“Godstruck:” Inside Seven Women’s Journeys to Religious Conversion

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And now, from the changing landscape of the Catholic Church to an increasingly secular America. Our next guest, inspired by her own conversion to Judaism, decided to delve into the stories of millennial women, who’ve discovered organized religion just as so many others are turning away from it. Journalist and author Kelsey Osgood joins Michel Martin to discuss her new book, “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion.”

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Kelsey Osgood, thank you so much for joining us.

KELSEY OSGOOD, AUTHOR, “GODSTRUCK”: Thank you so much for having me.

MARTIN: So, let’s just set the table here. There’s a Pew Research Center study showing that the percentage of Americans identifying as having no religion rose from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021, which is all the more reason that your book is really interesting because you explore the journeys of seven women, all people kind of in their 30s, millennials, including yourself, who each turned to organized religion at a time when a lot of their peers or not. So, first of all, why all women and what started you on this journey?

OSGOOD: One question that arose early on for me was I thought that most people would assume that if you were a woman to join a most organized religions, would be to kind of take a step backward in terms of your own freedom. Most institutional religions are fairly patriarchal in nature or their structures remain fairly patriarchal to this day. And I think that, you know, I certainly came of age at a time when this — there was the idea that we had more and more freedoms, more and more opportunities. And so, to be a woman, specifically to enter these realms where there would be higher standards for your domesticity, higher standards for maybe the number of children you might have, and sort of less opportunities to participate publicly in your faith, by holding positions of power maybe, that that would — that was a bizarre choice. Most people would think of that as being a bizarre choice. So, that’s mostly why I focused on women. There’s a tension there also with some of the data that shows that women more often are the ones who convert or who tend to be more preoccupied with questions of meaning and tend to be more active in their faiths when they are religious.

MARTIN: You grew up in a — sort of a — you describe your upbringing as kind of deeply secular in some ways, kind of — almost kind of anti- religious, I would say, somewhat. But just — but clearly secular. And that you ended up, as you put it, drawn to a Judaism that is mystical, conservative, and rigorous. So, just as briefly as you can, would you just tell us a little bit.

OSGOOD: Sure. I’m not sure I would describe my childhood environment as anti-religious, so much as just neutral towards religion. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, was a pretty secular milieu, in so far as, you know, nobody — it didn’t seem to me that anybody’s driving force was their religious belief. People celebrated Christmas and Easter, but outside of those things you never really heard or saw religion being practiced in a way that was visible to the outsider. I decided really quite young that God must not be real, went through all the questioning that people sometimes do. I just happened to be — maybe a little earlier than a lot of people. I — in my teens and early20s I struggled with anorexia. Ironically, it was in those early experiences of — in one hospitalization in particular that I met a number of very observant Jews, and I was very — I was surprised, I didn’t realize that it was — in a way, I didn’t even think it was possible to be that religious in the world at that time. I thought that, you know, religion — even for the Jewish people that I had met earlier on in my life, they had a relationship to it that looked to me the way that most of the Christians that I knew did, which is they had a Bat Mitzvah or a Bar Mitzvah and that was — and maybe they, you know, celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but outside of that, it wasn’t something that they really thought about all that often. So, through college and into my early and mid-20s, it was something that I became progressively more interested in. I had friends at school who were, what you, you know, might loosely call Modern Orthodox. I learned from them when I was in mid-20s I met the man that I would eventually marry. When we first started dating, I guess in a way I was OK, this is my chance. I started doing some learning with various rabbis who were very kind to give me their time, and it took a while to realize, OK, I think I want to pursue this in a way that’s real.

MARTIN: So, let’s talk about some of the women in your book. And they’re all different. I mean, there’s Angela, who’s a queer identifying. Started out atheist, journalist with a deep belief in rationality. She ends up drawn to Quakerism. You talked about Leah, who was a committed — also committed atheist who ended up converting to Catholicism. So, I just want to tell us a little bit about Leah and what her story is and why she was drawn to it.

OSGOOD: So, she was actually quite well known in the rationality community around the time of her conversion. And I don’t know if people know what rationality is, but it’s a sort of modern, philosophical, diffuse network school, if you will, of people who try to use systematic reasoning to come to make the best decisions across the board, moral decisions, but also any decision you can apply this sort of reasoning to. So, Leah was well known in this community. She was a blogger who wrote about her own atheism. She was a debater at Yale. And she — like the headline subject of that chapter, whose name is Angela, she was very morally questioning. She asked herself a lot of questions about morality, and I shouldn’t say was, is, I assume she still does ask these questions about morality. But she felt that — I think there were a couple of things that really nudged her in the direction of religion, she felt very strongly that morality was something that existed in the world. Meaning, like we people, we didn’t make up morality, we didn’t decide what is good and bad, that it exists elsewhere, but she couldn’t bridge the gap from, OK, if it exists elsewhere, then why or how? I can’t see it the way that I can see plants. And so, therefore, if it — if we know it exists somewhere, how — what — how could that be possible? And that ultimately led her to feeling, youknow, that that must be God who had, you know, created this morality, that morality had agency of its own. Catholicism is very supportive of this idea of using your natural reasoning to get to — and to get to points of identifiable morality. So, I think that that part resonated with her.

MARTIN: And then, of course, there was Sarah who embraced sort of a particularly kind of demonstrative form of evangelical Christianity. There’s Kate who became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints after growing up. And she really, more than, you know, you would kind of had an anti-religious kind of upbringing to the point where when she started studying, you know, Mormonism, she was actually afraid to tell her parents because she thought they would be mad. And then, Hannah, who became an adherent of a particularly kind of rigorous practice of Islam, it’s like — so we don’t have time to talk about all of them, but I was — I got to tell you, I was particularly fascinated by Hannah because she’s not from a Middle Eastern background. She’s not African-American, which are two groups that have particularly embraced Islam.

OSGOOD: Right.

MARTIN: You know, she’s a very sort of (INAUDIBLE) person to the point where she wears like abaya, like a full covering. The question arises, is this cultural appropriation, right? This is not the culture and to what degree does your embrace a bit sort of mean that you are kind of adopting something. But she describes it as a feeling of kind of great peace that just felt like home when she became a part of this community.

OSGOOD: Yes, I think that part of the reason I was drawn to her story so much is this — I hate to use this word again, but there’s tension there too, right? And it’s not easily solvable. And maybe it’s not really a problem that needs to be solved, but like we think of — especially over the last few years, maybe it’s sort of chimed down now, but there was time where we were all very sensitive to ideas of cultural appropriation, right? But so, then, what does it mean when you’re talking about somebody who is – – OK, they are religious converts who — it’s — there’s always a pathway to conversion in most faiths and there’s a pathway to conversion in Islam. But then you’re also talking about taking on the cultural characteristics of a particular subset of individuals. But actually, those people are, for the most part, probably quite happy about that. I think Hannah is a really good example of one thing that I’ve thought about a lot in the last few months, even since I put the book to bed, really, you know, that like religion — sometimes we want to make sense of religious conversion or we want to think about it through a lens that’s sociological or academic, but in some ways it kind of it doesn’t really fit neatly into those categories. It can almost be thought of more as like the act of falling in love. And I think that she really just fell in love with Islam and she fell in love with this particular expression of Islam. But I think it’s also interesting that as she’s been Muslim for longer and as she also — she relocated, she lives in Saudi Arabia. And as Saudi Arabia —

MARTIN: So, wait, wait. Say that again, just to make sure people didn’t miss that. She lives in Saudi Arabia now, where until very recently, relatively, women weren’t allowed to drive. She really did make a big lifestyle change from growing up in the Midwest to —

OSGOOD: Yes, it’s very big.

MARTIN: — you know.

OSGOOD: Yes. She moved there as a single young American woman. And that is really, for lots of different reasons, is a decision that I think a lot of people would find very confusing. And she — as Saudi Arabia has changed a lot, because it has changed a lot in the last five years, she’s also changed a lot. She wears now mostly just kind of scarves. She wore a knee — for five years she wore a knee cup. So, she was totally covered even, you know, the bottom half of her face. And then, she started to move a little bit in the other direction. Now, she really frames that as a decision that doesn’t reflect anything about her relationship to Islam. I think she feels that people — she — I think she understands why people would assume that, but she doesn’t feel that that is this — she feels like that’s people just putting too much emphasis on the outside and that her heart and her faith are in the same exact place. But it’s an interesting transformation and part of me feels like, you know, I think especially right around the time that you convert, if you are — if you’re somebody like Hannah or like me and you come from a culture that’s really quite different from the one that you’re joining, there is this sense that you need to be really, really good and you need to like just try to look like everybody else and do things the way that everybody else does. And I think, you know, as time passes, maybe — I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but for me, I think there’s a little bit less of that where you feel maybe some greater sense of ownership over it.

MARTIN: Well, the other reason it’s interesting for some people, I would argue, is that some people think the embrace of religion, especially a how can I say, a traditionalist manifestation of a religion is to stop asking questions. Some people think that that’s what, that’s what that means to give up judgment, to give up that part of yourself and just to follow, to not question, right?

OSGOOD: And I think sometimes it is. There are times in my religious life where I do just say, okay, this is what I’m told to do. It doesn’t make sense. And this is how it’s going to be. And there are some religions, I think, that are even more explicit about that than Judaism where there really isn’t any wiggle room. And Judaism, because it’s so, it’s not a systematic theology and because there’s so many voices and so much text, you can find lots of different opinions and lots of different ways. But not, that’s not the case for every faith. But I think with the other women’s stories, what I wanted to show is that even they’re all human. And even when you’re, when you’re becoming a part of a community and becoming, you know, adopting a theology that looks so static and set on paper, that that sort of process of figuring out how to live and figuring out yourself doesn’t stop just because you do that. I think they would all agree with me on that.

MARTIN: So Kelsey, the women you profiled and including you, are still relatively young. Did you find a through line, because these women are also different and these experiences took a long time. Like this wasn’t like they woke up one morning and like, this is, this is it. None of that was the case as you describe it. So did you see a common thread here?

OSGOOD: I don’t think there’s one characteristic that everybody shared. I think there were commonalities that different people shared. You know, or that, like you could find groupings. For example, like the desire to find a way to evaluate one’s life that outside of what you might call like modern ideologies, ways of thinking of oneself as a human with worth that didn’t have to do with your standing and or, you know, things like that. Sort of another one was like an interest in history or the past, a desire to sort of feel connected to a chain through human existence. If I had to pick one thing that really bound everybody together, I think what I said earlier probably fits that the best was that these are people who like, who just fell in love. They found something that they loved. And they were willing to go places to have that, that like, might look strange from the outside, but people do this kind of thing all the time when they fall in love with a person or, you know. So I think that’s the thing that really connects them to each other.

MARTIN: I realize that in the course of reporting this book or researching this book, you had to go out of your comfort zone as a person who observes an orthodox practice of Judaism, you would not be going to Christian ceremonies, other religious — specifically religious ceremonies for other religious groups, right? That’s just not a thing.

OSGOOD: Yes.

MARTIN: So, you had to do that. I mean, you get — well, maybe — two questions. How did — first of all, how did you navigate that? Did you pray over it? Did you seek guidance from your kind of religious community about how to think about that? And then I have another question about it.

OSGOOD: So, I did seek some rabbinic guidance about how to do that. Part of — interfaith dialogue is part of my job, sort of generally, like, I mean, when I’ve written smaller articles and essays I don’t only write about Judaism, I write about other faiths. Why I do that? I don’t know. I’m a nosy person. You know, like I’m interested. And it — there — it’s an interesting facet of my life that I’m interested in — you know, I am part of this community that in some ways can be insular, not my immediate community, but orthodoxy as a whole certainly can be insular. But I’m also — I am very curious about others, how they live. And actually, I think that all the — all of my subjects are the same.

MARTIN: The final question I have for you is that experience of this deep immersion in other people’s faith life, did that challenge you at all?

OSGOOD: I have a lot of like love and respect for the people who made these enormous changes in their lives, and I felt really understood by them in many ways. We had a lot of, well, huge points of convergence in our experiences of doing these things that, you know, again, like sort of look irrational and a lot of the ways our lives can be sort of similar, even though some of the underpinnings of those lives are very different. You know, if I’m talking to somebody who’s Amish and I — she believes obviously that Jesus is her savior, but then also we can talk about what it means to join these high bar cultural situations where all of a sudden, we’re expected to understand kind of coded action and language that we didn’t have access to before. So, I don’t want to say that I was changed because I have more respect and affection for that kind of experience, I feel like I always have, but I definitely feel that strongly now, if that makes sense.

MARTIN: Kelsey Osgood, thanks so much for joining us.

OSGOOD: Thanks.