Molly Worthen is an academic, a historian of religion, a Yale-educated professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, and was an agnostic for decades. She studied Christianity, wrote about it, and even lived alongside devout believers. But belief itself? That always felt just out of reach. In this conversation, Molly shares how God gently disrupted her intellectual framework, used unexpected relationships (including Pastor J.D. Greear), and led her on a rigorous investigation of the resurrection that changed everything.
Listen as she unpacks:
- Why she resisted religion growing up
- How studying Orthodoxy and evangelicalism fed her curiosity
- Why most scholars don’t take the resurrection seriously, and why she did
- How she moved from detached study to full surrender
If you’re a skeptic, seeker, or a believer walking with one, this is an invitation to deeper reflection.
Guest Bio:
Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She received her BA and PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Molly writes about religion, politics, and higher education for the New York Times and has also contributed to the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Slate, and other publications.
Resources Mentioned:
Molly’s Resources:
• Website: mollyworthen.com
• Book: Spellbound (2025)
• Book: Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism
• Book: The Man on Whom Nothing was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill
• Great Course: “History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch,”
• Course on Audible: “Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America.”
Molly’s recommended resources:
• Reasons for God, Tim Keller
• Resurrection and the Son of God, NT Wright
• Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham
• Language of God, Francis Collins
• Author, David Bentley Hart
• A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Van Auken
America’s Christian Credit Union (ACCU): AmericasChristianCU.com/Jana
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Episode Transcript
Molly Worthen
00:00 – 00:35
The goal of the Christian life is never should never be the total excision or settling of doubts. But that would require turning off your brain, but rather the kind of healthy engagement with doubts both on your own and in a community. And I really appreciate that. I’m in a church and also, you know, I found Christian communities at my university that really encourage every question and have never made me feel like I need to turn off that part of my brain or stop wrestling.
Jana Harmon
00:40 – 02:53
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Molly Worthen
02:54 – 02:54
Thanks for having me.
Jana Harmon
02:55 – 03:05
Molly, as we’re getting started, could you tell me a little bit about your education, your background your history as a professor, where you’re working and the kind of books that you’re writing, those kinds of things.
Molly Worthen
03:06 – 03:46
I teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the History department. I’ve been here for 13 years. I teach primarily the history of religion and politics and ideas, mostly in the American context. I also, for my whole academic career, I have tried to do as much journalism on the side as possible, writing for magazines and newspapers, trying to come at those same topics that interest me as a historian in the more contemporary setting. I did my education at Yale University in New Haven, both my undergrad and my Ph.D. and, yeah, that’s the basic lay of the land.
Jana Harmon
03:47 – 04:23
Yeah, that’s a pretty impressive lay of the land. But you’re sitting here as a historian, someone who was once at least agnostic about faith and religion, but yet had a curious interest in it. And we’ll get into all of that well before you believed. But let’s start back in your childhood and let’s talk about the kind of beliefs that shaped you growing up. Tell me about your family, your home. What was that like? Was there any talk of religion in your home? Or God or the Bible? Walk us through that.
Molly Worthen
04:23 – 06:18
I grew up in Glen Ellen, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago, about 20 miles west of the city, 2 miles west of Wheaton College. Although I had nothing to do with Wheaton College growing up, I knew it vaguely as this strange Christian school where I was told students weren’t allowed to dance, which I think is not true anymore, but that was all it meant in my mind. And religion, formal religion, was no part of my upbringing at all. I think my parents just wanted to impose as few boundaries on my intellectual curiosity and that of my brother as possible. I do remember when I was young, my mom was concerned that we not grow up total cultural ignoramuses. So she briefly attempted to read us some stories from the Old Testament. And I think she deliberately chose stories she thought would appeal to us as kids and had as little to say about God or theology as possible. I remember her reading David and Goliath. And I had some inbuilt resistance to this. I don’t know where it came from. I just resented, resented the whole exercise on principle. And I mean, I think I literally held my ears. I mean, I was just, wow, I was a brat, as a complete brat. And my mom, you know, reasonably gave up after a couple of attempts. I was, I suppose, vaguely aware that a lot of my friends and classmates were in churches of various kinds, Catholic and Protestant, a couple of Jewish friends, but it just never came up. It was not something I was attuned to either its lack or its presence for other people until I got to university.
Jana Harmon
06:20 – 06:55
So it was just something that even wasn’t of curious interest to you at that time. You were resisting somehow internally repelling even the Bible stories. What did you think? I mean, growing up, obviously you were given the free rein to develop your own intellectual ideas about what was true or what was not. There was something in you that was resisting whatever that was. What did you think religion, Christianity, faith, the Bible was as you were growing up prior to going?
Molly Worthen
06:55 – 08:08
To university, reflecting on it, I don’t think that my resistance to these brief touch points, my mother’s attempt to read us scripture, or I remember another incident when our devout Presbyterian neighbors finally prevailed on my parents to bring us along to church. And again I just, I was just furious that I was being made to wake up a little bit early and go to this strange place. I don’t think that I resisted it as something discreetly connected to God or faith. I was just a very anti-planning, anti-organization kid who preferred to be on my own as much as possible. I was keenly interested in history from a pretty young age. And this, the stories of all the wide ranges of ways in which humans have lived, you know, on the globe over the history of our species. And that would turn out to be really my path into religion. But it was totally dormant. The piece of it that would take me into religion was dormant when I was a kid.
Jana Harmon
08:09 – 08:26
It just wasn’t something you really seriously considered, much less to reject. It sounds like it was just a non-issue. So you said that you moved into college and university and started studying history, I guess more intensely.
Molly Worthen
08:26 – 10:55
Yeah, I went to Yale and I took classes in philosophy and history of politics. I remember a key moment was a course I took on the history of Russia. And I began to get really interested in Russian history and by that road Russian Orthodoxy, which was just so different from anything I had ever encountered in prior classes or in people I had known. At the same time in college, you know, it was a more diverse range of people from different backgrounds and you know, the nature of college, I suppose there is this expectation that you talk about important stuff and you’re, you’re thinking big, big questions in a new way. At least I was. And so I began to really reflect on the fact that I knew a number of people who had serious connections to religious communities of one type or another. You know, whether it was, you know, their relationship to their Jewish heritage or, you know, I had one friend who was a very serious Lutheran who had a few family connection also to Greek Orthodoxy that was really meaningful to her. And it was something I personally didn’t have and found myself envious of, both from the point of view of the community and the sort of sense of self it seemed to offer my friends and classmates. But also I was beginning, as an 18 year old, I was beginning to wake up to some of these bigger questions about what does it all mean, where do we go when we die, this sort of thing. And I was envious of these people who I thought, and I think I underestimated the degree to which, you know, people of faith doubt and wrestle their whole lives. But I was envious of, you know, being in a community that offered you answers to these questions. And so I began taking more classes on theology and religious history, I think as a way of sidling up alongside this thing that I didn’t know how to approach really any other way, which was religion. I was good at being a student and reading stuff and doing my schoolwork. And so I just kind of focused that on an increasing range of religious topics because that’s what I knew how to do.
Jana Harmon
10:57 – 11:06
Did you ever enter into conversation, discussion, church attendance with any of those of your friends who were involved in faith communities?
Molly Worthen
11:07 – 13:12
I remember having some serious conversations with, with one or two friends who were devout, although I don’t recall those conversations ever resulting in an invitation to join them. But certainly I became aware of, I guess, a chasm between the way they looked at faith and the world more broadly and myself. As my interest in Eastern Orthodoxy developed, I spent a very formative summer with the help of some grant money from my university, living in kind of the middle of nowhere in rural north central Alberta, near a community of Russian Orthodox old believers who have pretty strict purity rules. This is a sect of Russian Orthodoxy that broke apart from the main body of the church in the 17th century. And the diaspora is all over the world, but there’s a fairly isolated community in this remote part of Alberta. I couldn’t live with them, but I lived sort of alongside them in a neighboring town and got to know girls my age and eventually kind of worked my way into some of the rhythms of the community, got to help with, you know, preparing the chicken carcasses after the men slaughtered them, helped with the sewing preparations that had to happen before a young girl’s wedding in the community, this sort of thing. And it was my first attempt to really get as close as I could to the worldview of people very different from myself. And I loved that. I just thought, this is so interesting. This is what I want to do as much as possible in different ways. And so, you know, I continue in my academic path of just kind of learning about mostly kind of European and Orthodox Christian practices in the classroom setting. And that continued in grad school and intensified in some ways in grad school.
Jana Harmon
13:13 – 13:50
As an outside observer, you’re very curious. You’re very interested. There’s something attractive about it that continues to draw you to want to know more. You mentioned that obviously it’s a different worldview than the one in which you were living. Just curious, as you were exploring these religious ideas, were you reflecting at all on your own presuppositions, on your own worldview, what those were, how they were grounded, what the implications of those were as you were looking at religion or religious life juxtaposed to your own?
Molly Worthen
13:51 – 16:45
That’s a great question. The short answer is no. I think my intellectual process was kind of disorganized, and I was, you know, I know that there are some young people who really develop a coherent worldview and a set of political opinions, you know, quite early in their intellectual development. In high school, certainly by college, I would say in college, I was still quite unformed in so many ways. And I remember I had to write a paper reflecting on my intellectual autobiography. It was a great exercise. It’s one I now impose on my own students. And I ended up coming to the conclusion that my philosophy was contrarianism. That was my mode of interacting with the world, because I had grown up with my younger brother. He’s three years younger than me as my main interlocutor. And he was and remains really smart and precocious. And he was much further along in kind of forming his opinions of the world than I was. But I knew, you know, whatever he concluded about some issue, well, probably the right position was the opposite of that. So that was kind of my mode, and I think that informed how I reacted to my undergraduate context. I don’t really recall being driven to wrestle with the sources of my own assumptions or reflect on the fact that, you know, I had this keen interest in religion, a natural respect for religious people and an inclination to take religious worldviews very seriously. Like they never seemed all these. I mean, from the point of view of the, you know, kind of empiricist, Western Enlightenment, quite absurd claims, right, about the supernatural and all these wild things that do and have and will happen in the universe. I never had the inclination to dismiss any of that as ridiculous. I took it all very seriously. But maybe it didn’t really penetrate and it certainly. I don’t recall being prompted to reflect on the fact that as much as I was interested in learning about religion and was attracted to it, I was functionally moving through the world in a totally naturalist way. You know, I existed in a closed universe. You know, from the perspective of natural law and the possibility of any kind of intervention from outside of that, I don’t think I really took it seriously. I mean, you know, I was a bumbling undergraduate who was just sort of, I was intensely curious and would be inclined to kind of focus on whatever was right in front of my nose. I don’t think I did a lot of zooming out.
Jana Harmon
16:47 – 17:35
You were intrigued by and attracted to and curious of these religious forms and obviously engaged enough to go even live beside a Russian Orthodox community. That is intriguing to me. You had an openness again, an honest curiosity. But yet you’re coming from a different worldview. Like you say, materialism, a closed universe. Only the natural world exists, the supernatural doesn’t. So when you’re looking at these religions as a point of investigation, did you question whether or not the veracity of their beliefs or, you know, why do you believe this? Or were you just kind of in an observation mode?
Molly Worthen
17:35 – 20:22
I was in observation mode. I think I’m wired as a reporter who is just, when I’m working on a story, interviewing people, observing a worship service, I become, I try to become as much as possible, I guess, what, you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson described as his ideal mode of being in the universe, which is to just become a transparent eyeball. You don’t. You’re not there. You’re just seeing stuff and observing it and absorbing it. And of course, that’s impossible to execute. I mean, we are all imposing our own, you know, unspoken assumptions and blind spots and obsessions at every moment. But I just. I guess I didn’t find my own interior life that fascinating. I was just more interested in gaining as accurate as possible an understanding of how other people were moving through the world. And I think there was a disconnect between the sources of my deeper curiosity about religion and my actual kind of intellectual work. I was not oriented in these early years at all toward apologetics questions, toward, you know, the questions of, well, how might one go about putting these worldviews side by side and testing any of their claims and evaluating them on the basis of evidence. I was certainly not focused on scripture really at all. I mean, I had to read some of it in the course of university classes, you know, kind of reading it as a crucial part of the history of Western civilization and this kind of thing. So I read it dutifully and it kind of found it mildly interesting as a, you know, a source document. But I wasn’t enraptured by it. I had no desire to read it beyond what I was assigned. And I don’t think it occurred to me to approach it from the point of view of could this be a true account of things that actually happened. And I present all of this to you in full awareness that it has a certain incoherence. Like as I recounted to you, I can’t explain why I wasn’t pushed, you know, along the lines of certain, of certain obvious questions.
Jana Harmon
20:22 – 20:54
At that time, you continued to take coursework when that integrated religion and history, and I think you ended up settling on really researching evangelicalism. And that still, as I would imagine you would still have called yourself a bit of an outsider, an observer, a commentator, a reporter of history. Walk us through that. Take us there. How did you move in that direction and why?
Molly Worthen
20:54 – 29:50
I wanted to be a journalist. I had done some journalism in college. I’d interned at daily metro newspapers and Time magazine. I’d done some writing for my college paper. I knew that was a great mode of just having an excuse to talk to interesting people for a living. And I wanted to focus on religion. I had some sense. I don’t know how I developed this because I was such an ignoramus, but I had some sense that conservative Christians got kind of an unfair shake from secular journalists. So for strategic reasons, I decided I needed to kind of fill the well and learn something about American religious history to set myself up to have something to say about American religion and politics. I think, too, I loved being in school and I thought, well, you know, applying to PhD programs is just a good way to keep up this racket and get to stay in this intellectually luxurious environment. So when I started graduate school, I ended up staying at Yale for graduate school. I thought I was training not for a full time conventional academic career, but to be a freelance journalist, and I got spoiled by the luxury of doing freelance magazine and newspaper work. I did a couple of articles a year, not very much from a perch in academia, so decided I wanted to kind of stay in that world. So while I was learning about American religion with a lot of kind of deep context in the broader, you know, the broader history, taking classes also at the Divinity School and New Testament studies and patristics, taking classes in the Reformation. So really trying to try to fill what I was aware were pretty big gaps in my knowledge. I was still really personally interested in faith. And I started attending the local Anglo Catholic Episcopalian parish near campus and got tired about halfway through my graduate work. I got tired of being a voyeur in that worship environment. And I started thinking, well, I have made no progress on these fundamental questions. I mean, forget Jesus. I wasn’t nowhere close to confidence that God existed, but I thought, maybe there’s something to a higher view of the sacraments and maybe, you know, if I could just start participating, like something would happen. And I remember having a conversation with the rector there who, you know, he was in charge of a parish proximate to, you know, a secular elite university. I think he’d seen many cases like mine, and his instinct was to take the most generous posture possible toward any seeker, which I appreciate. And we had a conversation about the Nicene Creed and how one could think of it as aspirational. He didn’t make any demands on me. I think he was convinced of my sincerity. And also, you know, because I was a PhD student in American Religious history, it wasn’t as if I was coming into this ignorant. I mean, I certainly knew, you know, plenty about, you know, what it entailed to recite the baptismal vows and these kinds of things. And I appreciate, I mean, I think he sensed in me a desire for certainty that as an experienced Christian, he knew was not, you know, not actually the walk of faith for most people. And I suspect, too, that he had some confidence that participation in the community and the liturgy would reorient my heart and my mind. And I think this is how it works for a lot of people that you do. I mean, the crass way of putting it would be, you know, you fake it till you make it. But this is the experience that I think aligns up with, like, how our epistemology works. And certainly a major reason why, you know, we worship in a community is because left to our own devices, certainly there will be many days when we’re not feeling it right, and we need that community to carry us along. And I think, too, the more liturgical churches have imbued their people with a kind of confidence in the power of the liturgy to carry people along. So I ended up getting baptized in 2008 at the Easter vigil. And it was. I don’t regret doing it, but it was a pretty traumatic experience. I didn’t know why I was doing it, really. I mean, I felt pushed to do it and understood that as, even though I was agnostic, when it came to the existence of God, I did narrate that compulsion as a divine hand. You know, I’d been reading Augustine. And I’ve always been attracted to a kind of hardcore predestinarian picture of divine sovereignty. This was true even when I was an agnostic who didn’t believe in God. I often had the cart before the horse. Like, that’s a sort of theme in my spiritual development. So, you know, I felt like I was being pushed to do this thing. I didn’t really know why. I was still so far from even tentative confidence in the most basic claims of Christianity. And the sociology of this parish was such that I was doing this incredibly personal, vulnerable thing in front of all my colleagues because this is the Episcopalian parish closest to the university. And the membership was full of professors and divinity students for whom I was a TA and grad students. I knew other people from the university. So I felt very exposed and uncertain what I was even exposing. Right? So I went through it and continued worshiping there, taking communion, you know, the whole. The whole bit for some months. I did not get confirmed. And I kind of drifted away from it with a great deal of regret. I mean, not in like a, I don’t know, casual way where I was just relieved to be able to stay in my pajamas on Sunday mornings, but a sense that I had failed and that this was like a persistent thorn or itch or, you know, whatever metaphor you want to use. And I would, you know, sometimes go to compline services at night, you know, when traveling or later when my husband and I moved to Newport, Rhode Island. I would sometimes attend Anglican worship there. And I guess I kept hoping something would happen, but at the same time, I wasn’t really willing to do any work. Like, I wasn’t. I really. I’m an introvert. And I think one reason I liked the high Anglican culture is that they respect introverts and they don’t drag you to coffee hour and they leave you alone with, you know, with your sins in the pew. And I really preferred that. And I just. I really hated any church environment where there would be, like, an overly enthusiastic greeter and someone trying to suck me into some kind of conversation and get to know me. It was just terrible. So I had a real aversion to the community part of church, which I know makes me a little bit odd because I think that community part is often the main thing for most people. But that certainly. I mean, understandably, I suppose it helped keep me away from worship and it kind of reinforced my laziness. It’s not as if I was sitting holed up in my room, you know, reading all kinds of books on, you know, the case for Christianity. I was constantly reading about Christianity from the perspective of history for my work and, you know, working on articles where I was talking, you know, to religious believers in various communities, usually evangelical Protestants, but not always. And interestingly, in those conversations, I mean, every once in a while, at the end of a phone call, the person might inquire about my own views, and I was always quite transparent. I would call myself an agnostic. I. You know, I’ve never liked the word seeker, but it’s a useful one. I probably used it once or twice.
Jana Harmon
29:50 – 31:05
It’s such a curious juxtaposition, almost like I’m sure you were walking in some kind of dissonance. You’re going through the motions. You were participating. You were even finding yourself proclaiming some kind of affiliation with a God that you didn’t even know existed. That must have been strange. Honestly, during that period, it sounded like you wanted to feel apart in some way or to believe it as the others did. But it sounds like it was still something at a distance, something that you still studied, but somehow, even though you tried to partake, it somehow didn’t take in some way that there was still, I don’t know, some kind of a wall or some kind of a lack. As an investigator and looking at history and looking at religion, did you still perceive it as an agnostic? Did you still perceive religion as being somewhat of a social construction to meet those needs of community and belonging and providing answers to the bigger questions?
Molly Worthen
31:05 – 35:33
I was always a little bit skeptical of the characterization of religion as purely a social construction. And I think I’ve always been wired to take the ideas extremely seriously. At the same time, when you grow up in a kind of post Christian or residually Christian culture. And especially then when you go on to study it and develop credentials as an expert in Christianity, maybe it’s easy to think that you understand it like you have, you know what Christianity is. But I guess I didn’t realize for about two decades I didn’t realize that I had kind of skipped a step in my, in my learning about Christianity. Part of what happened is that in graduate school I absorbed, I think you could say from the ether, a what I now see as a very outdated understanding of the scholarship on New Testament criticism. I think I absorbed a vaguely kind of mid 20th century Jesus Seminar idea that yeah, there is this lovely Jewish holy man, you know, at the center of this thing and we can’t really know much if anything about him and there’s accretions of myth and community stories around him and you know, what’s actually there at the center is a mystery. And also, you know, the more you learn about all of the moving parts of Christianity when you’re an outsider non-believer, it’s easy to be paralyzed by how many ways and from how many directions Christianity challenges the basic way in which a secular, materialist person moves through the world. So it’s not just Jesus. It’s so much miraculous absurdity throughout the Bible, Old Testament and New,, this picture of the end times, heaven and hell, this, you know, sexual ethic that’s totally at odds with mainstream, you know, 21st century norms. It’s just a lot. And so, you know, to the extent that I ever began to wrestle with any one piece of that, you know, then you look up from whatever you’re focused on and think, oh man, even if I make some progress kind of understanding this piece of it, what about all that other bananas stuff that then I have to deal with, like I can’t even make any progress. And the more I started to learn about world religions while I was very sensitive to the vast differences in them and I never fell for kind of the lazy line that I think one often encounters in the casual study of world religions that ah, they’re all sort of basically the same and they all have like the same golden rule and stuff at the same time, I did see them all on a relatively even playing field of making, you know, really crazy supernatural claims that could not be verified by any means that I had learned and all kind of seeking to answer the same questions. And so while I was focused on Christianity, I think I had that sense and that any intellectually honest seeking would have to really investigate in a rigorous way every major religious tradition. And that also, I think contributed to my sense of paralysis. So, you know, it was, I think there were a few intellectual factors conspiring to keep me relatively complacent, but I think it was more just this, this absorption, this sort of non-intellectual, certainly not rigorous absorption of a certain kind of condescending and dismissive perspective on the possibility of engaging with the historical claims of Christianity on the same level, you know, with the same rigor that I was studying and scrutinizing other historical documents.
Jana Harmon
35:34 – 35:48
So then what happened? What caused you to say, you know, maybe I should take a look at those claims. Maybe there is something deeper or more substantive there that I should be looking at.
Molly Worthen
35:50 – 38:18
Over my time teaching at UNC, I came to articulate my philosophical position as something like kind of William James pragmatism. William James was and remains one of my intellectual heroes, was a philosopher and psychologist, you know, one of the founders really of modern psychology and psychiatry, who wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And his version of pragmatism says that there is objective truth out there, but we cannot ever perfectly access it given our human limitations. So it’s best to think of it as an asymptote that we can get closer and closer to with the help of our community and, you know, everyone kind of putting into practice the scientific method. But we can never quite get there. However, we’re on a kind of journey toward truth. We should be constantly testing truth claims as long as they remain useful kind of doing their work in our lives. We have a warrant for confidence in them, but we should be holding them lightly and be constantly willing to revise our theories of the universe based on new evidence, which is really hard. It’s not at all how we’re wired. You know, we’re wired to constantly exercise confirmation bias and motivated reasoning and reject new information, information that interferes with our tidy worldview. But we should fight that as much as possible. And I thought that was really an attractive picture of how one should move through the world and think about the acquisition of knowledge. And so I thought of myself as a pragmatist, really, trying to do that. But in actual real life, I think I was a pretty, I was sort of a dissatisfied but basically apathetic agnostic, was not actively going to church, had this sense that agnosticism wasn’t satisfying or viable in the long term. And that some, at some point in the distant future I would find my way to some respectable form of Christianity, Catholic or back to the Anglicans or, you know, maybe even Eastern Orthodoxy. But I wasn’t really working on it.
Jana Harmon
38:18 – 39:01
I think, at least in my experience, especially those who are very, very reasoned, very rational, very intellectual. Is that it is a process over time of in some ways becoming dissatisfied intellectually where you are, that it’s not providing the answers or the clarity or the veracity that it claims, so that it opens the door and motivates you to look, like you say, outside of your motivated reasoning or confirmation bias to say, okay, maybe it’s time actually to see what else is out there. So how did you move from that place of frustration forward?
Molly Worthen
39:01 – 54:33
God ambushed me. I suppose I was not looking consciously. I was still doing some journalism, as I continue to do, kind of on the side of my work as a history professor. So this is about three years ago now. I was working on a magazine article about a local Southern Baptist megachurch and its pastor. This is the Summit Church pastored by JD Greear and he had at that time recently stepped down from a tumultuous tenure as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. So I was planning to write a story about, you know, why is it that this mega church is growing and also kind of putting this in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention and all the turmoil and the challenges of the culture war for evangelistic church that’s trying to reach a fairly secular, left leaning part of North Carolina, you know, what we call the triangle, the research triangle. I was early in my research on this church, you know, I was, it took a while to get on JD’s calendar for an interview. So I was interviewing other staff and just trying to learn as much about it as I could. And I was really struck by the single-minded focus on evangelism among these Christians. And this is not to say that I had any doubt that other Christians I met in other contexts really believed, you know, Christianity. But there was a relentlessness about Summit staff that not, you know, a joyful relentlessness, not a relentlessness that put me off, but just, just a single-minded energy for getting as many people as possible to hear this message that made me think, man, these people really believe this. Like they, this is serious. And I guess it just got me to sort of sit up and take notice a little bit. And I, you know, so I had this conversation with the head pastor coming up and, you know, I wanted to make the most of it. I had put together all of these notes and had all these topics I wanted to cover. And the conversation, you know, in many ways was a normal interview in which we did cover all of these various, you know, culture war type topics and questions about theology and so forth. But I did find myself departing from my own script a little bit. I outed myself as an agnostic, which I don’t normally do. I also remember one point in the conversation, and this was not a question that was on my prepared list where I said, is there any room in your church for people who doubt? A question motivated, I think, by that relentlessness that I had perceived in the culture of this church, which I thought had to stem from a certainty. You know, how can there be any room for doubt if this is your posture toward the world? And he said, well, sure, there’s room for doubt. I mean, start with the pastor. And he talked to me about his own, you know, how he thinks about doubt and his own wrestlings with it at very various points in his life. And so, you know, it was a great conversation. I didn’t really, you know, I didn’t have any kind of epiphany or I think it would go anywhere that my, you know, interviewing work normally doesn’t go after that point. But after we parted ways, he followed up by email and we ended up having an extended email exchange in which, I mean, it started with me, I guess, putting forth in a, in a not particularly thoughtful way, like very basic questions about the claims of Christianity. And, well, why are your claims about the Resurrection any more plausible than Mormon claims about Joseph Smith’s revelation or things that Muslims believe about Muhammad? And he would write back these extended, very thoughtful, very scholarly replies with citations. You know, often he would say, you know, that’s a really good question. Let me talk to a few colleagues at the seminary and look up some things and get back to you. And then he would, he would send a few days later, you know, a couple thousand word response much, much meatier than I was prepared for. And I was, I mean, I was surprised and flattered that this, like, very busy, fancy pastor was taking my questions so seriously. And it compelled me to feel, okay, I have to step up here. I need to take this process seriously. And also I was becoming intrigued and I was realizing to my shame that here I am a supposed expert on the history of Christianity. But I’ve never actually looked into the fundamental historical claims of Christianity and maybe I ought to. So, you know, at a certain point, after a few rounds of email, I said, you know, I am an academic. Can you just give me some homework and, you know, give me a reading list? And he was also, he was very astute, kind of appealing to my ego. And he told me that he had consulted the famous minister Tim Keller about my case. I knew who Tim Keller was. And I was like, man, okay, this is, this is getting serious. I’m being like tag teamed now. And so he said, you know, well, Tim and I have, you know, I talked to him about, about a book list. Here’s a list of books. And it, it included some of Keller’s books and N.T. Wright’s giant Resurrection and the Son of God, Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. So I began a summer of, I mean, it felt like doing a kind of informal but still very intense master’s degree in New Testament studies reading. But also, you know, remember I was not even a theist at this point, so I had to be working on that level also. And as I was doing a lot of reading in cosmology books like Francis Collins, Language of God, some of David Bentley Hart’s work, and I remember opening a word document and just beginning to keep a journal, which is not something that I make a habit of, but I was, I just needed a forum in which to record how much I was learning and how I was kind of in a halting way beginning to realize that I had never really interrogated my own assumptions and that there was this wealth of really excellent biblical scholarship, much of it published since the 1990s. I mean, there’s really been a renaissance in New Testament scholarship produced by, I would say believing scholars, but across quite a range of theological perspectives. And JD was also very clever in anticipating my kind of, as much as I don’t like to think about myself in this way, like he understood at some level I was this Ivy League snob. And so he was recommending books written by, you know, very respectable British Anglican professors who are at Oxford and so forth. I had to sort of sit up and take notice. And so that like, he was very tactical. And I think this is one of the many. Now I thought a lot about how did this, how did he execute this like judo move of here I come in as the journalist, you know, to learn about him. And I’m supposed to be in control. And he turns my own, you know, my own inquisitive powers against me, myself in some sense. So it was this, this atmosphere of just really open inquiry. And it’s important to stress too that we were becoming friends in kind of unexpectedly. Right. Like, you know, I’m a, I’m a history professor at a secular research university from an agnostic background. And he’s like a, you know, typical, very pushy, you know, single minded Baptist pastor from a pretty fundamentalist background. Although he’s not fundamentalist now. You wouldn’t think we would become friends. But it turned out that we, we had a very common sense of humor. I think that’s been important. And from the beginning we could kind of make fun of one another and, and also just make fun of the whole situation. I mean, evangelism is awkward. It’s like inherently awkward. And I think it’s important to be able to joke about it and for the evangelist to make the seeker feel, well, on the one hand, let’s be clear about what’s going on here. Like, yeah, I want you to come to Jesus, but I value you as a friend. I’m not sort of seeing you as like a target to fill my quota. Right. So I think that dynamic was really crucial. So I was working through these books, meeting with J.D. i don’t know, once a month or something, emailing a lot to my shock, given my high church snob tendencies, I was continuing to go to Summit for worship. I mean, well past the point where my article was done and all of that. I was also reengaging with scripture. I was reading the Gospels and finding myself affected by them in a way that had never happened to me before. And it started really with the Gospel of Mark, which I think had always been the most dismissive of Mark. It’s the shortest. It’s isn’t the Greek, not that I read Greek, but one hears that the Greek is very sort of unpolished, right? There’s just not like all of the elaborate theological stuff that you find in John and so forth. But when I came to it in my new frame of mind, I was struck immediately by the grittiness of Mark’s Gospel. And to some extent this is true of all the gospel accounts, but especially in Mark. There’s just this sense that the author is desperately trying to get down on paper this crazy stuff that happened that he doesn’t entirely understand. And it took on the character for me, especially alongside this reading I was doing of a really interesting primary historical source, which is just not a way I’d ever looked at scripture before. Now, you know, I was not, I could not, of course, approach the biblical documents assuming inerrancy or anything close to it. Right. I mean, on what grounds could I assume that? But my instinct was to simply accord to the scriptural documents the same respect and benefit of the doubt that I would give to any historical primary source document, any context. Right. So this is not to say, you know, you approach them in some state of naivete, but you also don’t approach them with some kind of like postmodern hermeneutic of suspicion, like on a mission to deconstruct every sentence and assume, you know, until proven otherwise, that it’s in some way fabricated. Right. You’re just, you’re sort of reading it in a straightforward way, which I think is the approach that, you know, people in classics, as opposed to in New Testament studies would be inclined to take toward documents from this period. I was also, I mean, trying to go about this in a rigorous way and reading a lot of scholarship produced by non-believing scholars. But I was, you know, continuing to read scripture and finding myself struck especially by the accounts of Jesus healing and the very precise and kind of personalized ways in which he meets every person. You know, in Mark 7, when Jesus heals the deaf man, he takes him aside privately and puts his fingers into his ears and you know, after spitting, touches his tongue and says, be opened. Or you know, Mark 8, the blind man at Bethsaida, you know, where Jesus leads him out of the village and spits on his eyes and lays hands on him and you know, says, do you see anything? And the man says, well, I see people, but they look like trees walking. So Jesus has another go at it and then he, and then he’s completely healed. I was just, I was struck by the, well, the weirdness of Jesus’s methods that kind of lent these accounts of believability for me. They just, they didn’t seem to follow any formula. And as much as I, and I remain kind of resistant to the like, the evangelical tendency to see yourself in scripture constantly, like I think that’s always part of it. But maybe, maybe evangelicals make too much of a point of that. I couldn’t help but see myself a bit in this very precise way in which God had sort of like set me up with, with this evangelist who just, it seemed like God just gave him my file like was like, here is how to deal with this girl. And that God had set things up for me to be humbled in this very specific way. I was this high church snob who had probably written some slightly snarky things about megachurch seeker sensitive worship. And here I was kind of caught in the gravitational pull of this mega church mothership, right? I wasn’t even worshiping at one of the satellites campuses that are smaller. Like I was going to the mothership, you know, really sort of relishing the anonymity of the dark rock concert feel. And like when I could work my nerve up, I could go down and talk to the pastor, but otherwise I could jet out. And yes, they would greet me in their very cheerful way. Summit has a lot of greeters. You know, you get greeted like six times by the time you get to the sanctuary, but they leave you alone. They don’t, they don’t like drag you anywhere. But, but there’s something about the very stripped down character of, of contemporary megachurch worship. And this, I mean Summit is a very like reformed, theologically serious place where the, the preaching is, is a pretty intense experience. And that helped me focus on Jesus for the first time. I mean, I think just because of my wiring, not through any fault of more liturgical churches for me, worship in a high Anglican or Orthodox or Catholic setting. Just, there was just so much for me to focus on that wasn’t Jesus, you know, like, wow, you know, Thomas Cranmer is such a, such a literary genius. Like, look at what he’s done in the Book of Common Prayer or you know, the, the stained glass and the, and the iconostasis and like all, all of these things which are wonderful teaching tools. And I, I have met so many Christians who grew up in a low church, you know, non-denom suburban, mega-church environment and got frustrated with that context and its blind spots and shortcomings. And for them, the path toward recovering the mystery of the gospel involved, you know, going in the more liturgical direction. That makes absolute sense to me. But for me, just because of my story, I had to go in the opposite direction.
Jana Harmon
54:33 – 55:34
It’s different. It’s calling you to something deeper, something more real than you had anticipated. I love the analogies that you brought out with Jesus, that you’re really learning more about who he is and that he allows the blind to see and they and the deaf to hear, not only through the literal healings that he accomplished in the Bible or through scripture that we read, but it seems that he’s doing that in your own life at this moment. It’s almost as if like you said that like the blind person, well he could see a little bit, but it wasn’t absolutely clear. And then there was a little bit more interaction with Jesus and things became more clear. And I’m anticipating that that’s the direction that, that your story is taking.
Molly Worthen
55:35 – 01:08:07
Absolutely. I, so I, you know, I was continuing to try to make sense of this, you know, in my notes and I found I had to constantly reread my own notes because my epistemological grooves were so deep that I would come to some kind of halting conclusion where I found, you know, NT Wright or Richard Bauckham’s account of the historical reliability of the biblical texts, you know, more convincing than I expected to. But if I didn’t confront myself with that tentative conclusion repeatedly, I would just sort of slip away from it. Like I’m not the kind of person who believes this stuff. That’s not an argument. But that’s sort of the default mode. Now NT Wright’s Resurrection and the Son of God is a, you know, it’s a behemoth. And even for me as a fairly scholarly reader, I found it at times overwhelming. And I would have to kind of go back and read the chapter in Tim Keller’s Reason for God where he kind of summarizes Wright’s case for the resurrection so that I could get myself reoriented for the, you know, forest instead of the trees. And he argues that coming back from the dead was not something that dead messiahs did in this time and that there were lots of self nominated saviors, prophets running around. Certainly it’s not something that Jesus’s followers would have expected. And he says that, you know, either the empty tomb or Jesus’s recorded appearances, if we had one or the other in the documents, they, they would not have yielded the early Christian belief in the risen Messiah, but that there is reason to take both seriously and that both in combination that the tomb was empty and that Jesus did appear to his disciples, they’re the only reasonable explanation for this very early, very strong belief in the resurrection. And Wright says that attempts by, you know, he calls them kind of post-enlightenment scholars to mythologize these stories and to read them as later Christian beliefs imposed on the past. You know, to say that the witnesses in the gospels were engaged in wish fulfillment based on dreams or you know, the special feelings they had about their experience with Jesus, their own guilt, whatever, that all of this is essentially chronological snobbery, to use C.S. Lewis’s phrase, and that it doesn’t take seriously the quite sophisticated way in which 1st century Middle Eastern people navigated their world and their worldviews. And you know, reading Wright lay out this argument made me see that I was myself kind of guilty of that condescension toward the past. And I hadn’t adequately appreciated the richness of 1st century Palestinian, you know, Hellenistic milieus, and that if I were to, you know, simply accord to that culture that, you know, the same courtesies I would want for someone studying my world, I had to just take them, take the biblical accounts seriously in a new way. The other thing I was coming to realize is that my resistance to the Resurrection was premised on a really deeply seated anti-supernaturalist bias. I was finally becoming aware of my existence in this closed universe. And the more I thought about it, especially as I was doing all this reading on cosmology and becoming persuaded of theism, the more I realized that I wasn’t really entitled to those assumptions. And that, you know, if I was willing to suspend my disbelief in the supernatural, well then the Christian account of the Resurrection was increasingly becoming more persuasive as an explanation for the evidence we have than the other convoluted stories about stolen body and later mythologizing and what have you. The other crucial thing that JD helped me see, and this sounds quite obvious when I say it, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time, and this is, I suppose the character of any epiphany, is that I came to finally see that Christianity is unique among world religions in that it really stands or falls on whether one thing did or did not happen in history. If the Resurrection happened, then I think we have grounds for accepting that Christianity is true. And if it didn’t, as Paul says in First Corinthians, you know, then our faith isn’t, is totally in vain and we are among those most to be pitied. And that gave me a way of kind of pragmatically narrowing my focus. It freed me from the paralysis I described before where I felt like I had to investigate all world religions and I had to investigate every set of claims that Christianity makes that just became overwhelming to think about. But this way of reorienting my seeking helped me see that. Well, all those questions are important. Sure, it’s not that you, you close them off, but you can kind of set them aside and focus on this one thing. It gave me a way of putting up, putting a pin in my all my other questions and setting them into the category of mystery just for now. Right. And so that I was able to make progress on this central question in the case of Christianity, especially because it’s fundamentally a historical question. And I’m a historian, so I felt qualified. I mean, I’m not a specialist in the first century and so very aware of my limitations. But in a fundamental way, I understand the methodology. This is not to say that I ever thought or think now that you can prove the resurrection. Right. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that we can’t get close to that singularity, that we can’t learn an awful lot about the immediate context, you know, preceding and also the aftermath of the miracle through application of the historical method. So I found. I mean, one of the books I was reading at this time that was so helpful to me is Sheldon Van Auken’s memoir of becoming a Christian during his time at Oxford in the 1950s under the influence of C.S. Lewis called a Severe Mercy. And he talks about, you know, feeling himself to be standing on one side of this chasm, you know, and there’s this gap between him and Jesus, and he’s so focused on this gap, and how is he going to get across the gap? And then finally it dawns on him to look behind him and see the emerging gap between his own worldview, older worldview, and where he is standing now. And he realizes, Oh, I can’t just stay where I am. Like, either I have to jump forward to Jesus or I gotta jump backward. And actually, that chasm is even bigger now, and it involves an active rejection of Jesus and reaffirmation of this old worldview that I’m not sure is plausible really for me anymore. It’s not serviceable. And that changes how achievable that gap in front feels. And that really helps capture, I think, some of my mindset. I was continuing to hope that I would have some sort of clarifying mystical experience. You know, I thought, surely one can’t become a Christian just by reading lots of footnotes. And so I was, you know, praying for this, and I was, like, talking to Christians of various descriptions. You know, what’s the emotional side of this? Like, why am I not experiencing any of that? And I had a few conversations with Catholic priests, with Tim Keller, who, he was dying of cancer at this time, but that man was an evangelist to his dying breath. And we had a few zoom calls, you know, where he talked through these things with me and he said, faith is kind of like a friendship, and, you know, it’s a relationship with a person. And just as when you’re, you know, thinking about becoming friends with somebody, yeah, you can ask around about them, you can, you know, Google them, look at their social media accounts, kind of get a sense of their reputation and what they’re about. But ultimately you cannot know what they’re like, and you can’t know what the friendship is like until you take the risk and enter the relationship. Faith is like that. And, you know, as I was describing what I was hungry for, he and other Christians would say, well, you’re, you’re describing the experience of faith. And, that’s the thing that you’ve got to take the risk to, to begin to actually have. That seemed plausible to me. So, you know, this is how I got to the point where I had, you know, had not had any lightning bolt experience. But by the end of this crucial summer, I thought, well, I’m not 99% certain that the resurrection happened, but I’m well north of 51%. And if I am a conscientious pragmatist in the spirit of William James, who’s actually willing to revise my working theory of the universe based on new evidence, then seems like the thing I have to do here is submit. And so that’s what I did. I mean, I went from praying, God, please show yourself to me, which had been my main prayer all summer, to Jesus, okay, I accept you as Lord and Savior. And although I had gotten baptized in that earlier context in the Anglican Church, and when this process began, this intense summer, I sort of knew. This is odd to say, but I, even when I was still quite far from being a Christian, I could kind of see where it was headed. And I was like, okay, maybe this is it. Maybe I’ll finally become a Christian, but there is no freaking way I am getting baptized at that megachurch. The JD pastors, like, I’ve been baptized. I don’t need another baptism. It’s like too embarrassing. But by the time it actually happened, it was just very clear to me that part of submission involved getting dunked in the tank, you know, while the worship bands playing, you know, with the Jesus in my place tee shirt that Summit makes all its new people getting baptized where. And so I, you know, I did that and I remain a member of Summit, and I, you know, I’m still a complete spiritual infant, but that’s just how it works. I mean, I think I’ve had to grudgingly accept that faith is not like other things in life where I can kind of set a deadline and, you know, homework and writing and reading I have to do to master something and then execute it and check it off my list and move on. Like, faith doesn’t move on our timetables, moves on God’s. So I’m still wrestling with so much and, you know, have to talk myself into it anew every day. But I think, you know, Tim Keller was correct when he said that faith without doubts would be like an immune system without antibodies. Like the goal of the Christian life is, is never, should never be the total excision or settling of doubts. But that would require turning off your brain, but rather the kind of healthy engagement with doubts both on your own and in a community. And I really appreciate that. I’m in a church and also, you know, I’ve found Christian communities at my university that really encourage every question and have never made me feel like I need to turn off, you know, that part of my brain or stop wrestling just because, you know, I signed the membership covenant.
Jana Harmon
01:08:07 – 01:11:40
It makes me think of William James’s essay, the Will to Believe, that we will never know in this lifetime because of our limited understanding, our finitude as humans, all of those things that there’s no way that we could ever know all there is to know. And I also appreciate that that is not a blind leap or a blindness to your faith. Obviously, you have done incredible due diligence not only to investigate the larger question of God’s existence, but also how that that can inform the reality of the resurrection and the person of Jesus. And so you have now what appears to be this beautiful combination of intellect and faith together, head and heart. And then you add that with your surrendered posturing and humility towards God. And you call yourself a spiritual infant. But I would say that you’re pretty far along in your journeying, that you have moved to in such a place of really not only profundity in terms of your own understanding, but also your deep desire, your eagerness to learn and your desire to go deeper. I love your story and how all encompassing it is and the honesty of your struggle and the reality that all things aren’t perfect and that we’re all on a journey. I mean, a daily surrender is not easy for anyone. But in your story, Molly, you were a skeptic and agnostic for many years. You were the voyeur who was looking in or looking at religion and looking at Christianity and analyzing and talking about it, writing about it, thinking about it. But it took you a while to enter in in a vulnerable way, I guess you could say. There are probably a lot of people listening who are just like you have been or were for so long. Where they’re looking at Christians, they’re looking at people from the outside saying, there seems to be something there. I don’t know what it is. I’m curious about it. You went on a very particular intellectual journeying. Like you say, Jesus meets us all in very specific and unique ways, and you need it to be met in a way that satisfies you intellectually. You know, not everyone is like that, of course we’re all different. But if somebody is interested in entering in as more than just a voyeur, just to see, is there something real, is there something true here? What would you recommend for that person? How could they take a step forward? Would it be reading some of those books? Would it be having me finding Christians of substance who can have those kind of conversations with you and humility and grace? What would that look like? What would you say?
Molly Worthen
01:11:41 – 01:16:48
I have maybe one sort of big picture point of advice and then a more practical point of one. The big picture tip, which I wish I had acted on earlier, is to ask yourself, have you posed the same questions that you are inclined to pose to the worldviews of people you don’t agree with? And that would include, for an agnostic, include Christians? Have you posed those same questions to your own worldview? I don’t really think I did that for far too long. Secondly, you know, this is hard to act on, but I do think it’s important to be aware how easy it is in our culture, which is so steeped in Christian assumptions, just part of the, you know, it’s part of the air we breathe. It’s easy to think that you really know what you’re rejecting when you reject Christianity. And I guess I would challenge any seeker to halt and really have at least a couple of serious conversations with thoughtful believers to make sure you understand what the gospel is and what, you know, the warrants for confidence in it are. I think it’s a person who will kind of come alongside you in this, but you can’t, that can’t happen. It can’t be a productive process unless you’re already at the point of feeling dissatisfied with your previous worldview, which is why I think posing those questions is so important. I think it’s easy. And regretfully, I talk to students at UNC often who are in this position to end up in Christian subcultures where your questions get shut down. And it breaks my heart because that’s just, there’s no reason for that. So, you know, I think there are particular resources, especially on a number of university campuses. I’m a big believer in the study center movement, really. These centers that have grown up kind of adjacent to many campuses that are devoted to reconciling Christian faith with critical inquiry and learning. And often, you know, if your campus has one of these, they are really great places to meet Christians who are keen to have these conversations. But most practically, you know, because I love helping like-minded seekers who are coming at this with questions similar to my own. I’ve put up online my own working reading list, annotated, divided into categories of books that were really important for me. And so it’s on my, my personal website, mollyworthen.com and then it’s on one of the pages and maybe in the show notes you can link to it. And that’s, I also have some of the interviews I’ve done about my own conversion. But then I think the reading list is really the heart of, it includes both more accessible, popular books that are sort of easy to digest in a weekend. And then it includes the more scholarly books and some books about the Christian life that I found really helpful. And so, you know, that’s, that’s like a concrete place to start if people are interested in these questions. And to Christians who are on the other side of this, I would, I would say that it’s important to not put pressure on yourself to close the deal, if you will. You know, when I think about my process, sure, you know, I was, I was evangelized in a very specific way, like by JD with a strong assist from Tim Keller. And they, but they were, they were the final chapter in a long, a two-decade process that involved countless Christians who each in their own way, you know, was ministering to me and evangelizing me. And you know, as much as I say now that my, you know, my first baptism didn’t take, I’m sure my Anglican friends would say it took, it just took a while, you know, for it to manifest. And they were, they were important in my process as well. I mean, that could have been a moment if it had gone badly, if they hadn’t been so, you know, respectful of my introverted nature and where I was. They could have totally alienated me from Christianity and, like, an irreparable way, and they didn’t. They planted seeds that then took a long time to germinate. So, you know, I think it’s important as Christians, you know, to see ourselves as constant witnesses who are playing some tiny role in other people’s stories. And those stories are not ours. The stories belong to God, and we can’t know the arc of them. Like, all we can do is tell people what our experience has been and what’s happened to us and, you know, have patience and humility about whether we get to see the fruits of that directly.
Jana Harmon
01:16:48 – 01:17:17
I appreciate that. Yeah, it has been interesting in your journeying the variant of the type of Christians you were engaged with, you know, from the Anglican Church all the way to, you know, to the kind of pushing you along when you really weren’t ready, but yet it still served a purpose. To JD who was the overt evangelist, to Tim, a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more, you know, letting you come to your own conclusions and, you know, stall out if you need be.
Molly Worthen
01:17:18 – 01:17:19
Exactly.
Jana Harmon
01:17:19 – 01:18:10
Yeah. You know, so Christians are different. Everyone they engage with is different. And this is, as you’ve intimated over and over, conversion is a work of God. You know, it is like you say, everyone has their own arc and what a beautiful story you have, and the arc and the life that the Lord is redeeming for him through you is just really quite an incredible story, Molly, I so appreciate you coming on. You’re being so incredibly articulate and very clear, and I know that so many people are going to benefit from hearing your journey and will want to investigate more as you have. So thank you for making your website available, your story available, your resources, everything. I just so appreciate you coming on today.
Molly Worthen
01:18:11 – 01:18:12
Thanks so much for having me.
Jana Harmon
01:18:12 – 01:20:05
You’re welcome. If these stories mean something to you and they’ve helped you think more deeply or see faith in a new light, would you consider partnering with us to support what we’re doing here at eX-skeptic? We’re so appreciative of our listener support, and your gift helps us bring these conversations to people who are genuinely searching. Find the link in our show notes or head to eXskeptic.org and donate. Or shoot us an email at info skeptic.org if you’d like to learn more. Thanks for listening to this episode of eX-skeptic with Dr. Molly Worthen. If you were moved by her story. You’re not alone. So many skeptics wrestle with questions about truth, faith, and reason, and Molly’s journey reminds us that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. It can be a doorway. To explore the same resources Molly used in her own pursuit of truth, visit her reading list at mollyworthen.com. We’ve also linked it in the show notes. Whether you’re a seeker, a skeptic, or someone walking alongside a loved one with doubts, you’ll find wisdom there. And if you’ve enjoyed if you enjoy this conversation, please subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with a friend who might be curious too. You can stream eX-skeptic on all platforms and connect with us at info@exskeptic.org. If you’d like to hear more stories like Molly’s, visit our website at exskeptic.org or our YouTube channel, where you can explore curated playlists by topic. You can also sign up for our email list to stay connected and be the first to know about our new episodes and resources. If you’d like to talk with one of our guests about your own questions, email us at info@exskeptic.org we’d be happy to connect you. Our podcast is part of the C.S. Lewis Podcast Network, and Ashley Kelfer is our wonderful podcast producer. Thank you for joining us and come back next time for another unlikely story of belief.
