books you might find helpful no matter where you are on your deconstruction path
created by calzonebetty
last updated January, 2026
Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement
Kathryn Joyce
The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption
Understanding Spiritual Abuse: What It Is and How to Respond
Karen Roudkovski
Jesusland: Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture
Joelle Kidd
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Catherine Nixey
The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife
Shannon Harris
American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church
Andrew L. Whitehead
Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms
Matthias Roberts
Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion
Out of Focus: My Story of Sexuality, Shame, and Toxic Evangelicalism
Amber Cantorna-Wylde
Becoming the Pastor's Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman's Path to Ministry
Beth Allison Barr
When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World
Leon Festinger
Wisdom of Your Body
Hillary L. McBride
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Judith Lewis Herman
When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion
Laura E. Anderson
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
Julia Serano
Sunbathers
Lindz McLeod
You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity
Jamie Lee Finch
Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy
Cait West
Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith
April Ajoy
Babel
R.F. Kuang
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
Sarah McCammon
Exvangelical and Beyond: How American Christianity Went Radical and the Movement That's Fighting Back
Blake Chastain
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
Lindsay C. Gibson
The Gifts of Imperfection
Brené Brown
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
bell hooks
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
Stephanie Foo
On Her Knees: Memoir of a Prayerful Jezebel
Brenda Marie Davies
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Stephanie Coontz
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Bessel van der Kolk
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