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.

Explainer

Belief

Culture

Leading

Wisdom

7 May 2025

4 min read

Why does the Pope matter today?

The personal, vivid link to the origins of the movement that changed the world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An Anglican bishop wearing purple shakes hands with the Pope.

The author meeting the late Pope, 2024.

There is something about the way popes are elected that captures the imagination. Whoever dreamt up the idea of black smoke for ‘no decision’, and white smoke for ‘habemus papam’ – ‘we have a new pope’ - was a genius at marketing. So much better than a press release or a tweet from the Vatican X account.

The conclave was brought to our imagination so vividly by the recent film with Ralph Fiennes. We love the idea of secret debates, intrigue, people locked away from the world until they come to a decision with arcane ancient rituals and an uncertain outcome. Was there ever a film whose release was better timed?

There are also the sheer numbers involved. There are approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world today – roughly the same as the population of India and China, the world most populous nations. Yet the identity of the new pope is of matters to the rest of us too. The leader of China of India is of interest especially to people living in China or India, but maybe less so for those of us who don’t. The new pope is the head of churches round the corner from where you live, or of people with whom you work, or, if you are Catholic yourself, your own spiritual leader. This appointment matters.

Yet it’s not just the optics, the drama, the numbers. And it’s not just for Catholics either. I am an Anglican, and since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have had in our own 39 Articles the statement: “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” That might seem to settle the matter that it’s of no interest to English Protestants. But that would be wrong.

I met Pope Francis once. It was at a gathering of Anglican Archbishops in Rome last year. We all were led through magnificent Vatican corridors into an imposing state room, adorned with fantastic frescoes, where the white-robed Holy Father was brought in on his wheelchair to deliver a brief 20-minute homily to us all.

It was a good talk, thoughtful, well-constructed, but in many ways unremarkable. It didn’t say anything much that I hadn’t heard from other sources. Yet somehow this was different. His words carried a weight, a gravity that went beyond the content of the lecture itself. It was as if, when he entered that room, he carried with him two thousand years of church history.

The line of Bishops of Rome goes back to St Peter, the gruff, unschooled fisherman who Jesus called from his mundane life to become an apostle, and who then on, was so captured by the person of Jesus that he gave his life in the cause. I left that room conscious of the weight of the office of the papacy, even if I don’t recognise him as my direct spiritual father.

Listening to this successor of St Peter felt like you were listening to one of the friends of Jesus – and this was not just the personal quality of the man himself, but something about the office he occupied. It was a personal, vivid link to the origins of the Christian movement, the first stirrings of the revolution.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past.

Of course, there have been some pretty terrible occupants of the papal see, whose personal lives showed scant evidence of any knowledge of, or relationship with Jesus. The sixteenth century Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) comes to mind, who despite the rule on clerical celibacy, had several children from various mistresses, won the Papacy by bribing cardinals, and made his favourite son bishop of several lucrative sees at the age of eighteen, and a cardinal at nineteen. So, there is nothing automatic about this – which is why the Protestant Reformers denied the idea of any blanket automatic papal authority.

Yet when a person of evident holiness is combined with this notion of the weight of the office, the papacy becomes a gift to all of us, linking us back to the earliest followers of Jesus – even to Jesus himself.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past. Monarchies do something similar – linking us to the past through the long line of kings and queens of England, Denmark, Spain or wherever, yet more often than not, the events they lead us back to, the process by which those families took power, reveal murky politics, bribery and bloody battles.

This is a line in history that links us to the event that, if Tom Holland’s Dominion is to be believed, has had more impact in shaping western culture than any other – the remarkable life, death and resurrection of Jesus – a radical life full of love, self-giving and transformative power – for both individuals and whole civilisations. And for that, whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or even, perhaps, unbeliever, we might raise a prayer - or a glass - of thanksgiving.