Life is difficult growing up gay when your family is steeped in a religion that condemns homosexuality as sinful.

And it may be even more difficult growing up as a adolescent music star with an abusive parent who is living solely for your success.

Such are the lessons to be found in pop singer David Archuleta’s new memoir1, Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself. The title does as much as any seven words could to describe the arc of the book: It wasn’t until Archuleta lost faith in his father that he could appreciate his value as a human being apart from his music successes. And it wasn’t until he lost faith in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints2 that Archuleta, who describes himself as a bisexual person attracted to men more than to women, was able to begin to come to terms with his sexuality.

According to his own description of writing the book and the acknowledgments, this book was written by Archuleta with the help of a collaborator, not by a ghostwriter — and the difference shows. By all appearances the words belong to Archuleta: His voice, his personality, his vulnerability, his rawness, they all come through in full force. At times, he speaks as though he’s speaking to a therapist rather than writing what a PR agent might tell him to say; undoubtedly, he found writing this book therapeutic. Frankly, there are times where an English professor might might give him a low grade for disjointed writing as he jumps from thought to thought — but that’s part of what gives the book its authenticity. And even as someone who has become a sort of involuntary spokesperson for LGBTQ persons adversely affected by organized religion, he seems sexually naive even at the age of 34, when he finished writing the book3. He clearly is still trying to figure life out.

And his story is beyond heartbreaking. No child should go through what he had to, being constantly pushed to perform as something other than what he was — or even what he wanted. He certainly wasn’t alone in that regard as he rose to fame through American Idol and other TV shows; in his adolescence and the few years before that, he often got his emotional support not from the adults who supposedly cared for him, but from other young performers who may have been in similar situations. Putting a child through stardom may not be inherently abusive, but in this book it seems to come close.

If you want to know what emotional abuse can do to a child, and even to a young adult, there may be few better ways to find out than reading Archuleta’s story. His honesty refuses to spare readers the unpleasant details.

An up-close look at a church’s inner workings

NOTE: The remainder of this review includes significant spoilers regarding Archuleta’s experience with the hierarchy of the LDS church. The spoilers are included in this review because of their newsworthiness to the LDS community.

As a celebrity who became a poster child for the LDS church by going on an unpaid mission, performing in high-profile church activities and becoming known for following the church’s conservative standards even as a nationally known entertainer, Archuleta had greater access to his church’s hierarchy than typical members could ever hope to have. He even became friends with Elder Russell Ballard, who was the acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, one of the highest-ranking and most senior leaders in the church.

According to Archuleta, what Ballard told him were things that no leader of the church has ever said in public. According to Archuleta, Ballard told him it was OK for him to date men (without sexual relations), although Archuleta wasn’t clear whether that was a “hall pass” just for him or for all gay men in the church, who traditionally have been discouraged from doing anything resembling dating. Archuleta said that Ballard said that church leaders reversed a 2015 policy banning the baptisms of children of gay couples because they felt the policy was a mistake4. And Ballard, according to Archuleta, said that church leaders have prayed about LGBT policies and have never received answers they were seeking:

Well, David, to be honest, I don’t know much about any of this. We don’t really have the answers on what to do do about LGBT people. We’ve ... prayed about this, but we’ve never received any answers. All we have is the family proclamation that states marriage is between a man and a woman, and they must create children. ... And we have the law of chastity that says not to have sex before marriage. That’s all we have. And we try our best to figure out how to fill the blanks and to make what we think are the right decisions with what we have.

Archuleta writes that he was disappointed to find out that the LDS leaders don’t really know what God wants, as he had always been taught:

I’d always followed the apostles because I, like all faithful Latter-day Saints, believed their messages came directly from God. But that wasn’t true? ... This was the beginning of unraveling of Mormon doctrine.

In a later conversation with Ballard, the apostle seemed to understand better the situation that Archuleta was facing. Ballard talked about how important it is to have in-depth conversations that lead to understanding. He even offered to arrange a time for Archuleta to meet with a few other apostles.

But the meeting never came.

What happened? Archuleta seems convinced that he was intentionally ghosted, and signs of bitterness are evident in his writing. Whether Archuleta really was ghosted, or whether Ballard might have still been trying to arrange a meeting before he died in 2023, is impossible to know unless private conversations or journals eventually become public.

One interesting final note: In part because the way Archuleta was treated, many of his family members resigned from the LDS church. But he did not:

I left my name on the [membership] list as a symbolic gesture. My door was still open, for conversation about gays in the church, if they wanted to have it.

So it may well be, even if unlikely, that the final chapter about Archuleta’s dealings with the church that, from his perspective, betrayed him has yet to be written.

Not all that many years ago, to be an evangelical was to have certain theological beliefs, such as basing personal salvation on accepting Jesus Christ as savior and seeing the Christian Bible as an infallible source of eternal truth.

But the evangelicalism of, say, the 1970s and the 1980s is no more. These days, people who describe themselves evangelical may not even be Christians in the traditional sense of the word; they might even be Jewish or Muslim.

So says Ryan P. Burge, a data scientist and former American Baptist minister, in his newest book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us. In a little more than 200 data-filled pages, Burge demonstrates not only how religious identification has changed in the United States during the past half-century or so, but how that change is affecting American political and cultural life.

As Burge sees it, religious changes are at the heart of the polarization that is wreaking havoc on the American political system and dividing the country as well as families.

The increasing number of Americans who don’t identify themselves with a religious tradition has received plenty of attention in recent years, but Burge’s analysis goes far beyond that data point. It is not just the number of people who identify with a religion that has changed, but also the type of religion with which they identify. And the big change Burge sees over the decades is the decline of mainline Protestantism — think of Episcopalians as well as the largest Methodist and Presbyterian denominations, among others — which served as a moderating force in American lives, as churches provided a place where Republicans and Democrats, social conservatives and social liberals, could worship and socialize together.

In the late 1950s, one analysis indicates, more than half of all Americans were connected with the mainline Protestant churches. According to one authoritative survey, around 30 percent of Americans were mainline Protestants in the early 1970s. Today that number has fallen below 10 percent. He uses the example of the United Methodist Church, which had 11 million members in the late 1960s, about the same as the Southern Baptists, and had congregations in 95 percent of the country’s counties. Today, thanks in part to a schism that caused hundreds of conservative congregations to leave the denomination, United Methodists number less than 5 million.

Meanwhile, new priests in the Catholic Church became increasingly conservative, as did the evangelical denominations. The result is that the moderate mainline denominations have become increasingly irrelevant, and when Americans think of Christianity, they tend to think of a conservative rather than unifying religion.

Although he doesn’t know all the reasons why it happened, the changes in religious life accelerated during the 1990s in a trend Burge calls the “Big Church Sort,” and the trends from that decade continue today:

Among Christians (especially white Christians), the pull is unmistakably to the right. White evangelicalism has never been more politically unified than it is right now. ... While the mainline stands in the middle of the political spectrum, it continues its march toward irrelevance as its numbers and cultural power dwindle. ...

The two Christian groups that have managed to maintain a robust membership, Catholicism and evangelicalism, have done so by drifting to the right. That’s certainly made them a haven for cultural conservatives, but it has also tended to scare away people whose politics are further to the left. The mainline’s commitment to ideological diversity has left its denominations on the verge of collapse. ...

Instead of the American religious landscape looking like a normal distribution, with lots of folks clustered around the midpoint, it looks like two mountains, one on the left and one on the right, with a chasm in between.

Burge goes so far to say that evangelicalism itself has become a political identity: He points to a study showing that a significant people in a dozen religious groups — groups that include Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and atheists — often identify as evangelicals if they are Republican:

The word “evangelical” has become a shorthand for people of all faith groups to say, “I am a political conservative.” It’s no longer primarily a theological belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For a growing number of Americans, to be an evangelical is to vote for Republicans on Election Day.

Despite all the religious changes, Burge still sees the United States as a religious country: Most of those who never attend religious services still say they believe in God. And while he is concerned about religious and political polarization, Burge believes that typical Americans are moderate, sensible and pragmatic, even on contentious issues.

Burge’s book is more than an impressive collection of statistics; it’s also in part a personal journey for the author, who as a former pastor and current believer sees religious participation as a past stabilizing force and future hope for the United States. He closes his book with his ideas for a path forward, but it is worth noting that his proposed actions are sourced from personal conviction rather than institutional change. He says he is both hopeful and afraid, concluding that while he is “under no illusion that American religion is the greatest panacea for all that ails the United States, I am convinced that the American church can be part of the solution.” And he offers the data to show how that may be the case.

God’s Stories as Told by God’s Children is a children’s Bible storybook like no other.

It may not have even really been written for children, who may find much of it beyond their reading level and miss many of the points the writers are trying to make in the same way that children often do not understand double entendres present in some children’s movies.

First of all, an explanation of what God’s Stories is: It’s the first book-length production of The Bible for Normal People, an entity that would be called a ministry if it were run by evangelicals. Instead B4NP is a theologically diverse group, one with a largely deconstructing or progressive Christian audience, that is devoted to devoted to bringing Biblical scholarship to ordinary people. So the book is written not by the folks who typically write children’s books but by a diverse collection of 55 scholars, theologians and storytellers from around the world; most, but not all, identify as some kind of Christian, and they also come from a variety of countries, ethnicities and sexual identifications.

So if you’re looking for a Bible storybook from an evangelical perspective, much less a strict Calvinist one, this isn’t it. And if you’re looking for a storybook that treats the Bible as infallible or even internally consistent, you won’t find that here either.

And, actually, you won’t find much of a unifying theme either, with 55 authors and nine illustrators. If there is a dominant theme to be found with careful purview, it’s that God has a kingdom (or, as some authors say it, a kin-dom) that welcomes all.

What you will find is solid writing that’s also entertaining while respectful in a relaxed way of the source material. Fifty-some chapters retell Bible stories from the Creation to John’s Revelation of, as the author tells it, “God’s vision for peace, healing, love, joy, friendship, and beauty.”

Writing styles vary from author to author, but many attempt a breezy style. Some follow the original source material quite closely, while others take literary liberties, although only one goes the extreme that the author of the Proverbs retelling did, reframing the collection of sayings as a conversation of farm animals such as the pig with a gold ring in her snout, an image inspired by Proverbs 11:22.

Most of the stories include sidebars that provide historical, literary or theological background, such as explanations of what the Bible means by wisdom or what it meant to talk about the tribes of Israel. And QR codes with the stories direct readers to additional resources, some free and some with a cost.

God’s Children isn’t intended to get children to read the Bible as authoritative in the sense that what it says is incontrovertible. Here, for example, is how a sidebar reacts to the story of Abraham and Sarah:

One of the things you might notice as you read through the stories in the Bible is that things happen in them that are not okay. In fact, they are downright wrong.

Two of those things happen in this story. First, Hagar is enslaved by Sarai and Abram. And second, they use her body without her consent to grow their family. ...

These things are 100% wrong. It is never okay for one person to enslave another or for one person to use another person’s body without their consent. Ever.

But here is the weird thing: the Bible doesn’t actually say this. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn’t, and that is because the Bible’s stories reflect the world in which their storytellers lived.

If you’re comfortable with this approach to understanding the Bible, you’ll find this book useful in introducing your children — including your teenagers, who are likelier to understand it — to the Bible and its themes. And if you aren’t comfortable with that approach, you may well find a few portions offensive. It’s a book that openly invites discussion rather than providing the answers.

A note about the electronic edition

Although God’s Children is available in an edition for Amazon’s Kindle, it is much better suited for a print edition. The Kindle version is distributed in a pixel-by-pixel reproduction of the print edition, giving the typesetting a less than clean look, and the text isn’t searchable or able to be highlighted. And of course, the colorful illustrations do not reproduce well on a black-and-white screen. While the vibrant pages look attractive on a tablet, they are nearly unreadable on a phone-size screen. By all means, if you buy the book, get it in print.

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