(RNS) When you’ve lived as the holiest of the holy, coming back to Earth can be an unpleasant re-entry. You enter the ranks of the unsaved only to find you have much more in common with the godless than you might have thought.

Even if you never leave the ranks of America’s evangelicals, you might get the feeling outsiders think your only talents must be teaching Bible school and rocking babies.

Being part of an American religious subculture is much more complicated than conventional wisdom would suggest. In two new engaging memoirs and one creative book of essays, women with deep evangelical roots mourn, celebrate and analyze their experiences in worlds replete with childhood witnessing, full immersion baptism and endless potluck dinners.

The memoirs are “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl” by Susan Campbell, and “I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed, Tales from a Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing” by Kyria Abrahams.

The first chronicles a journey from adolescence to reminiscences of the fallout inherent in leaving a childhood faith. The second book is a series of tragic-comic stories culminating in the author’s tentative reach for secular redemption.

The book of essays, “Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical,” edited by Hannah Faith Notess, assesses barriers to women in evangelical circles, differences in spiritual experiences, and wrestling with personal faith.

Notess, a thoughtful, insightful thinker at 28 years old, edited her book after realizing the gap between her quiet conversion experience and the dramatic, blinded-by-the-light stories of so many Christian writers.

“How do you figure out your faith when you don’t have a road-to-Damascus experience?” she says. “I found that a lot of my friends had had similar experiences to mine. I wanted to find some middle ground on both sides.”

So she gathered stories from people who stayed or left their childhood churches, who drifted away from the church, or re-evaluated attending services. The result is a beguiling conversation.

In the essay, “Why Isn’t God Like Eric Clapton?” writer Andrea Palpant Dilley explores her happy, offbeat childhood as the daughter of two former hippies who became Christians. “My struggle with my faith in my late teens and early twenties was enigmatic for many reasons, one of which was the fact that I had had a healthy childhood in a healthy church,” she writes.

Recounting the questions she pondered, Dilley shares early experiences that ring true for anyone reared with rock music. Watching Eric Clapton in concert in a hi-fi technology store, she saw his audience swaying “with the unmistakable demeanor of worship that comes with the experience of good music.”

That epiphany prompted an ongoing search, the sort of spiritual journey Notess discovered many evangelical women are making. She hopes the book broadens readers’ ideas about growing up female and evangelical.

“I think a lot of times evangelical women are pigeonholed as the beautiful Christian wife or a rebel. You either are a good church lady or you are kicked out. I hope that people come away from the book sort of listening to those different voices and aware of how much thoughtfulness and thinking is going on,” Notess says.

Multiple problems plagued the author of “Dating Jesus.” Newspaper reporter Campbell’s story rocks with uncertainty, confusion and contrast. Describing her high school years, Campbell writes:

I do not feel like drinking or smoking marijuana (add that to the list of things that frighten me), and to avoid the issue I simply do not go to the parties that burst like mushrooms (I do not feel like doing those, either) every Friday.

Years later, her religious roots still mark her. “At my job, I bring to the table a fundamentalist-bred need for clarity, an insatiable desire to pursue the righteous, and, yes, the ability to talk tough and not take crap from anybody,” Campbell says. “Through almost thirty years in the business and despite the fact that I no longer attend church, I kept rotating back to topics that would concern a religious type. I write about hunger and homelessness, homosexuality and civil rights, the juncture between faith and politics that only rarely is explored in polite conversation.”

With equal acuity and acerbic wit, Abrahams takes readers inside the world of Jehovah’s Witnesses. A spoken-word poet, stand-up comedian and Web producer who lives in Queens, N.Y., Abrahams’ memoir is an emotional zigzag from funny childhood stories to a miserable marriage marked by her growing dependence on the bottle. The unbelievable shock she felt upon leaving the safety of her faith hovers above the main storyline.

“Life in the Jehovah’s Witness was a calming portrait of multicultural picnics on the edge of a crystal-blue lake, with everyone smiling and selfless and seemingly engaged in some fulfilling physical chore,” she writes.

The world outside — where she now lives — jarred her. “I felt like I’d been thrown onto an amusement park ride and then asked to fix it while still spinning.”