[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to that Makes Total Sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian, aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice, but the how sometimes eludes us. That makes total sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice. Practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Okay, so this is Sarah, an interview that I have been looking forward to for a long time and also a little bit dreading because this subject matter is so.
It's so pertinent, it's so important, it's so relevant.
And as a woman who has been in the church my whole life and is still here, it is.
It's really hard to.
Not just.
It's really hard to live through the things that you're writing about and then to have them kind of recalled back to me. But I'm glad you're here because it's necessary work. So thanks for coming back on the podcast, Sarah.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Thank you. I was so excited to be invited back.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, I was thrilled when I saw your new book come back. I think I'll put shownotes to our conversation about disobedient women and just remind the listeners that it took me a year to prepare myself, really, to talk with you about disobedient women. This time with this title, I was like, uh, still. So let's get Sarah scheduled.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Like, I don't.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: I hadn't even received the book yet. And I was like, yes, A hundred percent, yes. I don't even care. You know, I know it's going to be great. I know it's going to be amazing. So, yes, let's get Sarah going. And then I was reading it. I was like, okay, I have to slow down.
There's a lot here, and I need to slow down. But thank you so much for your work. I'm going to say the name of this before we get started, before we get too much into it, because I feel like we'll just. We'll just take off. Sarah Stancour, my guest for today, has written an incredible, incredible volume called Damned if She Does Why Women Quit Church and what It Means for the Future of Religion. And I will say, Sarah, not long ago, I was reading the book and I posted just a story on my Instagram. And I cannot tell you the women who. I mean, our friends of mine who were like, oh, my gosh. Ooh, this looks amazing. You Know, like this kind of thing, because I think there's so many questions swirling around for Christian women still in the church in the US but it's not because we don't know or haven't experienced a lot of the things that you write about. And so I don't usually start there and it's not even in my notes to do so, but I think I will. And say you gave us disobedient women, can you tell us why you gave us this one, too?
Because I'm so grateful. What for you felt necessary about this work?
[00:03:41] Speaker B: I mean, honestly, I hoped to write this book first.
I was a devout church kid, you know, youth group president, all sorts of leadership within my local United Methodist Church. And then after my faith broke and I left the church, I thought I was the only person this had ever happened to in the history of the world. I didn't know anyone else who had done this.
I.
I had friends who were non believers from the beginning, and I had friends who went to church and that was it.
And then as a reporter, years on into adulthood, I started to notice in, you know, statistics coming out the Religion Landscape Survey, that as people were disaffiliating from Christianity, the segment of women was taking up bit by bit.
And my academic background is in religion. I know how crucial women are to sustaining faith globally in basically every religion. And I thought, oh, wow, this is huge. And I wrote a book proposal and no one wanted it. No one thought it was a big deal. It seemed like, you know, a blip.
All that blip has resulted in a time where now that gender gap, gender gap, which is usually universal, with more women affiliating than men, has flipped for Gen Z. It's gone for millennials.
This is huge.
And I think I've spent, I don't know what it is now a decade, decade and a half, talking to people, largely women, about faith.
And so I'm in this unique, I don't know if I can say fortunate. I think I'm fortunate, fortunate position to have spoken to so many people about their various faith journeys, that I had a broad outline of what I thought was happening. And I knew just enough to know there's so much more that I need to learn. And now, now is the time. And now, thanks to disobedient women, I think people trust my reporting in a book form.
And here we are, damned if she does.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Okay, I'm going to really try to discipline myself because I have so many notes. There's just no way we'll get through all of them. So I'm going to try, I'm going to try to put some order to this conversation.
First, I want to, I want to start with a couple of things as I read the book and you know, from we've spoken before, but just things that I study for school on my own, but especially for the podcast.
A lot of the information in the book, the various chapters I have, I'm familiar with those topics from reading them in different contexts, from different authors.
So a lot of its recent history, some of its recent events, cultural movements, phenomenon, I'm thinking about specific things like BLM or I'm thinking about clergy sexual abuse, or I'm thinking about Christian nationalism. You know, I'm thinking about some of these areas and to say, okay, I'm, I'm, I've got a familiarity with that.
But reading about those moments, those cultural phenomenon, those recent events from the perspective of, and how you connect them to women exiting the church was fascinating.
So I just want to, I just want to name that at the beginning to say that as you said, there's so much more like that you discovered and then was, you know, is out there than maybe, maybe anybody kind of had a first inkling. But I will say even though women are leaving, it's not all women are leaving for the same reason. They're not, they're, they don't look alike. You know, it's not this one like type of woman in this one type of congregation that's, that's leaving. There's a max mass exodus and there's so many factors involved. And so I'm wondering if like broad overview or, or you know, go micro if you want, you know, examples of women that you talk to.
But that was something that was, that was really fascinating to me in your book was I wasn't expecting some of the connections that you made. So it was like, oh yeah, I'm familiar with this, I understand this. But that's also a cause for women to be pushed out or feel, you know, pulled out or be leaving the church. So maybe a question here is what were some of those cultural phenomenons or moments or recent events that maybe surprised you that it had such an effect on women and their relationship with the church?
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like this is a two party answer.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: So one of the things that I had to learn through reporting, writing one off articles, I would kind of drop into someone's life and talk about one topic. And so naturally our interview, our back and forth would be on that one topic.
As I started really settling into Reporting for this book, I realized rather quickly, and then it was reinforced over and over, that people don't typically change a core part of their identity over one thing. Even as bad as at one thing may be, it's often, you know, purity culture and a bit of racism and homophobia and, and, and, and, and the pastor was really rude and whatever, like all those things may happen.
And then there's a tipping point. And the tipping point for many was an inconsistency in the morality that many of them learned within that church with what was either being presented in their own perspective, particular house of worship, or was just becoming so associated with Christianity in America in general that the whole thing became toxic.
That's one answer.
And then I guess an example, I was interviewing a white presenting woman, a white woman who I thought we were going to be talking about COVID and that period of time.
And you know, I could feel her getting a little impatient. I kept kind of asking questions down that line.
And then she said, well, you know, for me it's really about the white supremacy.
And I thought, oh, okay, I need to be asking way less specific questions and learn from her so much more about her life. That, yes, Covid and some things were going on around that time. There was so much else.
There was stuff happening in her family, but there was also dealing and helping, helping immigrants in her hometown.
And really how that changed how she viewed how other people were responding to their neighbors.
And in those moments when, you know, there's this pile on of not even reasons to doubt, just reasons to step back and ask is what I believe in, who I am in alignment with this organization where I am spending my time entrusting my family and donating my money.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: I, I think what you said about the tipping point for many of them being surrounding morality is huge.
This is, this is probably a third of my feed on any given day, you know, is, is people around my age, a little younger, who are really frustrated with how I will say the white evangelical church community is responding to, but also how they have been foundational in a lot of the racism, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia. You know, you just go on and on and on in, in the States today. And it's, it's, it's a real frustration that I see of saying even the language you taught me, you taught me to love my neighbor. You taught me about, you know, about honesty and integrity. You know, you taught me about these things. And then, and then when I'm trying to practice them, there's a rift.
And so I Think there's a lot of mourning and grief happening because of that.
Two important notes as we continue the conversation that you began the book with that I immediately starred. And I just want to, I want to name them right now because they end up.
Yeah, these underlying things I think are really important to the conversation. We may not talk about them explicitly, but I just kind of want to name them as you did, so that they're in, in all of our ears as we're going throughout the conversation. The first thing is women generally are locked out of leadership positions in the church in the US this is, yes, there are some denominations where that's not the case, but even within those denominations, generally it is pretty male dominated still, numbers wise, power wise, that's the case.
And a really interesting statistic that you brought up that I was not, not surpr. Not surprised necessarily, but to see it written down took me aback. And that is that there aren't any countries in the world where men are more religious than women by more than 2 percentage points.
And I think we've, we've seen it, you know, like anecdotally you'd see grandmas, aunties, moms, you know, these are the ones who are taking their kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, cousins to church on Sundays. You see it portrayed in, you know, cultural icons. You know, women are the ones who are, who are praying, who are committed in these certain ways, who are volunteering, you know, who are doing all those things. And so I think anecdotally we see that in the US to see a, that it's a global phenomenon was really interesting.
But also just to keep that in mind as we continue this conversation about the women who are leaving and then posing the same question you posed in your subtitles, like, what does that mean?
Yeah, what is that going to mean?
It's just striking.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: It is. And I think something that, you know, I have these, you know, basic tenets kind of like lodged in my brain dating back to divinity school. But this idea that women tend to be more religious than men and in societies where it's equal, it's usually the state religion. I mean, if everyone has to be religious, then your numbers are going to even out.
And baked into that are a couple of questions. Why? Why would women be more religious than men?
And there are a lot of theories. Some of it is just physical life cycles connect women in some views to the sacred creating life. And at the end of life, women tend to be the ones who take care of our sick and dying. Not always by any Means, but globally over history. Yeah.
Women's work is in this some ways very visceral physical plane that it requires some sort of spiritual explanations and often something spiritual to lean on to help make sense of it all. So there's some theory that that's there. There's also, and this is like long running but, but hypotheses around what happens when societies secularize. And we have a lot of examples of this from Western Europe.
And I think this bears out that as women's day to day lives start to be more equal to men's, whether that's career or treatment or rights, you also tend to see secularization.
And the idea behind this, one of the theories supposing why this happens is that as our lives begin to look like those of men, the contrast, if they come from a patriarchal faith background is so stark.
Why, why would you stay with that when you know what else is out there?
And then also what we've learned from Western Europe is once you reach that tipping point where there is less and less space between men and women, that's when your society is kind of already on its way to secularizing.
And here in our younger generations, we're there.
That doesn't mean, that doesn't mean faith goes away.
But the, the influence of organized religion has or is already changed.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: There are so many questions that are coming up in my mind that look like a splatter point graph.
I'm like, oh my gosh, thinking of all these, like just data points, you know, these, these moments in time that I'm thinking about.
It also goes great into where I wanted to go next, which is patriarchy and submission.
This is a major, major thread in the book, rightly so. It's a major thread in the church in the United States.
You explore this in a multitude of ways.
But I, I want to, I want to just mention a couple of those. First one is I, I did not know who she was before I read the book, but Dantra Soderman from 700 Club.
But you also talk about the clergy abuse in the Catholic Church and also in the Southern Baptist Convention.
I have a little bullet point here. Note the subduing of bodies.
But this, this idea. And again, I use patriarchy and submission here because if we talk about complementarianism or kind of soft complementarianism, I think there's an idea that it's like, well, women, they just have different roles or yes, they like technically submit to their husband in the, this kind of thing. But the examples that you give, and I would say how many women, including myself have seen this bear out is not in this kind of soft, complementarian kind of way that tries to convince us that it's a good thing. It really is. Women must submit to men, period.
And that looks like in real life, like any man in your life.
You know, I will say John Piper has been kind of, you know, called out for saying certain things to this effect.
He didn't make the book, I'm just mentioning that he has. But it's because this complementarian idea of like, oh, we just have different roles is one part on the spectrum. But kind of the overarching idea really is that women generally must be in a submissive role generally to men.
And even when women embrace that at first, I think you, as you show there often comes a tipping point with that as well. So can you talk about submission? I just want to like real open ended question because it's everywhere in the book and I was so glad to see it treated so thoroughly.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: I mean I think it's, it's a lovely fiction for some that there will be these bounds on submission where I mean, I think it was in Mother Jones recently a reporter went, I don't mean to bring up Doug Wilson, but went to Moscow, interviewed Doug, Nancy Wilson and she sort of played it off saying, you know, we agree on most things which if that's your system where you, whether you have to or you don't, whenever you disagree, you have to submit, over time you will learn to agree more and more.
And I think that's, that's the built in Catch 22.
The number of women I have spoken to in my years of reporting on this beat who either as children were disciplined and I'm making air quotes through corporal punishment in order to teach them to submit. And that happens to boys too.
But then for those girls, they also have that added layer.
You have to submit to your father until you are married and then submit to your husband.
And of course you have to submit to your faith leader who's a man and on and on and up. And it creates a system where you can succeed, you can make it through day by day for some time.
But as soon as you raise an issue question, create a conflict, you're going to be disciplined either by the man in authority position over you or the church. You will face consequences.
And these structures take away freedom.
As I was writing this book and toward the end I mentioned, I started thinking about the Declaration of Independence, which seemed like such a wild stray thought, but baked into so much of this as I talked to women, whether they left because they had questions over racism or the way their queer daughter was treated, or the way they were treated, or the way they were trained to think about their bodies, all of these systems were taking away freedom.
And the interesting thing for me, and this does not answer your submission question, but I just think it is somehow related.
Many still believe in Jesus.
Many still believe in many of the things the church taught them.
They just don't want to be the institution.
So they're getting liberation from the structures of the institution.
And then maybe they believe in Jesus, maybe they become a witch, maybe they become an atheist, like that. Paths diverge, but that freedom can still be couched in faith.
It just looks different than the institution that does not respect them as whole and equal human beings.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: And I think even in that case, as you point out, there is still.
We can call it discipline or we can call it something else, but there's still a situation where you say, well, you can't have faith outside of this.
There is still a submission is required for belonging to, for women.
And, you know, I'm generalizing here, but I think submission is, is, it's a precursor to belonging in many of these settings. And once you say, as you said, maybe I do believe in Jesus, but I just don't want to do it this way, then that's kind of, that's a final straw. Then you're like, really out, you know, because you didn't, you didn't submit to, to these ideas in this way.
And that brings me to. There are a few themes that I kind of wanted to talk about. The first submission, the second is binaries.
And this is.
I loved your face on that, which everybody thought. I'm like, yes, I don't want to, to butcher this idea, but I heard William Stell talk recently about his recent book, and he said something to the effect of outsiders are basically evangelicalism has to have outsiders in order for it to function, basically.
And I thought of that as I was reading this and thinking about the binaries and even just what we were talking about. You're either in or out.
And a lot of these women who you spoke with recognized that they got to a place, as we've been calling it, a tipping point, where they were going to be out. And I think for some of them, they didn't necessarily feel out, like, you know, they hadn't left their faith or anything, as you mentioned, but they were recognized as being out.
And so there's, so there's insiders, outsiders, there's wrong Ways and right ways to do things.
There's a lot of binaries involved in the church in the United States.
How does that thread relate to these women that you spoke with?
[00:28:41] Speaker B: So something I became very uncomfortable with working on the book was. I mean, I'm. It is explicitly about a gender binary, and a lot of that is just based on. I have to go by studies that have been done, and a lot of those, the gender binary is what is being measured.
So that was a piece of it. There is a reality that in this culture, women's lives are often still a bit different than men's, and especially within the church.
So I feel like it is necessary that I wrote this book this way.
However, and this is a vague.
However, as I talk to people, whether it's this, the binary of male and female and maleness being aligned with power and femaleness be aligned with submission is obviously problematic in people's actual lives.
That's a thing.
The way many churches, and historically the church has treated LGBTQ people is with great disdain. Objection.
And I think all of the anxiety, especially around trans people, is in non binary people, is that you don't fit within this binary. This easy answer. Yes, no, true, false. That is not attached to every church, is not attached to every denomination, but is core to the evangelical mindset that that has become synonymous with the church in America in a lot of people's minds. I think as a reporter, I started joking, you know, like, sheesh, the evangelicals are really good at getting themselves in the news.
There are other faith groups, but they draw our eyes, they draw our attention, and they have sucked our politics into their worldview. And so we have to contend with. With these binaries.
And I think the other piece of this, and I will tell your listeners, I'm sure I wrote this more eloquently than I will say it is. The notion of absolute truth is so baked in and necessary in an inerrantist worldview that anything else, either a diversity of thought, a diversity of spirituality, a diversity of other religions, or diversity of other forms of Christianity is seen as false and dangerous and something to be at spiritual war with.
And there, I think we feel a lot of the tension that many people are experiencing now and don't quite know how to name it, is useful to point out that is Christian nationalism, because it. It captures all of this. But that sick feeling a lot of people have over Christian nationalism and its place in our politics and our civil spheres and our religion that we need a better name for. And it's not just One thing, and that's, that's part of breaking out of these binaries. Even the objection to this binary is multifaceted. And that's why I think it's important to hear from women from so many walks of life and denominational backgrounds and ages and geographies. The answer is varied. And I think at root in this country our strength comes from that sort of diversity, both of human beings, but also diversity of thought. There is not just one answer that we must obey or face the consequences, at least not in a free society.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: So I want to, I want to go back to the morality question here and relate it to what you just said about truth and also binaries. And I will give the, my little on the fly thesis statement of saying, I think part of what the deal is with American white evangelicalism is they've chosen to go gray, but in all the wrong kinds of ways. And so I want to, I want to if I can. You said it, did say it very eloquently. Can I read the note? Because you, you have a footnote here that, that struck me. Would it be okay if I read that and then like as a starting point?
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: Read it if you have it handy.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: You got it.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: So, so this is you, you, it's a footnote to the statement we may not access the one single absolute truth. And you say, I should probably clarify that. I'm not declaring with certainty that there is no absolute spiritual truth, just that as humans it seems pretty unlikely that if it exists, we can access it fully on this plane.
However, I do think it is possible to discern falsehood if there is some absolute truth, some encompassing good with a capital G that shapes life and informs how we live. It would be morally inconsistent for it to insist upon poor conditions for women, queer people, the poor, the sick, etc. And be cozy with liars.
If there is not a single unifying metaphysical absolute, then practically Christian nationalism's model is still a pretty bad way to live, disempowering large swaths of humanity and mingling with liars.
And I, I, I pull to that, that footnote and, and take it back to this on the fly thesis of American evangelicalism, deciding to not be binary and to be gray in all these wrong kinds of ways because we grew up, I grew up in American evangelicalism with a very, very, very strong emphasis a on absolute truth, but also in our denomination.
I will say, I have said before, I don't think anyone ever explicitly told me this, but I really didn't think any other people, even who professed to be Christians, were, quote, saved because they probably didn't do it the way that we were supposed to do it. And so that was really unfortunate for them, but we were pretty much okay. So there was, you know, there was a rightness there.
But all of a sudden, you know, now when we have, you know, folks like Trump in office who just lies to say consistently is, like the understatement of the century, I feel like.
And to have people, the same people so much on his team, while he was joking, while it was this, while it was that, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, I'm not suggesting that you go back to a binary kinds of thinking, but I am suggesting that if we're going to look at these. These gray areas, we're going to talk about nuance and subtlety, that this is actually not the way to do that. This is the wrong place, this is the wrong time, this is the wrong situation, you know, to be doing that.
A couple of years ago, I preached a sermon that I called something like Christmas in July. And it was. I talked on the Magnificat and saying how it felt so unfortunate to me because the kinds of things that Mary brings up in her song are the kinds of things that I was taught growing up, like, you know, to believe, like, cheaters won't get ahead and, you know, like, things like that liars never prosper or whatever, you know, all these things. And I'm like. But I feel like just given our current circumstances, it feels almost dishonest for me to teach those things as adages to my children when I can see clearly cheaters do prosper and liars do get ahead. And these folks who are the bad guys, you know, kind of, if we're going to be binary, are winning and they're ruling and they're the powerful ones. And so it feels really difficult and inconsistent and hard, especially as a parent, to try and encourage my kids in truth and honesty and integrity when the opposite of those things are what are getting people, you know, ahead. And so I really.
I'm a sucker for a footnote, first of all, but I really loved that footnote and how you describe our mingling with liars.
Yeah, I mean, it just.
Anyway, this.
These binaries are problematic everywhere, and the women realize it.
[00:38:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
And I think.
To invest as much time as some churches do in truly what they call spiritual warfare, this, we're right, they're wrong, but then also stand alongside words from certain Leaders that are clearly certifiably easily fact checked and falls that cognitive dissonance is so unreasonable to expect every person to withstand if they all, especially if they are also suffering by being part of that group in all the many other ways we talked about at the beginning.
It's just, it's.
It's too. It's too damn much.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: I don't have any questions about this.
I didn't write anything down. And this is really going to be in just a. Just a vague kind of thing. Because when you said this spiritual warfare, I brought back.
It just brought a picture to my mind which was the same picture that was in my imagination when I was reading about might have been one of the sheets.
Can you just talk about that experience of being in that space and the women that you talked to who had been in those spaces where prophecies like that were so heavily influential.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: So the book.
Actually, I'm going to answer that question in reverse.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:59] Speaker B: One of my sources who actually asked use the pseudonym because her husband is still involved in these ministries.
She sees the world very differently than I do, for sure. She talks about prophecies. She was part of this, I would say, NAR type stream, the new apostolic reformation, a lot of healings, things that resonate with a growing subset of Americans.
As people are leaving, there are still plenty of Christians and they're clustering.
One of the places they're clustering are in these faith communities.
This particular source was seeing a lot of success. I mean, she was building ministries, she was doing the things that happen in these faith groups.
And then she had a personal realization that she kind of described in very spiritual terms.
She realized one day she was flipping through on Facebook and just kind of zip past someone's post and then saw all these other people responded, went back and wondered, why didn't I stop and look like this is a big deal? And it was a black person.
And in that moment she felt this kind of connection from God that revealed to her her own racism. And she describes trying to be very intentional in dealing with something she considered a sin.
And I think not really realizing that this was maybe an unusual step within the ministries in which she had been a part.
So then fast forward to George Floyd's murder.
And she was just shocked by the behavior of other people from her religious stream.
Not only that, she then went on, I guess I'd say the offensive, maybe the defensive, speaking up for other people because she felt like this is what God demanded of her.
And I don't know that she'd use the term like she.
She got frozen out of that world. People who had been her mentors, people who she had been kind of moving off with, all blocked her online. She retreated and lost that space. She still has faith. She still has a faith that's different than many other women that I interviewed. But she could no longer be a part of it because the underlying racist assumptions in those ministries were just too obvious to her and she felt like God demanded better of her.
So flip forward to the end of the book.
I live in Ohio and Tim Sheets, his church, Oasis Church, is actually not that far from me.
So I went there and just this was toward the very end of our reporting.
I tend to go to churches. I was spending some time in different churches and I felt like, you know, this is a type of church I have not spent time in.
And it was intense, the songs. And it's one of these places with the jumbotron screen with the lyrics.
And it was all about spiritual warfare. And this group, or I mean, I would not say crowd, the in person group gathering was probably much smaller than the online presence, but enough people there singing along, literally waving flags to these ideas of spiritual warfare.
And this happened to be, I think, the weekend of the first missile strikes in Iran.
So thinking back now is utterly surreal because I included these details in the book.
Honestly wondering with the way news moves so fast now if people would even remember.
It's hard to remember the bad thing that happened last week, let alone, you know, the year before publication, but the tensions and the way she's talked about Trump as this very elevated figure and the angels on the side of America and the enemy abroad.
If you want to talk binaries, I mean, it's that structure of war and now to be involved as a nation in a conflict that our Secretary of Defense war speaks of it in terms of a holy war.
This is, I guess, the logical conclusion of this way of thinking. And it is utterly dangerous and has put us in such a geopolitically vulnerable position.
And that is so big, that is so huge compared to an individual woman's experience with church.
But when you are a person who does have an understanding of the right way to treat people and the way other human beings deserve to be treated in their lives, matter wherever they are, whoever they are.
I can think of few other moral confrontations as stark as that.
It's.
It's shocking that we're at this point, but I definitely understand why people are backing away.
[00:46:29] Speaker A: Thank you for that. Like I said, that wasn't in my that wasn't in my notes, but as soon as you said it, I instantly. I was picturing that service that you described.
One of the things that's going through my mind right now, again, to talk about how there are so many different factors, so many of them are connected.
You know, we could list again, just these random data points of, you know, you've got Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth goes to Doug Wilson's church. Doug Wilson is also saying, hey, women shouldn't be able to vote anymore. You know, there should be a household vote. That should be the husband's vote. You know, there's all these kinds of things, and.
It's a web.
I really loved when you were talking with what you record, when you were having interactions with Denise.
She was very concerned about white supremacy in her church.
And I'm wondering if you remember, if you'd like to share the analogy that she gave you when.
You were talking with her about white supremacy and Christian nationalism. And she sounded almost at first like she kind of evaded the question. But then she told you about her husband's friend who had gone to prison.
Do you remember this story?
[00:48:17] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: And I'm wondering if you can share that, because that felt so insightful to me to try and gain a bit of an understanding kind of about the. Even about the web that. That. That I just mentioned. But could, you know, a broader perspective of what's happening?
[00:48:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So Denise definitely did not evade the question. She's the woman I was referring to earlier said, no, it's about white supremacy. She is like, to the point. She's very reflective.
I think it was a hard question. I was. I don't remember exactly what I asked, but it was sort of, what do you think of Christians?
Because she's someone who has invested so much energy and time, both in the church, but also in volunteering and taking care of other people.
She is the type of woman that is the heartbeat of so many churches around this country.
And I think it was a hard question because she doesn't want to hurt people.
These are people she loves.
So she told me a story about a friend of the family.
And. And I don't want to get the details wrong, but a summary line would be, he had a job, I think, at an airport, and he got involved in something and ended up being maybe a drug trafficking something.
And he was just a small part.
And to her, like, here's someone that their family loves, they go visit him.
He made a mistake.
He is living with the consequences.
He thought he was a small part of something so much bigger, and he didn't realize how much bigger than him it was.
And I think for her, many of her Christian friends are part of their local thing.
They're in their small microcosm, but they're not seeing the scale of all else it's attached to.
And I think for her, once she saw that scale, she just can't go back.
[00:51:01] Speaker A: Sarah, I have, like I said, a lot of notes, but I'm also looking at the time. And so I wanna.
[00:51:07] Speaker B: You can trim me up. It's fine.
[00:51:10] Speaker A: If I trim anyone, it won't be. It won't be you, I promise. Plus, I don't do the editing. My husband does that.
I can't trim anyone up, to be honest. He can.
There are. Yeah, there are a lot of other places I wanted to go. Maybe I'll just name a couple of those that we don't necessarily have time for. But then I'm going to ask you to kind of wrap us up, because I'm just really curious about your thoughts, especially as a journalist.
So some of the things we didn't. We didn't touch on were, oh, gosh, there's like this.
Many women have moved to spirituality outside of Christianity, or in addition to Christianity, which was huge.
There's also really interesting, like, not everyone who says they're spiritual but not religious is actually spiritual. That was really. That's really interesting to me.
[00:52:00] Speaker B: Especially the men.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: Especially the men.
That's right. Especially the men.
We also just. I mean, I've mentioned the clergy abuse scandals that lasted for decades. You know, there are chapters and sections on those as well. I didn't even think about the prophecy stuff, but thankfully we did get to that and got to touch on that.
You know, I think for me, a lot of times, I think when I think about some of this morality, there has been a lot of talk in the past, I would say, especially in 2016, kind of the old kind of. I feel like it's almost like a trope at this point. But it's like, oh, well, you know, for a lot of these leaders, especially male leaders in the Evangelical church in the US it wasn't okay for Clinton, but it is okay for Trump kind of thing. And I was actually grateful to see that idea mentioned, but it wasn't nearly. You know, that's not 80% of this book. Everyone. I mean, this is a small.
This is one of the compounding ideas for why women are leaving. We mentioned homophobia, transphobia, racism, white supremacy.
There's so, so much here. I think that's one of the things that I.
I learned a. It's very complex, but also as a woman, I felt.
Can I say I felt, like, affirmed as a woman. Like this book being written by a woman about primarily women just felt affirming to say we are complex creatures. We think about things in complicated that are complicated, and we think about them very deeply, very thoughtfully. Our experiences matter. The experiences of other people matter deeply to us.
And I came away feeling.
Even as a woman who's still very much in the church, I.
I came away feeling very affirmed in my womanhood, but also in my community of women, you know, kind of larger community of women. To say, we've been through a lot, we're smart, you know, I just kind of felt like the women that you talked to exemplified so many of these things. And to say none of the women that. When you relayed their stories, I didn't think for a second that any of them just kind of, in a moment of, you know, frustration, just kind of threw the talons, so to speak, and left. You know, there were no, like, dance mom kind of moments here, right? Like, fine, I'm just done, you know, and there's a drama. It's like, no, because as you said at the beginning, people don't make changes to a core part of their life lightly or for one reason or one instance usually.
So I just want to throw that out there and say there's so, so, so much more in this book than what we.
Than what we got to cover today.
And in part, I want to. I want to leave you with the opportunity to mention anything that you want. But my. My question for you is, how do you feel? Where are your thoughts as a journalist who, as you say, has been on this beat for over a decade?
It's been a year since you've last penned it. A lot of things have happened even since then that kind of continue on this trajectory.
So what are you feeling like right now about this topic? Thinking about the women that you encountered in the book, but also just in your everyday life?
[00:56:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
So, you know, at first, when I started writing about religion, I felt like I was reporting almost at the fringe. You know, who knew what Quiverful was?
Who knew who Doug Wilson was?
No one had ever heard of Joel Webbing.
And now, thanks to Pete Hagseth and thanks to our Instagram algorithms, and thanks to the convergence of a lot of factors and the power centers that are attached to Donald Trump, this is all right here.
It is so unfortunate for me that my Beat is now right in the mainstream, or at least bad for America.
And over the years, the number of people I've talked to who said how much work it was for me to leave my cult and, oh, it's as if my nation, my country, has joined the cult.
It's such a frustrating comment, but those people's stories are so, I think, very relevant because they show us you can extract yourself from a harmful, destructive worldview. This can be done. See these examples here.
So that's part of why I keep kind of digging into these stories. That, yes, they're. They're hard. It breaks my heart.
I.
My heart is broken almost every day, but then it is mended back together by the resilience of people who went through hell and are willing to use their stories and their voices to try to help the next person get out.
And when I think about any community, whether that community is faith based or is, you know, your local town or your country in order for us to survive, the main ingredients include freedom and resilience and people willing to do something uncomfortable in order to help someone else.
So as disheartening as a lot of this may be, I am still somehow hopeful.
And it's because I see the worst.
And from that I see a lot of the good that people can dig out with their nails and try to make better from.
So I worry now, you know, especially given where we are globally, that people may get to the end of this book and go, oh, crap, like, the church is done, the country's fried. They may be feeling that way already, but I hope also they feel like you do, where you know that something that maybe you didn't have words for, you've seen, reframed by someone else, by someone else you may never meet, whose life is very different than yours, who maybe believes in things you might never believe in. They have an astrolog and you don't like those differences can wash away when we see each other for our humanity.
And I think if there is a future for religion or spirituality or for this country, it's got to start there.
[00:59:54] Speaker A: That's so great. Thank you so much, Sarah.
The name of this book again is Damned if She does why Women Quit Church and what It Means for the Future of Religion by Sarah Stan Korb. Thank you so much for joining me again and thank you for this work. It's incredible.
[01:00:14] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks so much.
[01:00:17] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show notes, music and podcast production by Seth Buscetti. Be sure to give some review on itunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also Visit
[email protected].
[01:00:52] Speaker B: Sam.
