Introduction at the North Carolina Study Center

Doug Monroe:

Well Molly, welcome to a Praxis Circle interview. I’ve been wanting to do this for a good while now, and I’ve been thinking about the history ’cause it’s been several years, but this is probably my 50th interview. And my first one was over at the Love House, just a block from here that was with Dr. Baron. I think I mentioned Sam Baron to you before. He was retired probably by the time you got here, but he had a big influence on me and so I thought I’d start with him many years ago.

But I also want to make a note that we’re here at the NC Study Center, which is, just for the audience, what would you say, the sort of students’ Christian organization? It’s not technically under the university, but it’s an incredibly thriving organization, and you’ve been a real part of that.

Molly Worthen:

Yeah, the study center, it’s part of a movement. The first one I think started at University of Virginia in the ’70s, and then especially in the past 10 years or so, these have popped up on campuses around the country. And they’re generally some group of Christian philanthropists. And people interested in the situation of Christian students at a given secular university will purchase a house that’s usually right on the edge of campus, not part of the campus, but on its edge, just to create a space for hospitality, and a place where it’s okay to ask the whole range of questions that students run into as they are beginning to try to reconcile their faith with their college experience and what they’re learning.

A place where it’s okay to ask exploratory questions if you’re not a Christian yet, if you’re a seeker. They tend to be evangelical Protestant in their founding, but really quite ecumenical. There’s loads of Catholic students, a lot of interest in Eastern Orthodoxy here, a lot of exploration. And I’ve found it to be a really nourishing place to meet other faculty, as well as students who are just really interested in the big questions, the big meaning questions.

Doug Monroe:

Certainly, it’s right up your alley, what they’re interested in. And I went to UVA as well, and I did notice the Christian organization in Charlottesville. And when I found this one, I said Madison Perry has blown that one away, just in far as what he’s done and so on. So it’s really impressive what you all are doing.

 Early Worldview & Experience with Russian Orthodox Community 

Doug Monroe:

But to get into our interview here with Praxis Circle, we are about worldview, and we’re about studying worldview and exploring the concept of worldview, but we’re also about building worldview. And not everybody thinks about that very much because today with comparative religion, you’re kind of staying arm’s length, but at some point you have to, maybe not necessarily because a lot of people have several worldviews they go in and out of, but usually it’s good to pick one and then build on it. So we try and not forget that piece.

And so, you have a fascinating history not only in your personal expertise but also in your life story. And so, that’s what I want to get into right here up front. And so, we’re all born into a worldview and it’s usually comes from a family, or whatever family-like situation we’re born into. So I’m very curious about what yours was like in Glen Ellyn. I know some clues, but I wanted to hear straight from the horse’s mouth.

Molly Worthen:

I grew up in a town of about 20,000 people, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. It’s about 20 miles west of Chicago. And my home was secular. Not hostile to religion, but not engaged with any particular religious tradition. I think my parents were very happy to support wherever my curiosity led me, and it certainly did not, in my early years, lead me in the direction of Christianity.

I do remember, my mother is basically an atheist, but she wanted my brother and I to have some familiarity with the Bible just so we wouldn’t be complete ignoramuses. And when we were little, she made an attempt to get us to sit on the couch and just listen to a couple of Bible stories. She tried to pick ones that didn’t really have a lot of God in them, and she read us David and Goliath. And I remember holding my ears, I mean just literally having this allergy, whatever this was, it was being forced on me and I just didn’t like it and pushed it away.

So it wasn’t until I got to university, I went to college at Yale and I started taking classes across the whole range of the humanities, but also I think meeting a wider range of people. And I guess having the kinds of conversations that you have when you’re a first year in college. So there are plenty of people from religious worldviews in my town growing up, but we just didn’t talk very much about that. I wasn’t conscious of these questions.

But in college, it became clear to me that for 99% of human beings in the past and today, religion is this really important frame through which people make sense of the world. And I think I was also increasingly kind of envious of people who had answers to the big questions.

So that really became the focus of my intellectual interests. I started taking classes, especially focused on Russian religion actually. And in the kind of meandering way that you do when you stumble into a class and it leads to another class, I got really interested in Russian history, and that led me into an interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and some of my first forays and to kind of very amateur ethnographic work.

I had got a grant to spend a summer with a community of Russian Orthodox old believers in the middle of nowhere rural northeastern Alberta. So these are a community, it’s a caricature to call them the Russian Amish, but maybe that’s helpful, in that they’re a community that broke away from the main body of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century and they were persecuted first by the Czars, then by the communists. And there’s a diaspora of them all over the world.

And there is this fairly isolated community in rural Alberta. And because of their purity rules, I couldn’t live with them, but I rented a room in a nearby town and slowly got to know some of the girls in the community my age, got invited to help with farm chores, slaughtering chickens, milking the cows, eventually got to go to church and stand in the back in these four hour services.

It was my first attempt in a serious way to try to get as close as possible to the world view of people very different from myself. And I just fell in love with that. It’s so interesting. And you can never perfectly do it, but it really turned a light on for me, and I wanted to do that thing in some way for my career.

Growing Up in Illinois & Attending Yale: Religion a Foreign Concept 

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, you were clearly seeking another, you probably didn’t have the word world view at that time, but you wanted to diversify your knowledge of other people’s experiences and the way they looked at the world. And that’s similar to what I did in working with Dr. Baron, just wanting to know the communist world and the Marxist world, because the Cold War was in its fury at that time. So it wasn’t so much cultural, it was more ideological, but we share that interest in Russia in for what it’s worth category.

I have this notion that even though your parents were not religious, that you grew up in basically near Wheaton, and there was the surrounding almost Bedford Falls type of existence. What was it like going to Yale and being there for, I don’t know, 10 to 12 years in terms of changing the way you think?

Molly Worthen:

I was there for a long time ’cause I did my undergrad there and then I took a couple of years off, but stayed in the Yale community working on what became my first book, and then I did my PhD. Initially, I was a little intimidated. I guess I had this impression that a lot of my classmates had gone to Northeastern private schools and had more familiarity with some of the ancient Greek and Roman texts we were reading my first year and this sort of thing.

But pretty quickly, I don’t know, I got over that and I didn’t find it to be a catastrophic shock. It is true, and this is maybe something I picked up on later in my intellectual career there, especially in graduate school, that there’s a certain, I wouldn’t call it hostility to traditional religion. And at a place like Yale, there are loads of serious Christians, but they constitute a kind of subculture. They don’t, at least at the time, I wouldn’t say they make a big impact on your experience of the place if you’re not already in that world.

And I did find, especially as part of my PhD program, I was teaching undergraduates and divinity students as a teaching assistant, I did find a kind of bafflement, I encountered a kind of bafflement at religion. And this was even more extreme, I had a year teaching at the University of Toronto after my PhD. And there was this sense when I was trying to teach something about American Evangelicalism, say, I may as well have been teaching about martian religion. It was just, “Okay, this is very fascinating, but it’s so foreign.”

And frankly, I understood that. In a little bit of a way, I identified with it because I didn’t grow up in it. You’re right, I grew up two miles from Wheaton College, and later in grad school, it was very convenient to be able to go home and stay with my parents while I worked in those archives, but I think we all grow up in a little bubble no matter where we are.

Doug Monroe:

Absolutely.

Molly Worthen:

I’ve learned this, you can’t assume, you may have a certain idea about the part of the country someone is from, make certain assumptions about what they are familiar with and what they take for granted, but often you’re totally wrong.

And Doug, I was incredibly clueless. For someone who grew up in one of the epicenters of American evangelicalism, and the Chicago area really is that. One of the most influential mega churches in recent history is Willow Creek, which is in the Chicago suburbs. There’s Wheaton Moody Bible Institute, right? You name it.

When I got to graduate school, I did not know the difference between a Baptist and a Methodist. I had very specialized knowledge about Eastern Orthodoxy, I’d taken some classes in German theology, but my knowledge was very spotty. I had a lot of work to do.

The Supernatural & Materialism

Doug Monroe:

This is totally off the beaten path, but here’s an off the wall question. Did you ever believe in ghosts or anything like that? How would you think about-

Molly Worthen:

That’s a great question. I remember as a young person being fascinated by the idea of ghosts, having a phase where I read the sort of pulpy horror fiction that’s aimed at teenagers by authors like Lois Lowry, but never really taking it seriously as a component of the world as I experienced it.

Looking back, I think until quite recently in my life, I had a very strong, basically undeclared anti-supernaturalist bias. And in graduate school and beyond, I really thought of myself as open to all of these claims that the religious people I was studying made about the world. And in some way, I was, but there was this substrate of resistance because the way I moved through the world was so materialist.

Doug Monroe:

Well, you’re very kind and open-minded toward other ways of looking at things, that’s clear. And you allow yourself to go a long way down that road to understand. And I think that’s probably the trick to being a great biographer. And really, you have a gift for that in all your writing, and starting with number one down here, which by the way, that book about Hill is not too long. It’s just right. But I’ve never read a biography quite like that one.

How would you define worldview?

Doug Monroe:

All right, let’s go to worldview itself. Do you have a walking around academic definition of that? I find it a word a lot of people use, and it probably would fit into maybe three different types of usages, but I’m talking about the academic sense that somebody like Carl Henry or Kuyper would think about. How would you define it?

Molly Worthen:

Those two thinkers are part of the reformed Protestant tradition, which I think is a tradition that has contributed a disproportionate amount to really articulating what we mean by worldview in a way that is special. I think you’re right, it’s a word that we throw around without a lot of precision.

I think it is shorthand for the framework of assumptions that humans use to organize chaos and move through the world, and assign some kind of meaning to suffering. And for most humans, it’s not necessarily coherent. I think we are remarkable as a species for our ability to operate on all kinds of contradicting assumptions without it seeming to bother us, right?

I think to say that we all have a worldview is accurate, but I think we shouldn’t at all assume that we’re all kind of cognizant of it. A lot of what I see my work, as in the context of UNC, is getting students to become more articulate about their own unspoken presuppositions, and think about ways of interrogating those presuppositions and changing their mind if there’s a case for that.

I think a critical part of anyone’s worldview is the set of standards by which they decide what counts as evidence, and what evidence they admit, how they judge that evidence, and how they think about authority, which intellectual authorities they trust.

We all use shortcuts, intellectual shortcuts. In a complicated society like ours, it would be paralyzing to have to reason from first principles our confidence in everything we use throughout the day, right? Whether it’s a car or a computer, the food that we buy, we trust that it’s safe to eat all of these things.

We rely on this edifice of systems of authority. And we trust certain authorities, so we don’t have to do that work ourselves, and we can just go and live our lives. And we all have some system like that, but it varies across subcultures from individual to individual. So I think which authorities you trust and how you came to that relationship of trust is a huge component of worldview.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? 

Doug Monroe:

You describe yourself in various ways, in various places, as sort of a child of the ’90s, I would say maybe. Or at least you used to talk about your generation some, and I love it when people do that. Are you a feminist? How do you look at that whole issue today being a professional woman, et cetera?

Molly Worthen:

Yeah, that’s interesting. And thinking about my relationship to the 1990s, I would frame it not so much in terms of a feminism, but thinking about my generation as maybe the last one that really grew up and was formed significantly prior to the total saturation of childhood by the internet and later social media. Also, coming of age in that brief post-Cold War moment, where when I got to university, it did seem like Francis Fukuyama was basically right in that the good guys had won and democracy was spreading. And yeah, there were problems here and there to clean up, but basically everything was fine. And then 9/11 happened at the beginning of my junior year, which changed everything for all of us.

On the question of feminism, as a historian, learning about the history of the different waves of feminism and the ways in which attitudes toward even what a woman is, the shift relatively recently in the history of the West from this kind of Aristotelian view that a woman is an imperfect man, a sort of malformed, incomplete and immature man.

Doug Monroe:

None of the men I knew believed that anyway, by the way, even the ones that studied Aristotle. But you keep going. You keep going.

Molly Worthen:

Well, I think by the 19th century, that had begun to morph into something that I think in secular liberal circles today is seen as very conservative view, but this complementarian idea that women are fully just as valuable as men, but different in some way. The point I make to my students is that that may sound conservative to you, but that was a revolution, that reinterpretation of Christianity kind of stripping away that Aristotelian substrate.

I suppose. I don’t operate in the mode of a awareness of myself as a feminist. At the same time, I am quick to acknowledge how much I owe to generations of women who had very different situations to navigate. And I think about my mentors, and most of them have been men. They were men who, I suppose they’ve all been feminist men, if by this we mean men who absolutely treated me the same as they treated their male students. And never made me have to be overly aware of that difference between us, and welcomed this focus on the world of ideas that didn’t ignore gender and sex, but wasn’t focused on it.

It was important for me in graduate school, that was really the point at which I finally had a female mentor on my committee. And it wasn’t the center of our bonding, but it was very powerful to have a woman about 10 years older than me with whom I could talk about, navigating being a parent as well as a professor in these broader questions. So, I think awareness of that history that we use the shorthand of the feminist movement to describe is crucial, but it’s not at the center of how I think about myself.

Where do you find meaning and purpose in life?

Doug Monroe:

Okay, last question on the personal side is, what means the most to you, if the purpose in life thing, which you all teach a course on, how do you think about that for yourself?

Molly Worthen:

I think the way I have answered that question for my whole professional life, from being a self-aware college student to now, is that I derive the most meaning from this project of trying to get into the minds of other people.

Since becoming a Christian three years ago, I’m still really assimilating and working through what that means. And that is increasingly, as it’s supposed to be I think, if you believe this stuff is true, that Christians claim, this question of my relationship to God and who Jesus is and trying to press into that and somehow reconcile my own increasing awareness of my total depravity and the absolute selfishness of my existence with these truth claims of Christianity. I mean, that’s like the work of a lifetime. It’s just crazy. But I suppose too that that has made me lean into a dimension of my teaching that has always been important to me, which is the pastoral dimension. I think no matter what a professor’s faith, he or she is always in a pastoral role with students, especially in college. I mean, they come to you during office hours and maybe they sat down with the intention of just talking about the paper coming up, but often you’re quickly into big questions of life and they’re going through some crisis and you’re the adult who’s there that they’re opening up to.

And I love when those conversations turn into a conversation about how do you decide what’s true about the world? And I’ve always been very open with students in office hours about my own trajectory and attempts to explore these questions. And my answers to those questions have changed in recent years. But that basic framework of the pastoral relationship with a younger person who’s really trying to figure these things out, that’s the heart of what we’re doing and I am really grateful for it.

The Great Courses & The History of Christianity 

Doug Monroe:

Let’s move into Christian worldview thoughts. This is fantastic. And I can’t remember, we had lunch about four years ago at the Carolina Inn. I can’t remember if I had already listened to all these lectures, but let me just say that’s an incredible effort you made there.

Molly Worthen:

Thank you.

Doug Monroe:

Tell me about how you put that together. I’m just curious. 500 years of Christian history in a nutshell.

Molly Worthen:

Yeah. Yeah, So it covers 36 lectures that cover Christian history from the Reformation to the modern day. And I had done bits and pieces in my work at UNC, but I had not taught a course on that. So I mean, I spent a year really pulling together, doing a lot of learning myself to be able to offer, if not comprehensive treatment because impossible, at least a responsible tour through kind of the key chapters of Christianity’s expansion and transformation, especially as it goes from being a more or less kind of Eurocentric story, circa 1500 to what it is now, which is a global religion whose center of gravity is very much the global south.

So I mean, I learned a huge amount and I found the format of teaching through the great courses kind of liberating because freed from the obligation that at least I have in a more conventional university setting of feeling like, okay, I need to be sure my students come out with a certain timeline in their mind and we hit certain key points. I felt in this course a little more free to be more narrative and focus more on characters. And now that I’m actually teaching that course at UNC for the first time this semester, I’m trying to bring that more narrative approach into the classroom too. It’s very different teaching it with students and making sure we are digging into readings and there are assignments and all that scaffolding. But you don’t really understand something until you have to teach it and that was my experience with that course.

Doug Monroe:

I’m amazed. And you went to Yale with almost none of this knowledge, right?

Molly Worthen:

Right.

Doug Monroe:

Then you picked it all up at Yale and your study since. Wow.

Christian Conversion: Agnostic Theism, Truth, and William James

Doug Monroe:

Well, let’s get to the issue that’s got a lot of people focused on you and that’s that you did become a Christian in 2022, was it?

Molly Worthen:

Mm-hmm.

Doug Monroe:

Could you tell us about that a little bit? How did it happen and-

Molly Worthen:

Yeah, I had made attempts in the past to get myself churched, you could say. In graduate school, I tried to become an Anglican and I was really aware that my academic study of Christianity was partly informed by my desire to get closer to this thing I didn’t know how to access it in any other way. But by the time in the immediate lead up to my unexpected conversion, I wasn’t actively working on this as a problem. I was kind of a dissatisfied but basically apathetic agnostic. I thought “Agnosticism, it can’t possibly sustain me for my whole life. Surely at some point I’ll get my act together. I’ll become Catholic or some respectable high church variety of Protestant. This can’t go on forever.” But I wasn’t doing anything about it. I wasn’t going to church. And I thought of myself as a pragmatist in the spirit of the philosopher William James and by that I mean someone who is committed to holding one’s presuppositions lightly and revising one’s theory of the universe based on new evidence.

William James and that early generation of pragmatists certainly believed that truth exists. They weren’t total relativists, but they believed that as limited mortals, we can’t perfectly access it and all we can do is work together really in community and with the scientific method to get closer and closer to that asymptote of truth. And that’s sort of how I thought about what I was doing. I admired, I still do admire William James’ openness to spiritual experience. He was one of the pioneers of the modern scientific study of the human mind, psychology. He was a Harvard MD in the anatomy department initially, but he also went to seances and was really interested in spiritualism,

Doug Monroe:

Very interested in the supernatural, yeah.

Christian Conversion: Summit Church & J.D. Greear 

Molly Worthen:

And he didn’t care that his colleagues kind of looked askance at him for this and I really admired that. But I was in kind of a rut, I suppose. Alongside my academic work I’ve always done journalism. And so in 2022, I was working on a magazine article about a local southern Baptist megachurch and it’s pastor, the church is called the Summit Church, the pastor’s name is J. D. Greear. He had been recently president of the Southern Baptist Convention. So I went into this story thinking it was going to be kind of a typical religion and politics thing of the sort that I do a lot of trying to make sense of it for mostly secular readers. And I was going about my business as a journalist interviewing initially staff at the church and I was really struck by the way these people talked about the gospel and I spend a lot of time with interviewing Christians of various kinds who are all totally sincere and I don’t want to suggest otherwise.

But there was something different about these Summit people that made me kind of sit up and take notice. Their relentless focus on evangelism, it just made me think, “Boy, these people, they really believe this is true.” And so by the time I had an interview with the main pastor, J. D., I had been kind of in this mindset for a little while, and in the course of the conversation I kind of revealed that I was myself an agnostic and he was interested in that. But we mainly stayed focused on the topics I went in prepared to talk about.

However, that interview led to an email correspondence between us afterward in which I found myself asking questions first kind of casually without thinking a whole lot about it. “How are your claims as Christians about the miracles associated with Jesus and the Resurrection? How are they really any different from the claims that Muslims make about Muhammad or Mormons make about Joseph Smith?” And he took my questions, frankly, more seriously than I took them initially. He would write back and say, “That’s a really good question. Let me do a little homework and pull some resources together for you.” And he would send me back these responses that were like 2 or 3000 words with footnotes.

Doug Monroe:

Good night.

Christian Conversion: Greear’s Suggestion to Read N.T. Wright and Tim Keller 

Molly Worthen:

And first of all, I was like, “Wow, this fancy pastor who’s very busy guy is taking the time to answer these half-baked questions. Maybe I need to get serious about this.” And then also, the more we went back and forth, the more I realized, to my shame frankly, that even though I’m a historian of Christianity, I had never really investigated the historical claims the Christians make about the founding events of the faith. And I had absorbed in graduate school not because it was explicitly taught to me in any classes, but I had kind of absorbed from the ether. What I now understand is a very outdated view of the study of the New Testament and a kind of what you could call a sort of mid-20th Century Jesus seminar, that shorthand for that group of progressive scholars who really stripped away any claims we could know much at all about Jesus that really, okay, there was this nice Jewish holy man and we don’t really know much about him. And then around him is this accretion of myths and who can really plumb through that to get to the truth.

And The more I read, and my response to these emails from J. D. was eventually to say, “Okay, clearly I need to do some homework. Can you tell me some books to read?” And so he did. He came back with a list of books. Prominent among them was NT Wright’s giant book, The Resurrection and the Son of God. And I read that in concert with Tim Keller’s book Reason for God, which is helpful because Wright’s book is a doozy.

Doug Monroe:

Right over your shoulder back there.

Molly Worthen:

It’s 800 pages. And I am an academic, I love that kind of thing, but sometimes you get lost and need a reminder of what the forest is for the trees. And so I would kind of bounce back and forth, and this opened up into really an intense summer of I almost felt like I was doing a master’s degree or something, just reading both work by Christian New Testament scholars, but also more critical non-believing scholars. Also, remember I was not even a theist at this point, so I was also having to do a lot of reading on cosmology and arguments for the existence of God, let alone the Christian God.

And I began taking just very intense notes on it. I’m not really a diary keeper, but I found I had to record the reluctant reactions I was having to these books and then reread my own reactions because if I didn’t, it was so easy to slide back into my more familiar epistemological grooves, which were basically to say, “Okay, this account of Jesus and the explanations for the frankly bizarre behavior of his first followers, it makes more sense than I thought. But I’m not the kind of person who believes that, it’s just an abstract exercise.”

To avoid that reaction, I had to just constantly confront myself with my own reasoned responses to these books. The real power of N. T. Wright’s argument to me. I mean at first it’s just the scale of the book and what it communicates in terms of his command of the sources. But essentially he says, “If we only had an account of the empty tomb or we only had reports of Jesus’s disciples seeing him after his death, one or the other wouldn’t give us reason to take seriously the claims of the Resurrection. But we have both and here are reasons why we should take the sources reports of both seriously.” And so he makes the case both for the historical reliability of the New Testament documents, the Gospels especially, but also his book is a granular examination of the culture milieu of 1st Century Hellenistic Judaism and it made me realize how I had been guilty of what C. S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery, that there is this sense I think a lot of modern people have that, “Okay, people in the 1st century, they believed all kinds of crazy things, right? We can’t take them seriously.”

But it turns out that they, like all people in any culture, have very specific things that they find plausible. What William James would call live hypotheses, claims about reality that jive with their presuppositions and then they’ve got other things that don’t compute that they wouldn’t even make up, right? And certainly they believe that dead people stayed dead and they had very specific beliefs about what resurrection could mean. And in no zone of cultural imagination is it plausible that they would have made up the story that they then went on to report about Jesus as this risen messiah. It just broke the mold of-

Doug Monroe:

It’s the last thing they would’ve made up.

Molly Worthen:

It’s the last thing. Right. And I mean, it’s not a flawless argument, I still have lots of questions, but it’s a powerful argument and a point that Tim Keller makes and Reason for God in which he both summarizes this argument for the Resurrection and he also makes the case for Christianity in other ways and he says in his introduction, “You’re not going to find that any single one of these arguments is a slam dunk, totally closes off all debate. But if you are just open to them, you may find that they have a kind of cumulative effect. And by the end of taking seriously these various arguments for the case for the Christian God, just ask yourself, is this perhaps a little more interesting than you thought?” And this certainly happened to me. And as I was working through it, I realized that the thing that was really keeping me from taking these arguments seriously was my hard bias against the supernatural and my functional belief, even though I’d never articulated this to myself, that we live in a closed universe and this sort of thing just can’t happen.

And the more I thought about it and read about it, the more I had to realize that I wasn’t entitled to those convictions in the way I thought I was, that it was a set of assumptions, it was a faith. And if I was willing to suspend disbelief in the supernatural, then the Christian account of the Resurrection is actually the best explanation for all the events that follow. So I didn’t have a kind of conventional born-again experience.

Christian Conversion: Church, Resurrection, Personal Relationship with Faith 

Molly Worthen:

This critical summer I was continuing to go to church. I was going to this Baptist megachurch much to my shock and horror, right? Because if I was a sort of-

Doug Monroe:

You felt a little weird.

Molly Worthen:

I mean, I’d been flirting with Christianity in the past, but it was always high church smells and bells, right?

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Molly Worthen:

It was not southern Baptist megachurch. I was continuing to read the Bible and I was kind of rediscovering the Gospels, especially as not in some mystical way, but simply discovering them as really compelling historical sources. And this is another point that C. S. Lewis makes, right? He spent his career reading mythology and he knows what that genre looks like. The Gospels are not mythology. I mean if you want to slot them in anywhere, they’re more kind of like Greco-Roman biography. But even that is not a perfect fit. And I just was overwhelmed by the sense of these Gospel writers as men scrambling to get down on paper really weird stuff that happened that either they witnessed or heard about it fairly close hand and it made no sense and they were just putting it down, especially the Gospel of Mark.

I’d always kind of look down on the Gospel of Mark as that’s the shortest one, and people I don’t know, but people say the Greek is the least sophisticated and there’s just not as much… It doesn’t have all the rich neoplatonist aura that John has. But revisiting Mark in my new mindset, I was really arrested by the grittiness of Mark and the sheer weirdness just again and again reading the Gospels, and this still happens to me. I am just stopped in my tracks by the bizarre quality of the stories that these books tell. I mean, every healing encounter that Jesus has with an individual, it’s not like there’s a formula. Each one is so strange. And as a story of Jesus meeting this individual as an individual, maybe they need him to spit and make a sort of mud paste and put it on their eyes or take them out away from the crowd or heal them right in the middle of things.

As someone who spent my career reading primary sources, I mean, I’m not a specialist in the 1st century, but there’s a way in which certain documents just passed the smell test and others don’t. And the more I read in the literature, the more I’m struck too by the very different culture of scholars who are sort of classicists, who are not focused on the New Testament, but study that period versus the culture of New Testament scholarship, at least in more critical circles. And this is not to say that classicists are naive and always take their sources at their word, but there’s a way in which classicists have a culture of giving sources the benefit of the doubt a little bit more, I mean unless you have reason to believe that a source is fraudulent or it’s some serious remove from the event it describes, then at least give it the same benefit that you would other sources.

And this was my experience that not of course as a non-Christian going into this, it would make no sense for me to treat the biblical text as inerrant. Why would I have rationale for that? But if I was willing to extend to them the same courtesies I extend sources and other contexts, wow, there was a lot to wrestle with here. So I got to the point where I wasn’t 99.9% convicted that the Resurrection is true. But I had to admit I was well north of 51%. And if that was true, and if my hero is this philosopher William James who says, “You always have to revise your working theory of the universe when you have new evidence,” then it seemed like the intellectually honest thing to do was to accept the Lordship of Christ.

The other piece of this is I would bring my angst to various Christians of all different church affiliations and say, “Surely one can’t become a Christian just by reading a lot of footnotes. If God is real, can’t he just make it clear somehow? I don’t need Jesus to appear in an apparition at the foot of my bed, but can’t he give me a very warm, fuzzy feeling?” And they would say, “It sounds like what you are seeking is the experience of faith. And faith is a relationship. And you can think of it a bit like the process of becoming friends with a person. To a certain extent you can ask around about the person’s reputation. You can Google them and check out their social media feed, but you can’t really know what that person is like, and you certainly can’t know what it’s like to be a friend of theirs until you take the risk and just enter the relationship.”

And I found that persuasive. So that also kind of pushed me to say, “Okay, if the Resurrection is probably true, a whole lot follows from that, and I have to start to align my existence with that.”

Doug Monroe:

That last thing is definitely what the Catholic mystics will tell you. You have to go there to get it.

Christian Conversion: Personal Experience & God’s Grace 

Doug Monroe:

Listening to your explanation, if I divide things into maybe three categories of personal experience where Jesus, you have a born-again experience and you see Jesus in your life, in your personal experience, in various many ways that can happen, that’s one category. The next category would be scripture. Just you got the sacred word there. And by the way, have you ever heard of a book, I forget the author’s name, but he’s I believe, an English Anglican who’s dead, but this is from the 80s called The Ring of Truth.

Molly Worthen:

No, I don’t know this book.

Doug Monroe:

It’s a very short book. And he had spent his life studying in the original Greek and I guess Arabic and he just said, “After all my career looking at this, I’ll give you a short book.” It just has the ring of truth to me. It’s either true or it’s not and so I think it’s just based on just what you said. And then the third thing would probably be just a journey of reason, okay? And like Stephen Meyer, for example, who I interviewed, people say, “Well, worldview doesn’t work. That may open some doors.” But no, actually it does. People actually do get drawn in by believing in truth, then believing in God, then thinking, “Well, if God is obviously real, then where do I see it? Well over here: Matthew, mark, Luke, and John.” And so you’re hitting in the latter two categories pretty strongly, but not quite as strongly in the personal experience arena as you want to. Is that fair to say?

Molly Worthen:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

Did you follow what I said there?

Molly Worthen:

Absolutely.

Doug Monroe:

Okay.

Molly Worthen:

I think I’ve had to reinterpret my own story a little bit as I’ve had conversations with other non-believers who are kind of wired as I am, and I’ve urged them to read some of the same books that had made a big impact on me and seen these books fall flat for them. And that has forced me to acknowledge that as much as my experience of my process was a very cerebral one, it didn’t feel highly emotional, that clearly my desires were already pointed in the direction of Jesus. And I think you have to be walking in that direction already to be open intellectually. And that has forced me to acknowledge a pre… I won’t say non-rational, but a kind of pre-rational dimension to my own process. But it’s true. I am deeply envious of Christians who have these vivid emotional spiritual lives. And I’ve talked with J. D., Who’s now my pastor about this, and he has said, “At some level, you have to just accept how God has wired you, and he wires us with different gifts.”

But the other thing that’s been helpful to me is rediscovering some of the great Christian thinkers of the past, especially the Puritans and the Puritans have a lot to say about the thing they feared most, which is a sense of spiritual deadness. And I’m thinking especially of the English Puritan John Owen, who writes about desire for God’s presence and how hard it is to feel God’s absence. But he makes the crucial point that when we are yearning for God to be present, we may experience it as a terrible thing, a dark night of the soul. But the very fact that we feel that absence, God put that feeling in us, that is actually the relationship. It’s not perhaps the relationship we fantasize about, we read about in the lives of the great mystics, but we would not even have that. We wouldn’t feel that desire if it weren’t for God’s grace. And that has allowed me to reconceive of my own experiences in a way that I think gives them more credit.

Christian Conversion: Grace Envisioned 

Doug Monroe:

Well, that’s one thing I was going to suggest. Not that we’re going into that in this interview, but in my case, I was born into a traditional Presbyterian family on both sides, and I accepted it, and I went through college and graduate school, and I’ve always enjoyed reading this stuff. And I never got to agnosticism because the more I learned, the more it just made sense given I could understand, well, of course, look at the Western history for the last 2,000 years and all the thinkers and they all seem to build on each other and yeah it makes sense. But what got me was somewhere in my 30s when I understand what grace really meant, I didn’t understand what grace was. And as one of our contributors has said, grace is really, it’s how God is, okay? And once you start seeing God that in your life, that is your personal experience, okay?

It doesn’t have to be tapping you on the shoulder or being saved by an angel or anything like that, it can be just, “Wow, I see it in my own personal life.” And I submit you have that in spades, but that’s for you to determine.

Molly Worthen:

It takes a lot of patience to what you say resonates so much with what I have heard other mature Christians say, when I say, “What is your warrant for belief?” And the first thing they’ll say is, “Well, I look back over my own life and I see God’s hand there.” But I see that that is a learned skill, to learn how to narrate your life in terms of God’s interventions rather than just random chance and so forth. And it also just requires a certain amount of living through hard stuff.

And I have had to recognize that being a Christian is not like other… it’s not a project of the kind that I set my mind to in academic work, right? I’m used to being able to say, “Okay, I want to understand this thing, so I will read this list of books and I will write this essay and I will meet this deadline and it’ll be done.” And Christianity is not like that. It doesn’t work on my timeline, it works on God’s timeline. So this art of learning to see my own life in a certain way, I see that that’s something that one comes too slowly.

Your response to Bart Ehrman’s “How Jesus Became God”?

Doug Monroe:

Before we move on to Spellbound, I have to ask you about, I think you’re the third UNC professor that I’ve interviewed, the fourth great courses superstar, y’all are all superstars. But Bart Ehrman, I love that interview and I’ve read most of his stuff, work is fantastic, and he’s a great guy. So what would you say to, I know he had a lecture series on how Jesus became God, and I went through it, and I think I read the book by the same title. I’m not sure, but I put it down and I went, “Well, that’s how it happened. It just doesn’t happen overnight. People have to realize, “Wow, what was that? Who was that masked man? And that takes sometimes centuries. So what would you say about his argument that could be put on video?

Molly Worthen:

I love Bart. He’s been a really generous colleague to me. Certainly, this is something that we disagree about now, but I’ve so appreciated his books and his courses because he has a way of putting the question very clearly and I’ve learned so much, especially from debates that he does. And he’s done so many with Christians of various stripes because he is just relentlessly willing to have that conversation.

And unlike a lot of non-believing debaters, he knows the lanes of his own expertise and stays in those lanes in a way that I think really enhances his credibility. But ultimately, I would never want to go up against him in a debate because his expertise is so vast. But I am more persuaded by some of his opponents on these questions. I think that there’s good evidence in the gospel accounts for Jesus’s self-understanding as much, much higher than anything that made any sense in the Jewish milieu before.

I think the story of him healing the paralyzed man who’s lowered down on the pallet through the roof and his claim to forgive sins, I think that’s a story of incredibly high Christology. I think his use of the self-description, the Son of Man, and the echoes of that and the Jewish apocalyptic tradition raises a lot of really important questions. It’s not clear, but it’s certainly open to greater a range of interpretation.

And I think even Bart will admit that if he wants to say that Jesus did not declare himself to be God, it was awfully quick, the development of that high Christology was awfully rapid, within a couple of decades at the outside. And that’s too fast to account for by, I suppose, his favored means of telling a story of the accretion of stories through different communities.

So I suppose what it boils down to is I read the gospel accounts differently and the relevant parts of Paul’s letters, and I’m also persuaded by what other scholars have said about the reliability of those documents. And they’re relatively early creation and their proximity to the events they describe. There’s a way in which the New Testament texts were created in this historical sweet about 2,000 years distant from us, which is far enough away that there is a lot of haze and confusion, and there are real limits about what we can say for sure.

But 2,000 years, it’s not like we’re talking about the era of Moses or the ancient Egyptians. It’s close enough to us in the relatively literate milieu of the Roman Empire that there is loads of evidence, archaeologically and in text. So there’s a lot to work with. Both things are true, which means that it’s possible for smart and informed people to disagree.

But I think Bart’s pretty frank in these conversations that what it comes down to for him is number one, he doesn’t think historians of any business going after the miraculous. He and I have argued about how to understand that. I agree with him to a point, but I think that the historical method can get you to a point where the leap of faith is a shorter leap than it would otherwise be.

Doug Monroe:

The whole issue with Bart is a miracle.

Molly Worthen:

But he will say any account, any explanation, alternative explanation for the empty tomb and the sightings of Jesus, no matter how convoluted stolen body, bribe, Roman guards, whatever, anything you want to come up with is more plausible than a miraculous explanation.

And if that’s your position, that shuts down the conversation. But I think Bart is a really great interlocutor for Christians and they ignore him at their peril.

Doug Monroe:

Well, for me, you have a genuine skeptic who does have a kindness for the subject that says, here’s my skeptical view, but it could have happened. That’s what he told me. And those are my words. And so there’s so much we could talk about there.

“Spellbound”: American Religious and Political Movements

Doug Monroe:

All right, to get to Spellbound, I’m going to pull it up here. And this is not a book review. Okay. This is just what, when I finish a book, see this is how I read people.

Molly Worthen:

Oh my gosh.

Doug Monroe:

Okay.

Molly Worthen:

Wow.

Doug Monroe:

See that?

Molly Worthen:

That’s amazing.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. Well, it’s just I get into a dialogue with the author about what he or she is saying. But anyway, when I’m finished. I finished Spellbound Monday, April 19th at 9:48 PM at home with my wife. And so when I do that and I like something I write down just what comes to mind.

It’s not a book review. So I said, “Excellent book really gets the reader thinking about human nature, God and human history in new ways. From a predominantly US perspective, but not solely. I think Molly understands America well, seeks to understand without bias and has a natural eye for phonies. An engaged and gifted biographer. She pulls up and out many of the less known but important historical figures across gender, race, and time. Bravo, I understand American and religious history much better now.”

Molly Worthen:

Well, that’s terrific. I really appreciate that.

Doug Monroe:

It’s a story that hasn’t quite been told that way. And I know there are people like Mark Knoll that you’re following on. You may view yourself as the new Mark. I don’t know, but that’s how I can see you a little bit. But tell me about this. What should I know? What should people know about this?

Molly Worthen:

Well, I started working on it around 2016, 2017, and it had two origin points you could say. One was an desire to try to make sense of the American political landscape and especially the powerful, polarized reactions provoked by Donald Trump. And how is it that one individual can be seen as so compelling by a huge swath of the country and the other half of the country doesn’t just find him unpersuasive, but actively repugnant what’s going on there in this individual.

At the same time, I’d been thinking for a while about how scholars and journalists who study religion have, for generations, relied heavily on poll data and they’ve made a lot of rates of church attendance, what people say when pollsters call them up and ask, do you believe in God and do you affiliate with a particular church? And we all know, of course, with some interesting exceptions, especially recently, that those numbers generally go in one direction.

And so we tell this story of the decline of religion, but it has always been my conviction for my whole career as a student of religion long before I became a Christian, that humans are, in some fundamental way, religious creatures. We seek to connect our puny mortal existence to a big transcendent narrative that lands at meaning.

We have an impulse to worship, to set something, some cause some power apart as holy and orient our lives toward it. And just because that impulse is not landing as often as it once did in organized weekend worship, I think it’s a mistake to assume that it’s just evaporating.

Doug Monroe:

I’ll raise my hand. I don’t necessarily go to church near as much as I used to for lots of reasons, but I’m still just as religious. But sorry to interrupt, I’m just an example.

Molly Worthen:

In your case, probably you’re still mostly in the lane of Christianity.

Doug Monroe:

Oh, totally. More so than ever.

Spellbound’s Theme: Charisma 

Molly Worthen:

In fact, that’s not necessarily true for a lot of Americans, but I think my working hypothesis was one place this religious impulse might be landing is in the relationship that people have with certain leaders. So what’s going on there? And that propelled me into this study of past four centuries of American history focused on charisma in both meanings of the term.

So I’m interested in charisma in that original New Testament sense. And it’s a word that Paul really coins derived from the ancient Greek word charis anointing gift from the gods. But for Paul, it means in some contexts, the gift of salvation, in other contexts, a range of spiritual gifts, these supernatural powers, speaking in tongues and prophecy so forth that Christians have struggled to make sense of for the past 2000 years.

And that is intertwined to me with charisma in the sense that we use it colloquially today when we talk about politics, which is a usage that we’ve inherited really from the German sociologist, Max Weber, who a bit more than a hundred years ago, took that term charisma from the world of biblical studies and applied it to the study of power more broadly.

But I think that there’s a real muddle about what it means, and we punt to the word charisma often when we are witnessing a dynamic we can’t quite make sense of. And initially, I really confused it with charm and I thought that I would be writing a book full of really charming people, amazing orators, people really good at working the room. They’d all be really good-looking. That was true in the breach maybe, but not as the broad pattern.

And in fact, the broad pattern I found was that initial pattern that intrigued me about Donald Trump, which is that charismatic figures are deeply polarizing and they revolt as many people or more as they compel. And that charisma in that sense of being able to build a movement and persuade followers to support you, it does not reside purely in the individual but it is really about a story.

To be charismatic is to be adept at a certain kind of storytelling and to invite the potential follower into a new narrative, a new way of understanding their world that is more compelling than other narratives on offer in the culture. And so that ended up being the driving theme of the book.

Doug Monroe:

I want to get to Donald Trump and get your updated thoughts on that a little bit later on perhaps. But it’s a weird thing of in some ways a Marxist way of looking at things where there’s historical forces and an individual pops up that is that force like Napoleon, for Hegel or I think I’m getting that right, or Kennedy for his time, or you list them all in there, Washington and of the better known ones.

But it’s also a real something where people think it is a something like the mind, we don’t… Where is the mind, what is it? But we know it’s there, we know it’s something, and maybe we can only see it darkly, but it’s something that’s there.

Molly Worthen:

I think historians have swung between seeing things, putting too much focus on individuals, but then they’re then followed an overcorrection of diminishing the importance of individuals and saying it’s all about grand historical forces. I think that the truth is in the middle.

Doug Monroe:

It’s definitely individual. It’s in people. And I think you bring that point out very well, particularly with the lesser known characters in there that developed amazing followings.

 What is your view on the Holy Spirit? 

Doug Monroe:

Well, let me ask you the Christian question about the Holy Spirit. You’ve been to a lot of these churches, I think that’s my impression anyway, do you think it’s real? Do you see it happening? What is it?

Molly Worthen:

I think it’s my duty to be very open to all of these claims. I came away after my conversion with full of curiosity about the claims regarding the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in our own time. And my next research project after I accepted the resurrection was into contemporary claims of miraculous healing.

And I spent a fair amount of time interviewing both Western Christians and Christians, formed in other cultural contexts, especially really interesting conversations with a few Nigerians who have since transplanted to the US but really have feet in both worlds and express a lot of dismay and bafflement at the tone deafness of Western Christians so often to the activity of the supernatural.

And I developed a friendship with a pair of academics at Indiana University, Josh and Candy Brown, he’s a neurologist or neuroscientist, and she is a religious studies scholar. And they both had, they’ve made really successful mainstream careers in a secular university, but because of their own family experience with what they believe to be a miraculous healing, Josh had a terminal cancer diagnosis that after a whirlwind tour of healing ministries and prayer miraculously vanished, they’ve devoted a lot of their scholarly energy to trying to this question of can you study these claims? Can we gather data from revivals in Mozambique where people claim to have sight when they were blind and be able to hear?

And so they took audiology equipment and eye charts to the field, and it’s not possible to do double-blind studies of this stuff, but the data they gathered is awfully interesting. And the more you begin to engage with this literature and just read testimonies and confront some of data about the huge proportion, something like 90% of people who become Christian in Burma do so because they say they’ve had a personal experience with some kind of healing.

Okay, you can dismiss some proportion of those claims as wishful thinking or hallucination or you name it. But was I really willing to dismiss all of it? I just couldn’t in good conscience. And you have enough of these conversations with credible, clearly non-insane people who tell you about these crazy things that have happened to them. It has to wrench you out of your epistemological complacency a little bit. So I take it seriously.

Charismatic Christianity & Being Slain by the Spirit 

Molly Worthen:

That said, as part of my research for this book on charisma, I went to a church weekend event that was basically a revival in this very Pentecostal charismatic tradition, a church in Durham that grew out of a revival I write about in the book that took off in the 1990s called the Toronto Blessing, which was characterized by people just being slain in the spirit and lying on the floor for hours, often laughing uncontrollably, losing control of their bodies in various ways.

And I went to this church service really prepared in a mindset of I thought real openness like Holy Spirit, I am ready for whatever you want to do. And I struggled when I was there because Christian subcultures that are familiar that embrace the Holy Spirit in this way, there is a liturgy, there is a ritual to it. There are certain expectations.

So preacher after preacher would get up on stage and they would, at a certain point in their message, begin to make groaning noises and get wobbly in the knees. And at a certain point when they had finished the arc of their message, a person called a catcher would come up behind them and be there when they fell back slain in the spirit. And then they would be tugged off-stage and draped demurely with a blanket while the next person took the spotlight.

And I suppose I wrestled with that with the way in which clearly there is sort of a choreography here. And I had fascinating, very candid conversations with Pentecostals and Charismatics. I said, tell me about the role of your agency. So you’re telling me this story about God forcing you to your knees and you had to crawl on your knees through the door of this church. Is it really the case that you couldn’t get up?

And this pastor I was talking to said, “Well, of course I could have gotten up. God is never going to make me do something that I am not willing to do. So yes, I had to submit, I had to be open to it.” Pentecostals and Charismatics, they’re very subtle about how they talk about the relationship between free will and the force of the Holy Spirit. But I couldn’t shake my discomfort and feeling watching this that it wasn’t entirely of God.

And I had a helpful conversation with a young man who’s now very high up in the Vineyard Church organization, and he was present in the early months of the Toronto blessing. And he said, “We felt that our job was to just create a container for people to stay safe and for God to do what he was going to do. Some proportion of these people having these experiences were probably in the grips of the Holy Spirit. Some of them were working through their own emotional stuff. Who knows, maybe some of it was demonic. It’s not up to us to know. It’s just up to us to create a frame for it.”

And I found that informed agnosticism almost about the what’s of the spirit and what’s not to be a responsible attitude toward it.

Doug Monroe:

Well, it’s my view anyway that, and I have a question in here on orthodoxy, what you think about Christian orthodoxy, whether it exists, but I would say it’s orthodox to say that we don’t command the Holy Spirit, the Spirit commands us. In other words, it comes to us on its own, its own time in its own way.

If we think we command it wouldn’t the medieval folks have said that’s magic. You’re not doing magic. And that sounds what’s bothering you a little bit is which where are we here on this? And I don’t have an answer, but that’s kind of the theoretical one side or the other on the whole issue.

How do you deal with the problem of evil? 

Doug Monroe:

But how do you deal with the problem of evil? You teach a course in sin and evil, so just as a fellow Christian, how do you think about that? It’s a tough one. I spent a lot of time on that myself 10 years ago with the help of great courses, God, Jim Hall, philosophy of religion, person who got his PhD here actually in the sixties. But how do you think about it?

Molly Worthen:

It’s the defeater. I think it’s the major reason why in our own time people either reject Christianity or leave the faith whether is due to their more abstract formulation of these questions, how could a good and a powerful God allow so much suffering or whether it turns on their own personal feelings of betrayal and trauma in a supposedly Christian community, right? That’s so often the theme of people who have de-converted, left Christianity.

And I think of the famous figures of skepticism in our culture, Charles Darwin, I tell my students that yes, we associate him with this great intellectual challenge to the traditional reading of Genesis, but Darwin himself said that what really shattered his faith was the premature death of his favorite daughter. It was a problem of evil experience. That’s what forced him out of Christian faith. So there’s no tidy answer.

And I think Tim Keller’s approach to this has been helpful to me too in that on this topic, he says there’s no slam dunk. But there are several lines of thinking that are helpful when you are in a place in your own life when you’re not immediately dealing with something terrible and you have the bandwidth to think about these things.

And then there are these other practices and scripture and ways of thinking about prayer that are crucial for when you are in it. And it’s not the place or the time to do a deep philosophical dive. I go back constantly to John 11, the healing of Lazarus. I think the thing that makes the Christian God different from all of the other pictures of divinity that we get in all the other world religions is that he is a God who, although he knew how that story would end, and he knew he would raise Lazarus, he wept.

He was deep in a personal experience of the pain of human suffering. This is the whole point of the incarnation, and it is what the Christian answer to the problem of evil different from all other theistic answers. I also think there’s a lot of power in the point that when we have that reaction to call something evil, that is a frame to sort the universe into good and evil.

That depends on theism, depends on a set of moral absolutes that I think derive from a particular picture of the universe as ordered by God. And humans is created in God’s image that you can’t really sustain without that religious framework. So fine, you want to critique the many, many sins and atrocities committed in the name of the church. Of course, that’s human depravity at work.

But in doing that, you are using a Christian framework, you are holding those Christians accountable to their own principles, and you’re not really entitled to use those principles otherwise. And this is something I changed my own mind on I, early in my own intellectual career, I was more persuaded that the more skeptical philosophers of the Enlightenment had managed to engineer a framework for universal moral claims without theism.

And I am just no longer convinced that that’s true. I mean, I think Kant and his categorical imperative, his argumentation makes a lot of assumptions that are really premised on his own Protestantism. More recent thinkers like John Rawls, very similar story. I think an attempt to offer a totally secular godless moral framework. But he thought he was going to be in the priesthood. He had an early formation as a very serious Episcopalian. And I think in his own intellectual journey, he climbed up the ladder of Protestantism and then kicked it away and tried to confect a rope that you could climb to get to where he did.

But I do think that the whole framework still depends on Christianity. Even if when we’re in the midst of suffering, it’s absolutely understandable and permitted to rail at God. This is the power of the Psalms. So many of the Psalms are written with the sense of clenched fists at God’s apparent absence in the midst of suffering.

And those would not be in the Bible if God did not want us to bring our feelings of disappointment and betrayal and anger and confusion to him. So it seems to me that the most important thing when you’re in an incomprehensible experience of suffering is to keep praying. And that can mean swearing at God. But the thing not to do is to totally turn away and stop arguing and stop making clear your own lack of comprehension because God creates, he wants that. The Bible indicates this.

Doug Monroe:

Well, as you were talking, I was thinking about ways that in early modernity, so to speak, it was dealt with either make God not all powerful. So we can’t blame him or to make God disinterested as in deism and put their counter thoughts there. And at least the way I’ve looked. I have to throw those things out because I do believe God is all powerful.

If God made this, whoa, God is holy, all powerful and well beyond. We’re just a fly on an elephant’s rump when it comes to understanding all of that. And God is here. So you get to the notion of accepting paradox, and I’m not going to ask those questions, but you talk about it a lot in here, and I think it’s something you just have to get comfortable with as a human. 

“Apostles of Reason”: Addressing the Stereotypes of Evangelical Christianity 

Doug Monroe:

So with those words, I want to understand a little bit more also about Apostles of Reason, which goes back a little bit. That is a worldview book, if there ever was one. And I think I see Molly getting to know these evangelicals and how they think, and I think you were writing against a stereotype, and I know they appreciated it. And so what is that book about the crisis of authority? I think that’s an ongoing crisis that we all have.

Molly Worthen:

I started out, you’re very right to perceive-

Doug Monroe:

Is that a question or not? Did I ask the question? I don’t know what the

Molly Worthen:

Question. I’ll get into a question.

Doug Monroe:

Make it into a question for me. Thank you.

Molly Worthen:

You’re right to perceive a desire in that book too. Push back against stereotypes. I did have this sense early in my grad school career that conservative Protestants just didn’t get a fair shake. I think the media landscape’s better now. I think there are a lot of really good reporters writing about conservative Protestants and Catholics for secular media. It was less true in the early 00s, and I think I’ve always been inclined to take people’s stated ideas seriously unless there’s good reason to dismiss them. And I think I was frustrated by what I’d call a very materialist character in a lot of professional U.S. history. So history that’s written on the assumption that the most important driving forces of human identity and conflict are the desire for material power and our material interests. And any kind of philosophy or theology is just a varnish over top of that, that’s never seemed persuasive to me. So part of my aim was to just plumb those ideas.

And then I was also curious, the more I was learning about evangelicals, the more I was aware of their incredible diversity and how much disagreement there is under this umbrella term evangelical. And the contrast between that messiness and the fairly narrow picture that the secular media had and has of, even if we just say conservative white evangelicals, what that term means. And so how did we get to the point where that became the image. The book, then it’s a kind of account of the intellectual backstory of the rise of the Christian right, and how it is that all of these different theological streams end up yielding or yielding to a public-facing pantheon of thinkers and activists who reflect a more narrow stripe of that.

I thought I was very struck reading books by people like Mark Noll about the dominance of the reformed tradition in this history. And I went into the book thinking I was going to kind of push back against that. And I made the point of spending time in Pentecostal Assemblies of God archives and Wesleyan sources and Baptists and Churches of Christ and these other streams of the evangelical tradition and Mennonite archives. But ultimately I ended up finding that in fact, this subculture of American Protestants that is numerically fairly small, these self-consciously reformed thinkers have had this disproportionate impact on the shape and the thinking of evangelicals far beyond their official boundaries for precisely the reason that Praxis Circle focuses on, which is that the reformed tradition has offered some of the most articulate, thoughtful, and politically effective language for talking about world views. And drawing a line from scripture and Christian worldview to a particular, for better or for worse, to a particular political agenda.

Christian orthodoxy between Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox? 

Doug Monroe:

Going from there, I know you even toward maybe two-thirds into it, you even bring the Catholics into it. And John Paul II, who I’m a big fan of and Michael Novak, and my question is, do you see an orthodoxy in Christianity across the three big ones?

Molly Worthen:

Absolutely.

Doug Monroe:

You do? Okay.

Molly Worthen:

Yeah. The Nicene Creed, I mean, yes, the Eastern Orthodox have their … We have our fight about the Filioque clause, the procession of the Holy Spirit from God or from the God and the Son. But yes, I do believe in mere Christianity, and I’ve become more sensitive to this because God’s particular way of humbling me was to convert me in the context of a church I never thought I would be affiliated with. And about which a lot of people in my secular, mostly liberal milieu and academia and journalism have certain assumptions. So I go to a Southern Baptist megachurch, not because I am absolutely convicted on the Southern Baptist distinctives, although I think there’s a good case to be made for their approach to baptism, things like this. But because it’s the best place right now for me to learn mere Christianity, and I think that God has permitted or perhaps encouraged all of these different streams because human temperaments and cultural situations vary so much.

And I think a Christian constantly has to be attuned to both the strengths and the blind spots of wherever you happen to be located, and be willing to avail yourself of the resources and approaches of the whole Christian tradition going back in time and globally to enhance your own awareness of what you might be missing. I love teaching students about Eastern Christianity because most of my students are … They grew up in the United States, they’re probably products of an American church, and there’s so much they take for granted in how they think about free will and God’s sovereignty and religious practice and mysticism and how we know God. And even the barest introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy shows them that there are other ways of looking at these things that I think are still in the lane of Christian Orthodoxy, but they’re radically different.

Have Catholicism and Protestantism come closer together since the 1960s? 

Doug Monroe:

Yes. Do you think Catholicism and Protestantism has come closer together, say since the 1960s?

Molly Worthen:

Yes. Yes. I think if we can read in the Council of Trent in the 16th century, the Catholic Church in a defensive posture of really reacting against and doubling down on the growing differences between Lutheran and Reformed interpretations of authority and scripture and grace. Fast-forward to the 20th century, I think Vatican II does represent a meaningful [inaudible 01:33:40] and movement of Catholic hierarchy toward really recovering an attitude towards scripture and grace and authority that is pre-Protestant. I think it’s not that the church became more Protestant, but it’s that it reflected in Vatican II, I think, an effort to get back and recover basics.

That said, I mean, I do think there are still cataclysmically important differences in how Catholics and Protestants think about grace. And whether as in the Catholic concept, grace is a thing, it’s this sort of ongoing supernatural substance that is a gift from God that heals us and it’s an ongoing process. That’s very different from the Protestant understanding of grace as a change in our relationship with God. And I think too, we can talk about the way in which there are these theological differences, but then also part of what’s driven perhaps Catholics and Protestants closer together in many contexts is the changing broader culture. And this sense that whatever the historic divisions between these different streams of Christianity now, the great threat is the rise of secular, humanistic, radical individualism. And there’s more to be gained by a kind common alliance than there is in fighting.

 Can Christian Churches and denominations work more together?

Doug Monroe:

Can we work together more? Are we doing it? What do you think there? And why don’t we work together more?

Molly Worthen:

Well, I guess what’s your standard? I mean, compared to a generation or two ago, it seems to me that there’s far more goodwill and willingness to collaborate while still there persists the residue of old stereotypes, I think on both sides. I encounter in my Catholic or sort of post-Catholic, lapsed Catholic secular friends, a real condescension toward Protestants. And then I encounter among Protestants a deep suspicion that some important way, like Catholics are not really Christians. There’s a kind of pagan dimension. I think humans, we are so depraved, we will do anything to continue worshiping ourselves. And I think I see both in Protestant contexts and in Catholic contexts, ways in which those temptations show up more vibrantly. And it’s easier to see the sins of the community you’re not in than to see your own problems.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Molly Worthen:

But I think compared to 50 years ago, we are far more capable of seeing one another as Christians and having a kind of sober, clear-eyed conversation about our differences.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. It’s self-evident and I don’t know. Protestants tend to splinter more. They always have and always will. And you account for that, and Catholics hold a huge tent together, and it’s an organizational difference and it’s a strength and a weakness. But I was glad to hear that you say that you do think there’s an orthodoxy. I do. And I’m very interested in working together against these other forces that are hurting us.

 The Rise of Donald Trump: A Veto of the Establishment’s Narrative 

Doug Monroe:

So speaking of politics, how would you explain Donald Trump in your own language?

Molly Worthen:

Gosh.

Doug Monroe:

And I don’t mean him as a person. I mean the movement. Okay. What’s going on there?

Molly Worthen:

I think the political success of Donald Trump is partly a story of him as an individual and a real political genius that he has had. And that’s been evident since before he formally entered politics, a gift for telling a certain kind of story about himself and perceiving the frustration of a large number of Americans with the existing political options. But the power of his movement is about the intersection of him as an individual with I think some of these broader forces. There is over the large span of American history, a kind of ebb and flow to Americans’ views of establishment elites. We are a country that has a long history of ambivalence, if not outright skepticism of centralized power and elite power. And I think we are in a place currently in our culture where that skepticism is very pronounced. And to me, we’ve been seeing over the past two or three generations, the decline of Americans’ trust in all kinds of established institutions across the board.

So in 1958, I think was the national election study, this was the first year they asked Americans, do you trust the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time? And in 1958, 75% of Americans said yes. Now that figure is more like 22%. It’s a little bit lower among Republicans, a little bit higher for Democrats. And you can trace a similar erosion of trust in universities, mainstream media, the Supreme Court, big companies, even the military. So I think Americans were at a point of real exhaustion and readiness to hear a different story. And I think that that meant that Donald Trump’s total disdain, disregard for mainstream sources of authority on information about the world-

Doug Monroe:

Including his own party.

Molly Worthen:

Right. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the Democrats and the Republicans as parties are part of that. They are institutions, they’re established institutions. And the Democrats handed Trump a real gift when they nominated Kamala Harris because she really was the face of the establishment in a way that I think triggered so many of Americans’ frustrations. So I think too that we blame the internet and social media so much for the kind of echo chambers that have made it possible for our Americans to reside in different fact universes. But in my research, I was interested to learn about so many of the pre-internet roots of that polarization. And really the way in which the media landscape was … The table was set for Donald Trump in the 90s. And Rush Limbaugh, I think pioneered so much the style of storytelling and attacking mainstream establishment media outlets and talking about the elites in a certain way that really created a playbook that I think has served Donald Trump really well in our own time.

Does the Democratic Party have a good story?

Molly Worthen:

And I think his opposition is scrambling because they don’t have a story. The Democrats have plenty of very capable orators, good public speakers, but I don’t think they have figured out the grand narrative that they can offer that counters the story Trump tells about the world. They tried a narrative that was premised in the kind of post-Obama period that was premised on an account of Americans that foregrounded race and gender identity as the absolute core of who you are as a person and determinative of your interests. And I think much of what we’ve seen in the rise of Trump, the movement of many non-white voters toward supporting Trump is just a resounding defeat, a veto of that storyline. It doesn’t resonate with Americans. They don’t think of themselves in that way. I mean, the gap between the way Democratic elites think about affirmative action and the way affirmative action is taken for granted is obviously good and righteous in secular academia. And what the poll data says from non-white Americans about affirmative action, really expressing a deep skepticism of it. I mean, that gap, I think tells the story.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, there’s the gap. It’s kind of the English Channel, continental philosophy versus Anglican and English, and you weren’t necessarily going there.

Is America a “City on a Hill”? 

Doug Monroe:

Let me ask you the question I wanted to ask you, and I’m going to preface by one of your lectures where you’re talking about early America and you’re talking about the extent of religion in early America, and it’s really a lot less than people think according to your statistics, like 10% went to church.

Molly Worthen:

Well, in the Revolutionary era-

Doug Monroe:

The Revolutionary Era-

Molly Worthen:

They weren’t very churched.

Doug Monroe:

They weren’t churched. No. And Rodney Stark would say the same thing about the Middle Ages. He would say, “No one went to church. And when they did, they kicked them all out because they wouldn’t behave at all.” But anyhow, so do you think part of our national narrative is the city on a hill and along that line, and is there a philosophy we have or a creed that still is alive?

Molly Worthen:

I think that story of American exceptionalism, that there is something special about a country founded not on a particular ethnic background, not on a timeless connection with a particular geographical place, but rather a country composed of immigrants that needed from the beginning of European contact, an ideological justification because of the diversity of origin points. I think that the story of America as some kind of experiment in moral aspiration continues to resonate across the political spectrum with varying interpretations and degrees of cynicism, but perhaps to our regret. Because I think it can lead us to, as Americans, ignore the many ways in which we could learn from other countries, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. And why is it that our approach to certain social problems like the providing of healthcare, for example, has to be so different from what other countries are doing?

I think sometimes we are reluctant to learn from other countries, but at the same time, the United States is a revolutionary state that broke in profound ways with what came before, that in the course of the revolution, truncated the spectrum of Anglo-American political philosophy and has been coping with the aftermath of that ever since. But I don’t know that … It’s one thing to sort of use the romantic language of the city on the hill, and it’s another thing to flesh that out and talk about what that means as a vision for community and America’s place in the world. And I think we’re at a point of real confusion about that.

What Universities Can Learn from Fast Growing Churches

Doug Monroe:

You just wrote an article about what universities can learn from evangelical denominations or organizations. Could you give us-

Molly Worthen:

Right. Well, it’s a little counterintuitive. I think in our culture war context, we often think of conservative churches, whether they’re Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox as on the other side, and secular liberal universities is on this side. But the point I make in that article is that we have seen this very interesting resurgence among more traditional churches, not just Pentecostal Protestants, and my Southern Baptist megachurch is growing by leaps and bounds. But more entries into adult baptisms into the Catholic Church in places like France than they’ve seen in a generation, a really interesting influx of especially young men into Orthodox churches.

And the common denominator is that the churches that are growing are the ones that are unabashedly supernatural. They lean into the weirdness of Christianity. They embrace the way in which Christianity is a counterculture. This is not to excuse them from all errors and compromises with politics and so forth, but there is a way in which they know what they’re about, and it is to run counter to important streams in the broader culture. I think universities have forgotten what it is to be a true counterculture. And I don’t mean that in the usual kind of thin left-wing sense. Universities have, for at least 100 years, always offered a pretty hospitable home to that.

But I mean, counterculture in a broader sense in that universities should lean into their historic identity as a place where it is valuable to study obscure languages and sit around reading Dostoevsky late into the night and thinking about what you think about ultimate questions and that, well, first of all, I actually do think that all of that work has plenty of practical benefits when it comes to getting a job and being employable. But that’s not the point. The point is that a true counterculture is not enslaved to the immediate utility, the kind of way in which the marketplace values a fairly narrow set of often changing skills and metrics, but rather allows for a broader span of what it is to be a flourishing human. So that’s my point in that kind of funny comparison between churches and universities.

Doug Monroe:

And school in the 70s was nowhere near that way as it is today, in terms of being utilitarian. It really wasn’t. The utilitarian or STEM study was there for sure without the name, but it was almost more the minority. Now, I think it’s the majority by far.

 Influence of Charlie Hill & Optimism for the Future 

Doug Monroe:

So my last question, this has been a really delight to talk with you, and I wish I could just engage you as Alexander the Great did Aristotle and we could talk on for another week or two. But I’m thinking about Charlie Hill and I’m thinking about his great life, and I’m getting his name, the people he served and the age that he was a part of. And he’s almost like the extremely wise white man we’ve heard so much about, and he was confident in his views. And we’ve been on a long journey since then. A real long journey from, as you said, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama, and here we are now.

How has our journey been? Are you optimistic? Are you happy? Are you [inaudible 01:50:34]? Where are we? Just because you’re very in touch with that, obviously, and I was amazed at the maturity of your book coming right out of college. I couldn’t believe that you could bring all that together. You must have dedicated so much to it. So you ensconced yourself in all of that. How do you feel now since then?

Molly Worthen:

Yeah, your audience probably needs a quick primer on who Charlie Hill was.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, I would appreciate that.

Molly Worthen:

So he was the subject of my first book, and I got to know him because he was my professor when I was an undergraduate at Yale. But he had had a whole career, four decades as a foreign service officer, and then working for the United Nations that sent him to the kind of most interesting points of Cold War foreign affairs history in the late 20th century.

Doug Monroe:

He was the Forrest Gump of world activity.

Molly Worthen:

He kind of was. Yeah, so he’s not a famous name, but he was behind the scenes at so many key points. He was in Saigon when America withdrew from Vietnam. He was a China watcher in the 1960s. He was posted in Tel Aviv in some critical parts of the late 1970s. He was a speechwriter for Henry Kissinger and kind of second in command during the Reagan years in the State Department under George Schultz, and kept contemporaneous verbatim notes on every conversation he saw or was a part of, especially during that later part of his career. So he was an amazing historical source. My book is both a conventional biography of him, but also about a third of it’s written in first person because I was his student and I started the project really idolizing him. But being a halfway decent biographer and also getting to know his ex-wife and seeing that he had made decisions on the fly in his career and in his personal life that were not immune from criticism, I really had to come to grips with a new view of my mentor, really.

And I think about Charlie all the time. He died in 2021, but remains this the most important influence on me as a thinker and a teacher. And he combined a kind of, there was a certain pessimism to him in a broad civilizational sense with an unbounded exuberance for the study of ideas with young people that was the opposite of pessimistic. And I really identify with that tension now. I find it’s so easy to slide into catastrophic thinking about the state of our civilization, the rapid approach of the AI singularity, the failure of us as a society to even agree on a shared set of facts, let alone solve basic problems. I worry so much about higher education.

But when I’m in the classroom with students who are still very fired up by supposedly old-fashioned ideas and eager to figure out what they think about the world, that helps me stick a bit more to what I guess is my obligation as a Christian, which is to have a fundamental optimism and a fundamental confidence in who we are as creatures made in the image of God. Even if the Christian map of the human story allows for plenty of awfulness that has happened and will continue to happen, it’s that already not yet tension in the eschatological character of Christianity.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, and it’s somewhat the same with being able to reconnect to Carolina other than just the Rams Club. I played soccer for four years, and I’m dedicated Tar Heel on the sports side, but in the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance, being able to meet people like you and get to know some faculty members again and be around students more than my own son and daughter who went here. And I mean, it’s just been a real treat. And there’s no replacing getting optimism that way, which is kind of the way you walked in the door here.

Molly Worthen:

That’s right.

Doug Monroe:

Talking about your students and what you’re getting out of that. And so thank you for giving that to me. It’s been quite a pleasure.

Molly Worthen:

Thanks so much, Doug. This has been fun.

Pre-Interview: Combatting Technology and AI in the Classroom

Molly Worthen:

It was great. It was our first week of classes and both my classes went really well, and it’s been a couple of years since I taught smaller classes that allow for more interaction with the students. And this sounds ridiculous, but it’s almost like I’d forgotten a little bit how smart and enthusiastic and just keen UNC students are, especially the ones who signed up for the kinds of classes we’re doing this semester.

And I’ve been so, I don’t know, my morale has been so low lately about higher ed in general, AI, everything. And I’ve just been so focused on that, and it was really like a tonic to be in the classroom with these students and they were just… I couldn’t get them to shut up.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Molly Worthen:

It was really encouraging.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. And that’s not replaceable.

Molly Worthen:

And I am coping with technology by going in the other direction and becoming more and more no tech. So for the first time this semester, for the past couple of years, I’ve banned laptops during class, but this semester I said, “The moment you cross the threshold into the classroom, no screens.”

And I know it’s awkward to have to talk to each other in that time before class starts, but we’re all so lonely. We keep reading about the mental health crisis. And to help it along, I put a little icebreaker question on the board. And they were totally game, and they were instantly just chatting with each other and into it.

Doug Monroe:

So, when you say no screens, they can’t have their laptop?

Molly Worthen:

No, no, they have some accessibility issue. That’s one thing. But no, they’ve got to take notes by hand. Their phones have to be away to totally like, “Let’s pretend it’s 1990.”

Doug Monroe:

Wow. And they’re doing that all semester long?

Molly Worthen:

Yeah, and more and more professors are doing this. Yeah.

Doug Monroe:

I get it because I think that’s how I learn where I’m writing and that’s why I like print. I like things printed out rather than reading them on the screen.

Molly Worthen:

I’ve gotten rid of all PDFs. I’m going back to as many full books as possible.

Doug Monroe:

It sounds like John Haidt had an impact. We were talking about that last night, that within a month after his speech here even, the whole world changed as far as how to look at iPhones.

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