Sarah Stankorb with Robby Robinson: Damned if She Does

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In this landmark account of American women leaving the church, award-winning journalist Sarah Stankorb, author of Disobedient Women, asks why they leave--and where they land.

Ordinarily, women are more religious than men. But these are no ordinary times. In America, where Christianity is still the most common religion, women are vacating churches. In the past decade, 16 million women have left the church. Younger women are disaffiliating from religion faster than men. For some women, leaving is like a dramatic divorce; for others, as one woman tells Stankorb, it's more like women and the church "stopped calling each other."

Exploring trends from the 1980s to today, Damned If She Does is an intimate account of women whose stories got missed during the Christian Right's headline-grabbing rise to power. Their exodus is marked by harm, disillusionment, and drift: from pastors' wives and a national Christian TV show host, to girls whose horrific abuse gives another face to the Catholic sex abuse crisis. Some couldn't stand by a church that cast out their queer friends. Others were maligned for who they loved. Churches with strong opinions on sexual purity and abortion stood beside men with histories of assault. With horror, women who loved the church watched the rise of Christian nationalism and saw their faith bastardized.

Finally, they've had enough. Some are atheists. Others are forging new spiritual avenues through astrology or energy work or connection to their ancestors. Some have a Christian faith they no longer entrust to an institution.

Attuned to emotional subtlety, women's agency, and religious longing, Stankorb asks what happens when a woman realizes that she's damned both if she stays and if she leaves. This consequential work of narrative nonfiction is a poignant reminder that women deserve better, and a tale of what happens when they don't get it.

Sarah Stankorb is the author of Disobedient Women, a USA Today national bestseller, and her reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Slate, and VICE, among others. She covers the intersection of religion, politics, and gender. Stankorb studied religion and philosophy at Westminster College and ethics and South Asian religious history at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her work has received awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Professional Journalists. She lives in Wyoming, Ohio.

Robby Robinson is Editor At Large at the Boston Globe, where his high impact stories about local, national and international events have graced the front page since 1972. Since 2007, he has also been Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University and the Edith Kinney Gaylord Visiting Professor in Investigative Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. Robinson led the Boston Globe Spotlight Team that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its investigation of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. The Spotlight Team’s groundbreaking investigation exposed a decades-long cover-up that, in Boston alone, shielded the crimes of nearly 250 priests. Twenty years later, the team's work continues to spark similar disclosures across the country and around the world. Spotlight's investigation was made into the 2015 Academy Award-winning film, Spotlight, starring Michael Keaton as Robinson.

In the mid-1970s Robinson covered politics and government for the Globe, and went on to cover the White House during the Reagan and Bush Administrations. He covered four presidential elections, in 1984, 1988, 1992 and 2000. In 1990 and 1991, Robinson was the paper's Middle East Bureau chief during the first Persian Gulf War. In 1992, Robinson became the Globe’s city editor, and then for three years the assistant managing editor for local news, where he supervised 85 reporters and editors. In the late 1990s, he was the Globe's roving foreign and national correspondent, and spent much of that time reporting on artworks looted by the Nazis that ended up in American museums; and the illicit international trade in looted antiquities. For his reporting on antiquities, the Archaeological Institute of America awarded Robinson its first-ever Outstanding Public Service award. As a Northeastern journalism professor, Robinson and his investigative reporting students produced 26 Page One investigative stories for The Boston Globe over seven years. At the Cronkite School, his students produced 13 investigative reports in just four years.

Before joining the Globe in 1972, he served four years in the US Army, including a year in Vietnam as an intelligence officer with the First Cavalry Division. Robinson is a 1974 graduate of Northeastern University. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Northeastern and Emerson College. He is a board member of the New Bedford Light and the Plymouth Independent. He is a past board member of the New England First Amendment Coalition and the Plymouth Public Library Foundation. He has been a journalism fellow at Stanford University, and a Pulitzer Prize juror four times. Robinson is co-author of the 2002 book, Betrayal: Crisis in the Catholic Church.

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