Twila’s Reviews > Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion > Status Update

People are unearthing joy in exploring or choosing peace, whether that comes from atheism or astrology or advocacy or just taking a break from the church.

If people find spiritual or secular paths that are more vibrant and feel their lives with practical truths that do not require submission to false authorities, maybe all this tumult will result in some good. They'll raise their children in
what may be safer environments.
There's a wealth of decency among the apostates and nonchurchgoing believers and ancestor-venerating women

Religious claims cannot be objectively measured. They rely on how closely mystical experience or conscience or art or music or holy books (taken down by fallible humans) resonate with a person's subjective sense of (or absence of belief in) the divine. Religious truth is not truth like you'd arrive at via a logician's truth table or by scientific measurement. It is based in trust. It is a choice.

Many women may feel far better DIVing spirituality than enacting the old alternative: being a misfit and witnessing the cozy embrace of those who did fit in and comply.

As mothers and those so often responsible for caring for the aging, women more commonly find themselves at the boundaries between life and death.
Marta Trzebiatowska, coauthor of Why Are Women More Religious Than Men?, speculates that part of what may draw women to spirituality is how close they are, due to biology, to birth and death.

doubt the veracity of their pastors' and church leaders' claim to ultimate spiritual truth. If their moral absolutes—which had so firmly dictated believers' lives—could be traded for Supreme Court seats, for power, then wasn't their moralism a farce? If that morality could be bartered away, either the leaders were not fit to be followed or else the particulars of their moral absolutes were not so firmly immutable

Tiffany was trained in purity culture and had a dose of holy terror instilled by end-times films during youth group lock-ins. And then there were the visits to Hell Houses: Christian haunted houses that conjured all the ways teens could imperil their souls. Her friends hand-wrung in whispers: "Do you think you're really saved?"

Miriam, who stands on God's side of the altar every Sunday, predicts the church's demise in a way that frames its powerbrokers as the deluded ones. The disillusioned, those who fled and were stomped under, will one day witness the illusion snap. And those who suffered in the church will watch the people who harmed them discover they don't actually know who God is.

So much of her faith was spent waiting for the future living for heaven. That warm Mardi Gras night she was present to all the joy and freedom she could find on earth