Kathryn Post interviews Sarah Stankorb about her new book, Damned If She Does, on why women are leaving churches:

At the conservative organization Turning Point USA’s Women’s Summit in June, speakers repeatedly pointed to feminism as reason for women’s exit from religion. Do you agree?

Some of the old sociological theories argue that as women’s lives start to resemble those of men’s, if their faith community does not resemble that same equality, there’s going to be cognitive dissonance. I don’t know that I’d say feminism is at fault. Personally, I would look at it and say, if women are experiencing more equality in other parts of their lives and the church is not keeping up, I think the blame could go the other way. That distance has not been good for keeping many women engaged and interested in being inside an organizational structure where they may not be given the opportunity to preach or where they may be asked for endless free labor that is not recognized for the value that it is.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Stankorb's brief reference here to "free labor." Scholars like Dana Robert and Gina Zurlo ^[1] have shown that Christianity historically has been so dependent on women's (largely unrecognized and erased) labor and leadership that it could rightly be characterized as women's movement. That women are now leaving institutional Christinaity at higher rates than men does not bode well for its future.

In your book, you point to several overlapping reasons why women have left the church. If you had to summarize why women are leaving, what would you say?

That is a hard question because it really is a list. I mean, for some women, it’s homophobia. For some, sexism is to blame. Misogyny is to blame, racism, abuse. Due to the internet and our access to information, when they confront a prejudice or an abuse that’s happening in their church, they no longer have the ability to think it’s just in their church. So many stories of abuse have been well-documented. There’s a pattern here, and it’s systemic.

This is very close to the question driving my Ph.D. project, although I'm less interested in the reasons women leave, per se (I think that's fairly well documented), and more interested in what their stories about Christian dis/affiliation reveal about the "systemic patterns" she references above.

Christianity has developed extraordinarily sophisticated ways of talking about evangelism, conversion, discipleship, and spiritual formation. We have a remarkably impoverished vocabulary for talking about why people leave. As Stankorb rightly notes in this interview, “Deconversion” doesn’t adequately describe the phenomenon, not least of which because leaving Christianity doesn't necessarily mean abandoning one's faith. Underneath it all, I think what people are often leaving is the way institutional Christianity is wedded to colonial imaginaries of people-as-occupied-territory. This is where my research differs from hers.

I haven't read Stankorb's book yet, but I am very much looking forward to it. I'll bet it's a banger. In the meantime, check out the interview here.