Why Women Are Leaving the Church - Sarah Stankorb on What Broke

Why are millions of women walking away from American churches, and what finally pushes them to leave?Journalist Sarah Stankorb, author of Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, traces an exodus she says has been building for decades. The conversation examines purity culture, sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups, racism, LGBTQ exclusion, political polarization, and the growing influence of Christian nationalism. Stankorb explains why leaving is rarely about a single event. For many women, questions and contradictions accumulate until the institution they trusted becomes impossible to reconcile with the faith and values they were taught. Some leave Christianity entirely. Others reach a different conclusion: they never lost faith in God. They lost faith in the church.The conversation also looks at Gen Z women, deconstruction, the Christian Right, and what the continued departure of women could mean for the future of American religion. Stankorb's book documents this trend through women's stories from the 1980s through todayBook: Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religionhttps://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091GUEST BIOSarah Stankorb is an award-winning journalist and author whose reporting focuses on religion, politics, gender, and power. She is the author of the national bestseller Disobedient Women and Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vogue, and Elle. She studied religion and philosophy at Westminster College and ethics and South Asian religion and history at the University of Chicago Divinity School.