In an evangelical upbringing, McCammon notes, there is an overwhelming emphasis on what a person truly believes. Of her sister’s infant dedication, she writes, “In our belief system, while my sister’s dedication was important, it was only a symbol. For us, the central question was what we believed in our hearts, not whether we’d participated in the proper rituals.” She adds, “There were frequent warnings against insincere belief, reminders to look deep within and be certain, absolutely certain, that your ‘heart is right with God.’” McCammon was “saved” at age two and a half; I was “saved” at the relatively advanced age of five. Afterward, I asked God to “save” me many times over because I feared my initial prayer wouldn’t stick. Fear shaped everything we did, and everything we thought. Childhood, for McCammon and her subjects, is “characterized by the push and pull of fearing eternal punishment from God while embracing his love, which was the theme of every church service, every prayer meeting, every hymn.”
Fear can be a useful political tool, and a vehicle for hatred. McCammon reflects on the racist fear that shaped her own education in a Christian school, one of many “initially opened by white churches in the 1960s and 70s in a revolt against school integration.” The Christian homeschool movement went a step further, as it cut off “white Christian students from the outside world and reinforced a nostalgic vision of an America once dominated by (mostly white) Christians,” McCammon writes. By the late 1970s, a robust media network conditioned the evangelical mind. Media juggernauts like James Dobson of Focus on the Family taught evangelicals how to educate their children, how to have sex in a God-honoring way, and how and whom to fear. Over time, evangelicals constructed a predominantly white and exclusively heterosexual country within a country, whose territories they sought to not only defend but expand.
Youth were key to this mission. McCammon herself was a foot soldier in training, interning for the Eagle Forum and becoming a page for a Republican senator. As I learned in my own upbringing, worldly interests—in politics, or culture—were suspect among evangelicals, especially when they appeared in girls, so they were weaponized rather than nurtured. A girl could never preach, but she could be political as long as her role models were women like Phyllis Schlafly or Margaret Thatcher. She could write like Elisabeth Elliot, a former missionary who was known for her anti-feminism. A well-funded infrastructure existed to train her. Historian Molly Worthen describes “Christian worldview” material promoted through “publications, camps, and curricula focused on evangelical youth,” McCammon writes, adding that the men behind this material “approached this endeavor by framing their vision of a ‘Christian worldview’ against any secular one that might challenge it”—for example, by popularizing a revisionist American history. As Worthen writes, evangelicals could thus “dismiss opposing interpretations of the evidence…. They insist upon their own worldview as the only clear window on reality.” (Worthen has since converted to evangelical Christianity.)