An unbelieving seeker journalist in the US finds faith

Molly Worthen is a highly regarded historian and journalist who researches North American religious and intellectual history.

She is perhaps best known for her book Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, which examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945. She also writes regularly about religion, politics and higher education for the New York Times.

In August 2022 she stunned academic and church circles in the US when she announced she had become a Christian. What follows are edited extracts from an interview she gave to Collin Hansen on her conversion, which may be found as a podcast on The Gospel Coalition’s website.

‘I had made a couple of incompetent efforts early in my adult life to get myself to church. I went to the local, high Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian parish for a while, felt pushed at a certain point to get baptised there, as it was something I felt pushed to do. I continued to go to church for some time after that, but fell away and since then had coasted along in a state of mildly dissatisfied agnosticism.

‘Fast forward to early 2022. I guess the Holy Spirit was working on me. I began an article on J.D. Greear and the Summit Church in North Carolina, just after he ceased being President of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I thought this might give a lead into the bigger story of all the stuff going on at the SBC.

'It dawned on me I was being evangelised'

‘When I met him I mentioned that I was an unbelieving seeker. We discussed C.S. Lewis; later I wrote back and said forget the Narnia stuff, look at the space trilogy instead. This sparked an extensive email correspondence about the historical claims of Christianity. He sent me very long, detailed, well-sourced, sometimes footnoted email responses, taking every question I asked extremely seriously. It dawned on me I was being evangelised. I was flummoxed because this fancy pastor was very busy, but he was still going to answer every question. And we were also becoming friends, which is so important.

‘J.D. Greear helped me see that Christianity stands or falls on the resurrection. And I could agree to struggle with all the other questions. I am a historian of Christianity. And I had always conceived myself open to the claims of Christianity. But I only realised last summer that I really had not been, and that I had never seriously investigated the claims of this unique religion.

‘And I felt kind of ashamed of myself. So I began to pray for some sort of warm and fuzzy mystical intervention. And it didn’t happen. By August I had to admit that I had gotten over that line of the resurrection being the best explanation for the historical evidence we have. And if that was true, I had to change my working hypothesis of the universe.

'I told my husband I was feeling pretty stressed out, I think I might be a Christian'

‘So I went from praying simply for God to show Himself to me, to saying Jesus, You are my Lord and Saviour. That weekend I told my husband I was feeling pretty stressed out, I think I might be a Christian. And he said what’s the big deal? So I ended up making it official by doing the prayer in front of a Christian notary, in Greear’s office, and I got myself properly baptised. And it was some baptism service. They rented out a local amphitheatre for the 16,000 people taking part, with giant Jacuzzi-size tanks down front and people lined up to answer the altar call and wearing the church issue black T-shirt and shorts. So I found myself in the unexpected position of standing on stage while the worship band was playing, getting into that chlorinated tank with the former President of the SBC and having him baptise me.’