(Illustration source: Qisvanset Avenue)

“I hope you don’t stop going to church.”

I can’t count how many times I heard this usually condescending statement from people in my hometown—sometimes even from near-strangers—when they learned I was moving from Bible Belt Texas to New York City for college. I assured these people that I was going to a Christian college and had no plans to stop going to church. They’d level me with a doubtful look, and that would be that.

My Texas community would have been happy to know that I did study the Bible at my Christian college, I didn’t party, and I kept going to church. But there was always a disconnect. I felt like a body in a seat on Sunday mornings. I wanted a connection and a community, but I didn’t think it was going to be possible for me.

Until a year ago, when my partner and I decided to look for a church closer to our neighborhood in Brooklyn. I was dreading the hunt, hopping from church to church and listening to an unimpressive gamut of sermons.

On that first Sunday though, we sat at Forefront, an interdenominational church. An hour later, we sat side-by-side at a diner, and looked at each other knowingly until I said, “What if we keep going there?”

It felt like a spiritual revelation, the likes of which I hadn’t previously experienced. That church has since come to feel like a home and gives me a community that extends beyond Sunday mornings.

Though my experience was less of a conversion and more a reconstructive shift, I empathize deeply with the subjects in Kelsey Osgood’s book Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, whose stories largely begin with life-changing moments of spiritual revelation.

Part testimonial, part research trove, part memoir, Godstruck features the stories of Osgood—a convert to Judaism herself—and six other women who have converted to become Quaker, Evangelical, Mormon, Muslim, Amish, and Catholic respectively. Osgood artfully places these deeply personal stories in the larger context of religion both past and present—and in the context of feminism, urbanization, globalism, and more.

Addressing the reason the book focuses on the stories of women, Osgood acknowledges “that most religious converts are women” and “that many religions are patriarchal in many ways.” She considers it “a meaty dichotomy to unpack” to consider why Millennial women would convert to patriarchal traditions.

Throughout the text, Osgood offers insights from people such as the Russian writer Tolstoy, founder of Christian monasticism Saint Anthony the Great, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and many others whose stories and work shape the book’s narrative.

I hope this suggests that Godstruck is a weighty book, because it is—but any good book on religion in the modern world should be. It has a controversial mission, too: “if this book is anything, it’s a nudge to reconsider organized religion,” Osgood writes.

This is controversial particularly because it fights against overall trends reported from the last two decades, which show greater declines in church attendance than at any point in the past 50 years. Americans are by and large more secular, but more than that, they are not going to church or other places of worship as often as previous generations.

Plenty of people, particularly those who are younger and living in urban areas, would perhaps consider themselves “spiritual,” not religious—along with several major religions, this is an option under the Religious Beliefs section on the dating app Hinge and has been for some time. They may practice mindfulness or “self-care”; they may collect crystals, read tarot, or interpret their personal star charts. Osgood argues that these practices are not as effective as a more structured religion at fulfilling the void at the heart of what these individuals seek.

This is certainly true for Osgood and the other women in the book. The book raises implicit questions that are worth considering: what are we missing? Is religion the answer—is it the only answer?

While more Americans are moving away from religion, the seven women featured in Godstruck are far from the only ones who’ve pursued conversion. Though evidence is largely anecdotal, Osgood cites, among a few other sources, a Tablet magazine article in which 43% of rabbis surveyed “indicated they were doing more conversions today than earlier in their careers.”

Godstruck suggests a few reasons this may be taking place or, at the very least, suggests likely candidates for religious conversion. No matter their backgrounds, their upbringing, or their varying levels of trauma, all of the women profiled in the book possessed a form of openness to spirituality or intellectual curiosity about the institution of religion.

Kate, who grew up with nonreligious parents, read the Book of Mormon the summer after graduating from high school; she’d grown up with Mormon friends and had recently and reluctantly ended things with her high school boyfriend. As is traditional for young members of the LDS Church, he was leaving for two years to proselytize on his mission assignment and felt it would be unfair to stay with a girlfriend who wasn’t Mormon.

Angela, a “queer-identifying” woman, had always been a voracious reader of books and blogs across the spectrum of belief and theology. After seeing multiple peers convert, she turned her attention to religion more fully. When she began pursuing Christianity, she joined online forums and attended churches of various practices and denominations. Today, she is officially a Quaker and a member of the Brooklyn Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

Most of the profiled women, like Angela, seemed to crave the structure and routine of organized religion.

Osgood herself speaks clearly to this, as someone who struggled with anorexia as a child and was prone to a nihilistic, hopeless worldview. She describes being at the worst of her eating disorder and deciding firmly that she was going to choose to die through the extended process of starving herself—but, and this was long before her conversion, “a little whisper inside me said: no.” Now, she finds stability in the practices of Judaism; particularly memorable is the way she learned to truly love and embrace Shabbat, turning it from a time of boredom and stress to one of thankfulness, community, and worship. She also writes that there’s something liberating about sacrificing a part of yourself for a greater entity and for the good of the community, something she says organized religion provides well.

This craving for structure and routine aided, for Osgood and the others, conversion to more conservative religious practices. Osgood converted to Orthodox Judaism; Hana, for several years after she converted to Islam in 2011, covered both her face and hair in a full niqab. She stopped wearing a niqab for the sake of her career and as a result of a more progressive Saudi Arabia, where she has lived since 2015. Of the seven women, Angela, the Quaker convert, could be described as least religiously observant. For the other women, conservative forms of organized religion offered them an almost pre-made community of likeminded believers with whom to practice the routines of their chosen religion.

The book’s title speaks to another similarity between the seven women. All of them were, at a time, struck by God in a way that altered their previous foundation of belief.

Most vividly, perhaps, is Kate’s revelation. She had prayed doggedly for nights on end, talking “to this entity about she neither understood nor technically believed in”—until one night, she felt “a warm blast of heat [that] seemed to burst from her chest, flooding her with joy.” The experience felt to Kate like a visit from the divine, and beyond the overwhelming feeling of happiness it gave her, it thrilled her to have finally found the God she was searching for.

Most of the women also put great emphasis on the importance of their new religious community, which has fulfilled their physical and spiritual needs. Osgood describes the abundance of benefits she’s received in her Jewish community—help with childcare, preparing meals, having neighbors who are willing to assist at any hour. She’s also grown close to people who have coached her Judaism’s practices; she credits other Jewish women in teaching her how to observe and enjoy the Sabbath.

Several of the women also describe a sense of inner peace, a renewed purpose, and a more frequent feeling of joy. Sara, who became an Evangelical Christian, was just one building away from the first bomb at the 2013 Boston Marathon when it exploded. After one Sunday service, she says she “‘felt immediately healed and freed from the anxiety and fear’” she’d been feeling for years in the aftermath of the attack—something not even therapy had been capable of taking away. (She later began to see a therapist and dietician to help recover from an eating disorder.)

For these women, conversion was an unequivocal good in their lives—despite, at times, some initial resistance from family and friends. Osgood describes the book as showing “what it’s like to meet God for the first time and fall in love.”

Despite this positive overall message, Osgood poses questions about the potential pitfalls of conversion for the individual herself, the institution of religion, and society at large.

For the individual: what happens “when someone takes on the identity…of a minority”? Hana, a pale-skinned woman, felt, and still feels deeply connected to Islamic Saudi Arabian culture despite its absence from her ethnicity and upbringing. Osgood felt—and still feels—disconnect from Jewish people because she isn’t ethnically Jewish and doesn’t share in their generational plight.

For the institution: what benefit is there in joining an organized religion with a harmful past and “reputational deficit”? Orianne, raised in Canada, became Catholic in a country where Catholicism was responsible for the abuse and deaths of countless Indigenous children.

For society: “is there such a thing as religious appropriation?” Osgood describes her own past faults in appropriation, recounting a story in which she attended a Catholic church not for any spiritual pursuit but to have what she thought would be an “authentic” vacation in Paris. She also delves into the complexity of the subject—it’s “a far stickier wicket than cultural [appropriation]”—within her own religion; Judaism doesn’t seek out converts and requires a rigorous conversion process, but Jewish practices are often co-opted by Christians. But one rebbetzin in a religious studies class Osgood took once suggested “that a greater affinity for Jews and Jewish ideas might bring these interested parties closer to an appropriate moral life.”

Godstruck is a deeply personal text, both because it shares the author’s own journey and because it tells the stories of the other women in an intimate, vulnerable way.

The questions Osgood raises in Godstruck are important ones. The book is useful as a supplement or a starting point, a snapshot of a certain subsection of women across religious traditions who, despite cultural differences, share similar spiritual journeys. Though it rarely provides concrete answers, it encourages readers to ask necessary questions about the complex nature of religion and culture today.

Jillian Cheney is an independent journalist who writes on film, television, religion, culture, and often complex combinations of the above.