The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice. The rules are simple – turn to page 56 in your current read (or 56% in your e-reader) and post a few non-spoilery sentences.

This week’s quote is from one of my rare nonfiction reads, You Are Your Own, about being an ex-evangelical woman. As an ex-Christian woman myself, a lot of this hits very close to home, and it’s a pretty difficult book to read.

While this may sound ridiculous or possibly not even that big of a deal, it’s important to recall that for a girl growing up in Evangelicalism, the only option available to me for stability was submission as a wife to an Evangelical man. Pursuing an education or becoming a working woman were largely discouraged – and are discouraged even still today. This idea may sound old fashioned, but for so many cisgender girls and women it is very much alive and well within that belief paradigm. So, if one of those women were to compromise her “purity”, she would effectively be compromising her entire future.