It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYc, good

again. It's Brian Laird Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone.

Yesterday on the show, we did a call in for folks who have, contrary to the current national

trend, returned to a religious faith.

I mentioned that we would be talking to NPR National Correspondent

Sarah McCammon today about her new book that traces the opposite journey and one that

statistics show is more common in America right now. the loving, living, and leaving the white evangelical church will hear her story in some of yours.

Hi Sarah McCammon, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

And since this is your story and that of other ex-Angelicals who grew up

during this period of such a rising preeminence and prominence of the white evangelical movement in the United States.

Tell us a little bit of your story.

So I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the Midwest in a very intensely, you know,

conservative Christian evangelical family.

We would have just called ourselves Christians at the time,

but in retrospect, we were definitely evangelical.

I went to an evangelical college.

And for us, Christianity was the center of our lives and a very specific form of Christianity that focused on, you know, a personal relationship with God, with Jesus, a literal view of the Bible.

We believed that the Earth was created in six days as described in Genesis about 6,000 to 10,000

years ago.

We believed it was our job to sort of share that message with the rest of the world.

And there was a very strong political overton. This know, this was the time that the moral majority

...