Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation

In this enlightening memoir, Ward (Camelot’s End), senior political correspondent for Yahoo! News, recounts a life caught between Christian and secular worlds. Ward grew up in the 1980s and ’90s as an evangelical pastor’s son, going to protests outside abortion clinics and embarking on mission trips. But when the Sovereign Grace Church took a sharp turn toward New Calvinism, its notions of man’s total depravity left Ward further disenchanted with the sin-obsessed, “hermetically sealed” church world he’d already started to question. Ward pursued journalism and landed his first reporting job at the Washington Times, though for years he dealt with an “existentialist despair” after realizing his upbringing hadn’t prepared him for “the world in which [he] now moved.” West fully broke with the church after the evangelical community embraced Donald Trump in 2016, causing rifts with his family. Nonetheless, Ward advocates for a Christian presence in public political discourse, in which he contends believers should serve as “agents of nuance rather than of reductionism.” While this sometimes seems more like an ongoing personal inquiry than a finished product (as when he touches on the current status of his faith in the final chapters), Ward is consistently clear-sighted and perceptive as he charts a genuinely fascinating personal and spiritual evolution. This will resonate especially with Christians wondering about faith’s place in modern American society. (Apr.)