Trending Topics Evangelical Women’s Memoirs: Reviews of Evangelicals, Nice Church Patriarchy, Women They Wanted, Lifts, Devout Believers

Evangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
Sarah McCammon
st martens

Of these five memoirs by evangelical women, the one by NPR correspondent Sarah McCammon, who was the lead reporter for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, provides the most instructive introduction to the evangelical movement. are doing. For the uninitiated, McCammon says the phenomenon is a phenomenon of “loosely organized groups that share a theologically and politically conservative Protestant Christian background and a decision to remain , a people’s movement primarily online. As a former evangelical pastor who knows all too well why people leave fundamentalism, how they leave it, the costs, and the trauma it leaves behind, I’m probably not the intended audience for this book. But for those who are interested in this great escape and have never experienced it, I highly recommend this book. McCammon covers a wide range of ground, from purity culture to the religious right to young earth creationism. She doesn’t delve into her theme of LGBTQ inclusion until Chapter 9, but for me this is the emotional heart of the book and features blood.
A boiling email exchange between McCammon and his mother. The overview this book provides is guided by McCammon’s own journey and augmented by snippets of interviews with sociologists, historians, adult children of evangelical pastors, and trauma therapists.

Church Patriarchy in Nice: Rehumanizing Women from Evangelicalism
liz cooledge jenkins
Apocryphil

Although McCammon’s focus is wide-ranging, the next three memoirs focus on one of evangelicalism’s chief sins: patriarchy. From the beginning of her memoir, Liz Cooledge Jenkins tells her story of the most obvious instances of patriarchy in the church, overtly misogynistic men’s retreats, and a repressive home education movement. He says he won’t take us there. Instead, the first half of her book takes us on her own missionary journey, from a respected “soft complementarian” church to a decidedly egalitarian missionary context. And this is the important point. Even these ostensibly better churches and ministries employ subtle forms of sexism and gender subordination. In the second half of the book, Jenkins suggests concrete steps in scripture reading, theological education, and liturgical planning to eliminate misogyny in Christianity. Her interesting section on intersectionality analyzes the 2020 vice presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. There are several similarities between Jenkins’ ministry and mine. We both ministered to college students, were part of the liberal minority in a conservative evangelical church, and were both fired for fully affirming LGBTQ people. But Jenkins’ book works for me like an inversion of the Taylor Swift song “The Man.” My path has been difficult, but I wonder how much worse it would have been had I been a woman?

The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife
Written by Shannon Harris
hardwood book

Shannon Harris, ex-wife of ’90s purity culture icon Joshua Harris, gives us a very different anti-patriarchal memoir. She does not interview experts or prescribe seminary or church procedures. She simply tells her painful human story, one micro-essay at a time. Most entries are irreverent, often very funny, and are no more than three pages long. Together, they tell the story of a woman who loses her identity under the overwhelming weight of church expectations and finds it again by leaving the church and pursuing music. This book was worth reading even without the different approaches, but I found some pleasant surprises in it. For example, two essays pause Harris’s narrative and simply criticize typical evangelical interpretations of his Genesis 2-3 creation account. Additionally, the autobiographical essay is littered with astute observations about evangelicalism, including one that stopped me in my tracks: Mr. Harris’s book gave me painful insight into the little hell my wife experienced as the wife of an evangelical pastor during the early years of our marriage.

Rift: A Memoir of Escaping the Christian Patriarchy
Written by Kate West
air domence

The subtitle of Kate West’s debut novel includes the phrase “Escape from Christian Patriarchy.” It is important to know that unlike the other books on this list, this does not address the widespread patterns of male domination that exist in most megachurches. West is instead writing about an escape from a very specific Christian patriarchal movement. She describes it as a cult that cuts across different Protestant traditions. The movement is primarily underground, but includes prominent leaders such as Doug Wilson and Voddie Baucham, and seeks to shape society around men as divine rulers. And West grew up in “an environment like this.” [my father] I can control every aspect of our lives, my life. ” For home-educated Westerners, graduating from high school did not mark a transition to adulthood, but simply staying home and waiting for her father to find her a husband. She contains an interesting part of what can only be called the poetry of the earth. In other words, it’s a study of the ancient movement of the Earth, where the tectonic plates split just like her story. The story is not a triumphant one, as West continues to battle trauma, OCD, and infertility after her escape. In her place of victory is a haunting and beautiful healing and resilience.

The Godly: A Memoir of Doubt
Written by Anna Gazmarian
simon & schuster

This memoir is unique on this list because of its narrow focus on mental health in an evangelical Christian setting. Anna Gazmarian begins her book with a scene in her psychiatrist’s office when she was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2011. The memories that flash back to her mind in this scene set the stage for one of the memoir’s major conflicts: fundamentalist incompetence. , with its toxic positivity and skeptical attitude towards science, to understand and help people with mental illness. We travel with Ghazmarian from her doctor’s office to college to another college, to her love affair with her now-husband, and to her continuing writing career. Along the way, we learn about Ghazmarian’s fear of her new medication and side effects, while also considering the connections between her faith and her bipolar disorder journey with biblical figures like Job and Moses . It wasn’t until I heard Ghazmarian read her verse 39 from Romans 8:38 that I realized for the first time that there were cracks in the armor of total depravity and that God loves her just the way she is. I love many of the scenes and inspirations that come with it.Or, in a college poetry course, she realized that poetry had become her prayer and her class was her church..