Fresh Air - An 'Exvangelical' On Loving & Leaving The Church

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

NPR Politics correspondent Sarah McCammon grew up in a white evangelical church that taught her to never question her faith. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about her upbringing, how her faith was tested, and her decision to leave the church. She now reports on the Christian right and their support of Donald Trump. McCammon's book is The Exvangelicals. Also, Justin Chang reviews The Shadowless Tower. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And today my guest is Sarah McCammon. She's a national political correspondent for NPR, and she's written a new book called The Exvangelicals, Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. This book is a deep dive into the social movement of mostly young people who have left evangelical Christianity. The book is also part memoir. McCammon counts herself as an exvangelical. She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri in the 80s and 90s and was taught to fear God and never question the faith. Some of her first memories are in the church, being saved at age two and baptized at eight. But as McCammon grew older, she couldn't ignore how much of what she was taught

was in contrast with her expanding worldview. The 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump became a flashpoint, where McCammon covered not only the growing support of Trump, but also the rising generation of young evangelicals who also feel disillusioned with the church and what they were taught about the world growing up. In addition to being a correspondent, Sarah McCammon is also a co-host of the NPR Politics podcast. She covers the political, social, and cultural divides in America, including abortion policy and the intersections of politics and religion.

Sarah McCammon, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks so much for having me. Yes, thank you so much for being here. So this book, you give us an inside look at white evangelicalism through a personal lens and through your reporting. And I'm really curious when it was apparent to you that you needed to write this book. You know, my personal experience and my professional life kind of ran headlong into each other when I was covering the 2016 campaign. I was in my mid-30s then. I had spent a lot of my 20s and early 30s kind of privately,

quietly moving away from my evangelical background, trying to make sense of a lot of pieces of it that didn't quite feel like a fit while preserving the things that did. And so I didn't talk a lot about my religious background at work. Most people, I think, don't. But then I was assigned to cover the presidential campaign and not just the campaign, but the Republican primary. And soon enough, the big story really became white evangelicals who make up such a big part of the Republican base. And there were all of these questions around their support for Donald Trump. Would they support him? How would they deal with the cognitive dissonance, the apparent conflict between everything Trump seemed to stand

for and what the movement said it stood for? And I became fascinated with those questions. But I think the moment that it really came into focus for me was January 6, 2021, when I saw people with crosses, religious signs, signs that said Jesus saves, walking into the Capitol and perpetrating the insurrection. For me, I felt like that was the moment that I really wanted and needed to say something. The term evangelical has come to mean so many things. There's the theological, the social, the political. There are all these intersections, and they're also intersecting with your personal life, but it also feels really broad. What was your approach to taking on this topic, even in the scope of politics? Because not everyone who is evangelical, but a big majority of them do support Trump. Right. Something like eight in 10 evangelicals, white evangelicals, I should say, supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020.

And once again, in the Republican primaries this year, we've seen strong evangelical support for Trump. And you're right, the term evangelical is, it's been a contested one for a long time. It's a term that sort of vexes demographers and pollsters and academics, and there's debate about what it really means. But for me, as someone who grew up in that world, it refers to sort of a culture, really the culture I came from, a broad subculture that encompasses many different streams and stripes of conservative Protestant Christianity. And so that, you know, can include charismatic worship people who sort of raise their hands and worship and believe in miracles and speak in tongues. And it can also include more sort of traditional, sort of more buttoned down, even fundamentalist approaches. And there's

even overlap between that. So it is a massive category. But the way I experienced it growing up was that we all kind of unified around a belief in Jesus and the Bible. We didn't even call ourselves evangelicals. We just called ourselves Christians. And we believe that that meant something about the way we were supposed to live and also, for many of us, about the way the country should be. That's really interesting, right? This current political movement catalyzed this ex-evangelical movement, but it didn't necessarily spark it. I'd love to get a sense of how big this movement is. How substantial is this movement now?

How robust is it? Well, just like evangelical is hard to define and quantify, ex-evangelical is, too. this movement is? How substantial is this movement now? How robust is it? Well, just like evangelical is hard to define and quantify, exvangelical is too. It's a much newer term. But I can point to a couple of different data points. I mean, we know that white evangelicalism as a movement is on the decline. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, about 14% of the population is now white evangelical. If you look at data from the early 90s, around that time when I was entering youth group, it was close to one in four Americans were white evangelicals and more if you include evangelicals of color. So we know that the numbers have dropped dramatically. Not everybody who's left would call themselves an ex-evangelical,

and some of that change is just due to changes in the population, demographic changes. We are a more diverse, less white country. But that's one piece of it. There have been efforts by various groups, including some evangelical groups, to try to quantify this phenomenon, and estimates are all over the place. But it seems pretty clear that there are millions of people who were once evangelical who no longer identify that way for one reason or another. Now, they're not all anti-Trump. They're not all liberals or Democrats by any stretch of the means. But evangelicalism was and is such a massive movement that there are millions of Americans with ties to it and many who have left.

The other thing I'd point to is some new research from Pew that looks at the religious nuns, N-O-N-E-S, which is the group of people who basically say that they aren't religious, that they identify with no religion at all. And that group is now bigger than white evangelicalism, which is a seismic shift. And some of those people certainly come from evangelical backgrounds. And once again, I would also point to the vast and growing number of podcasts and social media channels and groups where people are talking about these themes. There's a real appetite for connection after being part of this community. You grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, part of a family of six, two sisters and a brother, and you're the oldest.

How would you characterize your family's faith? And if there is a scale when it comes to evangelical beliefs, like where are they on that scale? Evangelicalism is such a big movement and people are all different right as with any group some people are more devout some people are go to church less often although there's a real emphasis on going every week and being really plugged into a church community that's um in the absence of a lot of ritual like catholicism or mainline Protestantism would have, I would say that for evangelicals, the ritual is almost just showing up and being part of it. So that was important for my family, you know, attending regularly, praying every night at dinner. Going to Christian school was something that certainly not all evangelical kids do.

Not everybody has the means to do that. But that was, for I think my parents, a way of protecting us and shaping us, too, making sure that we were inculcated in what they called a Christian worldview. And you're not talking about Sunday school. You're talking about Christian education, so elementary school, middle school, high school, college. Yeah, I was educated in private Christian schools from preschool through my bachelor's degree. And, you know, this term Christian worldview is something you see in a worldview in particular, something you see a lot in evangelical literature. There's a real emphasis on this idea that we see the world differently. And and really the implication is that those of other faiths see it wrongly. And so it was important that children, that I and my siblings and my peers, it was important to our parents

that we be raised with, you know, a literal view of the Bible, with a view of the family that was very traditional, a mother, a father, monogamy, fidelity, purity before marriage, sexual purity before marriage. And it was important that we share those ideas with the rest of the world. I mean, evangelical has built into the word the idea of evangelism. We believed we had the truth, and we had a responsibility to share it. And that had both spiritual and often political implications. What was it like for you to revisit some of your Christian school textbooks? Some of them were worse than I remembered, to be honest. Some of them included passages that really minimized or ignored some of the ugly history of our country, including slavery.

There's a line I quote in one of the sections of the book. It described it in this way. It said, southern weather was warm and the slaves stayed healthy. And it presented slavery as sort of a necessary result of the economics of the region, which, you know, reading that now as an adult, and particularly as someone who was taught that slavery is evil and that God loves everybody and that we're all children of God, that was really shocking to see it talked about in such casual, callous terms. I was so struck when I read that you said, like, you were not even aware that you were part of a subculture.

What was your media consumption like growing up? Right. I mean, I wouldn't have, I would never have articulated it that way at the time. I just believed that the world was fallen and lost and that we were saved and we had the truth. And it was, you know, our mission in life was to share the truth with the world. But for me, I was, most of what I was surrounded with was evangelical literature and media. So Focus on the Family, which is the organization founded by James Dobson many decades ago, which he's no longer affiliated with. But it's been instrumental in evangelical culture.

And it's certainly not the only group, but it's hard to overstate how important Focus on the Family and its offshoots has been. Focus on the Family produced magazines for teenagers. There was this magazine called Brio Magazine, which is sort of an alternative to like Teen Vogue or Teen Magazine. They produced many, many books about parenting, many books about marriage. And there was a whole political arm as well. The Family Research Council was sort of an offshoot of Focus on the Family, which exists today and is a very powerful group in the Christian right. So we were listening to Christian radio. We were watching Christian television, Christian movies. I was allowed to sometimes listen to what we called secular radio, you know, rock and roll, but it was heavily discouraged. And if I was caught listening to it too much, my parents would shut it down.

I chuckled when I read that growing up, your dad referred to NPR as National Perverted Radio. Yeah. And, you know, I noted this in the book, but he doesn't remember that. So maybe I misremembered it, but I remember it. You know, the sense was just that the secular world was, again, was full of sin and was lost. And so really, my whole world was shaped by those influences. And I knew very few people who were not evangelical Christians. Your grandfather, he was a very pivotal, important person in your life and coming into your own beliefs and deconstructing your beliefs, as you put it. He was a highly educated man who was also gay, and the distance your family placed between him had a profound effect on you. It's almost like the distance did the opposite of what your parents were trying to accomplish. Yeah, I think that's really true. They were trying to protect me from him.

I mean, I think they loved him in their way, of course, but he was not a believer. He was, yes, he was highly educated. He loved to read. He was a neurosurgeon. And I think he – I remember a series of – a number of times when my dad would try to talk to him about becoming Christian and my grandpa wasn't interested. And that was always perplexing to me growing up because, you know, we thought that this we were told that this was clearly the truth. You just had to look in the Bible. We knew all the verses that backed up our beliefs. And, you know, what's more that this belief system was it was sort of a ticket not only to heaven, but to meaning and purpose. And so I couldn't make sense of somebody who I admired and I knew my parents admired and was very accomplished. Why wouldn't he accept Jesus?

Why wouldn't he go along with this? And I write in the book about sort of how I discovered that my parents had been keeping a secret from me about his sexuality. Yes, he had come out as gay, as a widower, in the mid-'80s after my grandmother passed away. And that, I think, just sort of deepened the rift between us. And, I mean, this was a time when my parents were fully enmeshed in the Christian right, when the moral majority was on the rise in the 80s. And then it wasn't long until the 90s when sort of same-sex marriage began to be on the radar even more.

And so there was a real, not only a theological and spiritual split, but a political split there. And really, you know, an intellectual and epistemic split. I mean, they saw the world so completely differently. And that was very confusing for me as a kid. But it also made me aware that there was a different way of looking at things. And I was always afraid of that, but also a bit curious about it. You write about that there is no political cause more important than abortion. It felt urgent when you were growing up. You grew up believing that having a baby was the highest calling for a woman. How did that urgency show itself within your family? And I want to note that when you were a teenager, you actually volunteered at

a local crisis pregnancy center. I did. And some people will probably be shocked to hear that because I've covered this issue. But I would just point out that there are plenty of journalists covering all kinds of issues who've done political work in their younger years. And it's been a very long time. And we were told that children were a gift from God and that, yes, the highest calling for a woman was to be a mother and a wife. And my parents, especially my mom, would talk about that in really glowing terms as something that was almost destined for me. And I want to say, I am a wife and mother, and it's wonderful. And I think it's lovely. But there were other things that I wanted to do with my life, too. And I think for us, abortion was viewed as literal murder. It was viewed as the taking of a human life. And that's something that I think is important to understand when you understand the politics around this issue, why it's so, why there's such intensity. I mean,

certainly there are people who support abortion restrictions who do allow for exceptions in certain cases. But the fundamental belief among a lot of evangelical Christians is that, you know, from the moment of conception, a child is a human life and has the same rights as, or should have the same rights as any other person. And as we're seeing, that does shape not only how people view abortion, but also things like in vitro fertilization and potentially contraception. Of course, when I was a little child, I didn't know any of the science behind it. I didn't know how complicated these decisions can be. I just knew what my parents believed and what my church taught. What is that like? Because you

journaled a lot, so you can actually go back to your writings during those time periods when you were younger and see how you felt, the strong feelings you felt about abortion or the Clinton impeachment, for instance, like all of those things you were writing in real trying to, and I think everybody is at that age, trying to make sense of the world and trying to figure out your place in it. I think a lot of us want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. And I think most people, I hope so, want to do the right thing. And so I'd been told a lot of things about what was right and what my role was both, you know, as a woman and as a Christian. And so I was trying to put that all together. And I think I maybe I was parroting things I'd been told. Although, yeah. Yeah, it was what you had been taught and you were you're not sure if you were believing it.

Yeah, it's hard to know what I really thought at that time. I mean, I will say I grew up, you know, the oldest of four kids, and I loved watching my mom take care of my siblings. I loved watching her grow in her pregnancies and breastfeed the babies and bring home all the cool baby stuff. And, you know, babies are – I like babies. They're really cool. And so I think I was – I thought about it in those terms, like saving babies. And, you know, but this was before I grew up and would have friends and people close to me face complicated situations that sort of expanded my point of view on what that all meant and what it was about. Our guest today is NPR journalist Sarah McCammon, author of the new book, The Exvangelicals, Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. We'll be right back.

I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. Hi, this is Molly. And I'm Seth. We're two of the producers at Fresh Air. If you like listening to Fresh Air, we think you'll also like reading our newsletter. You'll find the interviews and reviews from the show all in one place. Plus, staff recommendations you won't hear on the show, behind-the-scenes Q&As, bonus audio.

It's also the only place to find out what interviews are coming up. We keep it fun, and it comes straight to your inbox once a week. Subscribe for yourself at whyy.org slash fresh air. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is NPR national political correspondent Sarah McCammon. She's written a new book that chronicles her own journey and that of a growing number of evangelicals. It's called The Exvangelicals, Loving, Living, and Leaving the White evangelical church. There's this pivotal time in your life. You spent half of school year as a Senate page when you were younger, which meant you worked and lived in D.C., and it was the first time you were away from your parents.

And this was an absolute eye-opener on your worldview. You were confronted by several things, And one big question was the eternal destiny of people of other faiths. It was like a crisis of your faith. This was a very pivotal point for you. It was. And I had grown up, you know, praying for my grandpa's soul because he was not a Christian. And I knew so few people who weren't evangelicals or certainly who weren't Christians. And really, for the first time, when I went to Washington, I got to know someone who was a completely different faith. I talk about my friend Sina, who was, I think he was our class president. He was a really sweet kid. He was the son of Iranian

immigrants, and he was Muslim. And, you know, we talked about all kinds of things. We would sit these long hours on the Senate rostrum, which if you turn on C-SPAN are those little steps that lead up to the podium, you know, where the person in charge gavels in, the president pro tem. And so we'd sit there for hours in between votes and speeches waiting for senators to call us to help them with one thing or another to send documents around the Capitol. And so we had lots of conversations and we got to know each other well. And one day, Sina and I were talking about our families and our backgrounds. And I don't remember quite how we got there. But he asked me point blank, did I think he was going to hell? Because he was not a Christian. And, you know, I just

looked at him and I, I didn't know what to say, because I guess I did. That's what everybody told me. And yet confronted with it like that. I couldn't say yes. And, you know, I think, I think for me, that was, it's a moment I think about a lot, because it wasn't as if I'd never had that thought before or questioned it. But looking another person in the eyes who I cared about, and who had come from a totally different experience and background than my own, forced me to think about it differently. I think I just said, I don't know. I think that's between you and God. And I think in that moment when I said that, I realized something about what I actually believed. That's really powerful because I'm thinking about your journal entries when you were young and you were saying these things, your strong beliefs and the fear,

right, that was instilled in you because there's heaven or hell and there's nothing in between. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that is a big part of it. Like, if you don't think literally, your fate is tied to those two places. I think you're right. I think a lot of my journal entries don't match what I remember about myself. And I think that's really interesting. And I hadn't thought about it that way. But I think what you write down with a pen and paper feels so serious and permanent. And the thought of writing down a doubt was, you know, I don't, I think I

would have been afraid to sort of say it out loud. I mean, one of the few people I did say my doubts out loud to was, was one of my high school teachers, my English teacher, Miss Taylor, who was very devout. She was a fundamentalist Christian. And yet she was someone who held space for me to have doubts. And she was someone that I could talk to and ask questions. And she knew that I was struggling with my faith as a freshman in high there. But I think it is because the consequences for getting it wrong were so dire. I needed to convince myself of all of this, because there was always that risk if you left the fold of what would happen. You know, we would be warned. I remember hearing in Sunday school, Christian school, various places, you know, this warning that people will say to you, a loving God would never send people to hell. But don't let them persuade you of that, because God is also just

and holy, and God demands holiness and redemption and repentance. And so, yes, I mean, there really was no in-between. You were saved or lost. And even, you know, we didn't have some kind of belief in purgatory or limbo or anything like that. It was just, you know, yes or no. And you had to decide while you were alive. That was it. Which was, which was a terrifying thought. I mean, I spent many, many nights laying in bed thinking about that and just praying, you know, for people, for my grandfather, for other people, I knew that they would get saved because I was just so afraid for their souls.

There is a theory that evangelicals are more susceptible to conspiracy theories, particularly white evangelicals. How has that presented itself in your beat as a reporter interfacing with people talking about issues? Well, I think one of the places we saw it was in that infamous line from Kellyanne Conway, the advisor to former President Trump, after his inauguration in 2017 when he claimed to have the largest inaugural crowd ever. And, you know, there were multiple fact checks of that. And I think the Washington Post used cameras to try to check out that claim. And despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Kellyanne Conway got on TV and said that they had alternative facts. And, you know, what it reminded me of was sort of the refusal to absorb or incorporate information that contradicted the refusal to accept the overwhelming consensus around the history of the world and the age of the earth. And there is really interesting research around this, that evangelicals report fewer factually correct answers about, for example, the history of religion in the U.S. And there's other polling that indicates a greater openness to conspiracy

theory thinking, and I think some of it may be rooted in simply an approach to knowledge and an approach to secular knowledge in particular. Yeah, it's really fascinating that the differences between Christian education versus secular education that you write quite extensively about in the book. You talk to ex-evangelicals who also relate to you some of your own experiences. They had those same experiences. You even talked to one nursing student who talked with you about how she literally thought men had a missing rib because of what was written in the Bible. So she was shocked in nursing school when that wasn't the case. Right. And she talked about being really embarrassed, really embarrassed to discover that she'd missed this, you know, sort of obvious fact. But, you know, it wasn't hard for me to believe that she'd had that experience because, you know, I remember

the things that I had been told. There was so much, as you mentioned, that you didn't learn in school throughout your education. What is that like for you as you kind of are re-educating yourself? Are there any things in particular that you think about that you're like, wait a minute, like, I didn't know about that, and I had to relearn it? Maybe music or movies you had to discover even? I still feel like I'm behind on music and movies. I mean, I had my kids in my, I had one when I was 25 and one when I was 30. And I feel like now that they're teenagers, I am just starting to emerge from the fog of motherhood and working full time. And so like one of my goals is to sort of do remedial pop culture and watch movies that

I've missed. My husband's trying to help with that. But that said, you know, I think back to a time early in my career when I was doing one of my first stories for Nebraska Public Radio, where I started out in public radio, about science. And it was this really cool story about these two this fossil of these two ice-aged mammoths that had been um found in western nebraska underground like locked together fighting over a female and i loved this story because it was so nerdy and so interesting um but as part of reporting that story i had to talk about the fact that this fossil was 20,000 years old. And, you know, by this point, I'd accepted that that was the case. But it felt really weird to put it in a script.

It felt like, you know, writing about viruses and talking about the millions of years of evolution that have shaped the way viruses replicate and change and mutate. You know, just all these little things that are probably normal to most people that to me sort of stuck out as, oh, yeah, that's not something I'm supposed to believe in. Fortunately, though, I think, I mean, I don't know about you, Tanya, but like, are you an expert on evolutionary biology? I'm sorry if you are. There's so many things we have to be experts on. So you have to be a quick study, you know? Right. So some of it's just like probably like it is for anybody. I just kind of read, try to NPR national political correspondent Sarah McCammon. She's written a new book called The Exvangelicals, Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, which chronicles her own journey and that of a growing number of evangelicals. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air, and today we're talking to Sarah McCammon. She's an NPR national political correspondent and co-host of the NPR Politics podcast.

She's written a new book that chronicles her own journey and that of a growing number of evangelicals called the Exvangelicals, Loving, social, and cultural divides in America, including abortion policy and the intersections of politics and religion. I was really fascinated by the chapter where you write about the racial reconciliation we saw within white churches in the 90s when these evangelical churches were really trying to build diversity. And it really felt like for a brief second, they were trying to live out this post-racial ideal. What happened? Yeah, I remember this movement.

I remember talk about it from the pulpit in my church and the desire to reach out and to be more diverse, to be more inclusive. You know, Dr. Martin Luther King famously talked about the segregation of Sunday morning, and that was, you know, in the 60s. And by the 90s, it hadn't changed much. And so I think that it was a sincere desire. I think this is the people I knew wanted to be a more united church. But I think they ran up against the reality that people with different lived experiences often have very different perspectives and priorities. And for, you know, white Christians, there's a long history of supporting political causes and candidates that many Black Christians, and I'll limit my comments to that because that's the group I focus on in the book, that many Black Christians see as harmful to them. Tisby, who had experiences in white evangelical spaces, you know, who had been trained in white evangelical spaces and spent time in those churches. And when moments like the rise of

Donald Trump or the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis arose, began to feel that their voices were not platformed in the way that some of the white leaders' voices were, that the issues that were affecting their communities' lives were not a priority. And, you know, we've seen, I think, division, more division in churches in recent years over some of these issues, despite the intentions of many churches decades ago to try to become more integrated. It was really interesting, even, you touch on it just briefly, about how even the forming of the Christian schools was in direct response to school integration in the 60s and 70s, almost a revolt to it.

It all intersects in this way with something that these evangelical churches have to continue to face up against. It seems like with every flashpoint that we experience in society, so the most recent flashpoint being the racial reckoning in 2020, that is also one that we saw that kind of takes us back to the 60s and then the 90s and then now. Yeah, and I think that's something that white Christians have to contend with is the reality that there is a really ugly racial history in American Christianity. The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in response to divisions in the church over slavery. And the Southern Baptist Convention was the result of those who supported it not wanting to be with those who oppose slavery.

Of course, the SBC has since apologized for that. But that is part of the backdrop to some of these current conversations. And yes, you know, I think one of the things that appears to have driven the rise of the religious right is, you know, not only opposition to abortion, which we talk about a lot, but also anxiety around increasing diversity and integration. I mean, many Christian schools did form at the time that schools were integrating because they were spaces that could be restrictive. I'm not saying that people send their kids to Christian school today because they don't want to be around Black kids. You know, I don't think that's on the minds of most parents. And I know my parents taught me that everybody was made in the image of God and that we were all equal, regardless of our skin color. And I think there are many, many evangelicals that believe that. I think things get more

complicated, though, when you're talking about who's in control, who's platformed, who's in charge, who gets to call the shots, and whose issues are prioritized in churches. How has this journey for you impacted your parenting? Because you are a parent. And how do you take on the issues of faith and religion with your children? It's a tough one. And I think it's hard for a lot of people who I spoke to who've made religious changes. Because, you know, when you grow up in a religious tradition, it kind of tells you how to live. And one of the things that religion often provides is the rituals or the practices around these key life events.

And those can be really comforting and really important and also a source of community. And so in my case, I chose to have my children baptized in the Episcopal Church. It's a church that's pretty accepting of gay people, and that was important to me. I wanted to, I did that not because I felt like it conveyed some magic power or something, but because I wanted to bring my children into my faith community in a way that felt good for me. So I did that. And as they've gotten older, I really just try to have conversations with them around spirituality, but also around values and how they conduct themselves in the world that feel authentic to me. And so that means sometimes talking about my faith. Sometimes I cite Bible verses if I think they're applicable, but I probably cite

them the same way that I would cite a good poem. you know, it's not like you have to believe this. And this is the, this is directly from God. And it's literally, you know, has some sort of special power, but it's more like, here's some wisdom that I want to share with you, or here's an interesting insight. And, you know, my children are now I'm divorced and remarried. And, you know, my former spouse and I both kind of deconstructed together in many ways. And I think and I'm now in an interfaith marriage. My husband's Jewish. So my kids go to they've gone to services with us. We've all we all went to Christmas service this past year.

Their dad, my husband, my former spouse's partner. And I think that's really, you know, really wonderful for marking those moments and building sort of family traditions. They also see my husband's observance of his faith, which is a little bit different, but also beautiful. And I think it has enriched our family in a lot of ways. Sarah McCammon, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you so much. We spoke with NPR national political correspondent Sarah McCammon. Her book is called The Exvangelicals, Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. In the new film The Shadownless Tower, a Beijing restaurant critic is at a midlife crossroads. Now in theaters, it was written and directed by the Korean-Chinese filmmaker Jiang Lu.

Our film critic Justin Chang says, this absorbing drama draws you in at every step. The title of The Shadowless Tower refers to an enormous 13th century Buddhist temple that looms over the Xicheng district of Beijing. It's called the White Pagoda, and it was designed in such a way that its shadow can be hard to see. That makes it a poignant metaphor for the movie's middle-aged protagonist, Gu, who's struggling with his own sense of impermanence. As he quietly drifts through a life riven by loss and disappointment, he wonders, as time slips away, if he himself will leave a meaningful impression. The viewer, however, will not forget him anytime soon. Gu is played by the actor Xin Baixing, whose movingly understated performance holds you through every step of this leisurely but absorbing drama. We first meet Gu as he and his family are

visiting the grave of his recently deceased mom. It takes a few moments to figure out how everyone's related. The six-year-old girl we see is Gu's daughter, and she's as happy and upbeat as her name, Smiley, would lead you to believe. But we soon learn that Smiley lives with Gu's older sister and brother-in-law, who have effectively adopted her. While Gu is very much a part of their lives, he's an unreliable father at best, prone to showing up late, and sometimes drunk, for regular visits. Whatever Gu's failings as a parent, they seem to faintly echo those of his own father, whom he hasn't seen since he was a young boy, for reasons that are not immediately clear. Now, decades later, his long-absent father has been quietly reaching out to the family, and Gu is considering letting him back in.

You can imagine how this all might play out in a different movie, with stormy flashbacks, anguished recriminations, and a tear-jerking happy ending. But the writer-director Jiang Lu is after something subtler and more realistic. He knows how hard it can be in life for even two willing parties to connect. The movie's other key relationship proves similarly elusive. Gu, who once dreamed of being a poet, now works as a restaurant critic. One of his colleagues is a mischievous young photographer named Ouyang, played by Huang Yao, who takes pictures of the dishes he writes about. But while the two have a flirtatious chemistry, their romance never really

gets off the ground. That may be because of their age difference, which Ouyang pokes fun at by playfully introducing Gu as her father or her boyfriend, depending on the situation. But it may also have something to do with Gu's passivity. As another character puts it, too much politeness builds a wall between people. In its own unassuming way, the shadowless tower means to knock down some of those walls. Most of us realize sooner or later that we're more like our parents or other family members than we care to admit. But the movie articulates that truth with a gentleness that can take your breath away. Like the eerie moment when Gu realizes how much Smiley resembles the grandfather she's never met. And if this is a story of intergenerational conflict, we see some of that

tension reflected in Beijing itself. The camera follows Gu around the city, where sleek modern surfaces coexist with ancient traditional buildings, like that white pagoda often seen in the background. There's another inspired touch that resonates powerfully if you know to look for it. Gu's father is well played by the filmmaker Tian Zhuang Zhuang, who like many Chinese directors of his generation, experienced government censorship and persecution earlier in his career. His 1993 drama, The Blue Kite, set during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, was banned in mainland China, and Tian himself was restricted from filmmaking for ten years. I don't think it's a coincidence that Tian's character in The Shadowless Tower is seen flying a kite, or that he's shown to be emerging from exile. There's sadness in that parallel, but also a sense of hope, a reminder that while none of us can change the past,

the future remains beautifully unwritten. Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker. On tomorrow's show, Terry talks with Christine Blasey Ford on how her life has changed since accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her. And she'll describe her experience testifying at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and why she decided to come forward. After years of avoiding the spotlight, she's written a memoir. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

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