I was in a place of spiritual apathy, a vaguely unhappy but lazy agnostic. I was doing my usual reporter thing. He then followed up via email, and we got into this extended email exchange that turned into a venue in which I found myself asking questions focused mainly on the historical claims of the gospels and the life of Jesus and the resurrection. I mean, I just found myself obsessively reading about it with an increasing feeling of excitement. Could it be that actually there are books out there that might make it possible for me to suspend my disbelief in this story? I just found myself wanting to continue visiting this church. Even though it was totally, it was totally contrary to how I thought of myself. I felt like I was caught in like the tractor beam of the Death Star or something.
SPEAKER_01Today in 2024, who is Jesus to you?
SPEAKER_02Oh man, that is such an evangelical question.
SPEAKER_01Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. We're in a series called The Way Back. Is there a way back to Christian faith in our post-Christian moment? We happen to think so, and somebody else who thinks so is Molly Worthen. Molly is a journalist and associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to publications like uh The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. And she's a recent adult convert to Christianity who has found faith in the last place that she expected, a Southern Baptist mega church. Molly, it's so great to have you with us.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, give me a picture of who Molly Worthen is. I'm gonna pick uh uh an age completely at random, age 17 growing up, and I want you to paint a picture for us. Who is Molly Worthen, age 17? What is home life like? What is school life like? And I'm gonna tack on the extra spiritual question at the end. If somebody asked you who Jesus was, age 17, what would you say? But first of all, paint the picture about Molly.
SPEAKER_02Gosh, that's a great way to start. Well, uh Molly at age 17 was, I suppose, a high school senior in a medium-sized suburb of Chicago, about 20 miles west of the city called Glen Ellen, Illinois. Uh I was totally focused on the academic and extracurricular tasks immediately in front of me. I wasn't even particularly anxious about getting into university until I really had to be. I was just uh totally enamored with uh forensics, speech team, uh, not debate, but rather uh I did events, so it's almost like track for your mouth. Wow. Um, where uh you know I would uh construct an argument and perform it at uh you know in front of in front of judges, this sort of thing, and I loved that. Um and I was I was really a uh passionate student of history and literature. I was a big nerd.
SPEAKER_01And were your parents instilling this in you? Like what what kind of household was the was was your household?
SPEAKER_02My parents were totally supportive, but they put no pressure on me. I don't really know uh where it came from. Um and I suppose I forgot to to uh address the Jesus question. If someone had asked me, in in high school I had no interest in religion. Uh I grew up two miles, my house was two miles from Wheaton College, which is one of the most prominent evangelical colleges in the United States. And I was kind of dimly aware of it as that strange school where students weren't allowed to dance or something like that. But I I really didn't, I couldn't have told you what an evangelical was. Um I had been uh coerced into going to the local Presbyterian church once as a young child because our very lovely Presbyterian neighbors kept inviting us, and my I think my parents acquiesced this one time to be polite. And I I remember really resenting it for no particular, for no good reason. I'm sure it was a very sweet service. So if anything, I had um a sort of vague and unfounded animosity to toward religion and no real interest in it.
SPEAKER_01Okay. And the person of Jesus himself, like if somebody kind of nailed your color if you were to nail your colours to the mast on, like who who was he to you? Would that would that even register as a question?
SPEAKER_02When I was seventeen, I suppose I would have been I would have I would have had enough awareness to say he's the he's the the center of this religion, and my family puts up a tree and exchanges presents on this day associated with his birth, but I I I don't believe that in until I got to university I gave really more than five minutes thought to to the question of Jesus or the the claims of Christianity.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So tell me, what did you study at university, at college?
SPEAKER_02Aye, thanks for translating that into American.
SPEAKER_01We're both contextualizing for each other.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Uh gosh, uh I started out with a kind of great books program. I fell in love with Russian language and history. For a good portion of my time at university, I was a religious studies major, although ultimately I graduated with a history major. And I took quite a lot of classes in theology and uh American history as well as Russian history. So I was a bit all over the place, but very much in the humanities.
SPEAKER_01Yes. So you and you're a professor of history now. Um what is it about history that that so has gripped you?
SPEAKER_02I think I fell in love with the endeavor of trying to get as close as possible as we can, using the evidence available, to the worldview and experience of humans who lived in very different times and places. It's the same reason I'm a journalist. I just I really uh love trying to, you know, respecting the fact that that ultimately there is a sort of asymptote we can't pass between our own experience and that of any other human being. Uh I just love the project of trying to get as close as possible to that understanding. And, you know, you can't really, you can't fall in love with history in the abstract. You have to have a specific way into it. And for me, it it happened to be a course on Russian history, and I can't, I'm not sure I could have articulated at the time what I found so compelling about Russian history. It probably resonated with some reading I had already done in Russian literature. I'd been exposed to Dostoevsky in high school. Um and I think I became entranced by the little bits and pieces I was getting of Orthodox Christianity. It was just so different from, you know, the kind of half-baked ideas I had, which were very much uh rooted in Western conceptions of uh, you know, spirituality, faith, and reason, uh, the human person. And uh I went to a college that had many pots of uh money available to undergraduates to do kind of interesting things for the summer. And I had a professor who told me about this uh somewhat obscure Russian sect called the Old Believers, uh, who broke away from the main body of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century, and you know, they were persecuted first by the Tsars and then by the communists. There's a diaspora uh all over the world now, really. But there was this little community of them that had settled kind of in the middle of nowhere in northern Alberta and Canada. And I just I became really fascinated by the idea of this community, and I applied for some money and ended up spending the summer uh living quite close to that uh that community. I couldn't live with them because of rules they have regarding purity and boundaries. Um however, I you know I became friends with girls my age and eventually won enough trust to participate in things like chicken slaughtering, and I went to their really marathon, you know, pre-dawn church services. And that was that was like that was a deep dive, my first deep dive in into the world of people very different from myself, uh, who also had uh, you know, they had they they knew what they were about. Uh not not that they didn't have plenty of tensions and you know every community does, but uh it was really powerful, I think, to be in contact with um a worldview that at least from the perspective of a naive, you know, 20-year-old, however old I was, uh, seemed just seamless and confident in the way that my, you know, uh sort of fragmented and not particularly self-reflective secularism wasn't. I think I was part of me was envious.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yes. So you didn't you didn't feel like um you didn't feel like you dodged a bullet because you weren't a person of faith. You you felt like they hit the jackpot in in one sense. Was there something in you that yeah, absolutely envied them, but you also did not feel like you were constitutionally able to be a person of faith. Would that be fair to say?
SPEAKER_02That's exactly right. In in college, it wasn't just the old believers. I mean, I was meeting for the first time really, I I was having serious conversations with people in a range of religious communities, you know, various, very serious uh Jewish friends, Greek Orthodox, Catholic. And uh I I found myself very jealous of the their answers to life's big questions as well as their their sense of community, but I felt I wasn't I wasn't wired in a way that gave me access. I I'd made some very half-baked attempts to go to the local Greek Orthodox Church. You know, it wasn't, it was maybe typical of a kind of immigrant Greek Orthodox congregation in that it was not very accessible to outsiders, they didn't post their uh service times, things like that. I was I was too afraid. Uh but I I was really envious. And I I think that much of my studies from that point on uh were really about, and I was always self-aware. This is not um an only an insight I'm having in retrospect. They were a way of sidling up alongside this way of being in the world that I felt I couldn't do myself, but I admired.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah. You you're glad that it it existed in the world, but you couldn't place yourself in into those shoes. Um you you became very interested in in in a historical sense in in religion in North America in particular. Um how did that come about?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell I was interested in religion in all kinds of contexts. I mean, from an intellectual perspective, I I would have been really happy specializing in medieval history, but I also wanted to be a journalist. And it's not very easy to sell magazine and newspaper articles to editors about 14th century Carthusians, right? So I was being, at some level, I was being pragmatic. And too, I think I I had a kind of natural tropism toward the history of ideas, and so maybe that meant that I it never occurred to me that I could study, you know, the 20th century without going way, way back and tracing the roots of all these things and getting to learn about all that older history and that broader, you know, global story, even if my focus was on the American context, because I needed to have some kind of expertise that secular editors would consider relevant. Um so when I went into uh my graduate program, I mean, I I had I had this kind of funny back knowledge of uh orthodoxy, but I didn't really know much at all about American evangelicalism, my my purported focal point.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell And what are the sorts of things that we would uh discover if we did a search for the the bylines of Molly Worthen in in terms of the publications that you've written for, and the New York Times and the New Yorker and that sort of thing? Um, and in terms of the books that you've published, what what kind of areas have you written about?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell I have written pretty broadly on contemporary American religion and politics. I write a lot about culture, wars, dynamics, uh, with a focal point on um American evangelicalism in particular, but sometimes I stray out of that zone. Uh there's the odd article on topics that just caught my interest, like you know, the history of socialized medicine in North America and why it is that the United States has gone on this uh rather idiosyncratic track compared to the UK and Canada and peer countries. Um, my first book is not on any of this stuff. It's it's a biography of a man who had a long career in the Foreign Service and high levels of the State Department posted all over the world before coming to teach at Yale, which is where I met him as an undergraduate, and he had this tremendous archive that he let me look through. So that's really diplomatic history. My last book uh is a history of American evangelical intellectual life since World War II. It's sort of about the theological infighting that uh helps explain why it is that despite the quite remarkable diversity of conservative evangelicalism in the United States, there's one fairly narrow strand that's come to be its public face. Why is that? And so that you know gave me a chance to really learn learn the landscape of this world that now apparently I am in as a participant observer or something.
SPEAKER_01And what would you have said? Let's let's say you go on vacation to the United Kingdom and you're not yet a Christian, and somebody just says to you, Oh, American evangelicals? What what is the story with American evangelicals? Who are they? Are are they a voting bloc? Are they a spiritual movement? Like w how how are you gonna start to help people from outside the United States to get their get their hands on this this subject of of US evangelicalism? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_02And you're asking how would I have attempted to do that before before.
SPEAKER_01And maybe there's no maybe there's no great change, but yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I a part of why I was attracted to this to the study of American evangelical politics and history is because even before I knew uh much of anything uh about evangelicalism, I I had this sense that uh the media, the mainstream media treatment of American evangelicals was somewhat superficial and black and white in a way that didn't do justice to the complexity. Um I suppose I I f I feel that about the media coverage of most human communities, although I actually think that that uh coverage of of American religion is is is pretty good, at least in certain in certain publications today. Uh so gosh, I think my impulse uh for better and for worse has always been to take uh the ideas of human communities very seriously. Maybe I take them too seriously. So while it it's it's impossible to talk about evangelicals or or any group of people without paying a lot of attention to socioeconomic class and race and gender and all of these things, I I think I have a tendency to say to somebody trying to understand a community from the outside, pay attention to what these people say they believe until you have a reason to know that you know they're operating in bad faith or they're on a campaign to fool themselves and other people. Give any human community the benefit of the doubt and really investigate what they're saying about the world. Uh so I I guess that that that kind of advice and caveat, that's framed how I try to write about really any group I write about.
SPEAKER_01Where do you get that kind of open-mindedness? Because it's rare as hens teeth in a social media age where we are all tribalized and where we all do nutpicking, you know. Nitpicking is is is taking issue with something very small. Nutpicking is choosing the nuttiest example of your opponent's worldview and saying that that is representative of the whole. And we're very we're very good at nutpicking just naturally, and we're being trained in nutpicking in a social media age. Um, but what you're describing there is is very, very open-minded. Um where do you get that from?
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's interesting. That's very nice of you to put it that way. I hadn't really thought of it as I mean, I like to think I'm open-minded, but um I think of it as much as a I my my focus on ideas, I mean, it can also be a handicap. You know, it I I think it it has um made me put sometimes too much confidence in the internal consistency of people's worldviews, including my own, maybe, in a way that's actually not how humans operate. You know, I I I don't know where my tendency to um treat people as floating brains came from, but it's it's as much of a problem as it is, as it is a good thing. Uh, I suppose it is, though, I mean, maybe why it strikes you as open-minded is is because um, I mean, it's an it's an asset if you're trying to do reporting and you're trying to get people to in a community that you're not a part of to trust you. Um, because it means that your MO has to be do my homework, uh, read as much of what you have published or or you know said, put out into the world about about what you believe before I approach you, learn your history, and then uh ask you to sit down with me to answer questions uh about your ideas. And I think generally people from any background like to have that kind of conversation, and maybe it's not, especially in our current moment when everyone has a sense of what tribe they're in and what team they're on. Uh that's that's a conversation that we're invited to have less and less. Uh so it's really fun to have that. I mean, I'm we're I think I'm trying to kind of bring that, I'm working with colleagues in my own university to try to bring that emphasis back into our classrooms to the extent that it's been missing a little bit. Uh so uh that I that I guess is the frame of my curiosity, but that's not to say that it doesn't have its blind spots.
SPEAKER_01Sure, sure. But it it is like yeah, there's the curiosity, there's the empathy, there's the wanting to understand a worldview from the inside, and there's that that finding a point of common connection. Um which yeah, are are wonderful traits of a uh of a journalist, but you know, wonderful traits in in terms of building community as well. So with all that, you first show up at the Summit Church in North Carolina. What took you to the church where you now are for the first time?
SPEAKER_02Okay, well, uh gosh. So in terms of my personal spirit, I was not there uh for personal spiritual reasons. That's for that's for sure. I had uh made a half-baked, very earnest but unsuccessful attempt to get myself churched in graduate school in the context of a high Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian uh parish. Um, but that just I don't know, it didn't take. Uh I don't know the right way to put it. I had gone through a few phases since then of um attending church, always, always like very true to your caricature, right, of the kind of snobby uh East Coast professor, always in a very high church context. Uh I had very strong opinions on liturgy, even if I I couldn't decide what I thought about the existence of God, let alone Jesus. I had very strong opinions about you know what sort of outfits the priest should wear and what was respectable and what was just not. And uh but but by the time uh we're talking about the time I found my way to that uh church um in in Raleigh, North Carolina, I was in a place of uh spiritual apathy generally. I mean, I I was sort of a an unhappy, a vaguely unhappy but lazy agnostic who thought that eventually, like surely I wouldn't be an agnostic for my whole life, just didn't seem tenable. Uh surely eventually I would get my act together and I would become Catholic or some variety of Anglican or maybe Orthodox. Go back to my seeker roots, but I was not doing anything about it. Uh I I would have and still do uh describe my sort of epistemology as pragmatist in the William James sense. Um he's been a hero of mine for for many years. Uh this is the uh early 20th century American philosopher, part of the famous literary James family, um, whose whole he was one of the pioneers of modern psychology, uh and not a person of traditional faith himself, but very, very open, considered himself very, very open to a whole range of human. Metaphysical, supernatural claims. And his feeling was we have to constantly be aware of the limits of our own access to reality and hold our own truth claims very provisionally and be continually open to revising our theory of the world based on new evidence. And that sounds lovely. And of course, it's like it's not how we're wired, you know, by evolution or whatever, right? We're wired with our bias toward confirmation of our existing prejudices and all these things. But in terms of something to aspire to, I really liked William James. I was continuing to do journalism alongside my ordinary professor work here at the University of North Carolina. So I was working on a magazine article, this is in the spring of 2022, about this local megachurch that I had been aware of for my whole time teaching at UNC because they've got a big presence on our campus among our students. They're a giant growing church. Their pastor had recently stepped down from his term as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. So I thought, oh, this would make, you know, this is a good chance to get to know this church and talk about megachurches and also fold it into a broader look at the politics of the Southern Baptist world. So I was doing my usual reporter thing. I had a number of conversations with people who attended the church, staff members. I was learning, you know, more and more about the intricate dynamics of Southern Baptist controversies as they stood in 2022. And was increasingly aware that this church, even by even by the standards of the Southern Baptist Convention, was really obsessed with evangelism. I mean, Southern Baptists are pretty serious evangelists in general, but this church has sent out more missionaries internationally than any other church in the SBC. I mean, every year for the past 10 years or something. And they have planted uh more than 500 new churches in the United States and abroad. And just every every person I talked to who was associated with the church was just so single-mindedly focused on evangelism, it made a big impression on me. Um so that's those were sort of the the things on my mind as I went into my you know my my the pivotal conversation, I suppose, which was a conversation I had with the pastor whose name is JD Greer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And so not exactly a high liturgical church with bells and smells and incense. I'm imagining rock band and t-shirts and ripped jeans and that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_02Yes, maybe not ripped jeans, uh but but yes, exactly. I mean they're they're they're the the platonic, whatever your cliche is of a suburban megachurch, that's that's accurate. Although they don't have a coffee shop in the lobby. That's the one piece of the of the parody that that they don't have, I would say.
SPEAKER_00Hi folks, it's Thomas Thoroughgood here, media producer at Speak Life. You might recognise my voice as the guy who does the filler bits on the podcast. It's part of my job to think of how we can include you more in the work of Speak Life and bring you behind the scenes, if you will. And so we have a very exciting thing called the Speak Life Discord server. It's an online platform where you can interact with other Speak Life supporters and the Speak Life team. We have bonus content, creative theological discussion, and lots of fun along the way. So if you want to join that, you can just go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash give. Okay, back to the podcast.
SPEAKER_01So you left after the first Sunday and you thought, perhaps I have enough to go away and write my article? Or like, but but what was it that kept you coming back?
SPEAKER_02Well, I I mean I I I went to uh services at the main, it's one of these mega churches where there's like the mothership, you know, the main campus that then broadcasts uh the sermon to all these other campuses. So I, you know, I went to the mothership once, I went to one of the satellite campuses. Uh, but the the key thing that happened was uh that I I met the pastor, and um that interview was when it was, it was maybe a little bit longer than normal. Uh he was a better listener than a lot of these guys are. I mean, I I should say I I have a fair amount of experience interviewing kind of evangelical warlord types, you know, like these guys who uh very conservative theology and they've built some sort of empire. Um, and they're always like very uh courteous to someone like me, um, but not not that interested in, I suppose, really having a two-way conversation, which is fine. I mean, I'm I'm usually there as a journalist. But uh there was a little bit more back and forth in this conversation I had with JD, and it it came out. I mean, I I don't go out of my way to conceal uh my own views. I I never have done that. I mean, it's always been my practice when someone I was interviewing asked me about my own faith. I would just say, you know, I'm not a Christian. I'm open to it, I'm envious. Sometimes I would even say I'm envious of it. Um, but that I found myself volunteering maybe a little bit more about my own views than was typical. And he then followed up uh via email, and we got into this extended email exchange that turned into a venue in which I found myself asking questions focused mainly on the historical claims of the gospels and the life of Jesus and the resurrection. Questions that I mean I hadn't been, it's not like I'd been wrestling with these questions in a self-conscious way. Uh clearly they were there, like just below the surface. I I had questions about how the Christian claims stack up uh alongside the claims that Mormons make about Joseph Smith or Muslims make about the Prophet Muhammad. I mean, all the basic questions, right, that I'm sure he'd heard loads of times. Um, but he he took the questions with sort of shocking seriousness. I mean, he would uh write me back these really long, um, well-researched, often footnoted answers. Sometimes he would say, you know, I would, I would fire off some half-baked question. I mean, I wasn't well read in this stuff. And he would say, you know, that's a really good question. Let me let me ask some colleagues and look at some books and get back to you. So he gave me the feeling of taking my questions very seriously. And as this conversation was unfolding, I just found myself wanting to continue visiting this this church, even though it was totally, it was totally contrary to how I thought of myself. I felt like I was caught in like the tractor beam of the Death Star or something. I mean, I'd always, if I'm honest, I mean, even though I I had certainly made fun of mega church worship in the past, I at some level I'd always secretly liked it. I mean, I don't think it's hard. It's hard to go to uh a mega church worship service when the you know the the band is is rocking out, like the room is thumping, it's dark, and you know, that music is like it's it's the same, you know, syncopation and uh, you know, often the arrangements are similar to the music that does well, you know, in the in the mainstream pop music world, right?
SPEAKER_01Like it's cold planet, but yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So so uh I'm not ashamed any longer. I once was, I'm not ashamed to admit that I get affected by it. Um and the preaching was really good. Uh was uh JD and his colleagues, because there's a number of pastors on staff, um, you know, they they're not like it's not like so erudite that it alienates people, but I mean rarely a sermon would go by. And these are, you know, these are these are Reformed Baptist sermons, right? So we're talking like 45 minutes, you know, it's like a it's a great lecture. Uh rarely a lecture would go by without you know, quote quotations of uh and explication of Greek terms, and I just I felt like I was really learning stuff. It was interesting. And this is this is I'm continuing to go as I'm continuing to kind of have these conversations with this pastor. And at a certain point I said to him, you know, I'm I'm an academic, I uh like to learn about things by just reading the the best stuff on the topic. Can you just give me some homework? And so he recommended that I read some books. Uh we were focused on the resurrection. And the main, I mean, there were there were a number of books uh that were important, but but the central one that he recommended was uh N.T. Wright's giant book on the resurrection, the resurrection and the Son of God.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So you like a channel.
SPEAKER_02So I can tell you Yeah, well, uh I so I mean I I just found myself, so this is the summer of 2022. I mean, it was it was it was akin to doing a master's thesis or something. I mean, I just found myself uh obsessively reading about it uh with a an increasing feeling of excitement. Like, could it be, could it be that actually there are books out there that that might make it possible for me to suspend my disbelief in this in this story? And I I'm not someone who keeps a journal generally. Uh I don't find my interior life that interesting, but I found I had no choice but to start keeping a diary, uh recording my reading and my kind of grudging reactions to it. The key about this for me, because again, you know, I thought of myself as someone who was who had investigated Christianity, who, who had sincerely attempted to become a Christian, who was much more open, I thought, than the usual secular person to the claims of Christianity. But I think in the past I had been overwhelmed by all of the dimensions of the Christian worldview that are so, if you're not a Christian, so bananas, right? And this is true anytime you're looking at a at a uh any religious worldview, I suppose. You know, there's there's just a lot that is at odds with our uh 21st century kind of post-Enlightenment uh empiricist or uh attempting to be empiricist worldview. So it's not just Jesus, you know, it's it's all the miracle claims in the Bible, it's the end times, uh heaven and hell, the you know, ethic of sexuality that's totally at odds with with mainstream secular ideas. It's just it's paralyzing. It's like, where do I even start? And if I if I begin to you know tug on this strand, I I I quickly you know get distracted by these other crazy things, and then I and then I'm back to square one and I think how how can I even take any of this seriously? What my conversations with JD and the reading, he and I should say uh Tim Keller also, JD put me in touch with Tim Keller, um, what they they put me on to was this very specific question of whether the Christian claims about what happened at Jesus' tombs are tomb is are true. And I as a historian I I was immediately attracted to that because it's it's a historical question. And I when I saw that really everything stands or falls on the resurrection, and that I can agree to kind of struggle with all the other questions, I I can put those aside for now. They're important, but they're not the main thing. The main thing is the resurrection. How did you come to that?
SPEAKER_01Because so so few people kind of choose that as the the centerpiece. I think it's absolutely the centerpiece if you want to investigate the faith. So clearly J.D. Greer is saying that, Tim Keller is saying that, or or you somehow knew that that the resurrection was the thing to aim all your skeptical guns at?
SPEAKER_02In in retrospect, I mean I I'm I'm ashamed of myself that I didn't I never seriously investigated it earlier. Uh I mean, I, you know, I was doing a fancy PhD, I mean, not in New Testament studies, but Christian history for crying out loud. Like, why why didn't it occur to me to look at this more seriously? And I I mean it's not like I was a bozo about Christian doctrine. I mean, I knew I knew I knew the centrality of the resurrection. I I don't think I had quite I'd quite focused on it though. I mean, I I I have to give a lot of credit to to both to JD and to Tim. I mean, I think they they saw that I, you know, that they were dealing with a a historian who was, you know, uh kind of kind of nerdy and um would be interested in this stuff as a as a as a historian, like even if it didn't work evangelistically. Um and but but some somehow these questions were already um they were percolating in a kind of subterranean way. I I I have to grant. I mean what? The Christian answer is is clearly like it's the Holy Spirit. I mean, I felt very uh like like I'm the I'm we're all, you know, we're all very idiosyncratic humans and God made like a very idiosyncratic path for me. Um and uh these questions were there and I simply had never I'd never asked them. I mean, it's funny to say this, but uh when as this email correspondence was developing, and you know, I was doing this reading, I would meet with JD roughly once a month to sort of check in, it quickly occurred to me that I had never been evangelized before. I mean, I I, you know, I I've spent um many years uh reporting um, you know, among evangelicals, and they would occasionally say, you know, I'll pray for you. And I know plenty of serious Christians, although at the time not closely, but no one had had really seriously evangelized me. And and I think a lot of that is because evangelism is is deeply unfashionable. I mean, it's it's in our pluralistic, you know, you do you culture, it isn't it's incredibly offensive. And you know, I I understand, I understand why. Our our pluralistic society depends on a certain cognitive dissonance, right? I mean, if if if you or you know a devout Muslim or a devout Jewish person, you know, has an exclusive truth claim, our peace and harmony depends on you kind of keeping your exclusive truth claim to yourself and not telling me to my face, right, that I'm not living how God wants me to live and that I may be on my way to damnation. Uh evangelism is outrageous. But I mean, I think I think it's so I think it's so important. And if it happens in the context of relationships. So I mean, crucially, crucially, I I developed this like very surprising friendship with this Southern Baptist megachurch pastor that you would never you would never expect us to be friends. And so we could be having like on the you know, a one-minute, like a super, a super sincere conversation about uh, you know, the discrepancies among the gospels or whatever. And then the next moment we could be making fun of each other, kind of teasing each other based on you know the the stereotypes. I mean, you know, he he drives like a giant pickup truck and I drive a Prius. Like we we you know, stereotypes are stereotypes because they have a grain of truth. So I I think that that the evangelism was possible because because of the friendship and because of like the you know the commitment to caring about the other person regardless of of where this conversation goes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That's a great word about the the importance of evangelism and the rarity of evangelism in the church today. Um but there are different kinds of evangelists, aren't there? So help us to compare and contrast J.D. Greer and Tim Keller. How would you compare and contrast them as evangelists and in his task of evangelism?
SPEAKER_02They they were they were the perfect team for me. They were I really think that God like looked at his roster and he was like, this, you know, it can't, it's it it neither of these guys by himself could do it, but together they can do it. Um They both they I mean Tim, I I really miss him. I didn't get to know him well, but uh I we had a few conversations over Zoom and an extended email correspondence, and then of course I was so like so many people, I was so shaped by his books and sermons online. Uh he made it seem possible to uh uh cerebral Yankee secular person who who had no personal connections to uh any religious community in in a in an organic way, made it seem possible for someone like me to find a way into that world. And he in our conversations, he uh he was so relaxed that he never put any any pressure on me and he made me feel like all my doubts and questions were were totally normal, and that even he as a mature Christian uh shared them. And that was uh powerful contrast to what I would describe as the the Southern Baptist relentlessness of JD. Uh, I mean, just like a bloodhound. Not not in a way that I mean, he knew when to pull back and kind of give me space. Um and that it it couldn't, you know, I I had to be coming to him with questions. It couldn't uh it couldn't go only in one direction. But I think I needed both.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I I needed, I remember my first conversation with Tim Keller. Uh, I told him my story, and he leaned back in his chair, and you know, he was suffering from cancer at the time, but uh still just totally he didn't want to talk about that at all. He only wanted to talk about my situation. He said, I don't know, Molly, you know, maybe, maybe you'll become a Christian this time, or maybe you'll just stall out again. I don't know. And I I was I was I was a little bit thrown, right? Because I'd been dealing with, you know, this this Baptist who was just just uh, you know, on me like every every other conversation would end in an altar call, and here Tim Keller is telling me I might stall out, and he seems like sort of indifferent.
SPEAKER_01Where I think that might be so so vital for you is that if you were just reading Tom Wright's Resurrection and the Son of Gods, there might be the sense that, oh, I'm going deep into the issue of the historical resurrection but to what end? And but if you've got a J.D. Greer who's after you, it's very clear to what end. You're doing your homework, um not for the sake of of having a greater appreciation of of this culture, you're you're doing your homework because you need to meet Jesus.
SPEAKER_02And the point that uh a number of people made to me, probably J.D. and Tim both made this point to me at in in some conversation. I I remember hearing it from a a Jesuit acquaintance in Toronto. Uh it's a I think a very uh uh familiar Christian point. Um I was so I was seeking some kind of affirmation through experience. I mean, here I am reading all these books, taking all these notes, and having my presuppositions disturbed in in some significant ways. But I thought, man, at the end of the day, I I can't become a Christian just by reading a lot of footnotes. I mean, surely at some point, you know, maybe I'm not gonna get the apparition of Jesus like at the foot of my bed, but surely at least I can get, you know, like a warm and fuzzy feel. I just want a warm and fuzzy feeling. That's all. Something. And it so I was doing all this stuff, right? You know, I was going to church, I was praying, reading scripture, I was having my relationship to the Bible was changing. That was uh that was a very serious thing that I can I can categorize as an experience. But in general, it felt so cerebral. Uh, and I would complain about this to Christians, and they would say, it sounds like what you are asking for is the relationship of faith. And it's like any relationship, it's like a friendship. You can kind of suss out the person at a polite distance, you can check their references, ask around, you can do all your homework. But if you want the experience of the relationship, you have to take the plunge, you have to actually enter the relationship and put some trust in it, put yourself at risk. And I found that persuasive. And and so it it made me accept. And I also remember a conversation that I had with JD where I was complaining about my lack of spiritual experience, and he said, you know, you just have to take what God. Gives you like God makes people in different ways. Uh, He didn't make you Pentecostal, so deal with it essentially. And so I realized that um if I was willing to suspend my disbelief in the supernatural, which truly is the is the hard that that was the huge barrier for me. But if I was willing to do that, uh then I had to grant that while you know I didn't find myself 100% persuaded by uh N.T. Wright's assessment of the evidence or Richard Baucom or any of these guys that Jesus truly rose from the dead, I I had to, I had to grant that the other, the secular alternatives were really not as persuasive. Uh, and I was certainly north of 51% persuaded. And if I was truly a William James style pragmatist, willing to adjust my working theory of the universe based on new evidence, then I I had to submit to this.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah, there's that sense of am I able to take the leap of faith forward towards Jesus? Well, that's one question, but there's another question, like, can I go back to a materialist view of the world? And with all that I know now, um, I think when God sort of shuts that door behind you, there's a very significant nudge um towards towards taking the leap. Um we uh on this channel we've we've had Tom Holland um come on many times uh talking about um doing a history of the church and kind of the fruits of Christian civilization that uh uh uh have led to the secular liberal values that we all take for granted. And I think he has given a lot of people a vocabulary for faith that they didn't think they had. They thought they were incapable of believing, they thought they were incapable of having any sense of the supernatural or the transcendent. And he starts pointing out, well, where do you think your human rights come from? Um it's as theological as believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of the Father. And a lot of people I I found uh uh have taken sort of a a Tom Holland train, but they've taken it so far to the point where they're kind of uh almost even sold on the the the moral fruits of Christendom and um and that Jesus is at the heart of the beliefs they already have, but they can't sign up to the metaphysics. And I I know people who sort of describe themselves like uh Nick Nick Cave, the um the Australian rock star who says, you know, um he is religious but not spiritual. Um very very happy actually to submit to the Christian story, but but he hasn't had this encounter and he doesn't know if he'll ever have that encounter. Um what what would you say to people who are in a in a situation like that? Um, how how can they how can they come to faith for themselves?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was definitely me. Uh that is that you've just described most of the people in my in my world. And uh I thought a lot about this, and I I love Tom Holland's book, Dominion. I think he crystallized in a super powerful, zesty, compelling, narrative way. I mean, really the central questions that uh historians have been wrestling with uh for the past generation, and that and um that are a big part of my own kind of disillusionment with secular liberalism's ability to answer those questions about the sources of universal human rights. I think my advice would be that most people in this category who say, you know, I can I can buy the argument that uh there needs to be some kind of metaphysical basis to my picture of what a human person is and what that person deserves, but I can't I can't really buy it because I just my whole uh day-to-day experience is that of a closed universe in which the natural laws are impermeable and um uh anything else is is is the fruit of imagination. Uh, most of these people consider themselves very cosmopolitan, very open to other worldviews, very aware uh of the legacy of you know European colonialism and um the sort of immoral tyrannies, political and intellectual, that have come with that history. And so I I guess I think if that's true, then isn't the next logical step to start taking the worldviews of the vast majority of humans alive today, let alone humans who've lived throughout the history of our species, seriously. For me, uh uh this took the form of it was kind of if it immediately followed my my baptism. So um it wasn't part of my conversion proper, but I would say it was uh tremendously important for me intellectually. Uh, and that was uh research I did on claims regarding miraculous healings, uh both in the United States and around the world. And it as I started reading the pretty vast literature, some of which is quite excellent, uh collecting these stories, attempting to, in some cases, investigate them to the extent that there's documentation, and sometimes there is, and sometimes it's awfully interesting, uh, having conversations both with uh academics who uh were familiar with my frame and also uh with people who um may now kind of reside in Western academia but but come from countries where uh there is more uh common um experience with the supernatural. Uh I uh the scales kind of fell from my eyes. I mean, I realized how how blinkered I had been, uh, how I had just tuned out and never investigated this huge swath of human experience. And sure you can write off some proportion of uh claims to miraculous healing as wishful thinking or hallucination or uh whatever. But we're talking about millions of people. You know, we're talking about like 90% of the people who become Christian in places like Burma say that they become Christian out of personal experience with a healing claim. I mean, this is what scholars like Craig Keener have have found. And then, you know, you do, if you if you really investigate this stuff, you you would you find cases where uh there is enough documentation to suggest that something awfully weird happened. Now, none of this proves causality, right? And I've had in my research, I mean, I always investigate multiple sides. So I certainly had fruitful conversations with materialist skeptics who can always say, uh, well, oh, all right, we we cannot explain why that woman regained her sight after many years, uh, you know, directly after after prayer. However, uh science is advancing, and you know, at some point science will produce an answer. Well, that's fine. It's as unfalsifiable as the Pentecostal saying that you know that healing was the result of the Holy Spirit's intervention, right? And so if it doesn't, if if investigating these supernatural claims that come from uh this huge swath of human experience doesn't immediately give you uh the faith that it's all true, it at the very least it might it might disturb your materialist presuppositions just enough to allow you to suspend disbelief in the supernatural. Uh so that I think is my I think that's a fruitful line of inquiry for any person who wants Christianity to be true but can't quite get there with the metaphysics. Because the desire does have to come first. I mean, I do, I do think that this kind of uh turn we've seen in apologetics uh to recognize that you you can't just lead by snowing somebody with natural theology and doctrinal claims, you've got to work with them to maybe see why they ought to be less satisfied than they think they are with their current worldview. Uh you've got to work with them to uh see past maybe bad experiences they they perhaps have had with uh Christians who don't behave in a way very consistent with the gospels. You have to get them to the point where they want Christianity to be true before they they can be open to any of this evidence.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, the whole Pascal thing. Yeah. Make people of goodwill wish it were true and then show them that it is. And and I I found it more quite fruitful more recently to think if you are on the Tom Holland train and have come to see that morally speaking, um we've been living off our Christian inheritance and we have considered that certain moral claims are self-evident, self-directed, impersonal, um just just there by by themselves. And if you've come to see that that's nonsense, um there is a there is a parallel in the metaphysical world that uh a a post-Christian society that has developed the Western scientific method um also, strangely enough, thinks that the universe kind of continues on in a self-directed, closed system that's entirely impersonal and requires you know nothing personal about it. Um but if you're if you're starting to see that it is unlikely that the moral system is as self-sufficient as you think it is, then maybe the metaphysical system isn't isn't as self-sufficient as you think it is either. I think there's a there's an interesting parallel there, I I think that's worth worth pressing into. And as you say, like if if one of those miracle claims is true, then naturalism is false. Like literally one of those.
SPEAKER_02Right. And I will say, I mean, I I was talking only about uh all the scholarship on the resurrection, but I did a lot of reading in cosmology. I mean, I was kind of working on on two tracks at once, investigating uh these claims about the resurrection, but also, I mean, I was not even a confident theist, so I had to I had to investigate that also. And the I mean the the the recent work uh in that area, um, you know, the the various cosmological constants, the fine-tuning of the universe, um, the things that physicist physicists have learned recently that have started to make the um not the alternatives to theism seem just as theological, just as I mean crazier, the multiverse stuff. Right. At least as crazy as any religious.
SPEAKER_01It's completely untestable. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So uh I think that that also is a really fruitful line of reading. And then, you know, the kind of problem of consciousness. Um in uh Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos, in which he confesses that while he's not he hasn't gotten himself to the position of any uh traditional religion, he that that book is all about uh his disillusionment with naturalistic Why naturalism is almost certainly false.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, as a subtitle. That's a heck of a subtitle. Um do you have time for one last question, Molly? Is that a is that of course. Great. We s because we started with the question, age 17. We asked 17-year-old Molly, uh, who is Jesus? So it's been also recent for you. Um like we're just going back to 2022, aren't we? In in terms of pulling at this thread and and finding Jesus on the other end of it. Um tell me today in 2024, who is Jesus to you?
SPEAKER_02Oh man, that is such an evangelical question. Well, listen, I uh I don't think I fit in in the in the in the narrative of that that question assumes very well, because my process was to accept on the evidence this thing that happened in history, and then and then to say, okay, if I'm gonna accept that that happened, I've got to assimilate all this other stuff. So I am still, I mean, I can tell you, right? I mean, I can tell you that that Jesus is Lord, I can use all the all the like the evangelical ease. But the fact of the matter is that I am still every day working really hard to actually wrap my head around all that follows from the resurrection. I think maybe you know, if you've been a Christian a long time or you've grown up in it, you're used to reciting the creed, uh saying these things, you forget how crazy they are. I mean, the idea that that God is a personal God, that that God, that God cares about you and me as individuals, like what an insane thing. Like what what an outrageously hubristic, right? If we take it out of theological context, it's outrageous. This idea that Jesus, uh, I mean I can almost I can almost go with you to uh wrap my head around the idea that Jesus died for the sins of the human race. Okay, that seems like something the Son of God would do. But you're you're telling me that he died for my sins. I I I want to say that uh Jesus is my is Lord, is my Lord, yes, but he's also um he's someone like I'm really I am actively trying to develop this thing that Christians talk about as a relationship with Jesus. I mean that is not that that is not something that I like I I gained upon you know praying my uh ham-fisted version of the sinner's prayer or upon being you know dunked in the jacuzzi-sized tank on stage at my in my mega church. That's something that I'm I'm still um slowly feeling my way into. Uh I mean, this this notion that that God is not an abstraction but a person who we should love. I am, you know, I'm doing my best uh in the way that comes naturally to me, which is to read a lot of books, but that only gets you so far, you know. So the other pieces of it, the the praying, the the really the encountering God in scripture, um that takes a that takes a lot of practice. It's not it's not it's not something that I um I have found comes naturally at all. And so that is my I don't know that that is that is that is my perhaps evasive answer to your question, who is Jesus? I I don't I don't know yet. I mean I hope I hope one day I I I I have the I have the visceral sense of of who he is that you have or that you know people who are who are not spiritual infants like I am have, but I don't have it yet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I didn't want the cliche. Yeah, and I I knew you wouldn't give me a cliche, because if you gave me a cliche, that would be a lousy uh end to the interview. Um there's there's that there's that immense sense, like the the whole Bible, you've had you've had 66 books that are all about Jesus, and then Revelation comes along, and like one of the last sights we we we have of Jesus is Revelation chapter 19, and he's riding on a white horse, and he's got a tattoo down his leg um that that is you know, Lord of Lords and King of Kings. And and he he has a name that that no one knows but he himself. And at the at the end of scripture, it's it's not like okay, and and now we've got Jesus sewn up. Now now we've got you know Jesus in a box. I you know, it's not it's not I can refer you back to the the previous 65 books and you now have Jesus nailed. It's he has a name written on himself that no one knows but he himself. You know, he he is the most deeply mysterious person in the universe. Um and that's what makes him the most fascinating person in the universe. And that that's what makes him the center of faith. You know, because and that's why the resurrection is so vital. Because it's not just uh our supernatural event happened, I guess naturalism is false. It's this guy is the heavyweight champion over death. And it was the case that death was lord because death had never lost a battle. And now this guy has beaten death, and so this guy is Lord, and the future belongs to this guy. And we spend all eternity kind of figuring out who this guy is. Um, but yeah, perish perish the thought that yeah, coming to know him would be a cliche. I think you pointed out beautifully to.
SPEAKER_02I have to tell you that part of my process of coming to believe that I could trust the Bible's claims about Jesus uh was wrapped up in coming to appreciate how weird, how weird Jesus is, and how weird the stuff he says is. I mean, you know, Matthew 11, 28, you know, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. I mean, the gentle and lowly in heart, yoke, yoke stuff, like what is he talking about? The here, the healing miracles, his different method for all these different people. He's sometimes he's spitting on his fingers and rubbing dirt in their eyes. And curses a fig tree, for goodness sakes. It has this was C.S. Lewis's point, right? Like, Lewis is like, I've read all the mythology, I know what that looks like. This is different. This is an account of stuff that happened that people saw and they they were like, What the heck? We need to write this down. And I I just I came to to have that reaction to it myself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Which is and the final of the four gospels finishes with John saying, if everything was written about Jesus, not even all the books in the world would have enough space to Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's there's deep mystery to it, and we must we must never reduce that. Um Molly, well, that's been so great uh spending time with you. So, like, how can people uh catch up with you? And um you're you're working on a book at the moment. Is there a way that people can can find either what you've written in the past or what you're about to come out with?
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, I mean I'm not on social media at all. I believe it's destroying civilization, uh, but certainly I'm Googleable and you know, I have an email address uh at UNC. I'm finishing up a book on the history of charisma as both a religious idea and a political idea, mostly in the American context. I I did a an audible course on charismatic leaders in America a couple of years ago, but the the the book is a is a is a bigger, more confusing uh version that I've learned a lot writing, but that'll be uh that's coming out in uh early, early next year. Uh but I always I always love to hear from people. Um, and I one reason I decided to talk about my uh conversion, like tell the internet about something so personal, is because it it has been uh really a blessing to hear from such a wide range of Christians, uh, some of whom, a small number of whom are adult converts like me or investigating, but but many of whom are not. However, it's been eye-opening to learn how many Christians, even those who who grew up in it, uh wrestle with doubt and can can really uh find common ground with someone like me who's come to it so late.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's great. And I'm sure your story will resonate with uh so many people. Uh Molly, thanks so much for spending time with us.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for having me.