This is an outstanding memoir and such an important story to be told. Cait’s writing is so clear and well-organized, honest and compelling.

Although I grew up in a family that was only nominally Christian, it’s amazing how many of the ideas that impacted Cait’s life so profoundly, managed to seep into my life, too. These ideas are so pervasive, much more than I think most people are aware. I really appreciated the quotes throughout the book, taken directly from the sources that her father relied on. Even though I had never read these sources myself, I can clearly see their connections to my own lived experience.

And as a young adult in my early 20s, I somehow ended up finding myself going down a path similar to Cait’s. I remember when I was in my early 30s, being told I was sinning because I didn’t still live with my parents. And even though I did go to college and live on my own, I remember the way I was treated by the church as a single woman, and the waiting around for a husband so my life could finally start. Cait’s descriptions reflect so much of my own background.

I so appreciate Cait sharing her voice and experience. I think it’s vitally important to hear about not just her life within religious fundamentalism, but how she got out, and how it continued (and continues) to affect her. I think her story will connect with a lot of people and help them feel less alone, as it did for me.


I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I received a digital ARC from Netgalley.

Read. This. Book. If you have people in your life, read this book. Cait tells her own story but it overlays on so many people's experiences with aspects of how oppression and minimization happens, even from seemingly good motives, how it comes from people who are trying to help but end up hurting so badly.

Her story telling is honest, humble, and heartbreaking. It doesn't end in a tidy way - there are lots of places where the reader is not told how things end. But that's ok. Cait is already charting her own course through life and the details she does and does not share reinforce how this has become her path now. I thoroughly enjoyed the scientific and historical and geological parts that added vivid color to how a younger Cait probably soaked up as much as she could, not realizing until later how one-sided the information has been.

Regardless of your thoughts on religion generally (and Cait's experience specifically), I hope that you read this book with open hands and an open heart. She is gifting us with an opportunity to enter into a story still in progress but one that is rich with progress. It isn't finished but we can hold her and her story gently as the earth keeps shifting, alive, under all of our feet.

Wow ! What a story. What a life the author has lead. And that she made it out of the dictatorial, emotionally abusive, cult-like upbringing to understand that how she was raised was very unhealthy. Bravo to the author !
This book captivated from Page 1. The author used an unusual, yet effective technique in starting the first 20 or so pages with geological, tectonic plates... with the Earth's shifting geological formations analogous to the ever-shifting ground she grew up on. Her analogies to geologic changes over millions of years interspersed in the story of her life was effective, and clever.
I recommended this book to two friends and my daughter already, saying they need to kept on their radar once it's published.
I appreciated how the author blossomed as she grew up, as she grew more aware of how her parents ( Father mostly... ) had unusual methods of discipline, Bible devotion and a complicated standing in his Church ( having to switch churches as other's became disillusioned with her Father's leadership ).
Great debut book ! Highly recommend for the who appreciate memoirs involving personal and emotional growth and increasing self-awareness.

What drew me to Rift was that it’s told from the perspective of a ‘stay at home daughter’ - meaning a young woman who remains at home under her father’s protection until she is handed off to her husband to become his helpmeet. Most times these women present as being content with this path, but - What if they’re not???

This is was I was hoping Rift would answer, but results were mixed. The writing often felt like multiple essays pieced together. The narrative is linear and straightforward for the first half of the book. The author shares her experience growing up in a strict religious home. It focuses a lot on her controlling father, especially during her young adulthood and courtship years. The writing in the second half feels more experimental. The story shifts the be more about the author’s thoughts on her trauma and healing.

One thing I enjoyed throughout were the excerpts from various Christian publications (propaganda) that the author was subjected to as a child. These were fascinating and made me want to track down the source documents for further reading.

As an introduction to the topic, and the addition of another voice/perspective to the conversation, I think this is worth reading. That said, the writing was not always the most compelling and this sometimes limited my engagement.

I've noticed a pattern when I talk to gender traditionalists and try to explain why I've changed my mind about women in the church, the home, and the world. The first response is, "But what about [insert Bible verse here, such as 1 Timothy 2:8-15 or Ephesians 5:22-24]?" I'll give an answer to that objection, but then the second response is usually something like, "But how much does this really matter anyway? Isn't this just kind of an intramural debate about academic theology?" It isn't, and books like Cait West's new memoir help show why.

In Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away From Christian Patriarchy, she shares her story of growing up in a theologically and socially conservative home where her father tried to take the notion of "male headship" as seriously as he could. He viewed it as his sacred responsibility to be the "head" of his wife and children, which he understood to mean, "Someone who takes direct and active authority over his family." He took his family to attend an Orthodox Presbyterian Church weekly, where they would hear sermons about the importance of homeschooling. He would read books by men like Doug Wilson explaining that God's plan for women was to be soft, quiet, domestic, and under the authority of either a father or a husband. As a girl, she was taught that her highest good would be to get really good at sewing, cooking, and cleaning so that some day she would be ready for the man who would take over her headship from her father.

West describes the milieu of these teachings as "Christian Patriarchy," a more right-leaning, more extreme version of mainstream Complementarianism, but one still aiming at many of the same ideals that many conservative Christians view as God's plan for men and women. So the next natural question is, "What was it like for a girl to grow up in this environment? If this was God's plan for her, did it then generally lead to her flourishing?"

Rift as a whole provides a resounding "no" to that question. I imagine that conservative Christians will be tempted to write her book off as yet another angry feminist diatribe that paints the world in black and white, where she's the faultless champion who fearlessly smashes the all-bad patriarchy. Yet, the strength of the book is the humanity with which she portrays her family, and especially her father. She is deeply critical of her upbringing and the ways her father acted toward her, and yet she also tells of the sweet memories, too. The portrait I received of him was of a man who was trying to love his daughter and raise her well, but according to a deeply misguided rubric.

Many of us who were raised in the late nineties/early aughts imbibed the teachings of purity culture, but it seems that West's father wanted to play the game on hardcore mode. He instilled in her feelings of excruciating guilt for feeling even the smallest hints of attraction to this or that boy, for dressing or acting in ways that give the barest suggestion that she might be interested. When she was finally allowed to court in her twenties, they were tightly chaperoned affairs where the only conversation allowed was about what the suitor believed about infant baptism or similar. Then her father forcibly broke off the courtship for her when he deemed her too emotionally compromised before marriage, while commanding her to repent of that.

Eventually, she came to the realization that if she was ever going to be a human—and not just the background scenery to her own life—she would need to stop asking for permission. Virtually everybody goes through some kind of breaking away from their parents when they enter adulthood, but it's an entirely different beast when you've been taught your whole life that you're essentially the property of whatever man oversees you. For her, breaking away from Christian Patriarchy was more like an escape from prison.

It is heartbreaking and terrible to hear her story. For me, it was especially challenging to read about her sojourn in Colorado because my family was shaped by many of the same voices and influences as hers during the same time. While I definitely understand why folks believe that it is "biblical" to view male-female relationships through the lens of authority-submission, and while I definitely get why it can seem like an "academic" or "intramural" debate, stories like West's make it utterly clear that it is anything but. Pastors and professors and seminarians might tussle over passages in that way, but people actually listen to the sermons you preach, and they take those home and try to live them out. If it feels academic to you, you need to read Rift and sit with it. If you're a Complementarian/Christian Patriarchalist, I beg you to sit with the life stories shaped by your doctrines. Cait West isn't the only one telling this kind of story, but she's one who is telling it with a great deal of humanity. Those who have ears, let them hear.

DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.

Cait did an excellent job writing her experiences in Christian patriarchy, and with spiritual abuse. I felt like I was there. That may also be because I grew up in a Christian patriarchal homeschooling family as well. I resonated with a lot of what she said. She brought the reader in to the exasperation, confusion, and unfairness of living in a household like that and trying to please our father to no avail. Nothing was ever enough.

I highlighted many passages. I'll share one here:

"I try not to make church people a new "them," a new "other." But what they don't know about religious trauma is that the words that uplift them, inspire them, sing them to sleep, are words that pull on the strings of my memory, unraveling the scraps of experience I have so carefully tried to weave into a new reality. While they find wholeness, I am falling apart. Where they find healing, I am reminded of the wounds inflicted by men of religious authority.

When they sing to God with their faces lifted, "Goodness and mercy all my life / shall surely follow me," I am reminded of the darkest days, times when those same words were told to me by my abuser. I have been left wondering, Where was the goodness of God then?

And when they say, "I'll pray for you," they don't know how many prayers I whispered in the night, sleepless, no way to escape, no answers from heaven."

Absolutely this. It's hard not to apply the bad/good mindset, yet many truly do not understand the depth of religious trauma. Cait did a great job highlighting so many of those areas.

I received a digital ARC of this book from Netgalley.

It's a good thing that there are more of these kind of memoirs every year. It's important to see how common, and how diverse are the ways that women live under religious patriarchy. I think a lot of these memoirs owe their existence to Tara Westover's Educated, but Westover's story is so extreme, and her memoir is so thoughtful and deep, that other memoirs can feel a bit thin in comparison. That's one of the drawbacks of Rift, that Cait West's story feels like it has lower stakes. It's a less sensational story, one that's more family next door, not survivalists on the mountain.

But let me stress that this doesn't make this a bad book. And I'm always glad to see more examples of people escaping from their terrible backgrounds, especially as the forces of Christian Fundamentalist Fascism are reaching new heights of absurd evil in their attempts to take over the country.

"I'd been told that the world was dangerous for women," writes West, "that being out of the protection of my father would be asking for harm. A woman alone was an easy target. I was an easy target. But I ventured out into that danger anyway when I left my parents' home, and with it the Christian patriarchy movement. Only later did I realize how much danger I'd left behind." (loc. 1724*)

When West was growing up, the rules were relatively simple: she would be a child until she married, and who and when she married (and whether she married at all) would be up to the discretion of her father. Under Christian patriarchy, girls were to be silent homemakers-in-training who submitted to their father in everything, and women to be homemakers and mothers who submitted to their husbands in everything. It was a long time before West started to question this.

Under a courtship model of "romance", romance itself was entirely out of the question: West was to keep her emotions strictly in check while she had structured, chaperoned conversations with a potential suitor and had equally chaperoned dates. When a suitor moved away, they wrote letters and emails: "When Matthew's letters came in the mail, my father would open them and read them first, to make sure there was nothing inappropriate or overly emotional in them. ... Before I send him my replies, I gave them to my father, so he could make sure I wasn't having any romantic emotions." (loc. 959) Emotion was supposed to come later, only after betrothal or (better) marriage; this was supposed to protect West, to protect girls in general, from broken hearts and loss of purity. Nobody asked the unmarried "girls" whether they wanted to be protected in this manner. Nobody asked the married women whether this model of courtship had brought them the type of relationship they wanted.

Religion is largely beyond the point in West's book. She writes instead about power and control and of course rifts—rifts in family, rifts in culture, rifts in landscapes, rifts in understanding of the way the world was shaped. In later parts of the book the story feels a bit more scattered, which is not unusual for a book that is mostly about being in a particular thing and partly about being *out* of that particular thing, but she writes with a great deal of thoughtfulness about the ways in which her father's chosen way of viewing the world impacted those around him. I'd be curious to know more about how her mother and sister experienced this patriarchal culture—her sister in particular, because the shift to courtship happened only when her sister was very nearly an adult, and would otherwise have been very nearly free. (Those are, of course, their own stories to tell, but I am curious nonetheless.) It's a fascinating look into a world that I want no part of—West was lucky to make it out on more or less her own terms, and hers is one of so many recent voices speaking against the ways in which the Christian patriarchy (and the patriarchy more generally) acts to tear apart women's agency and freedom.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.