Molly Worthen: I’m not the first person you would expect to encounter in a Southern Baptist mega church. Maybe that’s exactly the reason I should stay.

Mark Oppenheimer: It’s partly because you think they look like Costcos.

MW: Mine absolutely does.

MO: Have the aesthetics grown on you at all?

MW: Oh, I love the aesthetics.

MO: Oh, so you used to hate the Costco and the Christian rock and now you’re into it.

MW: Yes.

MO: That strikes me as news.

MW: I’m working on an essay that’s going to be like a very robust defense of contemporary Christian music.

MO: That’s really news because I could imagine you getting into the Christianity, but having to suffer Christian rock.

Greetings and welcome to Arc: The Podcast. I’m your host, Mark Oppenheimer, and I want to take you back about 15 years to an airplane ride. I was in one of those medium-sized jets, and I don’t remember where I was going from, but I think it was somewhere in the Midwest, like Wisconsin or Michigan, and I was going to Washington, D.C. I have no idea why.

At some point in the ride, I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me and I think, and this would make sense, that it was because he was reading some book that had something to do with religion, or because I was reading some book that had something to do with religion, and I don’t remember which it was, but somehow I ended up talking to this very genial, lovely dude, a bit older than I was. I think I was in my mid-thirties and he was probably in his mid-forties, and he found out what I did for a living. I’m a journalist and I write about stuff and I write mainly about religion, and I asked what he did for a living.

It turned out that he was a pastor and he was going to Liberty University in Virginia to do the in-person portion of an online master’s program that he was enrolled in. He was trying to get his MA because he said his denominational body wanted him to get more education. So he was a minister in a church, but he answered to a larger denomination and they said, “You know, you should go get a master’s.” So he’d been doing this online master’s at Liberty University, which some of you will know is the university that was run by Jerry Falwell and more recently by one of his sons. And it’s been in the news a lot, but it’s sort of the Falwell’s university. And they required a two week or a one month residency to go along with the online program.

So he was headed to D.C., and he was going to get a car, drive to Virginia, and do his in-person learning at Liberty University. And I said to him, what denomination are you in? Because Liberty is I think non-denominational and he could have been from any number of evangelical denominations. And he said, “Well, you’ve never heard of it. It’s really tiny.” And I said, “Oh, you know, try me.” And he said, “Well, we’re a tiny branch of the Lutherans.” And I said, “I bet your Wisconsin Synod Lutheran.” He was totally dumbfounded. He said, “How did you know?” I said, “Well, I know that the big Lutheran denominations are ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Missouri Synod Lutherans, and you said you were from a smaller branch, but it’s big enough that there’s some sort of denominational body because they told you to go get your masters…” So through my Sherlock Holmes like powers of deduction, I guessed Wisconsin Synod Lutheran. And he said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran.”

So we started talking about what that meant and he was explaining to me that the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans are more conservative, more traditional than even the Missouri Synod Lutherans, who as I knew, were more traditional liturgically and in terms of belief system than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. So we were totally jamming. I mean, whoever was sitting around us must’ve been totally baffled at what these two guys were talking about. Anyway, we’re talking, he’s going to Liberty University, he’s Wisconsin Synod, he finds out that I studied all this stuff in grad school, and then he said, “So what denomination are you?” And I said, “Oh, I’m not Christian at all. I’m Jewish.” And then there was this long pause, I mean it was probably 10 seconds. It felt like forever because we’d been jamming so hard and the conversation had been flowing so smoothly.

And I realized what was going on, which was that this guy from a small town in the Midwest from a very proselytizing evangelical denomination was seated next to an actual Jew, a Hebrew, an Israelite. And he was both excited because he probably had not met so many Jews, that was my sense of him, that he was not super cosmopolitan in that regard, but also he now realized that it was incumbent on him as a born-again Christian to witness to me, and he didn’t say anything. And finally, again after what maybe was 10 seconds, I decided to let him off the hook and I said, “Let me guess, right now you’re thinking that you should be witnessing to me, that you should be preaching the gospel to me, but you don’t really want to do it because it’s a little awkward.” And he said, “Yeah, totally, man.” He said, “That’s exactly where I am.” And I said, “Well, you should know It’s okay. I mean, I love it when people share their faith with me and I’m comfortable in my own tradition, but whatever you want to tell me is great.”

Honestly, I think by that point, maybe we were about to touchdown at Dulles airport or wherever we were flying into, and maybe he didn’t have time because I don’t remember him actually giving me the spiel, but I remember having this moment of real intimacy with him almost where I had seen him and he had seen me see him, and so he was seeing me and I was seeing him, and it was over this question of what does it mean to evangelize someone? And it is true that in contemporary America, it is seen as uncool by a lot of people to be evangelized. Anyway, I’m not one of those people. Even as a little kid, before I had an academic interest in religion, I always wanted to talk to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Latter-Day Saints, Mormons who came to the door. I like hearing people’s stories. I’m never worried that their story is going to impact me in a bad way. I mean, who knows? Maybe it impacts me in a good way.

So why do I tell this story? Well, my guest this week on Arc: The Podcast is my old friend Molly Worthen. And the important thing about Molly is that she’s a great historian and she has a new book out called Spellbound, which is about the history of charisma in religion and politics principally in the United States. And she takes it right up to the present. And more than any other writer I’ve seen looks at the hard question of why Donald Trump is charismatic for so many people at the same time that he’s repugnant to so many others.

One of her arguments about charisma is that it is audience specific, that it’s almost inherent to the idea of being charismatic that while your followers will find you charismatic, other people will have no idea what’s even appealing about you, that you will be a polarizing figure, that charismatic figures are polarizing. So that’s her new book, it’s called Spellbound. Molly teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s a writer. She’s simply one of the most interesting thinkers I know. I also go back a long ways with her. I was in grad school at Yale when she was an undergraduate, and we were both interested in American religious history. So I was the PhD version of who she was as an undergrad, and I was seven years ahead of her, but we would have lunch sometimes we had the same teachers and had the same set of interests.

This was back when Molly was pretty secular. She has recently, in addition to her flourishing as a historian, become a born-again Christian. And that has made some news in evangelical Christian circles, not least because evangelicals feel a little bit outside of the academy. And so to have someone who is an esteemed historian in the secular academy at a major university, like UNC, publicly come to Christ is very big news for them and she has been big news in that regard. In the conversation that you’re about to hear, we talk not only about her book, her research, but also about her childhood and about the question that was alive between me and the Wisconsin Synod Lutheran pastor on that airplane 15 years ago. We talk about the question of what it means to witness to each other, to try to persuade people that our version of the truth or our truth is actually the truth.

And if I have any misgivings about this conversation, it’s that we didn’t spend even more time on that, that we didn’t look even more deeply at what it would mean for me and Molly to actually try to talk each other into things for me to try to bring her back to a more secular worldview, for her to try to bring me more deeply into Christianity. At one point, she promises to send me some YouTubes about miracles, they haven’t arrived yet but I’m going to remind her of them. And so the conversation goes to a lot of places. I think she wishes that I’d spent more time on her book because of course the book is newly out. And actually just this week in Arc at arcmag.org, we run a very, very positive review of her book Spellbound. But for me, the conversation put me in mind of the various times in my life, whether on that airplane or pretty recently in the parking lot at Stop and Shop where two Latter Day Saint missionaries approached and invited me to Mormon worship services or this conversation with Molly when the question of what it means to witness to other people religiously, to evangelize them, to proselytize, smacks you in the face, which it doesn’t very often in the United States. It’s tricky.

Later in the show, we’ll talk about Shavuot, the Jewish holiday of cheesecake, so to speak, and we’ll do celebrity birthdays and religious holidays coming up. But for now, here’s the first part of my interview with historian Molly Worthen.

MW: I’m Molly Worthen. I’m a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I teach and research and write mostly about religion and politics in the United States, and I have a new book out called Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

MO: Right on. And we’re going to talk about that book in a little bit, but first I’d like to go way, way back. I want to hear your journey to the present day, and I want you to start back in childhood wherever you think appropriate. So for some people, the journey begins when they’re five. For some people it’s all nonsense until they’re 13 and that’s when life really kicks in. But take me back somewhere in childhood and explain what you’ve been up to since then.

MW: I grew up about 20 miles west of Chicago in a town called Glen Ellen, Illinois. I was a very detail oriented child who hated organized activity and liked to spend a lot of time alone. I think my big intellectual breakthrough in elementary school was a giant project that I did researching the Lost Island of Atlantis in fifth grade, for which I not only wrote the longest paper I’d wrote to that point, but I also made models of what I found to be the most convincing scholars portrait of what Atlantis might’ve been like both in clay and in gingerbread. I shared the gingerbread one of my classmates.

MO: So you were basically a perfect candidate for homeschooling. You were really self-directed, you just liked doing work. It sounds like you were the sort of, you weren’t homeschooled, but correct, but you should have been. It sounds like

MW: That’s actually not that you say that. I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I’ll bring that up with my parents.

MO: Bring that up with your parents. I feel like maybe we had that conversation 25 years ago when, because I should say you were an undergrad where I was a grad student and we were what, five years apart or something?

MW: No, I think I’m nine years behind you.

MO: Are you that far behind me? Oh my God. Well, I was class of ’96. What year were you?

MW: In college? Okay. No, so I was 2003, so I was exaggerating.

MO: Alright, well seven years. Anyway. I feel like at some point we talked childhood and maybe I had that same impulse, which is you’re the homeschooling poster child, but you never were homeschooled because you end up becoming a professional religionist and a religious person. Were you religious as a kid? And I mean that in both ways. I mean, were you raised religiously, but also were you personally spiritual?

MW: The answer is no to both questions. I grew up in, I suppose, a secular culturally Christian home in that we celebrated Christmas on Easter, although never, ever by going to church. I recall we had very devout Presbyterian neighbors who prevailed on my parents one time and my childhood to let them host our whole family, me and my parents and my younger brother at the Presbyterian church down the street. And I remember just resenting it brutally just as the man oppressing me. I remember also my mother, who is an atheist, got it into her head correctly that maybe she didn’t want to raise total cultural ignoramuses and ought to at least familiarize us with a few Bible stories. And I have a memory of being trapped sitting on the loveseat while she read David and Goliath, she really went out of her way to choose stories that had very little of God explicitly in them. And I remember literally holding my ears. I just wanted nothing to do with it. I wasn’t interested in religion or sort of pulled toward it until college. And even then it was very haphazard.

MO: It’s so funny because as somebody who’s also professionally interested in religion and now has a personal religious life though very different from yours, also was turned off by it as a kid. Do you think that there was a story there that in fact the repulsion or revulsion was the flip side of the eventual strong interests?

MW: There must be something to what you say can’t quite figure out. I can’t put it together or narrate it in a way that makes sense in my conscious mind. The change came when I started undergrad at Yale and began meeting a wider range of people, but also I think having a wider range of conversations because where I grew up, there weren’t very many Jews or Muslims or anything outside of Christianity, but there were loads of devout Christians of this type or another, and I was sort of dimly aware of them and that they went to the Catholics, went to their catechism class on Wednesdays and things, and I knew about Wheaton College two miles from where I grew up, which was the school where they weren’t allowed to dance. That’s all I knew about Wheaton College. But then at Yale, I guess I began having conversations with other 18 year olds who had various thoughtful, rooted connections to religious communities.

And I think it became envious and also began taking classes across the span of the humanities where it just became evident in a way, I guess it hadn’t been before, that for a huge proportion of human beings, through the whole history of our species, religion has been such an important frame through which they’ve understood the world. And so if I wanted to understand anything to do with humans, I had to learn more about religion. But I do think I was aware quite early of having a personal tropism toward it. Not only do these people sort of know what they’re about, but they have answers to the big questions about the universe. And that’s really great and I want that, but I could never get it by actually participating or having a mystical experience or praying or anything. And so I will sidle up alongside it by just taking a lot of classes in the subject.

MO: That’s so interesting because that’s pretty similar to my story, which is I got to Yale and met Jews who knew something about Judaism. I met 18, 19 year olds who were so much farther along in knowing their own heritage, their own culture, the books, the texts, and it made me think, wait, I missed something, I missed something just in terms of cultural literacy along the way.

MW: So you grew up fairly secular?

MO: Oh yeah, totally secular. Now it’s interesting because when here I’ll immodestly give away that I was not anywhere near being my class as valedictorian, but at my high school, the student who spoke at commencement was not the valedictorian, but somebody elected by the class to speak. And I think by virtue of my having won debate trophies, my classmates figured, well, Oppenheimer won’t screw this up too badly. So they elected me to be the class speaker, and I actually quoted from the gospels I quoted from the Sermon on the Mount in my class day speech. Speech. I think it was just the only literary reference I knew, and I had a sense that quoting something biblical would give gravity to my speech. It was probably a pretty cynical kind of or rhetorical move, which was if I reference the Bible, I sound deep and I think it was “blessed or the meek for Shall and her the Earth, it was like one line or something.

But I had a sense that there was great literature there, that there was something there. And yeah, it’s funny, I think around junior or senior year of high school, I began to be curious, but I often say had I gone to a college where there was nobody interesting to talk to about this stuff or where the people who were interesting were not thick on the ground and were segregating themselves off at Hillel or InterVarsity Fellowship or Muslim Students Association or whatever, and they only sort of came out of the closet at those meetings and I never got to talk to them. My life would’ve been very different. But at Yale, a lot of people were talking about this stuff. And so I got into those conversations and then I took those classes I think, and I don’t know which came first exactly, but pretty similar to your story.

MW: And the classes just had a way of focusing the mind on the big questions. I don’t know. I had a sense that that was part of one’s job at college.

MO: Right, right. Were there specific people, students who you still remember as having had given you food for thought?

MW: I had a close friend, first half of college who was a very serious Lutheran religious studies major, and we talked a lot about these things. And I remember a pivotal conversation with her. I had just won some grant money to spend a summer studying Russian Orthodox old believers in rural Alberta, so a kind of breakaway sect of Russian orthodoxy. And I was explaining to her my strategies and what I had been learning. I was deep into Russian language and culture and Russian theology, and I thought I was coming at it in a very respectful and responsible way. And it emerged in the conversation that she was disturbed and I think a little bit offended by what she perceived be my, I don’t know, condescending, amateur ethnographer approach. And I think she basically tried to communicate to me that from her perspective, I was really missing the point and I was presuming that I could parachute into this community with clearly no focus on the core gospel message and presume to understand these people, maybe even presume to understand them better than they did themselves. And I remember sensing just such a disconnection, feeling very misunderstood. That wasn’t at all how I was thinking about my project, but it was sort of a permanent rift in the friendship. And it did maybe reveal to me that it was hard to maybe communicate from one side of that chasm to the other in a way that I hadn’t grasped prior to that.

MO: Did you ever repair the friendship?

MW: We had cordial interactions after that, but it never rebounded to what it had been and perhaps what it might have been in a parallel universe. So it was kind of a breakup

MO: That’s so heavy as you talk about it, it sounds to me knowing nothing else about it that she was being a little bit unfair. I mean there you were 19 or 20 years old studying Russian and preparing to go off to Alberta. And I have a memory of us having lunch, I think in the dining hall of Jonathan Edwards College, and I think you told me this trip was coming up. You’ve gotten this grant money and thinking that, well, that’s cool. Molly’s going to have a great summer. So there you are really doing the work and she’s tri you for not being sympathetic enough to their religiosity. I dunno, it seems a little unfair. Was she being a little unfair?

MW: I mean we were both fumbling our way along. She was formed in a serious Christian household. I think she was maybe struggling with a whole different set of questions. She later became ordained. She was clearly trying to work out the relationship between her vocation and her emerging politics. She was, I think asking all kinds of questions about the tensions between progressive politics and traditional Christianity and how it all relates to this basically secular sphere at college. And then I was fumbling from the opposite direction. So I think you bring two fumbling people together on a very sensitive topic of ultimate concern and misunderstanding is I suppose a likely outcome.

MO: Do you Google her? Do you know what she’s up to now?

MW: I haven’t in a while. I think she’s working in sort of Christian adjacent nonprofit work.

MO: And then of course, leaping forward a good 20 years or so, you end up causing something of a sensation in a certain circle in the evangelical world for as you put it, becoming a Christian, which is loaded language because you’d become a baptized Episcopalian in college. And there you were 20 years later saying, well, I’m now becoming a Christian, which indicates that you were moving from mainline Christianity to what you might call born again Christianity. Is that a fair summation just as a potted summary of what happened?

MW: Well, that attempt to get myself churched in graduate school, it never took, at the time of my baptism even, I was not even a theist. I been attending high church, Anglican, Episcopalian parish for some time. I was sick of being a voyeur. I thought, well, maybe there’s something to this kind of higher sacramental theology. If I just am able to partake in the sacrament, maybe it’ll actually, the grace will have a transformative effect. And I met with the rector who being the rector of kind of the main Episcopalian parish closest to Yale campus, he dealt with a lot of people in my category and we had a nice conversation about how the creed can be aspirational. And he really didn’t push me on any of the major questions. And I had, it was frankly very traumatic baptism that I struggled to go through with. I ultimately did go through with it at the great vigil. So the biggest, the apex of the Christian calendar. And I was a PhD student in religious studies at the time. And so as you know that parish, it’s full of divinity students and other religious studies PhD students.

MO: Is this Christ church?

MW: Yeah, this is Christ Church and faculty. It was really going through this very personal thing, the real meaning of which I didn’t understand in front of my whole professional community. It was sort of terrible, but I did it and I continued to go to church for a few, I don’t know, probably the better part of a year after that, but even at the time, so this isn’t a case of where I thought I was Christian. And then I kind of drifted away. Even at the time my metaphysics were still sort of basically naturalist and I never moved out of the agnostic category. And I remained a pretty apathetic on paper, a seeker, but not someone who was really doing anything about it for many years after that.

MO: Wait, why was it traumatic? I could see it being less than moving or failing to live up to what you’d hoped it would be. But why was it traumatic?

MW: It was so public. I mean, I remember talking with a friend who was very into these things and becoming on a path to becoming a priest himself. And I was saying, isn’t there some little country episcopalian church out in rural Connecticut where we can do this? I really don’t want to do it in front of everybody, and I am an introvert. So I suppose I would’ve felt that way to some extent, even if it had been clear in my own mind what I was doing theologically. But because I was not clear on why I was doing it and certainly did not have what you could call a straightforward relationship to the baptismal vows, I felt even more exposed and possibly fraudulent. A good Anglican would say it just took my baptism almost 20 years to take.

MO: Well, it took, but as somebody who’s an extrovert and is congenitally anti literalist, doesn’t really care about the letter of anything, it’s all about how are you feeling about it? None of that would’ve been traumatic for me. I would’ve enjoyed being on stage. I would’ve felt like at the very least, maybe everyone will gather around me afterwards at coffee hour and give me hugs and slap my back and raise a toast in my honor. And then the theological stuff, I would’ve thought, well, the theology will come tomorrow or next week or it won’t, and I’ll drift away and who cares? Let’s do a shot. It’s so funny to me and says something about how different people are, and I see this in my children of course, where at least a couple of them would have exactly my reaction to it all. And I could definitely see another one in particular having your reaction to it all.

MW: So it’s partly temperamental, but is it partly in Judaism there is perhaps more room for, I don’t know, a range of non-rational, rational, non-literalist? Yeah, a range of relationships to the points of belief.

MO: Look, because Judaism is fundamentally incredibly, to put in Christian terms, congregational. I mean, every rabbi is going to have their own teaching on this stuff. So I don’t ever want to say, I don’t like the whole kind of liberal Jewish move of, here’s what’s easier about Judaism. We don’t proselytize. We are not universalizing. We let people have their own paths. You don’t have to believe in God. There is no clear theology of the afterlife. Well, that’s all true, but I can introduce you to plenty of rabbis who feel that actually there are pretty concrete things you’re supposed to believe in, concrete things you’re supposed to do, and there are many non-negotiables. So every rabbi is different. What I will say is that the sense that your religious commitments are bound up in being in a certain frame of mind that you attest to is very, very Christian and not very Jewish.

And I don’t know to what extent, I mean certainly it’s not typical of Anglicanism that people are scrutinizing your level of belief all the time, but in many strains of Protestantism, there’s real fear if you don’t feel that you know God or that you’ve fallen away. And I remember having this email exchange with Rod Drayer years ago where, and it was sort of offline, but I don’t think I’m giving anything away. I don’t feel I’m betraying him by paraphrasing his side of it. It was in response to something he had written that it indicated that he’s always aware that there’s a God and he always believes. And I think I wrote to him and said, I don’t really believe you. I think that everyone has days when they just aren’t feeling even the most theistic people have days when they aren’t feeling it or they’re not sure.

And my memory is that he came back, and again to paraphrase said, well, there might be days when my feeling of God is a little blurrier or there seems to be a kind of cloud between me and him, but I’m never anything but a hundred percent convicted that there’s a God. And I remember thinking that’s not something that most Jews I know, even among the would think about much, even though there are definitely people in all strains of Judaism who would say they are theists and very strong theists, the sense that you have to be sort of forming your conviction and be able to attest to it is not very Jewish. And I think certainly for someone becoming a Christian must feel very present.

MW: That’s interesting. I mean, I think there are clear, deep historical reasons why that difference would be true kind of across the two traditions. When you think about the origins of Christianity and what in many cases Jews or people kind of adjacent to Jewish communities had to declare in order to differentiate themselves. And then you think about the particular formation of especially European Christianity, the sort that produces the communities that Drayer was describing and that I’ve been affiliated with. There is of course this very western and even more so in the American context, emphasis on individual ascent to a set of propositions about the world and your personal relationship to them. But seems to me they’re also important temperamental differences. And I’ve seen across Christianity, I was aware of this when I was a outsider looking in, and I’m even more aware of it now. Every subculture within Christianity has different strengths and is also prone to different temptations. And I think there are some subcultures that place a dangerous amount of emphasis on having the right feelings. And I’ve really appreciated in the subculture I happen to be in now, a message that I hear relentlessly from those mature Christians who mentor me is don’t make an idol out of the feelings you want to be seeking God, not seeking the magical, warm and fuzzies.

MO: I want to back up in a minute to get to how you got to the Christian community you’re in now, but who’s mentoring you? That’s interesting. Again, I’m always charmed by non-Jewish language. We used to joke when I was at Tablet magazine that whenever someone uses the word fellowship, you’re in the presence of a real guy, a real Christian. Christians are always fellowshipping and Jews don’t fellowship. It’s just a gentile word. Mentoring Jews don’t mentor each other in the faith, but Christians do.

MW: Well. That’s interesting. No, I mean actually I thought I was translating it there. Not the term that you’d use in Christian circles. You would talk about discipling—

MO: Discipleship. Right? Well that’s even more Christian.

MW: Yeah, I mean, mentor is just a secular.

MO: So whose disciple are you? Do you have a nice, I’m going to be totally stereotyping here, but do you have a nice old church lady who makes you tea and invites you in and as you guys sort of sit around her fire and you open up the Psalms and what does your discipleship look like?

MW: I don’t have quite that, I guess I’ve got a few. My pastor is very much someone who I talk to a lot about these things. The women in my Bible study at UNC, we have a study center is part of this movement that has been slowly percolating in American and to some extent British and Canadian higher education since the seventies of these ecumenical centers that usually plant roots in a nice house or some building right adjacent to campus and try to be a resource for graduate students and undergraduate students who are trying to navigate between their faith and whatever challenges they’re facing. So it’s a place that tends to attract cerebral Christians who are interested in frank conversations about doubt and heady theological issues and this sort of thing. So I’ve met people there who have been Christians for far longer than me and come from a range of traditions. And I think the key has been for me, and this is why, it’s part of why I became I got evangelized in the context I did, is to find Christians for whom there are really no scary questions. There’s no doctrine I can ask about, or political theological tension I can poke at where they will try to shut it down. And so I found a number of people in that category and that’s been really important.

MO: Alright, so we’ve buried the lead, which is that at some point you became a Christian anew or again, or for the first time, however you put it.

MW: Absolutely. For the first time.

MO: Okay. Can you tell a little bit, and you’ve talked about this on other podcasts for people who are curious about the story that you’re about to hear, who want to go deeper into the story that you’re about to hear, that the Gospel Coalition podcast, you talked for 90 or a hundred minutes about this, and I was on some long drive. I called you afterwards, it was like 11 at night and I was on some very long drive and I listened to this and it’s totally, it’s spell binding, I will say. And there’s a good YouTube of you at Texas a and m talking about this, but is there the five to seven and a half minute version that you want to give people of how you became a Christian?

MW: Yeah, the quick version is that I do some journalism on the side alongside my academic work. I was writing a magazine article about a local southern Baptist megachurch, and I was interviewing the pastor, developed a friendship with him, and over the space of a few months, he evangelized me, which means he shared the central Christian message with me and in a friendly but persistent way, which actually as much as I’ve spent my whole adult career interviewing Christians, learning about different Christian communities, I had never actually been evangelized, which was sort of funny because I’ve spent so much time around, especially the variety of Christians who claim to do a lot of that. But evangelism is, it’s deeply offensive and are multicultural pluralistic. You do you culture. So even Christians who affiliate with conservative evangelical churches probably don’t do that much of it. It’s incredibly awkward.

And to my great embarrassment, I realized in the course of initial email exchanges and conversations with this pastor that although I considered myself a historian of Christianity and I thought of myself as an agnostic who was sincerely open to the claims of every religious tradition, I had not actually investigated the matter with any rigor. And I had not certainly investigated the case that Christians make for the historical reliability of their sacred texts and the basic things they claim happened in the life of Jesus, specifically, his resurrection. And that there was this huge pile of very serious scholarship that I was just unaware of. And I think in graduate school I had kind of absorbed from the ether. What I came to understand was actually quite outdated view of the scholarship on the New Testament, which is a view that, well, we can’t really know that much about this shadowy figure.

Jesus, there’s just this kind of accretion of myths around him. And the gospels were written at such a remove from the events they described that there’s really nothing in them that can be a clue to the history and that’s just not true. And so I embarked on a very intense, a few months it felt like doing a master’s degree or something in biblical studies of reading both scholarship by believing scholars as well as by skeptics spending weekends on the academic journal database I have access to as a member of the UNC community reading scholarly round tables on this and that book. Also doing a lot of reading just on theism, not just the particular claims of Christianity. And continuing to go during this time to this megachurch to my shock and the aesthetic horror of my lapsed Catholic Canadian husband whose objections I think were much more on the level of the tacky worship music, the sort of bad YouTube as he put it, and the church that looks like a Costco rather than the actual doctrinal claims.

But for me, I think my previous attempts to learn about Christianity and become personally involved with it had all transpired in much more liturgical, traditional, historically aware Christian communities, Anglican Orthodox, and I was a high church snob. But for me, I think those contexts had given the history nerd in me all kinds of things to pay attention to and focus on that were not Jesus. And so for me, I actually really needed the very, very stripped down presentation of the gospel that you get in an evangelical mega church. And I will say that the one I was evangelized in is a pretty cerebral reformed, so coming out of that part of the Protestant tradition associated with John Calvin and the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards, so they’re very sort of into rationalistic arguments and things like this.

MO: But it’s non-denominational or it’s Baptist or

MW: It’s No, no, no, Southern Baptist. Southern Baptist.

MO: Baptist, okay. Southern Baptist. It’s reformed Southern Baptist. Okay, gotcha.

MW: Correct. So I never had any, as much as I prayed for some kind of at least faint emotional experience, if not like a full-blown vision, I never got anything of this sort. But I did finally reach the point where I thought, well, my hero has always been the pragmatist philosopher William James, who says, you’re supposed to be constantly willing to revise your working hypothesis of the universe based on new information. And once I came to terms with the fact that I had had this very strong antis supernaturalist bias that I just wasn’t really entitled to, if I was willing to let go of that, then I had to confront the fact that I actually found the arguments for the resurrection more persuasive than I expected. And I got to a point where I thought, well, you can’t demonstrate a miracle, right? But I’m not 99% certain that this is the best explanation for the historical evidence we have. But if I’m north of 51% and then I’ve got all these Christians telling me, Holly, the warm and fuzzy thing that you say you’re chasing after, that’s faith, that’s the relationship. And you can’t have that without taking a step, without taking the risk and entering the relationship. And I thought, okay, that makes a certain amount of sense. So that’s how I found myself accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior, as we evangelicals say. And that was August of 2022.

MO: Is there a birthday for it? I asked that in all seriousness, are you—

MW: The date I have fixed in my mind is the date of my baptism, which is the feast day of St. Augustine. Just by, well, by providence. I was going to say by coincidence, but I’m not, I don’t believe in coincidences anymore,

MO: I just want it to be my birthday. I want it to be August 28th.
MW: Oh, okay. Sorry. That was a week after. It was maybe six days after I prayed the prayer and in the privacy of my own own house. And then I met with my pastor a couple days later. So I said it in front of the Christian notary as it were, and then it turned out my church was having baptism, so I found myself in the tank on stage.

MO: So the last baptism, which was not in the tank I imagine, which was just a sprinkling of water on your forehead. This one was the full dunking. Dunking with the changing room and all that stuff.

MW: Yeah, yeah. They give you an outfit, they give you black shorts and a black t-shirt that says Jesus in my place.

MO: And was this less traumatic?

MW: It was great. It was great.

MO: Oh, that’s so interesting. That’s so interesting.

MW: I was super nervous and I still would not say I had the stereotypical born again experience, which this, you’ve talked to many adults today. We’ve been reading about it since college. We’ve been reading these testimonies of “I was literally— a bright light broke me in half and I fell on the ground and next thing I knew, blah, blah, blah. So we have a template. It comes with this stereotypically, it comes with this intense awareness of your own sin and your own need for Jesus. And I didn’t have that. I had this very cerebral based on sort of my mode of evaluating evidence as a historian, I’m going to accept that this unexpected fact is actually true and it’s a fulcrum of the universe. If I believe this guy rose from the dead, I can kind of go along with him in his claims that he is who he says he is and all this other stuff that follows from that. But frankly, I am still assimilating it piece by piece. I think Christians too often underestimate the outrageousness of even the most basic claims of their faith.

MO: If it makes you feel any better. I’m intensely aware of your own sinfulness. Molly is a big ass sinner, I’m there to testify to the fact that let me be the Calvinist for you. Yeah, you have a lot. There’s a lot you’re carrying.

MW: I’ll say even before I became a theist, the one Christian doctrine I never struggled to accept was original sin. It just seemed, even though I understood, well, gosh, it doesn’t really jive with the rest of my worldview to believe this. And yet it seems so self-evidently true. And I remember early in my conversations with this pastor, this came up and he was sort of baffled. He said, this is so interesting. Normally in 21st century America where everyone’s all into their authenticity, that’s really hard for people. And he was like, oh, I’m so glad we can kind of put that one aside and work on these other issues

MO: We all think we’re naturally great. Sure, maybe Jesus rose from the dead, but you want me to believe that I have sin? No, we’re all awesome. I should tell you, I know two one and I think two very observant Jews who have told me that they have been tempted, and these are people who do feel very deeply and their feelings have always attached to Judaism, and they are Jewish who have told me the only time they’ve been tempted by Christianity is when they’ve been sort of in a pit of despair over their own sinfulness, and they don’t feel that Judaism has enough mechanisms, whether it be confession in Catholicism or whatever it is, Protestants do, just the kind of meditating on it, the awareness of it, the atoning for it. They don’t feel Judaism has enough mechanisms for them to be repairing their sinfulness all the time. And they think Christianity talks. Christianity has a deeper soteriology to use the academic terms, right. Sense of sinfulness.

MW: I think it’s the only religious tradition that says there is nothing we can do.

MO: Right. Interesting. Oh, right. But you don’t have to because someone died for your sins.

MW: I mean, God had to repay that debt because there’s nothing we could do that would repay it.

MO: Right, right. Interesting, interesting. So because you brought up percentages, this became something that was possible when you were about 51% and up, sure that Jesus rose from the dead. How sure are you now percentage wise?

MW: It depends on the day, but to, gosh, I remember I had a phone call with a very conservative Baptist pastor about, and I was grilling him on this because whenever I meet a Christian and have more than 10 minutes with a person, I kind of interview them about the warrant for their beliefs. And he said, oh, many days I’m like 49% agnostic. This is true of people who are career Christians. And I remember struggling with my continuing doubts shortly after my conversion, and my pastor said, you’ve planted the seed of faith. Stop digging it up and checking on it. Just leave the soil alone and let it grow. And he said, we welcome your doubts. The point is, have your doubts in the community, right? You can be some Amazonian tribesman who’s never seen an airplane before, and I fly down and I’m telling you, the forest is on fire. You need to get on this plane right now, and you may not believe that the plane’s going to fly and get you to the destination. Just get on the damn plane. And that’s kind of his view of death. So today maybe I am 76%.

MO: Okay. And are you still a Jamesian in that, and you might even say just a positivist I guess, in that you’re interested in falsifiability and still open to could you be unconverted at this point?

MW: Yeah, yeah. It’s a great question.

MO: Could new information come along they make you think like, okay, that was an interesting detour, but it doesn’t really hold for me anymore.

MW: Yeah, well, I mean, I have to say the answer is yes. I mean, it would make no sense to go through this very—

MO: Okay, so then what would that information look like? Would it be someone of N.T. Wrights proxity and sort of long-winded scholarship coming along with a similar book debunking N.T. Wright? Would it be 10 more years of not having had a kind of inner feeling that you were hoping to have? What would it look like?

MW: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, what I have noticed, so I remain addicted to apologetics and I think it’s unhealthy. I have to have to really keep it in check because you have to stop reading people trying to persuade you.

I think even though I know that, listen, if the definition of the historical method is the analogies that we draw from our own experience of cause and effect, that we project then into the past based on rules of the laws of the natural universe, and then we define the miraculous as supernatural intervention in those laws of cause and effect. Then of course the historical method breaks down at the singularity of the miraculous claim. There’s no scenario in which I’ll read a proof of it. However, I can tell at some non-rational level, I still this hope that there’s some magical book out there that I will read and that will allay all my doubts, even though I know it’s not true. I have been struck as I continue in my informal hobby of interviewing Christians about their grounds for belief. Almost always what they say amounts to an account of their own life that they narrate as a series of interventions and points of guidance by God. And they talk about, I mean, the evangelicals I know when we use language like God was so, has been so faithful. When I look back over my life, I see that God has guided me in this way. And so the sort of ethnographer in me because a scientist who’s entered my own experiment, so I can never turn that off. I see that what happens is you get socialized into understanding coincidences and things, and then that becomes your story of yourself and that becomes your ground for faith. And that’s a third thing.

MO: There’s the intellectual apologetics. That’s one way in another is sort of being slain in the spirit. God just presents themself to you. And then both of those I kind of understand though I’ve never experienced either one of them in a profound way. The third one I always think is just nonsensical. You hear these people tell these stories and you realize they’ve just started interpreting everything through the narrative they prefer. So all the times they went bankrupt, they forget about, but the one time that they won a thousand dollars in the lottery and it saved them from losing their car, God was with them. I’ve never heard someone talk about their life in a way that didn’t seem like a lot of special pleading.

MW: And we know we have selection bias and all of this, but I have had to continually remind myself that it’s not that I have dropped into Christianity from a neutral position before I was a Christian. I was socialized into a different way of narrating my life, and a different set of presuppositions that have their own historical context than are just as sort of ideological. So it’s not that I am coming from nothing and then adopting this new set. I have to continually remind myself of that because I do think that secular people have a sort of operative double standard, especially in our current culture that is in so many ways functionally secular and functionally naturalist, if you move through the world as not someone who pays any attention to the potential for the supernatural, you’re not pressed by your culture to really interrogate that at all. And it was really significant for me right after I got baptized, my next research project, if you will, was an investigation of contemporary claims of miraculous healing in which I just spent a lot of time reading tons of testimonials and interviewing people who’ve had these crazy experiences. And it was really eyeopening for me. I mean, certainly you can write off some proportion of these things as hallucination or wishful thinking or whatever, but if you really spend time reckoning with how many otherwise totally ordinary, trustworthy people report outrageous experiences, I found myself uncomfortable at the prospect of dismissing it all. And that has shifted me also.

MO: Yeah, I mean that’s a lot. I know you’re talking with Ross outfit at UNC Imminently tomorrow or something, and that’s a lot of his book. I’m less persuaded by that. I’ll just say for myself, partly because I’ve become more persuaded by an area of the world in which I used to be fairly skeptical, which was the power of our own mind, that the mind is at work in incredibly interesting and mysterious ways that would seem to account for what is actually the pretty small number of cases, I think, where people aren’t either crazy or where there’s not a medical explanation or what have you.

MW: There is no proof that you could present to a skeptic that would answer the question of causation in any of these scenarios without going down that rabbit hole.

MO: I would only say the proof would have to be me seeing something. The fact that these things are never caught on video, it doesn’t concern me that they’re not replicable. It does concern me that they’re almost always hearsay.

MW: Yeah. Well, I’ll send you some stuff.

MO: Okay. You can send me some.

MW: Yeah, I bet you haven’t looked into it as deeply as you think.

MO: I haven’t looked into it as deeply as, no, I think I’ve looked into it exactly as deeply as I think, which I’ll concede is not all that deeply, but also some people I trust a lot. Again, you Ross people of that sort of thoughtful, sincere, non perjuring, I presume have given me their best cases for it.

MW: I’ve never sent you all my files.

MO: You’ve never sent me your files, and I’m sure there’s a YouTube for that. Has becoming a Christian changed how you do history?

MW: I’ve thought about this a lot. I think the answer is mostly no, and I am not sure if that means that. I think it does partly mean I was drafting off of either Christian or Judeo-Christian presuppositions before, and a lot of my assumptions about the moral framework and my kind of empathetic duty to humans in the past, I guess I have become even more aware of some things that I always tried to do before I was a Christian, which is to highlight for my students cases where there is an obvious dissonance between the way secular naturalist historians narrate a series of events in the way believers understand them. But then to stress to my students that those two ways of narrating say the great awakening, whether it’s through a set of complicated economic and sociological circumstances that predispose this particular community in North Hampton and in Massachusetts in the 1730s to have this experience, or it’s the dissent of the Holy Spirit, that those two narratives are not mutually exclusive and that they can be complimentary. I suppose becoming a Christian has broadened my aperture of curiosity. So I mean, the signal example is my interest in miraculous healing. I mean, I never paid any attention to that before.

I was just inclined to write it off. I will say too, I mean, and this echoes, if you’ve been reading Rod Dre or Ross outfit on these things, both of them have some thoughts to share about UFOs, and I agree. So once you start taking the supernatural seriously, and once you start taking human testimony of weird stuff more seriously than you did in the past, I personally feel a burden to be non-discriminatory about that and to pay attention to all the weird stuff that people says has happened to them and think about it seriously. And so I do find myself doing that.

MO: So it’s kind of twofold. One, being a Christian has made you even more sure that you shouldn’t be an asshole toward people no matter their beliefs, right? You were tried not to be aholic before and becoming a Christian has made you even less aholic, but also it’s broaden in the aperture of curiosity. Would that be a fair summation?

MW: Yes. Yeah. I suppose I had a certain set of moral intuitions before, and I mean, one thing that changed for me that softened me up for the gospel is I had, for most of my adult life, I’ve been persuaded that one could reason from the most secular expression of the enlightenment to universal human rights. And I changed my mind about that. I don’t believe that that’s philosophically satisfactory anymore.
MO: Think I’m probably there with you on that.

MW: I was drafting off of Christendom in that sense, and now I’m just more honestly rooted in it.

MO: This is kind of an Ill-formed question, but hearing you talk made me think, reminded me of something that troubles me about the current nexus of Christianity and conservatism as it relates to higher education. One of the things I always liked about conservatives in higher ed, going back to the nineties when books like Dinesh Desus Illiberal Education were coming out, or Alan Bloom’s, the Closing of the American Mind was back then, it seemed like the liberals were throwing out empiricism because they wanted to be relativists. All knowledge is equal. There are many ways of knowing. Witches have one way of knowing. There’s an Afrocentric way of knowing. There’s a feminist way of knowing There’s this, and conservatives were saying, actually, we have to pay attention to the evidence if we want real science, if we want real history. And so there was a way in which he of the best version of the Enlightenment that was undergirding the academic enterprise were conservatives who were resisting all kinds of special pleading and identitarianism and political correctness and relativism on the left.

But now I feel like I certainly don’t think the left or the sort of traditional academic liberalism is nailing it. I think they’ve made enormous mistakes in the past 5, 10, 50 years, and maybe they’ve always been wrong on something like whether you can ground human rights in Locke or whatever without Christendom. But that aside, they are much more, I feel like empiricist and evidence-based. Now, when a lot of the right is saying it could be inmin for curing covid, but it also could be aliens, but it also could be covid, but it also could be, you know what I’m saying? The Supernaturalist turn has real problems for those of us of Christian or not who want to do history. I mean, do you see the risk I’m talking about?

MW: I see what you mean. I don’t think that the pattern you’re describing on the right has much to do with the fact that people on the right may have, well, and I don’t even know if they have disproportionate supernaturalist commitments. Their commitments are just different. I think it has to do with the very different regard for experts that people on the left and the right have, and American’s ambivalence toward institutional expertise is one of the great themes in the intellectual and cultural history of this country. And it certainly has some manifestations on the left, but I think there are historical reasons why it has really a fluoresced on the right in our own time, and it is connected to the total partisan conquest of our universities by progressivism. That’s sort of a separate rabbit hole. So I don’t know that, I think it follows from having an open stance toward the supernatural that you would then discount the guidance of professional guilds of experts. I think that has a separate sociology.

MO: Does it worry you as somebody who’s now more open to supernaturalism, that you might get overly skeptical of expertise or develop a cynicism toward it? I mean, a lot of people in evangelicalism, you go far enough down it and God’s intervening all the time, right? You go into Pentecostalism and just God is omnipresent, constantly intervening and everything can be explained by God.

MW: Yeah, that’s interesting. There have been great benefits as well as handicaps to becoming a Christian at midlife. I converted when I was 41 and also converting out of my particular intellectual and professional background. So on the one hand, I think there are really fundamental aspects of being a Christian that I find unusually hard. I have a kind of spiritual autism just because I didn’t grow up worshiping and praying and trying to encounter the supernatural. However, I do bring an awful lot of head knowledge and familiarity with the whole 2000 year tradition and knowledge too, of global expressions of all of these different subcultures. And so I think I’m pretty inoculated, or at least aware, conscious of the tensions and the pitfalls. I think one thing that appeals to me about Christianity is that it is a set of every important doctrine in Christianity is a paradox. Whether it’s the fact that God is three, but also somehow one, that Jesus is a fully human and yet fully God, that God is all sovereign, and yet somehow we still have a meaningful degree of free will. And if you go back and survey church history, you see that the individuals and movements whom the main stream of Christian institutions have deemed heretical, they’re all cases of taking one of these paradoxes and tipping it out of equilibrium.

And so I think the same applies here to one’s posture toward experts, and I mean, I think that there’s a sort of hierarchy of expertise in Christianity when it comes to navigating the supernatural. And I mean, there are some forms of Christianity. Catholicism is sort of the marquee example that does dictate a great deal of deference to experts even when it comes to evaluating God’s supernatural interventions.

MO: A very weak part of Ross’s book, by the way. The idea that the church is so rigorous about who gets to be a saint and who does it.

MW: They are pretty rigorous,

MO: But there’s so many cases where they rush canonization through. I mean, that’s pretty, as a historian, we know how much human will goes into that, don’t we?

MW: Of course. But if you look into the history of the shrine at Lourdes, I mean the number of miracles that the church has actually approved and sanctioned compared to the number of reports, I mean, it’s a tiny, tiny proportion. I think there’s a serious process there, so to say. It’s sometimes flawed, but they are very, especially since the Protestant challenge to all of this emerged in the 16th century, they’ve—

MO: Tightened it up.

MW: Yeah, they’ve tightened it up enormously.

MO: They’ve raised their game.

MW: Yeah.

MO: Okay. So I’ve asked you how being a Christian May or may not have affected your professional work as a historian, how has it affected your politics? Are there any substantive policy views on which becoming a Christian has changed your mind?

MW: I think I’m still working out a lot of that. I think part of what opened me up to Christianity in a new way, and this is connected to my sort of rethinking of the philosophical foundations of universal human rights, is a certain disillusionment with progressive politics, especially as I’ve seen them play out in secular higher education and the real strain of illiberalism that expresses itself. But I think I’m still trying to sort out a lot of the implications I did feel already before I became a Christian, I felt already out of step with the left on some things. So I was already much more conservative on abortion. But I’m still really struggling with say the way to square the scriptures with modern pluralistic understandings of human sexuality. And I appreciate that. I’m in a church where, I mean, the position of the church is clear, but there’s also a huge amount of room for honest questions.

MO: One of the things I want to ask only because it’s been asked by people in your chosen community is, okay, you came out, so to speak on a podcast where you were sort of a baby Christian and you told your narrative and you weren’t pressed, as I recall, on things like, okay, well, you’re in the Southern Baptist Convention. They are very specific that life begins a conception that gay marriage is not a legitimate form of human union, human sexual union. Are you aligned with your convention on all of that? Or are there churches where you would be, I don’t know if they banish, expel, rustic derate? Are there places where you’d have a problem with that? I mean, where are you on that stuff because you’re in a church that has said you’re supposed to be in a certain place?

MW: I can’t say that I’m perfectly aligned. My lack of perfect alignment is not because I am still dogmatically committed to a conventional left wing secular worldview on these things. I think it would’ve been the height of hubris for me to convert to Christianity, submit my life to Christ, and not be willing to put my entire prior worldview on the table for interrogation. But that doesn’t mean the process of squaring my own sort of moral instincts and the data from my own life with the traditional interpretations of scripture is a straightforward, painless process. It’s not, and long before becoming a Christian, I’d come to understand faith communities in my last book, which is about evangelicals, but I think this is broadly true of probably all faith communities that while yes statements of faith are deeply important, I take them really seriously. It’s probably more accurate to understand them as very contested communities of constant argument.

So even I’m learning more and more every day about the doctrine of biblical and errancy, which I think people outside conservative Protestant circles tend to have a very facile understanding of. I think it means, oh, a very sort of elementary school level literalistic interpretation of scripture. When you actually begin to read literature written by scholars who call themselves an ISTs, you very quickly realize that they argue about a huge range of things and that there are many and often quite important dimensions of it that are not settled. So I suppose I remain in the church where I was evangelized, not because, I mean, I’m still trying to assimilate the basics of the ene creed. And when I say assimilate, I don’t mean ascent to, I mean really understand in a visceral way, what does it mean to believe in a creator God who not only created the cosmos but is also invested in me and aware of me personally? What does it really mean to take the incarnation seriously? And I have found so far that the church where I was evangelized is right now a really good place for me to be working out these fundamental questions. Sometimes I say, if I want to get a rise out of my secular lefty friends and family, sometimes I call myself a Southern Baptist, but I’m not committed to that. Now, that’s not to say—

MO: See, I need you to be a southern Baptist because I need to be able to say, I have friends who are Southern Baptist.

MW: I’m glad I’m your diversity. When I became a Christian, I sort of realized what had happened to me. There was a brief moment where I thought, this will be so much easier if I just scoot on over to an Anglican church or even a Catholic church, although, so all the political questions you pose would be the same, but somehow the culture framing is different. I wouldn’t get the same raised eyebrows, but I thought, you know what? I’ve ended up committing so much of my professional life in higher ed to this problem of the shrinking intellectual diversity and our tendency in our culture to put people in boxes and here not by my own choice. I’ve ended up, I’m not the first person you would expect to encounter in a Southern Baptist mega church. Maybe that’s exactly the reason I should stay.

MO: It’s partly because you think they look like Costcos.

MW: Well, mine absolutely.

MO: Has the aesthetics grown on you at all?

MW: Oh, I love the aesthetics.

MO: Oh, so you used to hate the Costco and the Christian rock, and now you’re into it.

MW: Yes.

MO: That strikes me as news.

MW: I’m working on an essay that’s going to be like a very robust defense of contemporary Christian music.

MO: That’s really news, because I could imagine you getting into the Christianity, but having to suffer Christian rock. We’re going to put a pin in that. That’s a whole other podcast.

I asked this next question, not to pin you down, but also just because I’m sociologically curious. Let’s say the Supreme Court goes into a place where all of a sudden gay marriage is thrown back to the states and you decide that your pro-gay marriage and your church, do you have to leave?

MW: I mean, the way I understand it is if you are in a place on any important issue where you feel the need to be kind of an activist in the church space and publicly on this issue, vociferously taking a position that is at odds with the statement of faith and that, yeah, that’s a point where you should probably find a different faith community. Now, I do think, well, I don’t want to get myself in trouble with mainline Christianity. I mean, I do think that there are a lot of churches that have traded a set of political emphases and put those in place of an emphasis on the core message of salvation through Christ. And what I appreciate about my church, which by the way, my church and my pastor are constantly vilified within the Southern Baptist Convention as woke. I mean, this just tells you something about how polarized our current landscape is. But this is the reality. A major reason for that is because my church doesn’t deviate from the conventions stand on some of the culture war hot button issues. They do keep the main thing, the main thing. When we had a sermon series on the 2024 election, the main message of it was, you are a citizen of another realm and your identity is in Christ. Your identity is not in the Democratic or Republican Party.

MO: So socially at your church, it’s okay to have voted for Kamala. I’m not saying you did, but if one did that’s okay.

MW: So I mean, they don’t do a survey. It’s a huge church. The demographics vary by campus. It’s one of these multi-site churches. So the one that meets in downtown Durham, probably most of those people are voted Democrat. The one that meets in Raleigh tilts conservative, I’m sure, but it’s quite mixed.

MO: Hey, friends, if you’re enjoying this episode, please do subscribe and on whatever podcast platform you use, rate and review us because that mystical algorithm stuff, it really makes a difference. Coming up in future weeks on the podcast, I’ll be talking with Unitarian Minister Anna Levy Lyons, who is author of the new book, the Secret Despair of The Secular Left. It is honestly one of the most surprisingly great books I’ve read in a long time, and I really want to get people of all political and religious persuasions to read the secret despair of the secular left. So I’ll be talking with Anna Levy Lyons, also coming up, the British author, Paul Kings North and the other Mark Oppenheimer, the South African barrister, Mark Oppenheimer will join us in a future episode. So subscribe, stay in the loop over at arcmag.org. Our web magazine, we have posted some terrific stuff lately.

As I mentioned earlier, we have a review of Spellbound, the new book by Molly Worthen, today’s guest. The review is written by Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer, himself a biographer of Jimmy Carter who may or may not have had a deep charisma depending on how you look at it.

On the website, we ran a photo essay about Pope Leo iv, the New Pope’s childhood Church in suburban Chicago. We have the story of how an online Christian academy in Oklahoma argued its case before the Supreme Court. It’s a case that could have profound impacts on the funding of public school in America. And from historian Tamara Tweel, we have the story of how the Haba has Rebi helped Jimmy Carter conceive of the Department of Education, all of this and much, much more over at Arc: Religion, Politics, Et cetera, at the URL arcmag.org.

And now back to my interview with Molly Worthen.

So let’s talk about me for a minute. Has your attitude toward your non-Christian friends changed at all? Do you wish that I were reading C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright so that I could come to learn what you’ve learned so that I could come around to your convictions?

MW: Well, this is one thing that I think I’m working on assimilating, because if I’m honest, I don’t yet. I mean, my church is a very evangelistic church. It has sent more missionaries out worldwide than any church, other church in the Southern Baptist Convention every single year for more than a decade it’s planted hundreds of churches. It’s just it absolutely on fire for evangelism. One thing that attracted me to the church was the consistency of that position. If you believe this set of clues about the universe, you should be constantly telling people.

I mean, I have been relieved to discover that I can just sort of tell people about what happened to me, and that counts as evangelism of a sort, because I like what the great Roman Catholic evangelist Bishop Robert Baron says on this. And he says this following Pope Francis that while it is not Christian orthodoxy to declare automatic universal salvation, it is in our kind of humble position as mortals who don’t have the whole picture. It is within the realm of possibility that God has a plan by which everybody does end up saved. I had a helpful conversation with my pastor on this where I said, this is, to me, this is the great expression of the problem of evil, this exclusive claim that dams the vast majority of humans to hell. And he said, well, the way I think about it is I would love to get to heaven and discover that everyone else is there. The Hindus are there, the Mormons are there, everyone’s there. The atheists are there. That would be wonderful. But for now, since all I have to go on is these words that I believe God pronounced about the matter expressed both by Jesus and in the other biblical authors, and that is an exclusive truth claim. And so it’s a kind of Pascal’s wager, I bet on the narrow difficult interpretation and hope that the capacious interpretation is the real one.

MO: I mean, your husband’s not a Christian by your lights. He’s a Roman Catholic.

MW: Well, he’s not a Catholic.

MO: He’s not a Catholic, not anymore. He’s an ex-Catholic or lapsed Catholic.

MW: He’s an agnostic. Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of work to be done for myself.

MO: I’m always a little bit relieved when my religious Protestant friends evangelize me a little because I think there’s a kind of honesty in that. And otherwise, I always think that it’s sort of on the one hand, for many of them, not all, not all, and I’ve been corrected on this, I know there are many different kind of versions of universalism or plural roots to heaven out there, even in the evangelical world, but for a lot of them, I know they’d be elated if I became a Christian, but they never tell me that. And I always want to say, I always feel that’s a pretty basic thing you should be telling me.

MW: Yeah. Well, I’m glad that you feel that way.

MO: Now, by the same token, I wouldn’t be elated if they lost their faith, but it would cheer me a little.

ME: Yeah, we all want our side to win.

MO: We all want our side to win. And they seem to me to be in such profound error that it would seem like growth. Now, that’s not necessarily my best self. I don’t know.

MW: Now, do you tell them they’re wrong and they should become Jewish?

MO: I don’t tell ’em they should become Jewish because I don’t. I mean, it’s not our theology that everyone should be Jewish. In fact, quite the contrary, right? So we are not—

MW: But it’s your theology that your picture of God as the accurate picture.

MO: It’s my theology that a triune God is a deep heresy that serious thought should correct,

MW: And the Hindu picture of divinity is a deep heresy, and so is Buddhist.

MO: I don’t know enough about it. I don’t know enough about it. And I don’t know. There are strong arguments, for example, that Buddhism is not in conflict with the core teachings of Judaism, and by the way, the Old Testament is filled with that.

MW: Sounds like Leonard Cohen’s wishful thinking to me.

MO: Well, I mean, do you read the Old Testament?

MW: Of course.

MO: I mean, the Old Testament is filled with other gods that have powers. The Talmud is filled with demons and all so, but Buddhism—
MW: Thats’s not the core of Buddhism though.

MO: No, no, no, it’s not. I was bouncing back to Hinduism a little bit there, but the Jewish picture is not one in which there’s only one powerful entity just as the Catholic picture. Isn’t that—

MW: That’s true, and neither is the Christian.

MO: I know that Catholics talk about saints who have intercessory powers and there are demons, and there are, right, there’s time for exorcism and Satan’s alive in the world. I mean, I know a little bit more about how the Catholic cosmology works, but of course a lot of it is present in Protestant as well. When I encounter other religions, I don’t immediately think they are in deep conflict with Judaism. They may or may not be, but

MW: The Christian position is that other faiths have a lot of truth in them, and people in other faith communities absolutely have encounters with God. That’s absolutely not a controversial—

MO: It’s not the Jewish position that if there’s an afterlife that only Jews will be there. I mean, the stakes are much lower for me vis-a-vis you than in the reverse.

The cost to you if you persist in error, so to speak, is low to and probably zero. I mean, you could be leading other people, I don’t know. Certainly if you were evangelizing Jews and leading them away from our nation, that would be, there’s reasons one would have problem with that. But in general, you leading your life as a Southern Baptist is not problematic even for you, which is one reason, by the way, that I’m not even sure that my own feelings that you should be released from error are anything other than just my own chauvinism. Whereas for you, your feelings that I should be released into the truth of Christianity could have to do with your feelings about my soul being at stake, and I hope you value my soul.

MW: There’s this way in which in our culture, we are discouraged from coming to terms with the universalist logical conclusions of our own presuppositions.

I don’t care if a person thinks of himself as the most tolerant, indifferent, multiculturalist ever born, that person, if he has the courage of his convictions, he still is making an exclusive claim about the nature of the universe that tells me and tells you that our views are wrong. And so I do think that there’s a way in which the difference between Judaism and Christianity is partly theological, but it also has to do with the sort of rhetorical reach and the evangelistic temperament or lack thereof, and the willingness to sort of chase the presuppositions to their conclusion.

MO: Well, and for Jews, when we evangelize, we’re evangelizing fellow Jews to be more observant or to come back into communities.

I think we should be doing more of our fellow Jews, and I think there are people who think their path or their truth or the truth is Christian, when for them a more accurate path for themselves and perhaps to be in harmony with the universe would be Jewish. In other words, I think there are people out there with Jewish souls, many of whom convert, but I think there are more people who would convert if they knew more about Judaism, and we shouldn’t be shy about that.

Backing up a second, I would only say the problem with saying that the Western Enlightenment tradition is just as hegemonic or just as universalizing as Christianity, is that a lot of people in the Western Enlightenment tradition actually just have a lot of, and I say this value neutral, I think, I mean descriptive. They have a lot of humility. In other words, there are a lot of people who actually don’t want to universalize anything on other people. Is that a totalizing version of the world in a sense? But it could just be them saying, I don’t know yet. Right?

MW: There’s a difference between which political and philosophical order is pragmatically speaking, the best recipe for allowing people who disagree on questions of ultimate concern to live peacefully together. That’s one question. And then there’s a second set of questions that are asking what is the nature of the universe? So you’re right. So my own position may be that it is indeed that I have this view of the universe, but I do not then believe that suggests we need a political regime that enforces that. So I think you can both be a fan of liberal pluralistic quality and have an exclusive truth claim about metaphysics.

MO: But I guess what I would say is there are people who hold their exclusive truth claims with only about 53% conviction because they’re just not that sure of themselves as a temperamental matter, and they are not as worrisome regardless of what political order they’re in. They’re not as likely to stomp all over other people as people who wake up every day feeling 95% certain.
MW: I think There are people who have high level of faith, but are temperamentally not inclined to do the stomping.

MO: I agree. I’m just taking people of faith often say, well, atheists can be just as dogmatic, murderous, whatever. Well, that’s true. But there are also atheists, just like there are Christians whose version of it feels like weak or lukewarm to hardcore evangelicals or Catholics or orthodox Jews, because they’re saying, even though this is what I believe, my wager is pretty thin. In other words, the odds I’m giving are like five to four, not 10 to one. And so they just walk through the world a little bit more pacifist with regard to other people.

MW: And I’m all for walking through the world in a pacifist frame of mind. But I think it’s a mistake to be content with fence sitting. I mean, this is my big problem with my hero, William James, is that he wrote about other people needing to just have the courage of making a choice, even if it means leaping into doubt, but he never really did it himself. You have to make a choice. And I think these—

MO: But if people aren aren’t sure, why would they make a choice?

MW: You have to do the work. I mean, I think too many people just and I understand, we’re all wired differently and many people are not wired with an impulse toward asking ultimate questions about the universe, but the stakes are incredibly high. You need to figure out what you think. You can’t just spend your life sitting on the philosophical couch. I think we have a responsibility to investigate these questions,

MO: And this is how Ross ends his book, which is saying, you have to do the work whatever you come to, and maybe it’s not Christianity. At the very least, his big plea is not for Christianity, but for Go figure it out.

MW: Yeah.

MO: I think I’m perfectly comfortable saying, and this will sound a little judgy, I think I have more compassion for people who say, that’s not my jam. My jam is fantasy football and hanging out with my kids and recycling a little and trying to remember to vote and living a decent life. And there’s a kind of contempt that some apologists have for those people that I don’t like.

MW: Yeah, I think contempt is always bad. I don’t think Ross has that kind of contempt. I think he sees correctly that asking and investigating these questions, this is a luxury, and very few of us have an automatic tropism toward it. And so it is something that needs be awakened in people, and they need to be provided with the resources to have these conversations.
Mark Oppenheimer:
MO: Alright, well, if you want a sweet segue that shows why I’m an experienced podcast host, the people who often awaken it in us are people with a lot of charisma, which is what your latest book is about.

MW: Well done.

MO: So here’s my question. You’re the author of Spellbound. How charisma shaped American History from the Puritan to Donald Trump. How do you define charisma and specifically why is it different from charm and celebrity?

MW: Yeah, yeah. When I began the book, I thought I’d be writing a lot about both of those things. I think charm is something that happens in a kind of intimate context conversation. I think it’s a personality trait. It’s the ability to make your interlocutor feel like the center of the universe. And their conversation with you is this process of personal self-discovery, the best version of themselves. I think celebrity is a kind of time-bound mass media phenomenon that involves a false sense of intimacy between the famous person and the fan. Charisma is much older, and it is a relationship between leaders and followers that gives the leader the power to move those followers in a substantive way for reasons that are not legible to outsiders who are not in the relationship and for reasons that are not necessarily connected to material power, institutional status, source of law and tradition and so forth. And my conclusion at the end of serving 400 plus years of American history is that the common element that I found among Puritan heretics like Anne Hutchinson, I found it in Andrew Jackson, Joseph Smith, I founded in Marcus Garvey, all the way up through Oprah and Trump is the ability to invite potential followers into a story, a story that grants them both a sense of agency, a role that gives them some feeling of control over the chaos in their life, but also allows them to turn over a little bit of that scary responsibility to this larger force, this leader who is more powerful.

And I think that my book ended up being very much a chronicle of where the human impulse to find meaning and a transcendent story that connects us to something much bigger than ourselves, where that goes over a course of historical development when participation in traditional organized religion is declining. I have always thought, and this was my view before I became a Christian, that humans are in some fundamental way religious creatures, and that just because we’re not going to church or synagogue at the same rate that we once did, doesn’t mean that we don’t still have those impulses and hungers and that one place that they travel is into these relationships with charismatic leaders.

MO: So with someone like Trump, I mean, let’s step right into the moment. You point out that charisma can be very polarizing, that not everyone is susceptible to a given person’s charisma. I think you also say there are people who are, if not charming to everyone, are kind of generally acknowledged to be charming. Their charm is very hard to resist, and most people would be susceptible to it. There are charismatic figures who are highly charismatic for a subset of the population and repugnant to the rest. Right?

MW: Yeah. I almost came to think that that’s part of the definition of charisma, that there are probably very few leaders of whom that’s not true.

MO: So the people who are susceptible to Trump’s charisma, what is it that they’re attracted to?

MW: I think Trump, from the beginning of his public career, long before he formally entered politics, I think he very skillfully crafted a couple of powerful narratives about himself and about the country. I spent a lot of time going back and looking at interviews he did in the 1980s and nineties on talk shows and in the tabloids reading his ghostwritten books based on interviews with him from those years. And I’m struck by the ubiquitous presence of his message that the country is being ripped off and that he has this special expertise, if you will, in someone who is constantly fending off bad actors who have tried to take advantage of him, and he’s caught them and turned that around on them and sought justice. And it was not hard to expand that narrative out to really encompass the kind of the forgotten man, the people who have felt left out of globalization and the civil rights revolutions and so forth. I think that’s one piece of it. And I think he capitalized too on a certain story about the ability of outsiders with training in the business world to intercede in these sclerotic institutions, but there’s no way that his story about the country and his ability to crusade for justice on the part of these people who feel themselves to have been screwed over would’ve resonated if it hadn’t unfolded at this moment of, I think unprecedentedly low confidence in institutions.

MO: So he was the man for the moment.

MW: I think there’s always some, I think the story of every charismatic leader is partly a story of the particular contingencies of the individual’s biography. There’s a weirdness and a eccentricity, I think, to the appeal of each of these leaders that cannot be chalked up sort of the great tides of world history. I mean, if you think about simply the power of Trump rhetorically and how appealing his speaking style is to his followers and how absolutely baffling it is to people outside the bubble of his story, the specificity of his meandering rhetorical style and the way it glosses for his art and supporters as an expression of deepest authenticity and truly speaking truth to power, whereas it scans to people outside that as meandering sort of a stream of consciousness, half of which is made up. The story of that appeal is one that is so specific to Trump’s, to his own persona and to a particular story about authenticity and institutions and truthiness versus truth that I think is particular to this intersection of this person in this moment.

MO: And he wouldn’t have played well 50 years ago, right in the age of Adelaide Stevenson, Trump’s orange hair would’ve made him seem like a cartoonish snake oil salesman. I think the average middle class person wanted someone who seemed a bit more educated. This is why it was okay that Franklin Roosevelt was a Patricia who had a Patricia accent and wore a cape. And the fact that Trump goes to pains to seem less educated was a harder sell. I mean, maybe not if he were Huey long, there are people who pulled it off, but he wouldn’t have broken into national politics in that way.

MW: Part of what I’m trying to do in my book also is to intertwine this story of charisma as we’re using it now to talk mainly about the appeal of political leaders with the story of charisma in the New Testament sense, in the sense of this Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles and revivals speaking in tongues, people getting slain in the spirit and so forth. And this intersects with the rise of Trump because in my chapter about Trump, I tell his story only after I’ve told the story of this great revival that began in the mid 1990s called the Toronto Blessing, that people generally outside of religious circles haven’t heard of, but it’s arguably the most significant revival of the past a hundred years, which supercharged a particular type of independent charismatic in the sense of Holy Spirit saturated churches and evangelists and activists Right at time when institutions like the Southern Baptist Convention had actually peaked and were declining.

The institutional leaders, even of evangelicalism had less authority than they did 25 or 30 years ago.
And I think Trump saw before, really anyone else did the political potential in making alliances in some parts of that world. Also, there’s so much ink has been spilled over the very obvious fact that he is in no sense an orthodox Christian. But if we look at his own biography, I mean, he grew up going to Norman Vincent Peel’s Marble Collegiate Church, right? The great, the Godfather of the Prosperity Gospel. And that I think I increased, the more I study American religious history, the more I’m persuaded that the kind of positive thinking, new thought, I can manifest the reality I want just by thinking it into existence. That is the mainstream of American spirituality, and it is one that formed Trump and that he has an amazing instinct for, and it’s part of his appeal.

MO: So Molly, is anyone else highly charismatic in American life today at a Trump level, or do you have to be in the right moment to even show yourself to be charismatic?

MW: One of the arguments of my book is that the leaders who are truly successful, because of course being charismatic, being able to foment a mass movement, it doesn’t actually mean you achieve your goals. In fact, most of these charismatic leaders I write about, most of them flame out or after they die, murder hutchson, right after they die, the movement, the movement goes to seed or even while they’re alive.

MO: Louis Farrakhan is still alive, but who’s heard from him in 15 or 20 years,

MW: Right? Sure, exactly. So those leaders that I wrote about who really have made the most indelible stamp on an institutional legacy that really gives legs to whatever their policy vision was, are those individuals who saw the kind of ascendant set of cultural anxieties, the dominant type of charisma that was on the rise in a particular era and didn’t ape it, didn’t try to be that in some pure form, but rather responded to it strategically. So I write about how FDR sees the Huey Long phenomenon and sees the appeal of this kind of populist anti-institutional agitator, and he can tack that way in the 1936 election when he needs to, but then he also can combine it with an appeal to kind of the technocracy and the rational side of American voters. And so I don’t know that we have in our own time yet seen a figure who manages that synthesis.

I wanted to believe that it was Barack Obama who channeled the black Christian prophetic tradition while also really drawing on the age of the charisma of experts that I associate my book more with the 1950s and 1960s, but the relative short lifespan of his cultural moment makes me question that I see in the Democratic Party some amazing rhetoricians who have, I think a really preternatural ability to connect with an audience. I’m thinking of Westmore governor of Maryland, Gavin Newsom, who I think is just totally mesmerizing on his podcast. However, to me, the heart of charisma is actually offering what the Democrats don’t have is a story. They don’t have a grand narrative to counter the Trump narrative. I mean, this I think has been their great problem over the past 10 years or so. So until they sort that out and really are inviting Americans into a big story about what this country is about and what my life as an individual is about, I think all of the sort of rhetorical skill in the world won’t win them, the political power they seek.

MO: Alright, before I let you go, I have a few lightning round questions. You ready?

MW: Sure.

MO: I’m going to skip past “Do you believe in God?” because we’ve dealt with that and we also know how you make a living. So unless there’s some other secret side hustle that you want to tell us about, I’m not going to ask you how you make a living.

MW: No, I think we can skip those.

MO: So I’ll start with if you could have any other career, a realistic one, not like being a superhero or an Olympic sprinter, but something that would’ve been doable for you at some point. If the stars had aligned, what would it be?

MW: I always wanted to be an archeologist from my grade school days modeling Atlantis out of gingerbread. And I just love very, very fine motor skill work, very obsessive focus on detail. I would just love to be brushing off a very tiny fragment of Egyptian pottery for weeks on end.

MO: Well, when you become a missionary to a place with a dig, you can combine all of this. What’s a big regret you have?

MW: I wish that I’d had more children. I have one daughter and I have tried and failed through a tough few years of miscarriages and infertility, and I sometimes rethink the trajectory of my adult life and wish, I wish I’d started trying to have kids earlier and so forth. But I am trying to learn to understand it as providential. This is another piece of my new Christian belief that I’m really trying to assimilate, is to try to understand these things that I perceive as sources of pain and grief and regret as a dimension of my life that I need to understand my perspective is not the only perspective on them, and that there is some dimension of them to embrace.

MO: You don’t need my admiration, but I will say that I admire your candor on that. People should talk about that stuff more. Did you have names picked out for the kids you didn’t have?

MW: In one case, we’d started to think about it because it was a quite late miscarriage. But otherwise, I followed the general practice of holding off those thought experiments, especially as it became clear to me that this is hard and that no pregnancy is guaranteed till the kids out in the world. So yeah, I saved myself that.

MO: Do you know the Jewish folk wisdom that says don’t have baby showers? Because it kind of invites the evil eye, and I think it’s super wise. It’s actually something that Christians should really learn from the Jews.

MW: Yeah, I agree.

MO: If a college undergrad asks you for a general piece of advice on how to live, what would it be?

MW: Don’t get caught up in this stupid cultural slogan of finding your passion. Just find a thing that you’re curious about and do what’s necessary to learn about it. Look for things that make you useful and do the thing, and you do enough of that stuff and the passion emerges from that. And I would also say what we talked about earlier, I do think we all as humans, should feel an obligation to wrestle with the questions of ultimate meaning. And so to make yourself sit down and do that,

MO: Is there a song that invokes for you, an intense feeling of nostalgia?

MW: Yes. “You are the Best” by Joe Esposito, which I hope listeners will remember as the great standout song from the Karate Kid soundtrack that plays during the tournament montage as my favorite movie. And I used to watch that, the tournament scene from the Karate Kid to get myself psyched up before forensics tournaments in high school.

MO: And that movie was already an oldie by the time you were in forensics tournaments in high school.

MW: That’s a little bit old. Yeah. Yeah, 12, 14 years old. Yeah.

MO: Are you watching the TV show? Have you been interested in the Netflix reboot of Karate Kid?

MW: I haven’t. I can’t bring myself to,

MO: Yeah, I’m sort of the same way. It could only let me down. Alright, well, along those lines, last question, a three parter. Can you recommend something to watch, something to read and something to listen to? It could be something that you’re into now or it could just be greatest hits.

MW: My favorite thing that I’ve watched in the past few years is a Danish miniseries that came out in 2017 and 2018 called, well, the English translation is Ride Upon the Storm, which is a dark drama about the family of a prominent minister in the church of Denmark and his sons and his family complications. And it is the best depiction of big theological questions that I’ve ever seen on television. It’s become a little bit hard to find because I don’t think it’s any longer on Netflix if you can’t find that, frankly. I would say watch The Chosen if you haven’t already seen it. I think yes, this and that episode, you have to hang with it. It can be a little bit corny, but I think overall it is a really imaginative and engaging depiction of the gospel stories. A book I would recommend, well, I’ll recommend a sequence of science fiction books published in the 1990s by an author named Mary Doria Russell.
The first is called The Sparrow, and the second is called Children of God, and it’s about a Jesuit evangelistic mission to a foreign planet. It is just incredible as a work of literature and as a meditation on the problem of evil and anthropocentrism. Yeah, I love it To listen, if listeners are interested in some of these kind of big questions of faith and doubt and which system of metaphysics is true, I quite like a set of British podcasts hosted, hosted, at least in the past by a podcaster named Justin Briley. But there’s a couple called Premier Unbelievable, and then another one called Enchanted, where they just have guests. And sometimes it’s a debate, sometimes it’s one person from a range of worldviews who are just really getting into it and talking about how they came to their beliefs and the questions they have wrestled with. And I have found it really helpful in working through my own relationship to these big questions.

MO: Molly Worthen, Southern Baptist Professor. Thank you for chatting with me. Always fun.

MW: You for having me, Mark.

MO: I love the religious holiday calendar, and I love telling you about the religious holidays coming up in the next couple of weeks, most of which I’ve never heard of. I’ve been doing this stuff a long time. I’ve done grad school and the stuff. I got the t-shirt, I got the credentials, I got the framed stuff on my walls, and I had never heard of several of these holidays.

May 27th is Puja, which is observed by the Theravada Buddhists. It’s a day that honors the Buddhist birth, enlightenment, and passing. A couple days after that is Ascension Day, May 29th, which is celebrated by Christians 40 days after Easter. It’s the day that marks Jesus’s ascension to heaven, and it’s observed by various different Christian groups in various ways, but it’s one of those holidays that’s big in Catholic and Protestant and Eastern Orthodox traditions. A couple days after that is the Feast of the Visitation, which is more specifically Catholic and has to do with the visit of the Virgin Mary tour cousin Elizabeth.

And it’s so seldom that I’m reminded that my daughter, whose English name, her American name is Elizabeth and is biblically a New Testament kind of thing. I didn’t think I was giving her a Christian name, but sundown on June 1st, Jews around the world begin the holiday of Shavuot, or as the Yiddish speaker say, VUIs and this festival commemorates the giving of the tour at Mount Sinai. Jews celebrate for reasons that are historically obscure by eating dairy foods, so cheesecake and ice cream. It’s a big holiday for those of us who are not lactose intolerant from the evening of May 28th to the evening of May 29th, people in the Bahai faith celebrate the ascension of Bahala that he was the founder of the Baha faith and he died on May 28th and was seen to ascend to the spiritual realm.

Because I’m a child of the eighties, raised on morning radio with shock jocks and various morning zoo personality DJs, all of whom did celebrity birthdays. I feel it’s an important service I can provide to do celebrity birthdays on May 20th, Chris Frum, the British cyclist, and four time Tour de France winner turns 40. Bob Dylan will turn 84 on May 24th, and Neil Finn, the creative spirit behind the band crowded house, one of my favorite bands of all time, turns 67 on May 27th.

Arc: The Podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer, and you can call it Arc with Mark if you like. I would love feedback. Please write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman. Audio Consulting by Robert Scaramuccia. Our intern help is from Caroline Coffey and Aaryan Kumar. Our head of communications at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at WashU is Deborah Kennard and the leadership of the Danforth Center includes Mark Valeri and Abram van Engen. Our music is by Love Cannon, and our web design is by Cause and Effect online at causexeffect.com. Till next time, I’m Mark.