“We’re in a Crisis of Meaning”: An Interview with Molly Worthen
Molly Worthen ’03 B.A., ’11 Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2014) examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945. Her next book, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Trump, will be published by Convergent/Random House in May 2025. In addition, she writes about religion, politics, and higher education for the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and other publications. In a New York Times opinion piece in 2021, she wrote: “The consistent theme in my conversations with young religious believers on the left and the right is their yearning for the freedom to escape political tribes. Their refusal to be bound by the habits and fears of their parents’ generation echoes the special role that young Americans played in the détente between Catholics and Protestants two generations ago—and maybe the history of interfaith conflict has something to teach us about rebuilding working relationships between Republicans and Democrats.” Worthen was interviewed by Reflections editor Ray Waddle. Here’s an edited version of their conversation.
Reflections: Are we living in especially perilous times? Whenever I ask historians that, they look unimpressed and point to many other eras of worse danger and conflict. What are your thoughts?
Molly Worthen: I struggle with this question. It’s true you’d be hard pressed to find any era of history where thoughtful, alert observers were not panicked about some sort of crisis of civilization at the time. Certainly you don’t have to go back very far to find an American society in the 1860s or 1920s or 1960s that was by many objective measures far more violent and just as divided in its own way. People make a lot out of the media revolution today, its role in polarizing us and allowing extreme views to gain ground. That’s true as far as it goes, but the West is a product of a series of media revolutions, and I’m not sure the internet is an end-all be-all explanatory factor that it sometimes is credited to be.
There are productive ways to wrestle with our frustrations—the worst thing we could do is sink into cynicism and apathy.
And yet, as much as I am a historian who’s unimpressed with claims of novelty of our own age, I do share the broad sense that people express that something is different, and we’re living in a moment in our civilization when institutions that historically shaped most people’s lives are at a place of unprecedented weakness. So we are in a place that is quite different from the crises that previous generations faced. The structures that were available to those generations to make meaning out of suffering and impose some order on chaos are not as available to us.
Reflections: Can the life of faith lower the political temperature? Can religion be a moderating influence?
Worthen: Every major religious tradition has tools for making sense of the human propensity to continually fall short of the ideals the religious tradition posits. Since we’re still a religious country in so many ways, there ought to be values that imbue practitioners with a sense of humility. Those resources are absolutely available. But as we’ve seen in every era of human history, if humans have access to a set of ideas and practices for shoring up power and drawing lines around their own tribe and excluding others, we will do that. That’s what humans do. Though it’s disappointing to see humans wield their faith as a sledge hammer, it shouldn’t surprise any student of Christian history or Christian anthropology.
Reflections: Can we escape this history?
Worthen: There are productive ways to wrestle with our frustrations—the worst thing we could do is sink into cynicism and apathy. One of the powerful things about being part of a religious community, whether Christianity or a different faith, is it ought to compel us to be in constant conversation not only with those around us, our contemporaries, but also with a tradition going back thousands of years, over which time human nature has not changed one iota. So none of this is new. That can be simultaneously disheartening but also comforting in that there’s a community going back many, many generations who have wrestled with these questions and shaken their fist at God for the same reasons.
Reflections: How do you sort out the interplay of secularization and religious belief these days? Are broader historical shifts in play?
Worthen: If you think about secularization as a decline in worship attendance and practices of piety, it has affected a whole range of religious communities, particularly Christian ones. If we were having this conversation in the 1970s or 80s, we’d say that mainline churches were declining while Southern Baptist and Assemblies of God could claim they were still growing hand over fist year after year. And that’s no longer true. It’s important to dig into recent statistical reports and find various trends. Bigger congregations are growing. Churches that are withering and shutting down tend to be smaller. There are signs that certain kinds of evangelism and outreach seem to be effective in our time and place. And the number of people identifying as nones seems to have leveled off. There are signs that younger Americans, Gen Z Americans, are more open to spiritual conversations. Many want to hear why someone is very convicted about their faith. They do tend to be quite anti-institutional. And hyper-individualism does act as a centrifugal force that can pull people away from religion. But this is where it gets messy: By religious are we talking about a willingness to show up in person at worship at a church building on Sunday or about beliefs about transcendence? Does worship via YouTube have the same social consequences as worshiping in a community? (I don’t think it does.)
I’d say that the declining cultural and political authority of traditional Christianity in this country since the 1970s has spawned a range of responses. Certainly some conservative Christians have gone into quite a defensive crouch and have leaned into tribalism. But, as difficult as this period is, I talk to other Christians who say they are glad that it’s finally hard to be just a “cultural Christian”: If you’re going to be a Christian in 21stcentury America, it’s a decision you make. You have to be thoughtful about it.
Behind all this, I would point to broader, big-picture trends in Western civilization that have led to where we are. Certain special features of American history militated against the secularizing trends for a long time—features such as the peculiarity of the First Amendment, the way it created a competitive religious marketplace; the intertwining of religious belief and racial identity and racial prejudice that has contributed to the particular character of some Christian subcultures, including white southern evangelicalism and African American Protestantism. For a long time these helped keep America’s rates of church attendance higher than what we’ve seen in western Europe.
These broader trends include other elements too—like antibiotics, anesthesia. I’m overwhelmed by this whenever I’m doing research on any of the great religious leaders in our past. It’s almost a cliché that so many of them lost several children in infancy. Something I try to stress to students is that we have no concept of how difficult life was, and how rickety the authority of medicine in its infancy truly was. So it made perfect sense to turn more to the priest when facing a crisis. But there’s a flip side to this. If you look at the history of objections to religion since Voltaire in the 18th century, the dominant one has been the problem of evil: Why does God allow suffering? But if you go back and look at earlier Christian tradition, you find that Christians were not quite as fixated on this question. They accepted in some way that life involves suffering. So there’s this irony: Nowadays the most common objection to religion is, How could a good, all-powerful God allow suffering? Yet for most of our history, and this is still the case in other parts of the world today, that objection does not have the same purchase.
Reflections: Do you find hopeful signs for the future?
Worthen: I’ll mention two reasons for encouragement. One is: There’s something interesting going on generationally. When I talk to younger evangelicals, college students who have some relationship to conservative Christianity, in many cases they are really bothered by the way their parents’ generation handled political and social issues. They are likely to have grown up in a more diverse context, in which they know gay and transgender people personally; though they are often quite conservative in their doctrinal views of sexuality, they’ve imbibed a certain message from the culture about how to navigate space and how to interact. They don’t have the kind of virulent, disgusted fear of the other. It’s a meaningful shift. It’s hard to generalize, but I think there’s a desire by younger conservative Christians to frame the traditional culture war issues differently—there’s more interest frankly in a more Roman Catholic, broader ethic-of-life conversation, in which their opposition to abortion is part of a larger awareness of human suffering, from womb to tomb.
The second reason is the international context. Christianity by the numbers is declining in the West but booming elsewhere. We’re possibly in the midst of the largest global Christian revival in the 2,000 years of the church’s history. It’s astonishing, the rate of growth. And almost without exception, the kinds of Christianity that are thriving—at least holding steady in America, and thriving in other parts of the world—are the robustly supernaturalist, traditionalist forms of Christianity that are not ashamed to stand by claims of the miraculous or hold onto things the Bible pretty clearly teaches that are out of step with secularism.
Reflections: If institutions have weakened, how does theological education prepare leaders for the future?
Worthen: It’s important to be cognizant of the hazard of political capture across the political spectrum. I think the crucial antidote is to immerse students in the study of the entirety of the church tradition in a global context. It’s the only way to beat back the human tendency to be tribal and parochial. It’s the only way to see all the insidious means by which our particular place in time, the constant blare of political news, really attenuates our grasp of the core of the gospel. To that end, it’s important not to let the word evangelical become captured by some narrow right-wing expression of Christianity, but to constantly bring it back to the evangelion. I think there’s a fear on the left side of the church of old-fashioned evangelism. At their best, Christians go out into the world evangelizing in what they do in forms of service to the world, but they also preach the gospel. We’re in a crisis of meaning. People want to have conversations about politics and justice, yes; they also want to have conversations about the ultimate meaning of the universe.
Reflections: In light of Donald Trump’s re-election, how does your new book address the charismatic power of such a personality to enthrall and repulse so many?
Worthen: My book, Spellbound, puts Trump’s career in the context of four centuries of American history. It argues that the heart of political charisma is a leader’s ability to tell followers a new story that explains their lives and invites them to take an active role in their own future. Many Americans are baffled by Trump’s appeal, but I found in my research that the most charismatic leaders in American history often provoked deep revulsion among their critics. Charisma is not at all the same thing as charm, good looks, or magnificent oratory, and charismatic figures are polarizing. If you are outside the power of the story a leader is telling, you probably find his or her appeal very hard to understand. When we have that reaction to a leader, we should not use it as an excuse to dismiss his followers, but as an occasion to look closer.