Welcome, everybody, back to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity

and the modern world of science and culture very seriously. My name's Dan Koch. I'm a licensed

therapist and a post-evangelical. I don't self-identify as ex-vangelical. We're going to get

into that. And I'm a liberal

Protestant. And what I'm trying to do is stay blessed and let go of the rest, Sarah. I don't know about

you. That's what I'm here to do. That's the voice of Sarah McCammon, NPR journalist and author of

the ex-vangelicals. Sarah, thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I have been following you, like on Twitter and just sort of aware of your journalism for many

years now. So this is a real treat for me. You have, you've written this book, The Ex-Vangelicals,

and sort of from my perspective, it's like the first

semi-official, I don't know, like coming from a writer, from a reputable news outlet, like kind of

sort of like a general culture look with some journalistic care, but then of course it's

half memoir,

at this movement that I have been swimming in for the last 10, 15 years. And it does feel kind of crazy that there is like finally this book coming out. And thank you for taking the

time and making that happen. Yeah. You know, I, it's one of those things where, like, if you're a journalist and you see a story, you want to write it, a good story, especially with someone that you're interested in or is relevant to your beat.

And this was one that obviously I have deep ties to.

And probably I saw it because definitely I saw it because of my own connection to it.

I kind of accidentally wound up covering evangelicals.

Like it wasn't something I set out to do.

In fact, for a lot of my career, I wanted to steer clear of anything like that because it was too close to home.

But I, you know, I went up covering the 2016 campaign and

specifically the Republican primary. That's what I was assigned to cover. And it was like an unavoidable

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