In a recent column, I explored the unusual friendship between Jonathan Rauch, a gay Jewish atheist, and a circle of evangelical heavyweights like Russell Moore and the late Tim Keller. Rauch, a leading public intellectual, drew sustenance and inspiration from these encounters but never was able to wrap his head around evangelical metaphysics.
He is charmed by what evangelicals like to call “the Christian worldview,” but he never could convince himself it was true.
Molly Worthen’s religious history provides a fascinating counterpoint to Rauch’s polite intransigence. In 2014, Worthen, who teaches American religious history at the University of North Carolina, published Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
“Worthen’s religious history provides a fascinating counterpoint to Rauch’s polite intransigence.”
The book centers on the thinking of biblical inerrantists like Carl F.H. Henry who based their apologetics in the “presuppositionalism” of Cornelius Van Til. Every coherent worldview, Van Til believed, is rooted in a discrete set of a priori presuppositions, a worldview, that can neither be proved nor disproved. Van Til was postmodern before postmodernism was cool.
The problem, Worthen realized, was people who begin with an inerrant Bible often end up with radically different belief systems.
When Pentecostals base their defense of glossolalia and a “second blessing” in the inerrant word of God, or when evangelicals in the global South use their Bibles to bolster belief in witches, demonic possession or baptism for long-dead ancestors, Reformed evangelicals like Henry had no obvious comeback.
This is what Worthen means by a “crisis of authority.” She agreed with church historian Mark Knoll that a simple reliance upon biblical inerrancy is no guarantee of institutional cohesion or intellectual consistency. But, in her concluding assessment, she criticized Knoll’s famous quip that “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
It would be more helpful, Worthen suggested, to speak of an “evangelical imagination” which, although it has certainly been “both an aid to intellectual life and an agent of anti-intellectual sabotage,” also has functioned as a source of energy “that propels evangelism, institution-building, activism, care for the suffering and a sincere passion for intellectual inquiry.”
Evangelicals may disagree about almost everything, Worthen concluded, but the heat and light generated by the evangelical imagination “has proven over time to be a kind of genius.”
Her own struggle
Like Rauch, Worthen admired, even envied evangelicals like Russell Moore and Tim Keller. But wishing one could believe isn’t the same as actually believing, especially for brilliant minds trained in rational argument.
Worthen has been drawn to Christian faith throughout her adult life. She was particularly attracted to Ango-Catholic worship, especially when “the incense is so thick in the air you can’t see the altar.” In 2008, she was baptized in that kind of church, but she says it didn’t take. A kindly priest made no effort to evangelize her, and when she indicated some intellectual difficulty with aspects of the creed, he appealed to mystery and spiritual aspiration.
J.D. Geear with Molly Worthen’s book. (Imave via X)
In retrospect, Worthen feels the very richness of Anglican church history and liturgical life deflected her attention from Jesus. In the course of a Gospel Coalition podcast, Worthen said: “If you’re interested in converting to Christianity as somebody from the outside, as a fully-formed adult, it’s a lot to take in at once. There’s all the Jesus stuff, and there’s lots of crazy stuff in the Bible, there’s the end times prophecies, heaven and hell, the sexual ethic that is so at odds with everything our current culture says; it’s so much.”
Worthen’s journey to Christian faith began in earnest when she pitched a story about Raleigh’s Summit Church and its pastor J.D. Greear to a North Carolina magazine in 2022. When she sat down with Greear and he asked her if she were a Christian, she called herself a sympathetic outsider.
For Greear, that was insufficient.
In his 2011 book Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary, the megachurch pastor defined “gospel” as “the announcement that God has reconciled us to himself by sending his Son Jesus to die as a substitute for our sins, and that all who repent and believe have eternal life in him.”
All Worthen had to do was affix her signature to this proposition and she was in.
That pitch didn’t work on a professor of religious history. She didn’t want to bribe her way into “eternal life” by repeating a magic formula.
Conversations and conversion
Greear helped Worthen pinpoint her primary concern: the naturalistic worldview in which she was trained as an academic made it difficult for her to accept the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead.
Realizing he was a bit out of his depth, Greear called up his good friend Tim Keller, a low-key Presbyterian pastor who was in a losing battle with cancer. Together, Greear and Keller cobbled together a list of reading assignments for Worthen, beginning with N.T. Wright’s massive The Resurrection of the Son of God.
“The naturalistic worldview in which she was trained as an academic made it difficult for her to accept the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead.”
Worthen supplemented Wright’s tome with Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which makes a strong case that the authors of the four Gospels stood much closer to the events they describe than most recent New Testament scholars have appreciated. Also helpful was Francis Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief which associates his work as a scientist to his adult conversion to Christianity.
Worthen also was challenged by an image she stumbled across in Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy in which the author came to realize that he was even more estranged from the naturalistic worldview he was raised in than he was from a confident belief in God. Coming to Christian faith entailed a leap of faith, Vanauken realized, but so would a retreat back into his old assumptions.
Worthen was helped by David Bentley Hart’s argument that the God atheists dismiss has little in common with the biblical God.
To ensure she wasn’t getting a one-sided perspective, Worthen read critical reviews of Wright’s big book and dipped into the scholarship of Bart Ehrman, a personal friend and colleague at the University of North Carolina who, although raised in evangelicalism, now rejects the historicity of the Resurrection.
Finally, encouraged by the pragmatic philosophy of William James (her intellectual hero), Worthen decided she was considerably more than 51% convinced that the resurrection was a historical fact. It was time to take the plunge.
When Worthen’s conversion became public knowledge, leading evangelical podcasters wanted to interview the converted agnostic. With millions of Americans fleeing organized religion, Worthen’s journey to faith was a welcome anomaly.
Religious skeptics and progressive Christians, for the most part, maintained a polite silence.
Not far enough?
The internal logic of Worthen’s conversion moves from a belief that the resurrection of Jesus is more likely than not, to a confidence that the God Jesus talked about must be real. And if this God is the author of reality, all other issues, whether religious, scientific, sociological or philosophical, must be viewed through a Christian lens.
This perspective squares nicely with what I was taught at Southern Seminary in the mid-1970s. Professors like Frank Stagg, Frank Tupper, Bill Leonard, Glenn Hinson and Glen Stassen would have no objections to a pragmatic, Jesus-centered faith rooted in resurrection faith.
J.D. Greear also would affirm Worthen’s religious logic, so far as it goes. But, for a Southern Baptist preacher, it doesn’t go far enough.
“For a Southern Baptist preacher, it doesn’t go far enough.”
Greear teaches that hell is the default destination of every person who has ever lived. If you don’t confess Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, you are bound for perdition. No exceptions.
Greear might not be entirely comfortable with the implications of his own theology, but if he wants to remain a Southern Baptist in good standing, he isn’t free to follow his heart. Because he regularly draws fire from hardcore Southern Baptists who think he’s too soft on gays and immigrants, he is repeatedly forced to reestablish his infernalist bona fides.
What does Worthen believe?
Does Molly Worthen agree with her pastor?
Does she believe her friend Bart Ehrman is hell-bound because he believes the resurrection is a myth?
Does she believe a gay Jewish atheist like Jonathan Rauch will suffer eternally?
Does she believe all the men and women currently in same-sex marriages are eternally damned unless they divorce and embrace a celibate lifestyle?
Does she believe her Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and nonreligious friends and colleagues can expect nothing from God but eternal misery?
Does Worthen even believe in the traditional Christian hell at all? C.S. Lewis didn’t, and N.T. Wright and Richard Bauckham follow his lead. David Bentley Hart says there is no biblical warrant for the concept of eternal conscious torment.
Greear celebrates the “conservative resurgence” that drove thousands of Baptist pastors and lay people out of the Southern Baptist Convention. He even accuses the men and women who mentored me in my faith of injecting theological poison into the veins of mother church.
Does Molly Worthen agree?
Does Worthen believe in biblical inerrancy? Again, I doubt it. If she did, she would have accepted the Resurrection of Jesus simply because it’s in the book. Worthen required, and received, extrabiblical evidence.
As a diligent student of American evangelicalism, Worthen must realize the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC was, in large part, a panicked reaction to the ordination of women. In the 19th century, Southern Baptist preachers used the inspired Word to defend slavery and Jim Crow segregation; in the 20th century, appeals to an inerrant Bible bolstered patriarchal religion.
Does Worthen agree with her pastor that only males should preach?
Worthen may have kicked a lot of questions down the road so she could focus on the “one thing needful,” but she eventually will have to tell us how her new faith informs her eschatology, her politics, her anthropology, her understanding of God’s character.
After listening to at least a dozen evangelical podcasts, I never have heard Worthen address these questions. Perhaps her evangelical interlocutors fear that, if they pushed their scholarly guest too far beyond her personal credo, she might diverge from the authorized script.
An atypical conversion
Worthen claims the seeker-friendly anonymity of Greear’s Summit Church was the only context in which she could possibly have come to faith. If she’s right, what are the implications for progressive Protestants?
Worthen is fully aware that her journey to faith is highly atypical. After all, how many seekers have authored highly regarded books on American religion? How many have their doubts addressed by leading members of the evangelical cognoscenti? How many Christian converts reason their way to faith? Not many.
The natural question for those who come of age within a family of faith is why they should stop believing what they learned in Sunday school. Those who grow up outside a faith tradition want to know why they should believe what clever people on social media dismiss as nonsense. The reassuring rhythm of infant baptism and adolescent confirmation grows less effective with every passing year.
Liturgical Christians like to poke holes in evangelical apologetics but, apart from a few shop-worn appeals to “mystery” and “living the questions,” we have largely abandoned the intellectual battlefield. Sure, Christianity works for us, but if young people are attracted to atheism, Buddhism, Wicca or astrology, that’s perfectly fine. Who are we to judge another person’s religious preferences? It’s rude and tacky.
It’s fine to disagree with Greear’s definition of the Christian gospel; but do we espouse a convincing alternative? If not, it’s small wonder that Molly Worthen’s initial conversion didn’t take, or that she had to find a Southern Baptist megachurch pastor to close the deal.
Alan Bean
Alan Bean leads Friends of Justice based in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is a member of Broadway Baptist Church.
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