A Famous Preacher’s Hypocrisy Threatens His Community

In “God Spare The Girls,” a father’s betrayal forces two evangelical daughters to question their faith

In Kelsey McKinney’s searing debut, God Spare The Girls, it’s clear from the epigraph that she won’t be pulling any punches. McKinney opens her novel with a selection from Genesis:

“Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

It’s a startling, disturbing quote, but McKinney uses the next 307 pages to paint a portrait of how that attitude still applies in contemporary evangelical Christianity.

McKinney is an accomplished journalist, but it’s apparent her talents as a writer transcend genre: God Spare The Girls uses lean language to economically tell a poignant story about the impact of religious groupthink on a community. “For that whole brutal year, Caroline Nolan had begged God to make her life interesting. He sent a plague instead,” the novel begins, and no, it’s not a pandemic, but instead a Biblical plague in the form of grasshoppers that Caroline, the novel’s teenaged protagonist, crunches beneath her “sensible heels” as she walks…