For years, I thought it was just me who’d left a church I once loved. There was no social media and so no deconstruction group I could join for support as I reappraised my beliefs or worked through the loss. Maybe attending divinity school was my attempt at treating my spiritual disentanglement; maybe I did so by becoming a religion reporter, gathering up primary source accounts of faith, the way I used to check out books.
But about ten years ago, I noticed in Pew Research Center data that millennials, and increasingly women like me, were starting to disaffiliate at a clip similar to men (even though the same total numbers of millennial men and women had not yet left). I discovered I wasn’t just a solitary case. I was part of a small but growing trend. I proposed a book on the topic to publishers then, wanting to warn that American millennial women were starting to leave the church. No one wanted to publish that book a decade ago. And now I’m grateful I didn’t get to tell this story then. It was too early. The bright, clear outlines I now see were still fuzzy. It gave me time to heal and grow comfortable, even enthusiastic with my own agnosticism by hearing so many others’ wide-ranging stories of deconstruction, faith, and disbelief. After years of such reporting, I now see our combined stories far more lucidly. I have a better sense of what was so harmful, so off-putting to many of us. I have a better sense of what was freeing about leaving.
Documenting these stories is not an attack on the church. Instead, this book is an attempt to describe phenomena reshaping where and how millions of women feel at home and find meaning. I would hope America’s church leaders would care.
As some of our daughters come of age and some of our mothers (and grandmothers) quit too, the sweep of what we’ve gone through is becoming clear. And what we have experienced matters urgently for those who still care about the church. It matters to those choosing to leave now too and to a country that is rapidly changing in many of the same ways that drove us from the church in the first place.
If you are a person watching for signs of organized religion’s collapse — and in a still-predominantly Christian country like the US, that means the church — you should know that women are the bellwether. While the US is a religiously diverse nation, Jewish people, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, New Age believers, Unitarians, people with Native American spirituality, and believers in the world’s other religions all taken together only make up 7 percent of the population. Up to 29 percent of us (depending on the study) are unaffiliated. (When I left the church around 2000, just 14 percent of Americans were unaffiliated.) All the rest call themselves Christians of some persuasion — for now.
To understand the shifting religious climate in America, it is necessary to understand what is happening among Christians, particularly those opting out and shifting identity. Women are the sentinels, the proverbial canaries in a coal mine many wish they could still call home. They are the ones who sense the noxious fumes. As they stop singing the old songs, their silence provides a vital message. Theirs is no sudden exodus. The slide from faith has been building for decades. Talking to women who left, there’s a silvery thread of influences we can trace — events that eventually braid like a rope, dangling over a welcome escape hatch.
There’s no single reason American Christian women are breaking up with the church. It’s not a solitary wound that can be quickly mended. In most cases, many converging spiritual scars, moral protests, or logical objections meet in each woman’s life, eventually leading to a tipping point where she realizes she is better off fleeing than staying. Understanding what is happening on a national scale is like studying a pointillistic painting with another portrait tucked into each point. To really grasp the big image, the broad impressions — Christianity is contracting, women are leaving, the church’s gender gap is shrinking — it helps to walk right up and see the detail.
My rendering of this phenomenon begins in the 1980s, when evangelicalism and the consolidation of the Christian Right made it seem like the church’s influence could only ever expand until it became synonymous with our politics. What we couldn’t see then were the psychic and spiritual wounds carved along the way, how often women were casualties of our culture wars, or at least too sympathetic with the fallen to keep battling.
This book is told in stages: departures made by women who were driven away — by hypocrisy and abuse. Some were shamed simply for being women. Inheritors of feminism, many faced remaining inequalities in our civil sphere, which only made discrimination starker in sacred spaces, especially as some churches doubled down on their patriarchal impulses.
For some, God and Jesus ceased to make sense, and the church, eventually, held little attraction. But usually, the issue was certain church people. Some found themselves compelled by Christian principles of love and compassion to stand up for people that their church or national Christian leaders condemned. This commitment put them at odds with Christian institutions that were increasingly aligned with a thirst for oppressive political power. This form of Christianity became the public face of faith in America, trading virtue for influence, faith for religious nationalism, love of neighbor for lust for power. Whatever gentle and kind expressions of faith were happening in some individual churches, that politicized and power-driven expression of the church became a general turnoff. A root problem is that the Christian Right acted as though its ruthless tactics were holy, as though it held a singular claim on spiritual truth — all while leaders’ own sins became public, rampant abuses of power and of children’s bodies proved systemic, and these bearers of alleged truth fell to deceit and aligned with liars.
Perhaps this offers an added warning for faith institutions in other countries where religious nationalism is rising and comes with an almost concomitant patriarchal impulse to impose constraints on women’s liberties. Exchanging political power in order to oppress women and other people may one day lead to emptying your faith community of its vital force — the very people traded for dominion. To understand American women’s impending divorce from the church, it’s wise to start when the Christian Right took other brides: Political clout. Prosperity. An opportunity to supersize in scale and affluence. It seemed like many American churches were selling their souls. And because technology beamed it all into our homes via TV, Americans got to witness the romance in all its lurid depravity. Later, the internet offered the means to call it out in ways impossible under the former monopoly of influence once held by the village church. That last phase comes in disillusionment and new identities, a patchwork of women’s lives changed by fractured — and sometimes reclaimed — faith.
Reprinted with permission from “Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion” by Sarah Stankorb. Copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books
