Publishers are tapping into the deep well of hurt, and, ultimately, healing with new books from authors who have escaped cults, fundamentalism and other church abuses. “Thanks in large part to recent books like Jesus and John Wayne (2021) by Kristin Kobes DuMez and social forces like the MAGA movement, many Christians are doing some soul searching, grappling with the role of patriarchy and white supremacy in their theologies and church communities,” said Lisa Ann Cockrel, acquisitions editor at Eerdmans Publishing Co., publisher of Cait West’s forthcoming Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy, which received a starred review from PW.
In the book, due out in April, West offers an honest, heartbreaking story of growing up in the Christian Patriarchy movement, her family ruled by her authoritarian father. She became a stay-at-home-daughter after finishing homeschooling, waiting for her “real” life to begin, when her father chose her husband. Instead, West broke free, marrying a man of her choosing and moving away from her family. “West offers a stirring reminder that these ideologies have very personal consequences in individual lives,” said Cockrel, pointing out that West also has an active online community of survivors. “She has a hard-won wisdom that is a function of doing her own work to heal, but also of walking alongside so many others on the same journey.”
Eerdmans also publishes Angela Herrington’s Deconstructing Your Faith without Losing Yourself (out now), a guide for people in the process of deconstructing their faith, and Tiffany Yecke Brooks’s Holy Ghosted: Spiritual Anxiety, Religious Trauma, and the Language of Abuse (Apr.), a resource for people in the process of reconstructing their faith. Both aim to help readers establish a sense of wholeness after breaking away from toxic religious communities.
Another in the emerging subgenre is Hurt and Healed by the Church: Redemption & Reconstruction After Spiritual Abuse by Ryan George (Punchline Books, April.). George spent his childhood and early adulthood attending Independent Fundamental Baptist churches—his dad was pastor at one—and adhering to teachings like those of fundamentalist teacher Bill Gothard. George left in his 20s, eventually discovering his dad was a serial sexual abuser, and has spent decades reevaluating what he believes and reconstructing his faith in a non-abusive church.
Also find A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings (St. Martin’s, August), a harrowing tale of Levings’s recruitment into the Quiverfull (which rejects all forms of birth control) and Christian Patriarchy movements, the secret life she maintained as a “keeper of the home,” the years of abuse, and her eventual choice to save herself and her family.
In April, Worthy Books will release Star For Jesus (And Other Jobs I Quit): Rediscovering the Grace that Sets Us Free by Kimberly Stuart, which records Stuart’s journey from doing everything she could to be the perfect Christian—including trying to calm an actual storm and earning “Jesus” gifts for Bible memorization—to seeing God’s grace as her anchor instead of a list of must-dos.
Debie Thomas, columnist for The Christian Century, understands what it means to wrestle her way out of fundamentalism's narrow theology and into the expansiveness and grace of God, a journey she records in A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity (Broadleaf, Mar. 19). She calls readers to a spacious faith instead of a closed, cramped closet of rules and laws.
And this month, Lake Drive Books will release the third in Marla Taviano’s trilogy of deconstruction poetry titled whole: poems on reclaiming the pieces of ourselves and creating something new, which speaks into looking back to move forward, new thoughts on God and freedom to be your true self. Others in the trilogy are unbelieve: poems on the journey to becoming a heretic (2023) and jaded: a poetic reckoning with white evangelical christian indoctrination (2022).
