Quirks of the faith such as prohibitions against celebrating birthdays and receiving blood transfusions are not what might send the “cult” flags waving. Scorah certainly comes to see it this way (although, at one point in the narrative, she equivocates: “I’m not 100% sure it’s a bad cult though”). Many would argue that Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a cult. Scorah’s religion of origin is a bit more consequential than your run-of-the-mill evangelical variety of Christian faith.
Read our latest issue or browse back issues. This makes for a compulsively readable book-and that’s even before considering the notable plot twists that set the author apart from her peers in the genre. Her memoir, written in quick and spare prose, has an almost breathless quality to it, as if the narrator is so compelled to share her story she can scarcely be bothered to breathe between sentences. They are, of course, often conversion stories in their own right: men and women seeing the light and finding the strength to remove themselves from religious communities that traumatized and subjugated them. Disaffected evangelicals in particular seem to pick up the pen, compelled to bear witness to unbelief just as passionately as they once bore witness to belief. The current literary landscape is littered with deconversion stories. And then there’s the deconversion story, in which the one who was presumably found finds herself outside her former faith. There’s the classic conversion story, in which one once was lost but now is found. A handful of spiritual story lines inevitably get repeated in life and literature.
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