Allison McClain Merrill is a freelance writer and reporter focusing on TV history, music, and faith and culture. She has written for Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Today, Glamour, and Paste Magazine. She earned a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale University and can be found on Twitter @AMcClainMerrill.
Posts By This Author
‘Famished’ Explores the Link Between Purity Culture and Diet Culture
Anna Rollins sees her “quiet deconstruction” as a Christian as inseparable from her previously unhealthy relationship with food.
IN THE EARLY 2000s, Christian women were flooded with commentary about female bodies, both from secular and religious camps. A societal fixation on weight filled tabloid and magazine covers in grocery stores. Pastors preached against premarital sex by comparing teenage bodies to dirty water.
“So many sermon illustrations compared my body to food waiting to be consumed by men,” writes Anna Rollins in her new memoir, Famished. Rollins, who grew up in a white Appalachian fundamentalist Christian community, situates cultures of diet and sexual purity on the same continuum.
How Tia Levings Quit Being a ‘Well-Trained Wife’
The cover of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings. Book cover by St. Martin’s Press, graphic by Mitchell Atencio/Sojourners
Tia Levings made a decision for herself and her children on October 28, 2007. With the help of a priest, she planned for an escape from her abusive husband. “I heard a voice say, ‘RUN,’” she writes in her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy.
Pruning the Unfruitful Branches of Evangelicalism
In “The Exvangelicals,” NPR’s Sarah McCammon mixes journalism and memoir to wrestle with the ideas that shaped her life.
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon. / St. Martin's Press
CHRISTIANITY IN THE U.S. often resembles a politically charged, dysfunctional family tree, its branches twisting and tangling as factions clash. When evangelical Christians leave their branch — or the entire tree — some continue to wrestle with the ideas that shaped their lives. NPR political correspondent Sarah McCammon portrays those wrestlers with care in The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.
“Exvangelical” and “deconstruction” are buzzwords in some corners of Christian internet. The former was coined by Exvangelical podcast host Blake Chastain; McCammon defines the latter as “the often painful process of rethinking an entire worldview and identity that was carefully constructed” within conservative faith traditions.
The White, Conservative Faith That Controls Christian Music
Fans pack near the stage to cheer the band The Afters at the Creation Christian music festival near Mount Union, Penn., June 29, 2008. Mike Segar/Reuters
Payne details the creation, proliferation, and decline of CCM, tracing the industry’s relationship with conservative evangelical Christianity.
Jill Duggar’s Memoir on Freedom from Spiritual and Familial Trauma
With her book, and her appearance in the documentary series Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, Jill peels back layers of life on reality TV.