Recent decades have seen the growth of spiritual memoirs. It is a genre with a long tradition, reaching back to St. Augustine and including such classics as Teresa of Avila's Autobiography, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, Simone Weil's Waiting for God and the less-known but extensive works of Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest who worked with the disabled at the L'Arche Community of Daybreak outside Toronto. I found myself immersed in such books when I decided to set down my own experiences attending elementary and junior high school in a fundamentalist community in Florida.
These days, the spiritual-memoir genre takes many different forms, some of them sensationalist or written with the intention of demonstrating a particular faith's weaknesses or dangers. Diane Wilson's 2002 book, Awakening of a Jehovah's Witness, is a typical polemic. Filled with catalogs of childhood grievance, Ms. Wilson makes sweeping claims such as "the society's pattern of flip-flopping its doctrines means it actually teaches falsehood much of the time." Critics hailed her honesty in writing about the experience, including her choice to leave the Witnesses and her condemnation of their practice of "disfellowshipping," or excommunicating, wayward believers.
Within the Witness community, however, as one might expect, the reaction was altogether different. A spokesman for the group told a newspaper that Ms. Wilson's claims about church policies were misleading. What was bravery to the outside world, in other words, was a serious betrayal to insiders.
Such polemics become even more controversial when authors dredge up other childhood traumas, which may or may not be related to the faith. In Martha Beck's recent book, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith, the author alleges that her father sexually abused her. Not surprisingly, early reviews, even by outsiders, have judged the book to have a "hard, angry edge." And perhaps these sexual allegations overshadow her critique of Mormonism, which reviewers found "shallow" and "formulaic."
As these books suggest, the more insular and totalizing the faith, the more likely one is to find former acolytes angry about their experiences. There are many exposés of Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses; it is difficult to find a memoir by an embittered ex-Episcopalian.
Spiritual memoirs written without obvious anger can pose their own challenges to the communities they describe. Karen Armstrong's two chronicles about the seven years she spent in a Catholic convent, Through the Narrow Gate (1981) and The Spiral Staircase (2004), are a good example. The second book, subtitled My Climb Out of Darkness, tells a harrowing tale of spiritual confusion and unhappiness as Ms. Armstrong emerges from the convent to embrace a secular life. Critical reaction to both of her books was overwhelmingly positive, and both were best sellers. Reviewers, of course, praised her ability to cast light on a community that few understood and her "unswerving search for individual purpose."
But while the outside world embraced the books, what were Catholics to make of Ms. Armstrong's rejection of the church and her claim that "stridently parochial certainty can be lethal"? Catholics were dismayed by the enthusiasm with which she began appearing on television and radio shows to criticize the church on a range of issues.
Indeed, critics are generally inclined to hail the honesty of a person who leaves a religious community, seeing their own values in the individual's embrace of a secular life. These same critics are generally less enthusiastic about books in which the authors find faith for the first time or return to it after a hiatus.
Still, not all writers of spiritual memoir are indulging in religious schadenfreude. "I think the writer has gone a long way toward meeting her obligations to faith communities simply by being straightforward about where she is coming from," says Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God, which tells the story of her journey from Judaism to Christianity. "One thing that separates the wheat from the chaff is the ability to write with compassionate distance," she notes.
For whatever reason, many writers of spiritual memoir find themselves unable to move beyond anger or an eagerness to use their work as a springboard for a broader condemnation of people of faith. Writers of memoir generally must be true to their experience, of course, but spiritual memoirists face an especially daunting task. The faith they describe is not theirs alone--it is shared by many. That makes writing in good faith all the more challenging.
—Ms. Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of My Fundamentalist Education (PublicAffairs Books).
