When Cameron Dezen Hammon first becomes a Christian at age 26, she tries to make sense of historical conflicts like the Crusades. How can God be good when his human representatives are so terrible? “God is not the church,” her spiritual mentor responds. “The church is made of people and people fail.”
These become prophetic words for Houston author Dezen Hammon, whose first book, This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession, traces her path through evangelical Christianity from enraptured conversion to gradual disillusionment. It’s a revealing letter from a believer who tries, and ultimately fails, to conform to the vision of Christian womanhood offered by one of the country’s dominant religions.
