God’s Ex-Girlfriend: A Memoir About Loving and Leaving the Evangelical Jesus

Gloria Beth Amodeo was a freshman in college when she met someone who would change the trajectory of her life. Cate was smart, beautiful, and an evangelical Christian. Soon, Gloria had left behind her troubled family-which included her mother’s mental illness and addiction to pills-and joined Cate as a member of Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru).

To Gloria, the secular world she had grown up in was morally confusing and bereft of community; evangelicalism, by contrast, followed a simple ethical code and was filled with a supportive community of fellow believers-even if joining it meant she had to submit to many ideas that didn’t feel right to her.

Embracing her newfound belief system, Gloria became a cultural warrior for Jesus, militantly focused on converting everyone she met to her conservative brand of Christianity. Over the next seven years, she spent spring breaks preaching to MTV partygoers in bikinis; drank and smoked in bars as she tried to convert her fellow creative writing students in New York City; and kept a strenuous hold on her virginity, as she considered herself to be in a relationship with God.

Slowly, she came to realize that a God who believed that LGBTQ+ people were going to hell, that sex before marriage was a sin, and that men had the final say in all marital and relationship matters, among other things, was not a God she wanted to date any longer.

Laced with honesty, humor, and insight, God’s Ex-Girlfriend pulls back the curtain on evangelical organizations like Cru, which target vulnerable young people, as well as showing how one woman was able to escape from beliefs that she discovered were harmful to her, her family, and ultimately, society.