In third grade, Kelsey Osgood declared to her classmates that God was “not real.” Growing up in the secular suburbs of New York City, she had already internalized the idea that being religious meant being unintelligent. Yet, Osgood, who today describes herself as having been a “precocious” and “obnoxious” atheist, couldn’t stop talking about God – or, more accurately, his absence.
As she got older, that conviction began to pose some challenges. If there wasn’t a God — and a framework that came along with religious belief — how was one supposed to know how to live? “I felt very lost for a long time,” Osgood told me. That feeling of wrenching existentialism, as she described it, partly drove her to develop anorexia in adolescence, an experience she chronicled in her first book “How to Disappear Completely.” While she yearned to be thinner, the process was also a way of “fashioning” herself into the person she thought she wanted to become.
Beneath her ardent atheism was also a kind of anthropological curiosity about religious people, in particular those who chose lives governed by strict rules and rituals. She had Jewish friends and often described herself as “an awkward lurker in Jewish places.”
Once in therapy, her therapist, a Christian convert, helped Osgood see that in her own way, she did have a fledgling belief. For Osgood, who embraced Orthodox Judaism in 2015 at age of 31, the choice offered a way to channel the “existential restlessness” of her early life and gave her a sturdy footing for spiritual growth. But there was more to her conversion: “I also happened to believe it was true,” she wrote.
Osgood remained fascinated by the reasons that lead people —and women in particular —to religion, despite its often patriarchal history and cultural norms that clash with modern expectations. “You have to dress a certain way, you’re going to be pressured to have not just a family but a certain size of family. There are certain ideas about the proper role of domesticity in one’s life,” Osgood said.
Why do women choose to make these choices in order to practice a faith?
Osgood’s latest book, “Godstruck,” chronicles the conversion stories of seven millennial women — among them, a Quaker, an evangelical, a Latter-day Saint, a Muslim, an Amish woman and a Catholic nun. She wanted to hear from women why “the assumption that secular liberalism equals freedom equals happiness might be flawed.”
Osgood, who lives in New York with her husband and three sons, also wanted to understand why some women are choosing to embrace religion in a culture that prizes autonomy and individualism. “How do you square that circle?” she said.
Another side of the gender gap
In recent years, the dominant narrative around the gender gap in faith has been that women are becoming less religious, whereas men are flocking to houses of worship in greater numbers. But the numbers reveal more nuance.
While women still tend to be more religious than men, the gap between them is getting smaller, according to Pew Research Center’s 2023–2024 Religious Landscape Study, which surveyed around 37,000 Americans. In 2007, women were 17 percentage points more likely than men to say they prayed daily, but that gap has now narrowed to 13 points. The trend is most noticeable among young people: older women (74+) still pray much more often than their male peers, but among 18- to 24-year-olds, the gap is only 4 points. Meanwhile, Gen Z women are increasingly likely to be religiously unaffiliated. The same study found that 35% of Americans have switched to a religion they didn’t grow up in.
Recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute data shows that American Gen Z men haven’t become more religious in recent years — their religious behavior has remained steady. The more significant shift has occurred among Gen Z women, who are rapidly moving away from religion, Melissa Deckman, the CEO of PRRI wrote recently for Religion News Service.
In 2013, 35% of young men (ages 18–29) identified as religiously unaffiliated — the same percentage as in 2023. But among young women, that number rose significantly, from 29% in 2013 to 40% in 2024. Similarly, their participation in religious practices like attending church or praying has declined sharply, dropping more than 10 percentage points since 2016. Meanwhile, young men’s levels of religious activity have barely changed.
Though anecdotal, Osgood’s book helps examine why some women depart from this societal trend.
Osgood found that in the popular culture, religious women — especially Latter-day Saint and Orthodox Jewish women— are often wrongly cast as either oppressed or deluded. “There’s a flattened stereotype of what religious women’s lives look like,” she explained.
But the truth she uncovered is more complex, and the stories she tells challenge the common and false assumptions.
“There’s this knee-jerk reaction of ‘religion is bad, it’s a suppressive force,’ and we end up losing the parts that help us flourish,” Osgood told me.
A Latter-day Saint conversion
For the women in the book, making the leap to conversion emerged from a confluence of curiosity and life circumstances – and often a powerful spiritual experience.
Kate, now a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who grew up in a tight-knit group of LDS friends in Tucson, Arizona, began dating a church member. After he left on his mission —and ended their relationship before his departure — Kate, who goes by a pseudonym, downloaded the Book of Mormon because so many of her friends said it brought them peace. What started as a casual attempt to “humor myself” gradually turned into a committed, if complicated, spiritual journey.
Kate said she grew attracted to the “Mormon family unit, in all its archetypal American glory,” Osgood writes in the book. She compared the warmth and intimacy she saw among her friends’ families with a more distant and “impersonal” feel in her mostly non-religious home (although her grandparents were Catholic and Lutheran).
Kate’s exploration of the Latter-day Saint faith included trying out prayer, encouraged by her LDS friends. Though it began as a meditative practice without real belief, one night she got an answer — a feeling she described as a “a light in my heart,” “an explosion of goodness” and “a bloom of happiness.”
“It was so unlike anything else I had felt that I was like, ‘Well, this has to be something more.’ The only way I could explain that was it was God,” Kate told Osgood.
Another woman featured in the book is Hana, a real estate agent in Los Angeles who devoured the Quran in just two weeks — staying up all night, crying — before converting to Islam and choosing to wear the niqab, a garment that covers the face and body.
There’s also Sister Orianne, a young Catholic nun who didn’t see her vows as a sacrifice of husband or children, but as an expression of a different kind of love. “She said to me: ‘I was in love with Jesus, with this life. And just like when you’re in love with a person, you’re willing to do things and go places you might never have considered before,’” Osgood wrote.
The pull of Orthodoxy
In Judaism, Osgood discovered a tapestry of practices which allowed her to connect with God regularly and deliberately. ”I was hungry to show that I wanted that connection, because I didn’t know that that was possible before,” Osgood said. She embraced the modest dress code, seeing it “as a counterargument to a culture of oversharing and self-centeredness.”
Shabbat, in particular, captivated her — the shared commitment to unplug at a time when concerns over technology’s reach were accelerating. She was drawn to Orthodox Judaism as a serious expression of faith, and Osgood saw its structure and rigor as necessary for her spiritual growth. While her husband, who was raised in a Reform Jewish family — a more liberal strand of Judaism — was initially hesitant about the more demanding aspects of the tradition, over time, he too became deeply committed.
Osgood has wrestled with the role of women in her faith. She was coming of age during the rise of Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” feminism, which defined empowerment through corporate ambition. But the idea of outsourcing childcare and domestic tasks to become a “corporate overlord” didn’t resonate with her.
Orthodox Judaism, on the other hand, offered Osgood unexpected spaces where femininity thrived: women-only Torah classes, communal challah baking, and spirited dancing with Hasidic girls at weddings. She came to appreciate the women’s side of the synagogue, where she sat among mothers and their children.
“Perhaps it simply appealed because I am a person who enjoys clear boundaries, with which Judaism was rife: the sacred and the profane, the weekday and the Sabbath, meat and milk, light and dark, men and women,” Osgood wrote in her book.
In her Modern Orthodox community in the New York City area, she is surrounded by women who are doctors, lawyers and academics—many of whom are also raising large families. For these women, religion didn’t feel like oppression. It felt like relief and a form of stability in a chaotic world.
But she concedes that it doesn’t always feel that way. Osgood spends hours in the kitchen every week preparing for Shabbat, extending herself mentally and physically in myriad ways. The segregation of women sometimes feels “awkward or even insulting,” like the time when she was relegated to a small space inside a historic synagogue in Budapest along with another woman. Osgood’s personal struggle with secondary infertility transformed the ritual bath into a painful symbol of loss and unmet expectations. Why then remain committed?
“Because I believe in the value of sacrifice,” Osgood wrote. “Because I feel like a whole person now, one who knows how to take care of things, who knows how it feels to have obligations and meet them, who knows how to play a long game, who understands that inextricable interplay between love and pain, between fulfillment and abstinence, between creation and death, and because I believe Judaism taught me all this in a way nothing else ever could.”
Osgood’s doesn’t intend to convert anyone, but instead just wants to bear witness to her subjects’ lives. “And I’m saying ‘maybe you too should rethink this about yourself: I wrote off having a relationship with God and believing, and maybe I shouldn’t have done that so quickly.’”