What Happened to Historian Molly Worthen?

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Collin Hansen
For 20 years, I’ve felt like Molly Worthen and I have lived parallel lives. graduated college the same year. We wrote for the same publications on some of the same subjects. But I chose to head into church ministry and she settled into the academy and earned her PhD from Yale. Molly is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and you may have read her work and the New York Times slate or Christianity today and elsewhere. She is perhaps best known for her award winning book apostles of reason. The crisis of authority in American evangelicalism published by Oxford University Press, in 2014. In that book, Molly wrote that evangelicalism quote, craved an intellectual authority that would quiet disagreement and dictate and plan for fixing everything that seemed broken with the world. They did not find it and are still looking. In his critical review for the gospel coalition. Al Mohler wrote, quote, this is a book to be reckoned with. In terms of its comprehensive grasp of the evangelical movement, its detailed research, its serious approach to understanding the of angelical mind, apostles of reason stands nearly alone. In the larger world of academic publishing. Any serious minded Evan Jellicle should read it, and quote, now he also described the book as infuriating, describe Molly’s work as sometimes snarky toward evangelicalism. Well, much has changed in a decade, so I thought it would be interesting to invite Molly on gospel bound to discuss her scholarship, as well as her experience in the church and Academy. Molly, thanks for joining me and gospel bound.

Molly Worthen
Thank you for having me.

Collin Hansen
Oh, Molly, just take us back. What motivated you to study and write about evangelicalism?

Molly Worthen
I grew up and totally secular home about 20 miles west of Chicago and Glen Ellyn, Illinois, which is right next to Wheaton. I grew up about two miles from Wheaton College, but had no contact with with evangelicalism because of my geographical proximity. I remember occasionally walking across Wheaton College campus with my parents and they would point darkly to at the school buildings and say they don’t allow dancing there. So that was my first impression of angelical. When I went to college did my undergrad at Yale and I took classes in history and philosophy, and began realizing both in my coursework and in meeting a wider range of people from different parts of the country, different parts of the world, that for 99% of human beings, religion was this hugely important framework through which they process reality. And if I wanted to understand the other things I was studying, if I wanted to really understand history, or politics or philosophy, I had to grapple with religion. I took a couple of classes early on in Russian history. And in deed, my first my first real intellectual passion in the broad realm of Religious Studies was Eastern Orthodoxy. I had a really formative experience. The summer after my sophomore year, I got some grant money from my college, to go to this middle of nowhere place in rural North central Alberta, Western Canada, where I lived in a little French Canadian town, a few kilometers from a community of Russian Orthodox Old Believers, who you if you don’t know who they are, and you would have no reason to, unless you’ve kind of studied Russian history, you could caricature them as the Russian Orthodox Amish. But although it’s not quite, quite fair, but they they’re, they’re part of a diaspora of a religious minority who broke away from the main body of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1600s. And were persecuted for by the czars, and then by the communists that have ended up all over the place, and have sought to preserve really strict boundaries between their their own particular practice of Russian Orthodoxy and the wider world. And so this particular community had begun in Portland, Oregon, and that area found it to American to assimilationist they decamped for this much more remote place, I couldn’t live with them because of their purity rules. But I lived in the town next to them and gradually became friends with some of the young women who were roughly my age and ended up getting invited to you know, participate in wedding sewing parties and, you know, learn how to dress chickens after the minute slaughter them this kind of thing. I got my first experience going to four or five, our church services. I mean, they really they’re very serious about the physical experience of suffering for your faith in Orthodox worship. And that looking back was my first experience, really trying to get as close as possible Well to inhabiting the worldview of someone different from myself, particularly in the realm of religion, and I think it’s what persuaded me that I wanted, I wanted to spend my, my intellectual energy in some way learning about religion and finding excuses to talk to people in communities that were not my own. I had some kind of twists and turns. After that I had a few internships at newspapers and magazines. By the time I finished college, I had this idea that I wanted to be a religion writer, a journalist, but I didn’t really know anything about American religion, I thought, well, I have this kind of kind of eccentric knowledge in particular pockets, you know, Russian Orthodoxy, there’s not a huge market. Unfortunately, for, you know, mainstream magazine articles, Russian Orthodox liturgy, or, you know, medieval monasticism, which was another thing I was really interested in. So I thought, Well, gosh, to have anything to add to the marketplace of existing journalism, I need to learn more about the American scene, I had this vague idea that conservative Christians in particular, are getting pretty shallow treatment by the mainstream media, although I didn’t make that observation from a position of any any particular knowledge. I mean, when I began graduate school, I kid you not I did not know the difference between a Baptist and a Methodist. I mean, I really knew nothing about American religion. But I went to graduate school with the thought that I was not training for a traditional academic position, but rather, I was filling a well to be a semi competent journalist. And so through graduate school, I mean, I took classes where I learned things like the difference between a Baptist and Methodist as well as going all the way back, right, because, you know, you can’t, can’t really understand 20th 21st century American religious history without, without really doing the whole, the whole span. And along the way, as much as possible, I did a little bit of freelance journalism, for magazines, looking for connections between my area of study and the news headlines broadly construed. And, you know, over over that experience, I think a few things happened I, I got socialized into the value system of academia, or you might say brainwashed if you want to be less generous, and I think really spoiled by the luxury of doing journalism, from a perch in a in a in a big university where you got access to, you know, such a great library and so many smart people. And then at the same time, the bottom really fell out from the job market in the world of journalism, even more so than it had in the world of humanities academic jobs was really saying something right, because the job market in my world now has never been good. We

Collin Hansen
have chosen we chose so well Molly.

Molly Worthen
We love our work clearly because it’s not financially rational. Exactly. So I you know, long story short, I feel I have a kind of hybrid situation now, where my main my main work is teaching religious permanently religious history and the North American context, intellectual history more broadly, sometimes at a, you know, a flagship State University. But as much as possible, I continue my journalistic work, I spend a lot of time on the phone with people in the communities. I’m, I’ve been writing about as a historian as well. And I’m really grateful for kind of the combination of the two.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, the Russian part is, is another parallel for us, because that was transformative Russian literature in my own undergraduate experience, as well in there preparing for either an academic or a journalistic life. Well, it’s kind of a, quite a parable of the our religious scene in the United States in the latter 20th century, early 21st century that you could live in Glen Ellyn in a thoroughly secular home, right around the corner from Wheaton in what has historically been this kind of Evan Jellicle, Bastion or republican bastion of DuPage. County, Illinois, but has changed dramatically, as we’ve we’ve all seen there having lived there for a long time. Did you go to Glenbard West was that we didn’t get a beautiful, beautiful little campus on a hill over there. But I’m just wondering, How was that possible? They’re not there weren’t there weren’t Christian students there or you just didn’t meet them at all? Or just weren’t looking for them? How is that even possible? Or is that really how much things have changed by then?

Molly Worthen
Yes, that’s interesting. I mean, there are loads of Christian students I have I have memories of overhearing sarcastic complaining by some of my Catholic friends about CCD and things like this, but you know, part of it is just the the compartmentalized lives that we all lead, but maybe especially You teenagers. And I mean, I remember my mother once when I was young, making a noble effort to sit me and my brother down on the couch and read to us. Like she she read David and Goliath. Her thinking was when she she is, I think she would call herself an atheist. But certainly she sees the kind of civilizational and cultural importance of familiar familiarity with scripture. So I think she was just trying to, you know, it scratch away at our complete ignorance a little bit, but somehow, I don’t know, I was probably eight. Somehow I perceived it as, as the man like this was an imposition. This was some something that I didn’t want that was being forced on me. And I think I think I literally held my ears. I remember another case where our next door neighbors who were Presbyterian, invited us to church. And I think after maybe fending off these invitations a few times, my parents decided we needed to go. And again, I have this vivid, visceral memory of perceiving this as a great imposition on my personal autonomy. And I don’t know where I had no, it’s not as if I had a kind of bad experience with an overbearing religious relative, or something that would have primed me to react in this way. I just did. I mean, clearly, I had, I mean, we’ll get into this, but I, you know, I then went on to a life of obsession with the very thing that I was pushing away as a child, my brother has gone in very different direction, he does not have the same, the same inclinations. But I think I think, though, that when I grew up in DuPage County and Glen Ellyn, my parents experience of it was that it became more Republican and more conservative, evangelical, and it’s kind of vibe over the course of my childhood there, and that became even more extreme after I left. And my parents, I think, felt a bit more isolated, by, you know, kind of the early 2000s, than they had when I was growing up. They think I think they felt the kind of polarization and the, the inability to kind of really make connections across some of those lines. And they’d always thought of themselves as pretty moderate politically, but felt themselves to be more and more on the left. So Glen Allen, in a way experienced that story that has shaped really our whole country

Collin Hansen
over the past generation. Not to mention, Molly That was so when you were growing up there, that would have been Henry Hyde’s district. So outspoken anti abortion activist then replaced by Peter Roskam, similar characteristic, but then a complete and total flip in this last decade in so many different ways. And so, yeah, I assume this was at the Presbyterian Church downtown Glen Ellyn that you would have visited or a different Yeah, Main Street on Main Street right there downtown. Glen Ellyn? Yeah, you’ll have to the viewers and listeners have to forgive us. I lived at President in Geneva, right there and Carol Stream. So right at the intersection of Wheaton and Glen Ellyn and Carol Stream there for many years. What was your connection then to writing for Christianity today? I was just kind of assumed maybe it was just mark Galli as a managing editor because he lived in Glen Ellyn? Was there a different connection? Was it more just academic and journalistic? And just just because that was the leading flagship periodical.

Molly Worthen
One of my first big articles in graduate school was a piece on new St. Andrew’s college and Doug Wilson. Okay. Okay. And that, that was that appeared in the New York Times Magazine, and I think Mark and his colleagues saw that piece and they were interested in a piece on Wilson. And so they contacted me and then it you know, became a relationship where I could occasionally see them in person because my my folks to look to Ellen, I would travel there to do archive work as a graduate student in the Billy Graham Center archives, and so I went on to read a few more articles for them.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, I remember the one about Moeller, in particular cover story if I remember correctly on that one. Now, let’s let’s go back to apostles of reason here. So you write that quote, Evan geocells, claimed sola scriptura as their guide, but it is no secret that the challenge of determining what the Bible actually means, finds his ultimate caricature in their assuming and squabbling. They are the children of estranged parents by autism and the enlightenment, but behave like orphans. This confusion over authority is both their greatest affliction and their most potent source of vitality. And quote, Amalia I wanted to give read that quote, because I think it gives you such a good flavor for the for the care for your writing and for what you’re trying to accomplish in this book, but tell us what you mean especially by that last line that just dynamic of authority as an affliction but also vitality

Molly Worthen
In that passage, I guess I am trying to at least partly offer a summary of the history, the birth of modern evangelicalism in the aftermath of the Reformation, the context of the pious movement, but also the Enlightenment context. And as a result of this history, I’m gesturing at how I see the the story of movement unfolding from there. I think that evangelicalism are more tormented than most human subcultures, with what I see as a universal human problem. And that is, how different authorities in our lives lay claim on us and pull us in different directions. So I think that the foundational moment of modern evangelicalism at the intersection of highest revival and the, you know, the sort of efflorescence of the authority of of internal spiritual experience, as well as this, the kind of new you know, teeth that science gains in the context of the Enlightenment in the in the scientific revolution, I think that’s just crucial for understanding everything that follows in the history of evangelicalism. I think that locating one’s primary authority as a Christian in the Bible, has a lot of implications. One thing it can do is provide a license to to break away from wider communities from a church from a pastor, another source of authority, who is telling you things you you don’t want to hear a message that is in some way at odds with, with how you experience Christianity, and it can be a license to start your own start your own community, I see that impulse towards schism or toward entrepreneurship to be an another way of putting it as, as something that has really enlivened evangelicalism that in the context of American culture, and the at least relatively speaking, free market that we have in our in our religious marketplace. Compared to many other contexts. This is a major reason for the success of of evangelicalism. But over the long term, I think it is not always a good thing to be able to break away from people you disagree with, from ideas and information that make you uncomfortable. And so I I see that, that relationship to authority, and perhaps it’s kind of its power, but also it’s brittle quality, as something that has both really served of angelical but but has also been a source of consistent struggle.

Collin Hansen
Let’s go back. Let’s go back to something that you said earlier, about your experience listening to the Bible of being in church, because it just relates to what you were mentioning there about authority. Molly, I don’t, I have no idea why I thought this, but I remember sitting in my Methodist Church as a child, Madison, United Methodist Church in South Dakota. And I can’t remember when it was felt to me like maybe a Christmas Eve service. But we were fairly regular churchgoers at least 50% of the time. And I remember thinking, I’m so glad my generation is going to grow up and realize all of this is incredibly stupid and pointless, and leave it behind. I was away I thought, I don’t know why. I thought that. I don’t know where that came from. I don’t know what message. I don’t know what notion of authority that I had that even though and I think you might appreciate this as a historian, my Methodist family roots go all the way back to the awakenings of the early 18th century. My maternal family named Daniel is even According to Philip Jenkins, understanding and teaching a history of that period, reflective of the revivals influence on families by taking those biblical last names or biblical first names as their last names. And my the ancestor who came over in the 1840s to Wisconsin, had been training to be an evangelical minister, as a Methodist. But somehow in my head, sitting there in church, I just thought it was all incredibly stupid. I’m just wondering, have you thought about that Molly of like, where did you get the idea that this was oppressive? Where did that come from? What how’d that intuition develop? Because that’s that I think, I think that’s a relatively new phenomenon, that that intuition that would have been developed there. Where does it come from

Molly Worthen
you? You’re challenging me, because you’re suggesting that my reaction has had a lot to do with our kind of generational culture. I don’t know text. And I feel chagrin because, in principle, I’m a historian. And then I got my brain off to go there first. But to the extent that I’ve I have any answer for you, I guess I had tended to think about it more in terms of my own temperament. And I was a, I was a child who spent most of my time in my own head. And my parents didn’t mess with me much. I mean, they very rarely made me sign up for anything, only swimming lessons, because that was a matter of safety, pretty much nothing else was forced to do no piano, no nothing. And so I think that this was just this was this was the introduction of something that had not really had any presence in my home, although my father was and remains a huge lover of world mythology. So I grew up, you know, listening to, you know, Greek mythology, Roman mythology, Norse mythology, at bedtime, as our bedtime stories. But somehow, when the, you know, the one or two times when, when the Bible entered our home, the, the tenor of it, I picked up something different, right? This is a, this is this is a, this is the source of authority that, you know, on, once upon a time had a privileged place in this culture, and no longer does. It’s not, it’s not, you know, the kind of eccentric fairy tale that the story is about, you know, loci or, you know, Icarus or whatever might be this is something else, and there’s a sort of menace to it. But none of this was spoken, I’m totally projecting. But But you’re saying that, you know, even even in a home that was very different in which this was part of your part of the fabric of life, you also had a bit of a spirit of rebellion against it.

Collin Hansen
And maybe that’s just why We both became journalists. I don’t know. That could be what we’re talking about here. I don’t know. It was just provoked by what you said about authority. That in that, and I think it relates to a lot of the apologetic work that I’m trying to do now, is in a post Christendom context, even in an increasingly post enlightenment context, what are the sources of authority? You mentioned the universal human condition of these competing authorities? Where do you go for most of human history, it was fairly simple. Your authority was your community. And it was your family, your tribe or whatever, that’s most of human history there. We’re experimenting with some, we’re experimenting with new things here. of there being no clear authority, I was just observing that you and I being the same age, and similar career paths in some way, looking back just both had that formative experience of whatever this religion thing is. It’s not for me, and it just it feels wrong. There was just no sense of, of course, there’s what my parents believes what my community believes it’s what my you know, but that at least in my case, in your case, I do think even what you described, though, about your, about how you were parented? Well, that’s not a very historical mode of parenting either, though, in terms of authority, that’s a that’s a fairly child directed mode of parenting, that’s fairly novel, as well, so that could be contributing to it. They’re just trying to work that through in there. So you mentioned no other experiences going on for the church, though. Just visiting once and having that negative reaction?

Molly Worthen
Absolutely. I felt I remember, occasionally reflecting on how uncomfortable I would feel if I if I had to go, I didn’t know what to do. It was it was completely foreign. It’s not it’s really not something I thought about until until I got to college.

Collin Hansen
Did your parents what were your parents like? D church that they’ve been a part of a church like, did they have a story of like, we’re leaving this behind Varick and we want to raise our children differently. What was was that part of the change or what not

Molly Worthen
not in a prominent way? My father I think, was sent with his two younger siblings to Presbyterian Sunday school. Least a radically growing up. But he it was not a big part of his childhood. My my mother’s home was pretty secular. The most prominent event bearing on religion that occurred in her youth was the conversion of her younger sister to Mormonism. Oh, when her sister was 16 and her younger sister really craved more clarity. Just a plan, you know, for how you’re supposed to be in the world. And the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it really appealed to her for that reason. And I think observing that was made a big impression on my on my mother and maybe has informed I mean, both my parents are very have a lot of reservation Shannon’s about organized religion. And I think that that, you know that moment in my in my mom’s life in her sister’s life was something that that shape that

Collin Hansen
so made a big impression but a negative one. In that case, overall. Yeah. So one last question on apostles reason I could not help but read this book through the lens of this new venture that we’ve launched that the gospel coalition called the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics. And as an intellectual venture, your your work is certainly relevant to that. Anything that you would encourage us toward or caution us based on your research? Because you do talk about Francis Schaeffer, you talk about apologetics there quite a bit, certainly about cultural change and source of authority. Any thoughts there about positive avenues to explore or ones to avoid just some of those inherent conflicts as we try to work through how to be both both engaged with the culture but with a belief system that is we’re talking about here, in many ways just feels utterly foreign to the conditions of modernity?

Molly Worthen
Gosh, I almost think I’m the wrong person to ask about apologetics. Because I sometimes think that my own personal experience, which which we’ll get into, and my own reactions to things is actually quite a bit out of step from what I perceived to be the broader trends and the questions that more commonly preoccupy people who are investigating Christianity or thinking about leaving the church, this kind of thing? I guess I see. I mean, I see Tim Keller as such an inspiring model of how to pursue that kind of engagement in the the perfect balance in his writing and his public career of humility and confidence. And maybe this connects with how I’ve been kind of reassessing my own feelings about Francis Schaeffer. I know this is one, this is one thing that Al Mohler was not happy with me about in the book. And I have to say, I am so grateful to Al I mean, I wrote that fairly critical profile of him in Christianity Today, indeed. And I was I was later told that CT hired me to do that piece because they, quote, wanted to smack down the Calvinists. I was flattered that we’re getting

Collin Hansen
real here. This may or may not have been a reaction to a certain previous editor at Christianity today, who may or may not be on this video call right now.

Molly Worthen
Interesting, it’s all it’s all fitting together.

Collin Hansen
I told you Molly, our worlds are more aligned.

Molly Worthen
So I was I was really I was really surprised and and grateful when Al despite that he went on to write what was I mean, the review you quoted briefly from was incredibly generous, really generous, my book, but, but among his criticisms were I was too hard on on Schaefer and I have been, I went back and read for the first time in more than 10 years. The God was there, you know, one of Shaffers first big books, and I do think that there there is a real arc to Schaefers career as a cultural apologists apologist and culture warrior and the later the later years, especially under Frank Shaffers influence but in that early Schaefer, he’s he’s more Keller esque, in that, you know, and I’ve been revisiting that book, I heard in in Shaffers account of of the problems with modern civilization, a such a sincere pain for secular people or people with with worldviews that are not, that are not working for them that that are as leaky as sibs, and they don’t realize it. But there’s there’s a humane quality to the conversation that he was trying to start that I think is attenuated in Shaffer’s later career or gains more of an edge in a way that was very empowering for a certain subset of evangelicals. You know, both those evangelicals who were kind of politically activated by Shaffers later ministry, as well as those who were able to see intellectual careers and academia is open to them in a way that they maybe hadn’t considered before. He introduced them to the world of ideas. But I think that maybe the possibility in that you see In his Schaefers, early career for for bridge building, and the kinds of conversations that happened at Ligori, in the early years with like, it’s such a crazy, you know, amalgam of people, you know, marijuana smoking hippies and Timothy Leary and people like this, right like that, that stops being quite as possible in the later years. And I think that Tim Keller’s ethos is so takes the best of that of that early Shaffer spirit and updates it in a certain way. And, you know, I’ve always admired the way Keller, you know, he communicates from from a kind of clear, theological ecclesiological location, but, but he’s also he’s also very ecumenical wherever, wherever it’s possible. So, you know, he’s, I’m glad that I mean, this, this, this endeavor that you’re embarking on, I think is, is really important. And I guess the last thing I’ll observe in my, from my research, and this is the fruit of my journalistic research, not apostles, reason, some years ago, I wrote a newspaper story on the movement of Christian study centres on secular university campuses around the country, which began in the 1970s. But it’s really sort of blossomed in past 15 years or so, my own school UNC, got a study center, just not not even 10 years ago. Now, that’s really flourishing. So I spent some time interviewing Evan Jellicle, college kids who, who run the centers, and they they spend their time organizing public events and, you know, creating a space for students who are Christians, but also trying to do some outreach. And I asked them, Do you think about what you’re doing as a kind of evangelism, and without exception, they, they moved away in in kind of horror at the word evangelism. They wanted nothing to do with attaching that label to what they were doing. And they I think we’re reacting to what they perceive to be sort of their parents generations approach to evangelism where you a cost unsuspecting strangers on the street corner and harangue them about the four spiritual laws and don’t, you know, let go of their elbow until you get them kneeling in prayer. And you know, that I think that that character has always been unfair. And that actually the history of evangelism is much more sort of humane and complicated than that suggests, but certainly as part of this generation of angelical college students, broader desire to disentangle themselves from the mainstream cultures, stereotypes about the Christian right and anti intellectualism and you know, Christians as intolerant bigots that is involved or discomfort with evangelism traditionally construed and really a doubling down on on relationships, which I think is right. But I do think there’s room for sort of initiating the hard conversations when it’s appropriate.

Collin Hansen
What’s really helpful I appreciate Of course, you’ve read my my own book on Tim Keller, where I talk about that influence that Schaefer had on him from those Liberty years. But you’re you’re exactly right. There’s a clear departure when you get to the Christian manifesto, years published there by again, our Chicago neighbor crossway, constantly books there in the early 1980s. Were Shaffers moving in a certain direction over here and Moeller is somebody, he connects both of those worlds with Schaefer the academic world, the intellectual world, the cultural world, but also the very political and kind of Christian Right world. Whereas you’re exactly right. Tim Keller is definitely that early Laborie Schaefer, not the another later there as well. What Molly, I think there’s no other way to ask this question, but I’m just interested to know, how did you come under conviction of sin and the hope of salvation through Jesus Christ, talk with us about that, that dramatic change in your life?

Molly Worthen
Yeah, I am grateful for this chance to talk about it because I am still processing it. I still feel whiplash. I, I became a Christian last August. I’ll just I’ll do my best to tell you what happened. I think, you know, I had made a couple of incompetent efforts to earlier in my adult life to get myself church. I in graduate school, I went to the local, high Anglo Catholic Episcopalian parish for a while, felt pushed at a certain point to get baptized there not because I had even the inkling of anything resembling certainty, even about theism, let alone Jesus. I just felt it was something I felt pushed to do. And I thought, well, I’m sick of being a voyeur. Or maybe if I start Being able to receive the sacrament something something mystical will happen. And you know, the rector there was very used to dealing with people in my category, as you might imagine, you know, university town on the northeast, and we had a lovely conversation about how the Creed can be aspirational. I shouldn’t sweat it too much. And I think in the high church context, people often have a lot of confidence in the power of the liturgy to do the work if you participate, which may work for some people. So I got baptized in 2008, at the Easter Vigil, and it was incredibly traumatic. I didn’t really understand why I was doing it. It was a very closely affiliated University parish. So the congregation was all my colleagues and, you know, students from the Divinity School, who I TA, and it felt like, you know, being totally exposed in front of my whole professional world, and I didn’t understand how I was supposed to feel and I knew I was supposed to feel something. But But But what I continued to go to church for some a little bit of time after that, but fell away and, you know, have been an coasting along in a state of mildly dissatisfied agnosticism. Until last year, I think I always vaguely thought, This isn’t this isn’t sustainable over the long term. And at a certain point, like surely I’ll, I’ll get my act together. And I’ll probably become Catholic or like, you know, some variety of Anglicans.

Collin Hansen
Something respectable was exactly what I was going to definitely something

Molly Worthen
I had, I should say, I had like, my first love affair was was the Eastern Orthodox, like, there. It’s a bit like trying to become a Jew. I mean, it’s so ethnic, very. Yeah. And I just couldn’t break break through and was, you know, incompetent in my own efforts. So, you know, fast forward to early 2022. I guess, in retrospect, I had been some of what the I guess I should say, the Holy Spirit was sort of working on me a little bit, I had found myself listening on audiobook to CS Lewis’s space trilogy, which I picked up just because I thought, you know, I study the American Christianity, I got to be familiar with this. I liked CS Lewis as much as the next person, I will say, I was never someone who loved Mere Christianity was kind of it was a bit lost on me. But I picked up the space trilogy. And I think precisely because I thought, Here I am reading this is a work of science fiction. I mean, yes, it’s Christian, but it’s primarily, you know, it’s a fun, it’s a fun read. I didn’t perceive it as a as an apologetic work. I didn’t have my guard up. And that sequence of books really struck me. The first volume out of the silent planet, in its characterization of this prelapsarian world, and its portrayal of, of, of angels. It just, it prompted me to think about sin and think about some of the claims of the Christian story in a way that arrested me with new power perelandra The second book has, I think, the most disturbing portrayal of Satan. Maybe in all of English literature, I don’t know. I mean, I’m more so than Milton, certainly more than more than Dante. I mean, I the portrait of Satan in that book kept me up at night. And then the third book, that hideous strength is this brilliant takedown of the idols of academia. And of course, Lewis was describing, you know, Oxford circa 1950, like his world, but it like not that much has changed, and it just really, it really hit home. So I was I was just sort of, I have this was like, percolating, and I didn’t really have anyone to talk with about it. So I began doing reporting for this article that I had pitched to a local, a local magazine that covers North Carolina affairs called the assembly, which is an article on the summit church and JD Greer in you know, early 2022 Because this is a this was a church that I was wanting to learn more about. I’ve been aware of the summit in you know, from the beginning of my time teaching at Carolina because they’ve got a big presence on UCS campus. I noticed their their stickers on my students laptops, kind of curious about them. I knew that JD Greer had just stepped down from his term as SPC president so I thought Well, now’s a great time to write about him because it’s like way into this bigger story of all the stuff going on in the SBC. So I started doing my reporting, you know, it took a long time to get on JDS calendar, you know, the wait, wait several weeks. So in the meantime, I was just interviewing staffers and people who worked for the church in various capacities and I was really struck from the beginning. My reporting by the summit churches, obsession with evangelism. I mean, even by the standards of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is not a denomination that takes missions lightly. I was like, holy cow, like, this is something this is a different animal. These people are just obsessed. They’re just they they’re founded like 500 churches, you know, worldwide. You know, every service ends with you know, the the benediction. You know, you’re you are sent like, it’s just relentless. And it made us It made an impression on me, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t the ugly evangelism it because I would have these long conversations, especially with some of the folks involved in their college ministry about how they talk to college students, especially about human sexuality and how they talk to gay students and transgender students. I just, I was really impressed by by their open mindedness and their humanity. So I went into my conversation with JD with lots of questions. We, you know, we had a great conversation. And I guess, in the course of that conversation, I, you know, I mentioned that I was an unbeliever I, you know, I think I said, at some point, you know, it would be so nice to be a Christian, like, I wish it were, I wish it went through. And I remember he sort of like cocked his head like it, like I could just see sort of the radar turned on, in a way that it was, like slightly unnerving. But we move we sort of moved on. And I’ll say to that, you know, in my 20 years as a historian and journalist who focuses primarily on evangelicalism, I mean, occasionally I source at the end of an interview, a source would would ask me about my own spiritual beliefs, I’m always open. And I always say, I hate the word seeker, but I would end up using that word. And the most they would say, maybe would be like, Oh, well, you know, I’d be praying for you or something, but but people never pursue it. And I get that. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s, you don’t want to seem pushy or rude. Now, we, I did make a comment at the end of my conversation with JD where I said, you know, if I, if I ever become Christian, like, of course, I’ll become Catholic. And that really agitated him. He’s, you said, Well, you know, if it comes to that, just promise me you’ll, you’ll give me an hour of your time just to try to talk you out of it. But we parted on very, you know, very good terms. And then you followed up with a nice email a few days later, just saying, enjoy the conversation and, you know, making some comment, like, you know, you’re you’re welcome to you don’t have to simply come to our church when you’re on assignment. And he, he referenced CS Lewis, you know, he made he made a remark about the hearing the, I think he said something like, I, you know, the, the, I can hear the patting footprints of, you know, Aslan coming up behind you, or something like very corny, Evan Jellicle. Ly, I’m sure you all use, like, all the time. And I wrote back, and I, one of the things I said was, you know, forget, forget the Narnia stuff, like actually space trilogy. And, you know, if next time you’re dealing with a person in my category, tell them to read the space trilogy. That’s so interesting. And this sparked an extensive email correspondence that rapidly began circling around the the historical claims of Christianity. And I found myself floating to him the kind of standard questions that, you know, he and people that people in his role have heard a million times that will Why Why are your miracle claims any more plausible than the Mormons or the Muslims? And you know, what, why should why should we take any of these accounts of the resurrection seriously? And to my astonishment, I would receive and reply, these very long, detailed, well sourced, you know, in some cases, footnoted email responses, taking every question I asked extremely seriously. Sometimes he would write back and say, you know, that’s a really good question. I want to I want to go look up a few things, and talk to a colleague and I’ll get back to you and then he would, you know, a few days later, he would follow up with a really thorough response and, and it dawned on me Well, a couple of things died on me one as I was being evangelized. And that was the first time in my in my life when I had I’ve never actually been evangelized second, this is a little awkward, because I was still trying to write this article from from a position of relative objective, you know, journalistic distance. So I had to sort of keep the conversation at bay a little bit, but also I was really excited because I realized as we began having this convert session that I had all these questions, and that no one had ever come alongside me like this, and made it clear that they were not going anywhere. I mean, I was just I was flummoxed, right, because he was like this fancy pastor’s very busy, but it was just very clear he was he was he was going to answer every question I had. And we also it became clear to that we were also becoming friends, which is so important. So I mean, as much as my story is really a super nerdy cerebral one that like involves reading a lot of books and stuff. It all happened in the context of, of a friendship, where we didn’t have to be, you know, kind of hammer and tongs arguing all the time. We could sort of tease each other and, you know, make fun of each other and and openly acknowledged, but inherent awkwardness of the evangelistic relationship, right? Like being able to talk about that and laugh about it together, was really crucial. So at a certain point, I mean, I saw I, you know, I finished the article. You know, it was not a geographic, but not so critical that it destroyed all my friendships.

Collin Hansen
It was very different from your previous work really? Well, I’m just wondering, in the sense of the Moeller piece felt like it was being written through a filter. The Greer one felt like this was something that he would identify with. That’s what it felt like differently journalistically. It was sort of like, oh, I recognize myself in that, not because not because there’s not a place for being critical, but because I think as journalists, we want people to be seen as they are. And we want people to be able to, at some level, understand why they view things a certain way. We don’t necessarily want them to sympathize, but we want to engender some understanding, of course, you do that as an academic, as well. And I felt like, it is so rare in journalism, to read something that is that insightful and that humane, where I felt like, that’s, that’s my heart. Like that. That’s what that that’s what I feel. That’s what I want people to know. It’s just rare for somebody to be able to do that. In the way journalism works today, like I said, not because there’s no place for criticism and object, you know, objective analysis, also is where I felt like you were you were being mean, I guess, part of this goes back to my own views about journalism that is difficult to be objective, but we can all be fair. It just felt like an incredibly fair and humane treatment of him that was unfiltered from a sort of vantage point of implied unspoken skepticism, which colors, almost all journalism, about religion.

Molly Worthen
I appreciate that very much. I wonder if I, I was. I mean, I always I think I’ve made an effort to step into the vantage point of people I’m writing about, but I was because of where I was, personally, I was really trying it on in a new in a new way. Yes. And it may be a deeper way. Yeah. And that could not help but inform the way I told the story. So, you know, once once that was kind of behind us, I asked JD you know, just give me some homework. Like tell me what some books to read. Because that’s how I that’s how I get into things. And he, well, first thing he did was to flatter me and he told me he consulted Tim Keller for advice on my case. I was very savvy of him sounds like fancy guys. No so interested in compiling this bibliography or take this seriously. So he sent me to work on anti rights giant book on the resurrection resurrection Son of God, Richard Dawkins book Jesus and the eyewitnesses. Also, I mean, I had read some Tim Keller, you know, just kind of as a reading him, you know, from the point of view of a scholar, but hadn’t really engaged with his apologetic work and so I read reason for God and spent the next few months I mean, it felt like doing another Master’s degree. I mean, I was just I was I was just obsessed I’m still am I don’t really read anything else yet. I mean, I’m still sort of constantly reading apologetics and trying to get myself up to speed and all the all the kind of spiritual questions that I feel I’m behind on but I was keeping I’m not really a diary keeper. I’m not that interested in usually I’m not that interested in like my own thoughts. But I found that I had to start keeping a very intense journal, mainly as a way of synthesizing and processing the conclusions. I was sort of reluctantly coming too, and finding, you know, especially finding anti rights account. I mean, his is very this is a very detailed, many of your listeners have probably read it but it’s like 800 pages. It’s a very intense like in the weeds study of pagan and second temple Jewish mill us seeking to explain what the idea of resurrection did and did not mean to the immediate predecessors of the first Christians and like what’s the intellectual cultural landscape in which these people were drawing? And, you know, he argues that coming back from the dead is not something that dead messiahs did at this time when there were lots of self nominated saviors running around. And certainly, it’s not something that Jesus’s followers would have expected. And he argues that, you know, if we had only the empty tomb, or only Jesus appearances by themselves, in the historical record, that would not you know, have yielded this early Christian belief in the in the Risen Messiah, but that there’s there are all these reasons to take very seriously the combination of those two, and that the resurrection becomes this very reasonable explanation for their belief. And he persuaded me that attempts by you know, people need calls kind of post enlightenment scholars to mythologize these stories, to read them as later Christian beliefs, you know, imposed on the past, to say that the witnesses in the gospels engaged in wish fulfillment based on dreams or special feelings they had they had about their experience with Jesus. But all of this is really what CS Lewis would have called chronological snobbery. And it doesn’t take seriously the the sophisticated way in which first century, Middle Eastern people navigated their world and their worldviews and I felt, I felt really personally indicted. As an historian, I had always thought of myself as very committed to taking historical subjects seriously like this is the whole reason I do this for a living, that I believe that these these people were not superior to them. But reading NT Wright, made me realize that I had been, I had been engaging in a certain degree of chronological snobbery, and I was I was reading him and kind of believing biblical scholars alongside the very skeptical end of New Testament studies, you know, really trying to put those, you know, two clashing approaches to the mystery of the resurrection in conversation. And I was increasingly perceiving among the more skeptical scholars, I don’t know, a posture toward historical subjects, that that troubled me. And I became persuaded. I mean, Richard Dawkins book was very helpful. Later on, I read Craig Weinberg’s big book on the historical reliability of the New Testament, which was really helpful for me. So, you know, I was just sort of writing writing all of this down, also reading a lot of cosmology. So kind of trying to try to get this from a couple angles, focusing on the historical claims of the Gospels, but also the big questions like, Is there even a god and probably the most important book I read on that front was Francis Collins, his book, The language of God, which made a huge impression on me, partly because he very effectively lays out some of the arguments for, you know, a theistic interpretation of Big Bang and the fine tuning of the universe and so forth. But really, it’s the autobiographical portion of that book that hit home for me, I, of course, knew about Francis Collins, but I had always assumed that he grew up in a Christian home. And when I read that, in fact, he did not that he converted as an adult in medical school here in Chapel Hill, Unc. Okay, he was living on my street, when this happened, okay. That made me I had no choice but to hear him and read him differently. I would say that if you if you would ask me a year ago, like what’s your worldview? I mean, I had for some time, at that point, been committed to saying, Well, I’m a pragmatist, and my intellectual heroes, William James, and he’s still one of my intellectual heroes. So that is, I thought of myself, I still like to think of myself as someone committed in a sincere way to engaging with new evidence, and I don’t I don’t possess the truth. Truth is this asymptote that we can never fully get to, but we can get better and better at approximating it. The more information about a world we assimilate. And so, you know, I found myself kind of creeping toward this point where I was I was going to be more than, you know, 51% persuaded that the Christian account of the resurrection is the best is the best answer we have. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe that a person could convert just by reading a lot of books. and going through a lot of footnotes, so this whole time I was I mean, I was praying I would have these you know, conversations with JD occasional zum zum calls with Tim Keller, who was super helpful and they were like a great counterpoint. So, you know, JD is a classic Baptist. It’s a probably every third conversation would end with like a personal altar call. If Jesus showed up right here, what would you say to Molly? Whereas Tim’s approach is like very different, you know? So I remember in our first conversation, at the end of it, I told him a story. He was like, you know, Molly, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, you know, you might, you might just stall out again. I don’t know if he’ll become a Christian. Like, I’ll just wonder if he was using reverse psychology.

Collin Hansen
Studied nonchalance? Yeah, exactly.

Molly Worthen
So the other thing I was continuing to do was go was worship at Summit. This is a big deal, because you have to understand my whole adult life, I’ve been a giant high church snob. Like you can’t exaggerate. You can’t, you cannot exaggerate how, how snobby a high church person I always was. And I was, I was always certain that that that was the flavor of Christian I would be if I ever managed to become a Christian. But I see now and I’ll you know, when I look back at apostles of reason, but for the most part, I think it’s a pretty empathetic book. And that is not I mean, I know Al found it snarky. I think for the most part, it’s really not snarky. But there are some exceptions to that. And one is the couple of pages that in which I described secret sensitive mega church worship is not a sympathetic pet passage in the book. So here, I found myself sort of inexplicably drawn to worship at like the, I mean, it’s summit, the mothership in North Raleigh, because there’s many campuses, the mothership is like the platonic ideal of a suburban, you know, Southern Baptist megachurch. And it’s frickin awesome. I mean, I think for me, well, there’s a few things going on here. One is I realize that for a person like me, who’s a historian, there’s a way in which the liturgical experience of high Anglo Catholic worship gives the mind so many things to do that aren’t Jesus. So my previous experience of church I mean, this sounds ridiculous to say, but I do I do think this is accurate. My previous experience of church was just not, I wasn’t thinking about Jesus, like I was just, I was thinking about Thomas Cranmer. And what a genius he was, and the Book of Common Prayer and the poetry in the stained glass windows and, and all of that, and there’s a way in which megachurch worship, you know, that the very simple kind of theologically to the point him that he, you know, the the intense 40 minute sermon, deep dive, it just, it helped me focus on what I needed to be focusing on. Also, the sort of giant anonymizing context of the mega church was exactly what I needed. It was that there was this perfect combination of anonymity like I could go, it’s dark, it’s so loud, you can’t even hear yourself singing. No one knows who you are, except that I was becoming friends with the pastor. So when I could work up the nerve, which was not every time, I could go go down in front of words and like, check in with him. So it was sort of this combination of friendship and anonymity on on my terms. And I should say to that the the crucial intervention that that JD made for me intellectually, that made it possible for me to even have this process was to help me see that I had in my previous efforts, half baked as they were to investigate Christianity. I had been I allowed myself to be overwhelmed by things that weren’t the central thing. So if you’re looking at converting to Christianity from the outside as a fully formed adult, you’re not doing in the context of a family. It’s a lot to take at once, right? So there’s all the Jesus stuff, but there’s lots of crazy stuff in the Bible. There’s all the end times, you know, prophecies, Heaven and Hell, you know, the sexual ethic that is so at odds with everything our current culture says, it’s, it’s so much at once, it is overwhelming, and you might begin to make baby steps on one point, but then you’re like, oh, man, but all that other stuff was so bananas. How I can’t do this. I’m paralyzed. What JD helped me see was that it stands or falls on the resurrection. And I could I could agree to struggle with all the other questions like they’re important for sure. They’re not the main thing. I could agree to struggle with them. And that it’s all about Romans 10 Nine, right? I mean, it’s all about confessing with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believing in your heart that He rose from the dead. And I could I couldn’t do that, because I’m a historian. And it turns out and here again, I feel so, I mean, I guess every conversion is a series of epiphanies. Once you’ve had the epiphany, you’re like, How could I’ve ever been so dumb, right? So this isn’t a category. I mean, here, I am a historian of Christianity, certainly not a first century specialist. But yeah, a historian of Christianity. And I had always conceived myself as unusually open to the claims of Christianity sincerely open. But I only realized in this process last summer that I really had not been, and that I had never there were always resources for seriously investigating the claims of this religion, which is unique, and that it makes this singular historical claim. And that that is everything. And there are the tools available to really engage with it, and make up your mind about it. And I had never done that. And I felt kind of ashamed myself. And so you know, I never I over those months, I was, I was praying for some sort of now, warm and fuzzy, mystical intervention. And it didn’t happen. I just got to the point in August, where I thought, Well, gosh, if I am a consistent pragmatist, I have to admit that I have gotten over that line of the resurrection being the best explanation for the historical evidence we have. And if that’s true, I have to change my working hypothesis of the universe. And so I went from, oh, there was this weekend where I switched how I was praying, you know, in private, from praying, basically simply for God to show Himself to me to just seeing what it was like to say, Jesus, You are my Lord and Savior. And then, you know, I met with JD the following week. And I remember that weekend, I said to my husband, I’m just I’m feeling pretty stressed out, I think I might be a Christian. And he said, Well, why are you stressed out like that? That’s not I mean, you don’t have to go on wearing a sign. You know, just, you know, what’s the big deal? And I said, you just you don’t understand. I mean, you’re dealing with these Baptist, you know, mission minded types, like you can’t. It’s not it is a big deal. So yeah, so I ended up doing, you know, making it official by doing the prayer in front of a Christian notary, in the form of JD Greer is Office, August and I got myself properly baptized. Okay,

Collin Hansen
this is where we get witnesses where we got to stop barley. Okay. All right. So you got to tell us about the baptism, you’ve been kind enough to share with me your diary entry about this. You’ve got to tell us about the baptism. This is amazing. Tell us a story.

Molly Worthen
I mean, I gosh, is it well, it was amazing to me. I will say that, in the in the spring, early in the process, I could kind of see where it was headed. No, it wasn’t there yet. But I was like, wow, I can kind of see where this train is going. But there is no freaking way. I am getting rebaptised I’ve been baptized once in a respectable fashion, you know, by a guy in a dress –

Collin Hansen
Guy in a dress, and it’s totally traumatic.

Molly Worthen
But at least it was respectable. And I remember so in my in my guys as a reporter, I had covered some it’s been Easter service. And last year, they rented out a local amphitheater. It was like 16,000 people and they had the you know, the giant Jacuzzi size tanks down front and people lined up to answer the altar call and wearing the church issued, you know, black T shirt and shorts Jesus in my place. And I was like that it’s just so gauche. But I mean, this is here’s what happened. I mean, I like my short summary of the whole this whole business is it the god read apostles reason? And he was like, I see how this has to go down. And I know exactly the way this girl has to be humbled the cutter down to size a little bit, and I have exactly the guy from job like Holy Spirit gauge at my file. It really feels that way. So it so by August, I had changed my mind about the baptism. I felt that was the necessary step of obedience. I’d also just come to really appreciate how straightforward Summit is like my whole feeling about the Jesus in my place shirt changed from you know, derisive snobbery to Yeah, that’s like the point. That’s, that’s it. So I, you know, found myself in the unexpected position of, you know, standing on stage while the worship band was playing Getting into that chlorinated tank with the former president of the SBC and getting baptized. And it was, frankly, a more, I know that Baptists don’t like to invest a lot of sacramental significance into baptism. But for me, it was a much more sacramentally powerful experience than my high church baptism, years prior. It felt it was the closest I’ve yet gotten to, you know, the kind of warm and fuzzy feelings that I imagined, you know, mature Christians have all the time that I’m jealous of. But you know, I still, I still wrestle with, with doubts constantly, all the time. And it’s not like I got to a position of certainty. One book that really helped me articulate my own frame of mind was Sheldon van Hawkins memoir, a severe mercy came out in I think, the 1970s. It’s an old book, but it kind of a classic is a he’s an American academic who writes about his his time in England getting to know CS Lewis, he and his wife convert and also about his wife’s death at a young age, but much of it’s about their conversion. And he talks about the feeling of being on a kind of an island, and looking across the chasm between himself and Jesus and the claims of Christianity, and focusing for a long time on that chasm, and what’s going to be involved in jumping across that intimidating chasm. But then he realizes that all of this time a chasm has opened up behind him, and that if he doesn’t become a Christian, he can’t just stay where he is, he has to jump back. He has to actively reject Jesus and recommit himself to this worldview, that is no longer satisfactory. And that I’ll say that sort of a piece of this that we haven’t talked about that was happening in parallel. I mean, I think part of why I was open and kind of already walking in the direction of Christianity before all this happened is because I’ve become increasingly, I don’t know, dissatisfied and alienated with sort of the aspects of the world I’m in and secular academia and I came to see that I was treating secular academia as my church, and wanted from it, things that it cannot deliver. And coming to that realization, that was sort of the push factor that complemented these pull factors, you might say, hmm,

Collin Hansen
let’s, we’ve got a little bit of time remaining. And I do want to talk a little bit more about that. Let’s start with this, though. First. Are your friends and family and colleagues? happy for you? That’s their feeling?

Molly Worthen
Gosh, well, you know, it’s, it’s been hard for everybody. I’m, I’m the only Christian in my family, I have still very few Christian friends. And I did feel I mean, I began to really reckon with that, as I was going through my conversion process, because it was very lonely, I still feel pretty, pretty lonely. And it’s been kind of it’s been a little bit traumatic for, for them and for me, right? I mean, to go from being a piston epistemologically aligned and occupying the same framework for deciding what’s important deciding, know, where you where you find evidence, and how you interpret that evidence, to being in quite radical disagreement on these fundamental metaphysical questions. Is a is a startling thing. And, you know, it’s not that I’m surrounded by atheists who are, you know, kind of, always in a very aggressive anti Christian posture, it’s more that I think a lot of people in my milieu are, you know, kind of comfortable just letting these questions ride and, and not really investigate them. And I was surprised by how many conversations I had would have with colleagues. So I always thought it was totally secular. I mean, these are people who had never, never said anything to me, that would indicate any interest in religion. And they would say, oh, yeah, of course, I believe there’s a God cannot be a god. And I would say, What do you mean? I mean, how can you just let that like when you want to know what’s going on? So you want to know what’s true? And I, I’ve realized, too, I’ll say, you know, it’s not like I then turn and have conversations with a few Christians I know and it’s all All, you know, strawberries and buttercups, and in total, like my mouth, because I feel in many ways, like I’m a space alien, among Christians, to, most of the Christians I’ve come to know are people who grew up in a church, many of whom never really had a period of significant doubt and wrestling. Certainly, you know, didn’t have to go down the path of like, very intense, you know, note taking research, you know, spending weekends on, you know, the academic journal databases reading the roundtable on anti rights resurrection book, which I did, if I recommend it very fruitful. Like, they don’t like, what’s wrong, they’re not, they’re not preoccupied with the same questions. And I find that frustrating, because I just think, How can you? How can you soldier along in this thing, if you haven’t really investigated it. And so I have had the experience of feeling kind of a disconnection with the whole span of most people I’ve talked to about these things, and I, it’s made me when I talk with Christians, it’s made me realize my own intense spiritual immaturity, and I’m still kind of hanging on, you know, God made a path for me to become a Christian, based on who I am, which is this, you know, sort of very not postmodern, but deeply modern, you know, empirically minded historian who likes to have the illusion of control by reading a lot of books about something, and, and he made a path for me to become a Christian in that way. But obviously, there’s so many other dimensions. I mean, here’s the other thing, too. I mean, I finally had to accept what a number of Christians Tim, Tim and JD, among them said to me, which is, you say, you are continually, you know, praying for more of feeling of assurance, and and, and this kind of sub rational confidence in this mystical sense. And you’re not getting that, well, have you considered that what you’re asking for is actually the relationship of faith. And that just as you know, you cannot become friends with a human without taking a certain risk, and investing yourself, before having the experience of that relationship, maybe you have to take that leap. And so, you know, that was part of my part of what kind of got me to the point where I could become a Christian. But I still feel sort of defective. You know, I still, and I know like, a lot of it is just about patience. And I think I cope with that insecurity, and that fragility, by probably talking more than I should, especially to my poor, long suffering husband, about about the claims of Christianity and forcing some Keller books on him in a way that is not always productive. And he’s a historian as well, but he was not as enraptured with NT, right? He grew up Catholic, if I had, if I had done the respectable thing and become a Catholic, a lot of this would, would be easier, I will. And this was maybe the last point I’ll make about friends and family, which is that it is very hard to get over the hurdle of the Southern Baptist mega church context in which this all has happened in and many, many people in my world are very focused on that. And want to know why, why that it’s so it’s so baffling. And I mean, on one hand, it’s incidental. But on the other hand, it’s actually for my story, it’s very important. And I think actually, I could not have become a Christian in any other context. But but at the same time, it’s not about the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s about it’s about the resurrection. And, you know, I have have said to my husband, like, I wonder if, if part of what’s going on is that it is easier to stay focused on the kind of culture wars context than to focus on what has actually happened, which is that you know, this this person that you’ve spent your life with, that you are, you know, really well with whom you have always occupied the same epistemological framework, has suddenly decided that this guy rose from the dead and is the son of God. And that’s much harder to talk about. So we’re, you know, it’s still early days, and we’re all doing our best, but it’s kind of it’s been hard.

Collin Hansen
What do you want you to know Molly beyond a shadow of a doubt you’re, you’re you’re not remotely defect. Just as a brother in Christ and, and friend here, I just, you’re not remotely defective there. I mean, I’ve been a Christian since 1997. And I think we we long together for that, that relationship of faith. But what we also long for ultimately is to see Christ face to face. You know, not not through a glass dimly, but a face to face. That’s where that longing is. It’s because as Lewis would say we were made for another world, made for another world. And that’s that longing. You’re not defective, you are sanctified. And one day by Christ Jesus by the power of His Holy Spirit, you’ll be glorified. And that’s what we long for in there. So, just wanted to encourage you with,

Molly Worthen
I really appreciate that and what you say about longing, and it has been something I’ve drawn a lot of comfort in. I’ve been reading a lot of John Owen. I mean, I’ve been one of the things I’ve been doing is kind of rediscovering the Puritans now that now that I see that they’re focused on Jesus, who thought I knew a lot of other Puritans, I teach them all this I, let’s put that in the category of embarrassing. But yeah, go ahead. Oh, when Owen talks about, you know, some of what he says is intimidating to me, because he’s describing a sense of assurance that I don’t have. But he talks about the sense of longing and desire and what he calls a spiritual mindedness. And it has given me comfort, because I think, well, I don’t, I might not have this kind of, when I hear the, the lovely woman in my Bible study, say, you know, God really showed up or I really felt the presence of God in this moment. I don’t have that, but I have a longing and, and I have the sort of magnetism, to reading scripture, especially the gospels that I never had before. And I’m like, that is new, like, that is not me. There’s nothing rational or sort of scholarly about that. And it also helped me when I was thinking through Well, all of the kind of atheistic evolutionary but you know, psychology explanations one can offer for religious behavior, the the most glaring, there’s, there are a lot of flaws. And in that account, I’ve come to see but maybe the most glaring one is that there’s no good account for that feeling of longing. That feeling of of connecting with this intelligence beyond us. And that that is something I hang on to when I when I’m feeling like I’m, I’m just like, Is my conversion real? I don’t meet people who converted by reading a lot of footnotes, maybe my maybe I’m wrong about all of this. I hang on to that.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, it reminds me of, there’s a scene at the end of Field of Dreams where the skeptical brother of the wife, obviously, you know, they go through this traumatic experience, and suddenly he sees he’s like when it all these ballplayers just show up? I’m imagining you reading the Puritan saying, Wait, when did all this Jesus show all of this appear? Where did this come from? How did I miss this? All those years? And that’s, that’s the way it works. I mean, that’s the way it is in the Bible. How could the disciples have been so confused? How could How could the family members of Jesus had been so confused? And yet, once I was blind? Now, I see. That’s the paradigm that we’re working with here. So I just love imagining that. And do you think your students experience you differently? As a teacher?

Molly Worthen
Well, honestly, I mean, I don’t My policy is to not say anything about my personnel. And this has always been my policies. I don’t say anything about my personal views in the context of like a big lecture course. But if I get a question, I say, we’ll come to office hours. And in the context of office hours in a conversation, I always tell them, whatever they want to know. But you know, it’s too early to say, kind of what the consequences will be, I guess, I’ve already been really surprised and excited about the opportunities for a slightly different kind of mentorship. I mean, there is inherent whatever your metaphysics, if you are a professor, there is a pastoral dimension to your job. So I mean, I think I’ve long you know, talk with students and try to mentor them in the big life questions. But now there’s this category of of mentoring that I can do, this is a way I can be useful with students who are investigating Christianity or, or struggling with their faith commitments. And it’s exciting to find that I can. This is an insight I’ve had about evangelism, right. But it’s not like this special category of, of aggressive argument. It’s just telling people about this crazy thing that happened to me. Yeah. And that that’s actually evangelism. And so that has changed. I don’t, I don’t really see this, altering the way I teach or right I mean, I was before I became a Christian invested in helping my students or my readers who are over the audience’s understand worldviews that are not their own. And that doesn’t mean you have to turn off your own kind of critical judgment and your own moral framework. But your first job before you activate that is, is to try to understand what the world is like from the perspective of another human. And also, in my, in my teaching, I’ve always tried to take advantage of moments where I can point out to students, how a believers account of a historical event comes alongside and is different from although not mutually exclusive with a non believing scholars interpretation. You know, when we talk about the Great Awakening, we can talk about, you know, here’s how Jonathan Edwards understood what was happening in Northampton, here are some of the kind of theories that scholars have offered about the way the economics and in the in the kind of the cultural political moment, perhaps set the stage for that. And if you are a Christian, these two things are not mutually exclusive, you can absolutely investigate them both and take them both seriously. And, and so that’s, that’s going to remain something I’m committed to doing. So I might, you know, I don’t I’m still learning what what all of this means. And I do, I am aware that there is this kind of, maybe double standard, in in how we judge the question of a bias and objectivity. And part of how I scan to readers in secular magazines hasn’t always been as the sort of sympathetic outsider who has this kind of baffling interest in conservative Christians, but she’s not one of them, so we can kind of trust her. And that that takes on a different castes, you know, now that I have what gone native, I guess. And I, you know, I had a very interesting conversation with my editor at the New York Times, my last article for them was about miracles and about efforts to prove scientifically demonstrate claims of divine healing. And the article is not in no way, a personal I don’t say anything about myself. It’s not, not my style. He said, as we were going back and forth about the draft, he said, you know, you really should, you’ll have to say at some point that you believe this stuff now. And I said, Well, that’s interesting. If I were an atheist, would you would you ask me to make it clear to readers that I think all of this is hallucination, and that those are my presuppositions? Any he paused and said, I think I think I would, but I think I think my question, gave him pause. And then, and then he later reversed himself and decided, he agreed with me that this piece was not about me. And I didn’t, I shouldn’t put myself into it. And it wasn’t necessary. And, and the way I saw it, I was simply presenting this reporting that has nothing to do with the author’s presuppositions. So I don’t know I hope I get to the point where I can, I can talk openly about these things when it’s appropriate. And I keep them off the table when they’re distracting, but I’m just fumbling my way along, I don’t really know what’s gonna look like

Collin Hansen
what I was thinking, Molly, not so much necessarily about the content of your teaching, but simply your, your passion, the the emotional dimensions to it, because obviously, anybody watching this or listening to this can tell what a gifted teacher you are. And yet I see so often with with people who come to faith, they may or may not recognize that their their countenance changes, their attitude changes, there is an evident joy. And so that’s part of what I wonder about with students is they just in wondering, they probably do just perceive differences in you. Of course, he often will have students for just one semester or another. So that’s hard for them to be able to track but no doubt that something that that people will see in your life. I knew Molly to set aside 90 minutes, you warned me to set aside a good bit of time to talk and I think everybody has been blessed by it. I have a feeling we’ve got another 90 minutes ahead, which is some of the directions you’ve hinted at here. But I do want to give you one last opportunity, a question here. Why do you want people to know your story?

Molly Worthen
I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk it through with a seasoned Christian like you. Because as I think I said at the outset, I I still can’t believe that it happened. I think I have the self serving motive of hoping that sharing my story with your listeners will introduce me to a few more Christian friends. I’ve made a few really important Christian friends over the past year but I still feel isolated. I am still looking for people who can mentor me because you know, in some ways i i bring I bring to my new Christian identity, a lot of a certain kind of knowledge, but it is only it’s a very narrow kind of knowledge. I I wrestled with the question of whether to talk publicly about my conversion for some months, uncertain about, you know, how it would be perceived, especially by secular people. But while I’m still a little bit weary in some contexts, I’ve decided to stop overthinking it. And when people ask me what happened, to tell them, and to trust, to trust that not just in sort of in divine providence, but also to trust in the general, good goodness, I mean, I shouldn’t say goodness, I’m a good Calvinist, I believe we’re all terribly depraved and all that, absolutely. But that to trust in people’s judgment, right. And that, and that, the best policy is to just be candid and honest. And it all worked out. And I shouldn’t, you know, I shouldn’t worry about overly much anyway, about how people do or do not hear parts of my story, I should just, I should just tell the story. And I do think it’s helpful, especially to younger Christians in academia, or, you know, graduate students who are kind of investigating Christianity and are uncertain about it. I feel a burden. You know, as a tenured professor with relative job security, I feel a burden to bring my whole self. And that doesn’t mean, I don’t recognize that, you know, there there are times when it’s appropriate in the context of a secular public university to talk about faith, but then there are many contexts where it’s not. And that’s a whole separate conversation we could have, but I, I’ve just decided that the policy of honesty and openness is the best one for everybody involved. And plus, it’s super interesting. I just, I love, I love talking about this, these questions of the process of how how a person changes her mind, right? It’s very rare in life. Forget the specific religious context, any context, it’s so rare, to truly change your mind about something. It is a crazy experience. It is. It’s bewildering. And I just I’m hungry to talk about that. And I’m hungry, to just to be able to talk and talk publicly and right publicly about some of these theological questions, not giving up my my historical and journalistic work, by any means. And so that entails speaking honestly, about and openly about my own convictions.

Collin Hansen
Why no malice was one of the things that I wanted to talk about. But we’ll get to that in our next 90 minutes there about some of the dynamics of academic freedom, and viewpoint, diversity and whatnot. But it’s one of the things that I’ve observed for a long time is that, simultaneously, I can understand every bit of the agony and difficulty of bringing your whole self as a religious believer as a born again, Christian into that place. At the same time, it’s also a self fulfilling prophecy. The less honest you are, the worse that it gets, not just for you, but also for everyone else. Everyone else who might share those same beliefs or even their own beliefs that are different, that they also don’t feel safe to be able to talk through. So well, Molly, this has been a joy, to see the joy of the Lord in your face, to hear it in your voice. To be able to hear that story to be able to revel in God’s delicious ironies. In so many different ways, I just feel somewhat uniquely positioned to be able to celebrate it with you, because of just some of those parallel dimensions to our lives. And but more than anything else, just to be able to celebrate God’s grace in your life. And to remember that in our scholarship and in our writing, and in our teaching, are investigating, you just done such a good job of taking us back to the basics. Like, what’s it all about? It’s about Jesus. God become man raised from the dead, took our place on that cross, but triumphed over death and that resurrection, ascended into heaven and sits now interceding on our behalf. Man, that’s just what it’s all about. So, through all the inquiries through all the agonizing through all the awkwardness, thanks for testifying to God’s grace. Molly.

Molly Worthen
Thank you for giving me a chance to fumble my way through it. I really appreciate it.