his own version of triumphal judgments, he implicates himself in what he is going to challenge: “It’s the same road I am still prone to go down even now in the way I critique the Evangelicalism I have left behind.” Of the crowds of people at his church finding meaning in what an outsider might judge to be manipulative or indulgent, he writes, “It is easy to ridicule the people who seek these kinds of religious experiences, but there is great human pathos at play.”
I suppose a cynic could read a sentence like that as evidence of a kind of spiritual Stockholm syndrome, and I suppose an Evangelical might read it as the persistence of God’s mercy toward a prodigal son who has yet to return. I read it as the hard-won confession of an ambivalence Ward’s upbringing wouldn’t allow. Ward is somewhere new in the end, but he’s not shouting about his freedom; he’s trying to speak with grace. Maybe the right word for this is magnanimity.
In a rare acknowledgement of her own ambivalence, McCammon also finds a moment of magnanimity. The purity culture she experienced created overwhelming shame, and yet, she writes, “at its best, it could offer a vision of a woman’s body as something more than an object for men to use.” Marsh credits Evangelical devotional practices with teaching him how to really read, and how to pay attention to what he calls “an excess of meaning,” not only in a text but in the broader world. Even Edmund Gosse said the disciplines of his childhood religion transferred productively to other practices in later life.
A magnanimous reading of these four memoirs might lead us to say that Evangelical intensity is an excess and distortion of something nonetheless valuable and honorable. And maybe that something is simply seriousness—a refusal of frivolity, a determination to dig beneath the surface of things, a dissatisfaction with shallowness and speed. In David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King (2011), one of the characters has this thought: “If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free.” Let’s call the valuable thing in the Evangelical life mattering.
Marsh describes a burst of delinquency in his own childhood as the understandable release of adolescent energy, the usual turmoil of coming of age. But with so many religious guardrails in place, it was hard for that energy to find an outlet. He found outlets anyway. “The fire,” Marsh writes, “has to go somewhere.” How to have that fire go somewhere that still matters? Because it’s obvious, at least to this former Evangelical, that we need more seriousness, not less. I think again of James Wood’s line about the Evangelical being suspicious of insufficient seriousness even after he moves on. That suspicion can still be a valuable inheritance, not a curse. We do need concentration and attention. We need to hold on to the belief that something more than well-being is at stake in how we live. We need to matter. This will involve some tension and stress. The intensity will live on. But these memoirs suggest that if Evangelicalism isn’t going to burn out a whole generation of young people, or blur the lines entirely between church and state, it could use a little of the Emersonian spirit of “onwardness.” That spirit could keep it from stifling the natural fires of curiosity with fear. The intense faith can still be a mobile faith, after all, and it can still seek something beyond a feeling of connectedness to one another and a sense that we’re okay. It can still believe that there are other things that matter, if for no other reason than that we still find ourselves awed or inspired, and still recognize our own human limitation. We don’t comprehend or organize the universe. It is greater than we are, politics included. If these four memoirs urge anything, it’s that, in light of our limitations, we should aim to cultivate both more intellectual humility and more magnanimity toward what we leave behind.
Evangelical Anxiety
A Memoir
Charles Marsh
HarperOne
$22.39 | 256 pp.
Devout
A Memoir of Doubt
Anna Gazmarian
Simon & Schuster
$27.99 | 192 pp.
The Exvangelicals
Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
Sarah McCammon
St. Martin’s Press
$30 | 320 pp.
Testimony
Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation
Jon Ward
Brazos Press
$24.99 | 256 pp.
