Two recent books follow young religious converts down the winding back roads of belief.

December 24, 2025

Illustration by Shane Cluskey

In 2010, Christina Cortez was a high-school junior. She enjoyed reading the “Twilight” series, playing softball, and listening to Linkin Park and the Eagles on her iPod. One day, she was in the car with her mother, who asked, offhand, what colleges she might want to consider as her senior year approached. “I don’t think I want to go to college,” Christina told her. “I think I want to look into the Amish.”

Christina spent her early childhood in Bakersfield, California. She moved, at age eight, to live with her mother in Maryland, where a small group of local New Order Amish dotted the road with their tractors and buggies. Her mother sometimes took their family to a Baptist church, then a Methodist one, but religion mostly remained an abstract, impersonal part of Christina’s life. Then, in her freshman year, she developed a secret obsession with her quaintly dressed neighbors, spurred, in part, by her love of old things, like the “Little House on the Prairie” books. She began reading Amish history alongside the Bible, which she had cracked open in earnest for the first time; she went online to order “Martyr’s Mirror,” a multivolume account of the persecution of the early Anabaptists, and read it hungrily.

When Christina raised the possibility of skipping college and formally withdrawing from society, her mother was initially alarmed, but then remarkably open-minded. With her blessing, Christina approached a local Amish couple who ran a bulk-food store in town; she joined them for a Christmas-carolling event, and then her first Amish service. By the end of her senior year, Christina was learning to speak Pennsylvania Dutch and wearing clothes sewn by members of the community. Classmates teased her about wearing a veil, but this only strengthened her resolve. “If someone is okay with being martyred for their faith,” she said, “what is a little teasing compared to that?”

Christina’s story is one among several such accounts in “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion,” by the journalist Kelsey Osgood, who began converting to Orthodox Judaism in her late twenties. Osgood’s subjects find their way to Mormonism, evangelical Christianity, Islam, Quakerism; one of them becomes a Catholic nun. Like Osgood, they are earnest, funny, and articulate, if slightly eccentric. “I was a young person whose inner life had been—and still is, in so many ways—dominated by existential restlessness, and Judaism was a way to both validate that restlessness and channel it,” Osgood writes. With wry understatement, she adds, “I also happened to believe it was true.”

The book arrives at a moment when conversion may seem, in Osgood’s own words, a “wildly countercultural move.” The Pew Center’s Religious Landscape Study, which has held three rounds of surveys since 2007, has been reporting on a sharp trend toward secularism that has unfolded in the U.S. across decades, often called the “rise of the nones.” From 2007 to 2024, the group of people who were religiously unaffiliated grew from sixteen to nearly twenty-nine per cent. At the same time, the number of American Christians—the country’s dominant religious group—dropped markedly. But behind the headliner trends lie finer patterns of people moving toward, and away from, faith.

Osgood’s reporting takes us down the winding back roads of belief: though her title evokes a supernatural lightning bolt, she documents the clumsy, earnest pursuits that precede and follow any particular moment of revelation. Hana Nemec, a white woman from Cleveland who is the focus of a chapter on Islam, grows up with an instinctual openness to God, though she’s unmoved by her family’s vague Christian faith and disillusioned by the death of her mother. Things shift when her college roommate, a loosely observant Palestinian Muslim, sends her an e-mail that includes a short excerpt from the Quran. “Thy Guardian-Lord hath not forsaken thee,” Hana reads. “Did He not find thee an orphan and give thee shelter (and care)?” Tears of recognition spring forth. Such moments of transformation are striking—in time, Hana begins wearing an abaya—yet so, too, are her early graspings at belief. “This is so weird and random,” begins a Facebook message that Hana sends to one of her only Muslim acquaintances at school, who ends up helping her convert.

The “unexpected” journeys of Osgood’s subtitle might be taken to refer to the early reluctance of the converts themselves, but she seems to have in mind another group of skeptics: her readers. She writes with light self-deprecation, conscious that the reading public may see religion and intellectual seriousness as incompatible. Her subjects are familiar with this sentiment, too: one admits that she finds spirituality “powerful, but also slightly embarrassing.” So the book sets out to defend these women, and broadly make the case for religious life.

As a narrator, Osgood is affable and erudite, able to take smooth detours into the writings of Tolstoy, Plath, and Augustine, and others who have wrestled with religion and its place in society. She’s partial to the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who suggested, in her 2020 book, “How God Becomes Real,” that even the most devout believers don’t experience God as a true presence in their lives—they attend services and participate in ritual in order to generate the feeling. “I am asking what we might learn if we shift our focus,” Luhrmann writes, “if, rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship.”

It can be difficult to defend religion to nonbelievers on its own terms. Instead, Osgood tends to highlight the most universally attractive qualities of being religious, rather than those off-the-wall aspects that might alienate a secular crowd. In the chapter that details Christina’s conversion to Anabaptism, Osgood focusses on the value of “a culture of restraint.” She mentions Christina’s limited awareness of certain global events (Brexit) and technologies (Twitter). “Many people I know . . . would love to have the kind of largely indifferent relationship to the news cycle that Christina has,” she writes. This feels true, if a little beside the point. Anabaptism was not formed to escape the news cycle, nor is blissful ignorance a tenet of the Amish way of life.

Much of the book is organized into neat narratives of seeking and finding. Angela, a data nerd and erstwhile fan of Richard Dawkins—she read the “The God Delusion” in high school to impress a boy—craves a fixed morality that externalizes the value of human worth, and finds it in Quakerism. Sara, a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing, finds emotional and mental healing at a nondenominational church called Reality, on Santa Monica Boulevard. These details are compelling narrative tidbits, though one can’t help but feel that they are only part of the story. They’re the elements that augur a transformation, one Osgood can seem wary of describing in its totality. Anyone can appreciate moral boundaries and religious community as reasonable desires—even societal goods. It’s harder to defend the stubborn irrationality of abandoning one’s secular life for the woolliness of faith.

That’s not to say that Osgood never gestures at the weird stuff. It comes through in her own experiences of faith, descriptions of which are coyly and sporadically dispersed through the text. The broad strokes of her conversion are introduced early on: she went to college in New York, interned at “high-profile fashion magazines,” partied hard, and began contemplating a conversion to Orthodox Judaism in her twenties. Osgood compares Christina’s slow retreat from modern life to her own gradual adoption of the practice of Shabbat. “Like many converts, Shabbat was my gateway drug,” she writes, “and one of the major reasons I ended up pursuing an Orthodox conversion as opposed to one under the auspices of a different denomination, where the commandment is less obsessively obeyed.”

Osgood writes movingly about her experiences with Shabbat, which she enjoys as a source of community, routine, and time spent off her phone. (She deems the practice “the most valuable idea in all of history” and “the perfect response to our contemporary hell of overinformation.”) But even she realizes that her voluble, pluralistic analysis of the tradition doesn’t fully capture its power. Eventually, she writes, “My chirruping metacognitive exploration of Shabbat faded away, and I was able, for the first time ever, to direct my worship where it belonged: above me, to God, who’d had the wisdom to give me this gift in the first place.”

In the reported memoir “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion,” the writer Lamorna Ash begins her own journey toward faith from a position of journalistic skepticism. Her inciting incident is learning about the conversion of two college acquaintances, a comedy duo, to the Anglican priesthood—both men finding God at the same time. She sets out to write an article on the comedians turned priests and discovers a book’s worth of material.

“At twenty-six, I knew that miracles and religious experiences were not real,” Ash writes. “That churches were as useless and beautiful as dinosaur bones.” So she begins talking to young people who have chosen some form of Christianity, the dominant faith in her native England, drawn by a “marked attitudinal shift in how my peers talk about religion compared to the generations which came before us.” When she starts to report the book, she arms herself with the “prophylactics” of notebook and audio recorder, she writes, “as if to say, I am not here to be changed.”

Ash has a few hypotheses for the curiosity about faith that blossoms among her generational cohort: her peers, she suggests, share an open-mindedness to a host of divergent views, and an existential dread in the face of climate change. “The accelerative capacity of social media both makes the rest of the world, its untold number of voices, feel more in reach,” she writes, “and also leaves us feeling ever more atomised and isolated, craving the kind of physical community we might have once gotten through the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the church.” Like Osgood, she uses religion as a prism to refract broader questions about culture—about conspiracism, psychosis, suffering.

She also usefully broadens her scope to include people that Osgood’s presumed readership might find less palatable, seeking less to vindicate than to explain. Here we encounter, among other characters, believers seeking guardrails against what they see as the boundless immorality of modern life. Church leaders preach against “the culture” (defined by one pastor as a liberal, progressive individualism that originated in the nineteen-sixties) and the faithful place Post-it notes in their diaries in anticipation of Christ’s return. It’s the weird stuff, unadulterated, and Ash doesn’t shy away from it. She talks to a man who hears voices; she watches a mass baptism performed in a wading pool and live-streamed on a jumbotron while a woman waits nearby with a hair dryer to christen the new believers with a blowout. She has a brief falling out with a new convert, Max, who invites her to his baptism and then argues, in an e-mail exchange, that her queerness is a sin.

Eventually, Ash finds in herself a gradual attraction, not only to religious practice but to the wild disharmonies of belief. Her mother is sliding into late-stage dementia, and Ash yearns for a new source of meaning, something substantial and hard-won. “I was there to wrestle,” she writes, of early visits to religious services, “to be undone.” She tries to discern why she feels called to Christianity even as she finds some of its history abhorrent. Ash’s slow courtship with faith is moving, both because it’s colored by her impending loss and because of how she embraces the uncanny. “Once, I believed prayer was tantamount to wishing for something you could not hope to get,” Ash writes. She comes to see it, instead, as a “radical, active and quite literal acceptance.” Reflecting on the memoir “Love’s Work,” which was written by the philosopher Gillian Rose as she died of cancer and which opens with the epigraph “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,” Ash writes:

Prayer forces me to speak with my mind in hell. The version of myself who does the praying speaks from a truer place than I ever manage in my day-to-day life, where I am always trying to retain a kind of lightness, a disaffected surface with those around me. There is nothing else like the utterance of prayer: it requires you to sift out what cannot or should not be prayed for because you are imagining yourself to be speaking towards something outside of the human realm. Whether you believe in God or not, if I were to say to you, “Try speaking in your head as if to a god,” something quite unlike your usual mode of speech would come out.

Even as Ash ventures into the less accessible parts of faith, there’s a hint of moderation here, too. “You are imagining yourself,” she writes. “Try” to speak “as if to a god.” Perhaps, Ash seems to suggest, you can pretend your way to the benefits of prayer. But her agonized attempts to telegraph her despair into another dimension capture something different: for it to really matter, you have to believe.

Osgood’s book aims to make religious conversion intelligible to the nonbeliever; meanwhile, many of Ash’s sources resist this sort of intelligibility at every turn, fearing that a religion compatible with the secular world is not enough of a religion at all. The tension between accessibility and maintaining a boundaried tradition is an existential one for every faith, especially as religion has shifted gently, across centuries, to accommodate greater individual choice. “The Chance of Salvation,” Lincoln A. Mullen’s 2017 history of conversion in the U.S., persuasively details the ways in which modern religion shaped—and was shaped by—the American project, spawning new systems of belief; hybrid theologies; backlashes toward fundamentalism; and a more individualized approach to faith. Mullen memorably details the nineteenth-century invention of “the sinner’s prayer,” a tool for evangelism that simplified the process of conversion into a single act of confession. To some, this was a savvy innovation; to others, it was an opportunistic distortion. “Their religion,” one critic wrote of such revivalist practices, “apart from the occasional whirlwinds of excitement in which they are allowed to figure in their favorite way, may be said to be characteristically superficial and cold.”

The religious landscape depicted in Osgood and Ash’s books is one where conversion appears more readily available than at any time before, as the internet offers endless potential for incidental contact with alternative versions of life. (Max, the convert from “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever,” is radicalized to a conservative Christian faith after being served videos of anti-abortion pastors on YouTube.) What’s striking is that their subjects appear to choose faith because they want to approach it the hard way—the way that defies the sensibilities of the modern world. A woman named Orianne who appears in “Godstruck” joins a nunnery in part because she’s drawn to the challenge of lifelong celibacy. “When you marry somebody you give up a lot, including some things that we would label as freedoms,” she tells Osgood. “You’re tied to someone; you’ve bound yourself to someone. So it’s kind of a similar thing.”

There’s a moment in “Don’t Forget” in which Ash visits an evangelical youth gathering, one of the sort she finds aesthetically and politically unappealing. (Seeing the word FAITH! spraypainted on a building upon her arrival, she drags on her cigarette, and tells herself to get a grip.) A teen-ager approaches her to say that she has a word from God to share, and that the word is “Beloved.” Ash explains that this is an evangelizing process called treasure hunting—listening for God’s voice to share with strangers—and though she doesn’t yet consider herself a Christian, she finds herself surprisingly moved to tears. The encounter, like so many others in the book, captures an intrinsic challenge of writing about faith: the realm of belief can be so personal, so bizarre, that it begs for language that can’t be counted, verified, or corroborated. But religion has its own language for the elements that generate its centripetal force: being set apart, purified, chosen, favored, ordained, redeemed, made holy. Transformed. ♦

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