Politics reporter discusses personal journey leaving evangelicalism

Sarah McCammon, a national correspondent for NPR, lived as an evangelical and covered the religious movement for years.

She recently left the movement over its conservative politics and policies.

McCammon recounts details of her life, including being raised within a strict Midwest evangelical family and community, and explains how and why she ultimately left the faith in her new book "The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church."

She spoke with ABC News Live's Linsey Davis about the book and her experiences.

ABC NEWS LIVE: Before we get too far in here, for the uninitiated, what's the difference between a mainstream Protestant and an evangelical Protestant?

SARAH MCCAMMON: I think the short version is that that mainline Protestantism has embraced modernity in a way that arguably evangelicalism has not. And that it means things like a modern approach to science, including the acceptance of evolutionary theory, which many conservative evangelicals don't embrace.

ABC NEWS LIVE: You were evangelical for most of your adult life, and described questioning the faith as a kind of unraveling. What stops making sense for you?

MCCAMMON: Really, it was most of my childhood. I talk in the book about many things that sort of seemed off. And one of them was my family's relationship with my grandfather, who was one of the few people we knew who was not religious and who came out as gay late in life.

We spent a lot of time worrying about him. We had a lot of distance from him, in part because of his sexuality.

There was something about that that always sort of felt wrong to me throughout my childhood. Also, you know, being taught creationism in my Christian school, I always kind of wondered why we seem to believe something differently about the history of the world than most other people did, and why we rejected mainstream science.

ABC NEWS LIVE: You were NPR's lead political reporter assigned to cover the Trump campaign in 2016. Because of your evangelical background, what would you say made you the right person for the job?

MCCAMMON: I'm old enough to remember the 1990s, when many evangelical leaders were loudly criticizing former President [Bill] Clinton for his moral failings. And I couldn't help but remember some of those conversations in my own home and in my community about the importance of character in a president.

So I was thinking about that as I was covering this campaign. And while I had my own separation from that movement, I was fascinated to see how those voters would react to Trump, how they would talk about him and what they ultimately would do. And, of course, we've seen again and again that the white evangelical movement has embraced Trump.

ABC NEWS LIVE: Former President [Donald] Trump didn't appear to be the type of candidate evangelicals could get behind, yet they did and still do.

I remember that time when he was asked what's your favorite, you know, chapter in the Bible or Scripture? And he was just like, oh, the whole thing. And then he said, Two Corinthians, rather than like Second Corinthians.

There were several examples of him not necessarily being really a religious person. So why do you think that the evangelicals were so eager to support Trump in particular, not even just say, oh, we normally back Republicans because of the conservative beliefs, but this was specific to support Trump?

MCCAMMON: Well, based on my reporting, I, my sense from talking to voters was that they felt and had felt for a long time that the country was on the decline.

I cite in my book some of the textbooks I read in Christian school that talked about America as a Christian nation that was specifically sort of called and designed by God to be a certain way.

And usually, that was a pretty traditional, traditional view of families.

And there was this very kind of glowing view that was presented to a lot of white evangelicals for many years about the history of the country and a sense that anything that was going wrong in the country was a result of falling away from that, falling away from Christianity. This was a theme I heard a lot growing up.

And so I think when Trump talked about making America great again, and he explicitly promised to stand up for Christians, he said that many times, including recently, that resonated with a lot of people.

And I think they didn't fundamentally care that much about his character. I mean, we would hear things like, 'we want a politician, he's a politician, not a pastor.' And Trump was in search of a base that he could mobilize. And evangelicals were an easily mobilized base who were in search of a champion for their ideas.

He promised to do the things that they wanted. And he did, in many cases.