My conversation with... Molly Worthen

Belle TIndall is fascinated by the intellectual fascination that drove Molly Worthen’s inquiry into faith.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A woman seated at a table gestures with both hands while talking

Can you think your way into Christianity?

Can your mind lead the way into something that transcends understanding?

Is it possible to ‘fake it until you make it’ when it comes to belief in God?

These are the questions that hold our conversation with Molly Worthen together. Molly, for those of you who aren’t yet acquainted with her work, is a journalist and associate professor of American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For the past decade, her intellectual sweet spot has been the religious and intellectual history of North America. Flowing from her fascinating research are books such as Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, as well as pieces for the New York Times, The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

Intellectual fascination was her gateway into faith. She used homework, deadlines, schedules and challenges as tools with which she worked out and fine-tuned her beliefs.

In this episode of Re-Enchanting, Molly very generously walks us through her own story; from a child who would cover her ears when being read Bible stories, to a young adult who could relish the oddity of religious experience from a distance, to a journalist investigating various Christian communities, to a baptised Christian attending a mega-church. It’s quite the journey, but I shall leave it to Molly to unpack the full story, seen as she tells it with the vigour and detail of a historian.

I find Molly’s story captivating for many reasons, the primary one being that her intellectual fascination was her gateway into faith. She used homework, deadlines, schedules and challenges as tools with which she worked out and fine-tuned her beliefs. She says herself, ‘I needed to process to be rigorous’. How interesting is that?

Reflecting on the conversation that Justin and I had with Molly, I realise that there are three, rather distinct and yet wholly common, misconceptions about faith that she shatters. I don’t think that she was intending to, I’m not even sure that she was aware that she was doing it. But her fascinating crossing from agnostic to Christian has some interesting philosophical by-products.

She asserted that she didn’t want to ‘convert out of cowardice’ nor was she interested in succumbing to ‘a bribe’.

Firstly, the focused methodology with which Molly approached theism in general, and Christianity in particular, simply dispels the notion that a belief in God must render logic and reason redundant. On the contrary, Molly took step after considered step into her new-found set of Christian beliefs. Her story is one of measured assurance, of ‘not being 99.9 per cent’, but being ‘far north of 51 per cent’.

Secondly, Molly challenges the assumption that faith is sought out as a method of opting-out of the harshest parts of reality. That it’s held as some kind of cosmic ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card – the ‘jail’ being whatever un-graspable, un-controllable, un-bearable aspect of reality sits most heavily upon us. There’s a common notion that religious people have found a coping mechanism, that they’ve institutionalised their denial and spiritualised their escapism. I’ve often found that notion an interesting one, mostly because I wish that it were true. But it doesn’t quite work that way. Believing in an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-loving God does not mean that one can avoid looking directly at suffering, pretend that it isn’t there, or that it somehow doesn’t ultimately matter. On the contrary, it often requires one to look at it, and wrestle with it, for longer. Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan’s masterful Faith, Hope and Carnage is an ode to a belief system that resides in the midst of Nick Cave’s pain, as opposed to pulling him out of it. Molly, perhaps from all of her years of research, seemed to know this. She asserted that she didn’t want to ‘convert out of cowardice’ nor was she interested in succumbing to ‘a bribe’. Surely you are convinced by now that Molly Worthen is about as fascinating as it gets?

And finally, it was interesting to hear Molly speak of the choices, both micro and macro, that have led her to where she now finds herself. After all, faith is a choice. It reminds me of the philosopher, William James, who proposed that there are certain beliefs that can’t be evidenced until they are believed. For example, you cannot determine whether a chair will hold your weight until you sit on it believing (at least to a reasonable extent) that it can. This is partly (but profoundly) true of God; while one can ponder the empirical evidence for the existence of God for a lifetime, it is often the case that experiential evidence for God is available once you believe it. This doesn’t mean that belief must be a wholly blind choice, that would only negate my first point, but it is a choice. Again, Molly wonderfully encapsulated the tension of this notion in recalling that,

“what was really preventing me from engaging with this evidence is my own commitment to materialism and my own deep epistemological groove. But if I’m willing to suspend that, what happens?... You can walk right up to it and get to the point where you’re still faced with a leap of faith, but it’s no longer a ten-mile leap into the dark, it’s a leap based on a pretty reasonable body of evidence. And it turns out that to reject that leap is itself and act of faith.”

This episode of Re-Enchanting is a personal, and therefore profoundly interesting, one. We speak to Molly, not of how her field of work has been re-enchanted by the mystery and wonder of the Christian story, but how she has. And that makes this episode incredibly worth your time.

Review

Belief

Books

Culture

28 May 2025

4 min read

Could Lamorna Ash become a Christian in a year?

Moving, funny and beautifully written, this young writer’s quest for faith has lessons for all of us.

Lucy Denyer

Lucy is a writer and editor.

Lamorna Ash.

When two of Lamorna Ash’s university friends decided to leave behind their lives as standup comedians and train to become priests, Ash was fascinated. She interviewed them and wrote an essay about it for the Guardian but, by the time her piece came out, knew she was “not finished with Christianity.”

“Perhaps it was naive not to have anticipated how spending my days alongside two fresh converts… would have some cumulative effect on me,” she writes. “Through these encounters, it was as if the very corner of the sky had been pulled back. I couldn’t see what was going on behind it, but I understood it was there for them… they taught me how to believe in the belief of others… their stories became the starting point.”

And so Ash bought a second hand Toyota Corolla, stocked the glove box with CDs and set off on a Christian road-trip around the country that started with a Christianity Explored course and ended with a series of meetings with people who were consciously ‘dechurching’, taking in Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Quakers, Anabaptists and a YWAM community along the way. She books in ‘desert times’ on Iona; in Walsingham; at a silent Jesuit retreat. She walks, and talks, and tries to pray and thinks. Throughout her travels, Ash carried a ‘jokey’ question in the back of her mind to frame her research: could she become a Christian in a year?

The result of her quest is this book: tender, fascinating, moving, funny and beautifully written. Throughout my reading of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever I kept thinking of people I would like to give it to, Christian and non-Christian alike. Ash has achieved a remarkable feat: to make faith and its pursuit a compelling subject regardless of whether you’re a believer or not.

Primarily, this is because she has not - joke question aside - set out with an agenda, other than to more fully understand what makes believers tick (and, she admits, because it is something to write about). Though she is scathing about Rico Tice, whom she finds performative and evasive, and finds the dogma of the Christianity Explored course too rigid and inflexible for her liking, she is sympathetic towards and interested in her fellow Christianity Explored small group companions - and is self-aware enough to admit that during this time she “played the worst version of myself: hackles raised, on alert, unable to let a conversation pass without some interjection”. Though she finds the intensity of Youth With A Mission’s community - along with the fact that many of the staff are married to each other - a bit much, she is individually drawn to some of the people who work there, and reflective about what and why they’re doing. As someone who has grown up with faith, it is fascinating to see what we often take for granted held up to scrutiny by someone who is not there to be deliberately combative, but to try and understand.

“I am still too close to it to tell you definitively all the ways the encounters… changed me,” Ash writes. “What it felt like at the time, though, was that each conversation was leading me to places in my own mind I had never visited before.”

There are elements of Ash’s book I am intrigued by, but sceptical of: her suggestion, for example, that the Bible should not stop where it does, but might be continually added to, “like a divine Wikipedia, updated in perpetuity.” Her theological understanding is not, perhaps understandably, advanced. She is a self-confessed product of her era: young, progressive, queer, and her readings of and understandings of other people are framed through that lens.

But despite its failings, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever remains compelling because of its curiosity - a curiosity that Ash wonders might be the place “where God exists”; its attempts, however stumbling, to understand faith rather than just dismiss it. It is an atheist Quaker who teaches Ash “how I might approach Christianity: it was supposed to be a challenge.” You will have to read it to learn where Ash herself ends up, but her book extends the challenge to those of us who might benefit from a similar scrutiny of what we believe - not to fall out of faith, but also to understand it, and God, more.

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