‘This Is What Happens When Women Read’

“Is that a tattoo of Je—?”

I couldn’t finish my sentence before Julianna Glasse mercifully jumped in and saved me from the blunder. 

It wasn’t actually a large depiction of Jesus spanning the length of her forearm.“It’s Plato,” she beamed at me, laughing. “But you’re not the only one. Lots of people think it’s Jesus.”

Glasse and I had just met for the first time at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was October 2025. The rain was coming down in sheets. A mutual friend had introduced us. I knew Glasse was thinking about writing a book and that she’d once been a pop star. Beyond that, I didn’t know much.

Over the next hour, Glasse told me the story of her life. Along the way, I found myself wanting to stop her — both to fact-check her astonishing account, but also to take notes.

In the mid-2010s, when she was in her 20s she told me, she’d become a prominent Christian pop singer in America under her married name, Julianna Zobrist, regularly performing before crowds of thousands; her singles also landed on the Billboard Christian charts. She’d go on to perform at the National Prayer Breakfast during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, and delighting her more than 100,000 Instagram followers with a peek behind the curtain of her seemingly charmed life.

Her life offstage was high-profile, too. She was married to Ben Zobrist, the former Major League Baseball star who won two World Series championships. The couple, who have three children, seemed to embody a particular kind of evangelical American perfection: wholesome and Christian, wildly successful and famous.

But in 2015, just after she’d given birth to their third child, the foundations of Glasse’s life began to crack. Her conservative evangelical upbringing had taught her that humans were born sinful, but looking at her newborn, she couldn’t fathom how that could possibly be true.

That realization set off a chain of events that quickly gathered momentum. When she moved from Kansas City to Chicago (for her husband’s work), she broadened her social circle and became friends with a gay couple living next door — people her religion had taught her were living in sin. She began questioning everything she had once believed to be true. Then the reading began.

She turned to books, including Plato’s “Republic,” (given to her by her best friend, a former pastor, who was also questioning his religious beliefs), and specifically, “Book Seven, the Allegory of the Cave,” in which prisoners raised in a cave come to mistake shadows for reality. From there, the book collection grew.

When her husband found a stash of books she had hidden from him, he accused her of questioning God’s word and the Bible. “This is what happens when women read,” he shouted at her one day, gesturing at the various volumes, which by then included works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simone de Beauvoir and the poet Rumi. It was a moment of chaos and rupture: First came a separation, then a highly public divorce. After the separation and before the divorce, she fell in love with that friend, the former pastor who had given her the books. But amid all of the upheaval, the phrase her husband had used stayed with Glasse. 

It led to the founding, in March 2025, of her nonprofit — This Is What Happens When Women Read — which works to advance women’s intellectual autonomy through education and community. And on October 13, Glasse’s memoir, also entitled “This Is What Happens When Women Read,” will be published. 

Glasse sat down with The Persistent to talk about her decision to leave Christianity, all that led up to it, and what happened after.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

In your book, you write about looking at your newborn daughter and suddenly questioning the idea that humans are born inherently sinful, as you’d been taught. What happened at that moment?

The fundamental premise of the Christianity I was raised in was that humans are born inherently sinful and therefore need a savior, and that the savior is Jesus. I had always believed that to be true.

Then I had my children. I was nursing my infant daughter while preparing for my next tour, reading books about a woman’s position and role, and I looked at her and thought: She can’t do any of these things that are apparently required of a godly woman. She can’t read the Bible. She can’t memorize it. She’s not being submissive. She simply is. Nor has she done anything wrong.

And I thought: Why would God create my daughter already separated from him, and then make her salvation dependent on whether she has the tools to understand these incredibly complex theologies? What if she ends up having a learning disability and not being able to read?

Once that fundamental belief began to fall, the entire container through which I saw the world started to crumble. Up until then, I had moved through the world indoctrinated. I think of indoctrination as almost like putting contact lenses onto a newborn’s eyes: You don’t know anything different because you’ve only ever seen the world one way.

What did you grieve most as your faith fell away?

I grieved what I thought Christianity was. I had been raised with these beautiful ideas of grace and forgiveness and safety and belonging and community and salvation. From my perspective, the mission of being a Christian was that you were literally saving the world. You were saving people from sin and death. That was loving.

So when I left [Christianity] and experienced so much shame and rejection, it was incredibly confusing. I realized that the grace I’d heard preached wasn’t being extended to me. Nobody approached me with curiosity and said, “Help me understand what you’re going through.”

It felt like: How dare this woman challenge this institution? She must either conform or be crushed. And when I said, “I will not conform,” the crushing began.

Another turning point in your book is becoming friends with a gay couple. Why was that relationship so transformative?

In the Christianity I knew, I had been taught that “bad company corrupts good morals.” I’d been taught that your relationship to the LGBTQ community basically had to be: avoid, avoid, avoid. And if you were close to LGBTQ people, your goal had to be: convert, convert, convert. You were either hiding from them or you had to have an agenda.

Then, this gay couple became my neighbors. One of them told me he was also a Christian pastor, and my mind was completely blown. These were two things I had been taught were totally incompatible.

What happened next was that the couple simply welcomed me into their lives. They opened up space for me to imagine something new.

I began to realize that I was out of alignment with love. Even if I wasn’t personally spewing anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, I was participating in an institution that was actively harming people. My integrity would not allow me to stay there.

Then you started reading. What was it like to have to hide your intellectual curiosity inside your own home?

Humans very quickly understand where we are safe and where we are not. I understood that I wasn’t emotionally or psychologically safe to explore these ideas at home. So I hid my books behind a blow dryer, under my bed, in my underwear drawer.

It was both this precious period of intellectual exploration and this feeling of: What is happening to me, and who do I talk to about it? It lasted about two years and it was confusing. I didn’t yet have the language to understand what I was reading, or to articulate how my mind was changing.

Was there one book or idea that particularly changed you?

Plato’s “Republic,” and the idea that when the soul turns, the body turns with it. For me, that became about integrity. You cannot know what you do not know. But once you know something, that knowledge comes with responsibility. If my mind was shifting, then my whole self had to shift with it. I had to realign myself with what I now understood to be true.

After Plato, I read Walt Whitman, who tells readers in the 1855 preface to “Leaves of Grass” to reexamine what they’ve been taught and “dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”

The permission to dismiss felt audacious. How dare I trust myself enough to read whatever I could get my eyes, ears and fingers on — and decide for myself?

I’d lost this system of containment called religion… and reading helped me ask: How do I rebuild a system of meaning that allows me to function in the world in a meaningful and beautiful way again?

Is there anything you miss about your Christian life?

In some ways, the ease of knowing absolutely what is right and wrong. The simplicity of never questioning.

Self-actualization is the harder path. A woman deciding to move through life on her own terms requires much more courage and resilience and curiosity than being handed a rule book and told, “Here. Paint by numbers.”

Your nonprofit, which you launched in 2025, works with women who have experienced very different forms of oppression. How do you draw a connection to your own story without equating those experiences?

In 2023, I went to Oxford to complete an advanced management and leadership program. I initially thought I would research the weaponization of religion against women and girls around the world by looking at external manifestations of oppression; things like controlling women’s mobility, female genital mutilation, access to education, controlling how they dress and where they’re allowed to sit in a place of workship. My professor challenged me. He essentially said: You have women here from all over the world. If you focus only on the external, are you going to create a competition?

And I realized that if we only compare what is externally oppressing us, we will end up creating hierarchies of suffering. So I shifted my research toward the internal: shame, fear, isolation, psychological manipulation. Suddenly, the shame and fear I had experienced could resonate with women from Bihar, Saudi Arabia or the Maldives, without suggesting our circumstances were the same.

It changed the way I think about feminist progress. We have to look not only at what holds women back, but at what unites us: the resilience of a woman, the tenacity of a woman, the imagination of a woman, the curiosity of a woman. These are the things that allow women to become fully formed, autonomous individuals in the world.

Is education inherently liberating?

No, because everything depends on what you’re being educated with. Education itself can absolutely reinforce harmful ideas.

What creates liberation is permission to think critically about what you are learning. Take an argument and stretch it across time. Stretch it across the world. Does it hold up regardless of who you are? For a woman who can never bear a child, for example? Does it hold up in that case?

To be truly liberated, you have to be willing to keep questioning.

So tell me, how did Plato end up tattooed on your arm?

I actually got the tattoo in 2018, even before I left the church. Tattoos were considered sinful, so it was one of my acts of rebellion: This is my body, and I own it. I will do to my body what I wish. No one owns me.

Plato is on my right arm. I don’t even know that I consciously understood this at the time, but it felt like the side on which I would hold a sword.

Literature became that for me. Philosophy became the sword for my life and no one was going to stop me.