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In the forty-first episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Molly Worthen, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Worthen opens by discussing how her interest in journalism over time also came include serving as a collegiate educator. Few individuals whose interests expand in such a manner do so having already written, for example, for Christianity Today, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Slate. Such an evolution, however, proved beneficial. Worthen’s writing voice as forged by her commitments to serve as a journalist and public intellectual was one she was able to introduce to her career in higher education from the very beginning. Worthen discusses how her intellectual interests during her time as an undergraduate and graduate student were shaped by her experiences interviewing individuals with captivating life stories. For example, one of those initial experiences included traveling as an undergraduate to north central Alberta to interview members of an Old Russian Orthodox or Old Believer community. She introduces how focusing on individuals with captivating life stories shaped the focus of her first three books and that even individuals with flaws can still prove worthy of the time historians and journalists are called to invest. Regardless of the subject, Worthen also notes that pursuing such efforts is dependent upon the intellectual and moral virtues journalists and historians strive to cultivate.
- Molly Worthen’s Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum Books, 2025)
- Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013)
- Molly Worthen’s The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill (Mariner Books, 2007)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Molly Worthen, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Thank you for joining us.
Molly Worthen: Thanks for having me.
Todd Ream: In a recent conversation with “Seen and Unseen’s” Belle Tindall and Justin Brierley, you mentioned higher education was your backup plan and that you believed your initial calling was to serve as a journalist. With the job market in the humanities being what it is, I’m not sure what it says about your gambling history there or wagering history if you plan on the humanities being your backup plan. But regardless, you managed to do both very well. You serve on the faculty there at the University of North Carolina and include on a variety of topics to publications such as The New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico, Foreign Policy, Slate, and Christianity Today.
With such a combination of skills usually being the foundation for what we reference as a public intellectual, to start, can you begin by sharing how your writing voice developed over the course of your career, and in what practices did you invest to be able to serve such audiences?
Molly Worthen: I appreciate the question, and it, it implies a level of deliberate action and planning that I don’t think I really, I really engaged in. I just followed my own curiosity and instincts, I suppose. I don’t recall anyone early in my education giving me that cliché speech about needing to find your passion. I think if I had heard that, it would’ve kind of paralyzed me, wouldn’t really have known what to do with it. And I’m, I’m always telling the students I talk to to ignore that message from the culture. Uh, I just, I just think it, you know, there are, there are a few people who really have clarity about what they want to do and how very early on, but I think they’re the exception.
I was really interested from, gosh, I mean, fifth grade on, you know, doing a, a big project on the lost island of Atlantis, where I, I was moved to recreate the island based on, you know, a range of sources I had found both from modeling clay, but then also from gingerbread and candy which then I, after my presentation to the class, I offered. We broke it up and, and ate it. And I think from that-
Todd Ream: You were probably a crowd favorite then at that point.
Molly Worthen: That’s right, yeah. But I, I guess I was just really entranced by the opportunity to try to enter as fully as possible a world that was not my own. And I, I guess that, that is the through line that explains the classes I was drawn to, the reading, the twin interests in history, especially religious history and, and journalism, especially journalism focused on, on religion.
Uh, and so, you know, I, I think I just read a lot and read, read a lot across, across a wide range of fiction and, and nonfiction. And that to me is the key to kind of developing one’s ear for how a paragraph ought to sound. And, and I began kind of bumbling into short-term journalistic assignments that gave me a chance to just ask, ask a lot of questions and hone the art of interviewing and getting people to, to talk about themselves.
So I mean, I had a few early experiences that were really formative. Maybe the main one was getting some funding from my college the summer after my sophomore year to go to this rather remote location in north central Alberta in western Canada to do some very amateur ethnographic field work with a community of Russian Orthodox Old Believers, who are a sort of obscure sect that broke away from the main body of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century and were persecuted first by the tsars and then the communists, and their diaspora is all over the place. So there’s a remote community of them four hours northeast of Edmonton. Uh, and I went up there.
I had a mentor named David Goa, who was a professor associated with the University of Alberta, who kind of helped me get my feet under me. And that was my first time really trying to break into a, a pretty isolated community and really try to kinda learn how do you observe and, and describe a, a worldview and a kind of a way of being that’s, that’s not your own. I never managed to publish anything out of that. It resulted in like a giant pile of field notes. Um, but it really, it was my first time really falling in love with that, that whole endeavor of, of really trying to kind of get as close as possible to the asymptote that is another human’s experience.
Todd Ream: Thank you. What habits then, as your career progressed, as your education progressed, have you sought to develop then that would allow you to also continue to expand that voice as a writer and, and to refine it?
Molly Worthen: Interviewing is kind of my default conversation mode. It’s, it’s what I do in social situations when I feel awkward. It’s not just, it’s not just something I do when I’m deliberately working on a, a story. But I, I, I suppose just because of my temperament and that that’s kind of how I manage my own combination of being an introvert, but, but also being interested in other people. Um, so you do, you do a lot of that. You, you have lots of conversations where you’re asking people about themselves and learning how to overcome various kinds of friction points and obstacles that one encounters. I guess, I guess you get better at it.
I really found my voice as a writer and I, I guess, began to develop something I could call a vocation in my first big writing project, which began as a seminar paper in college. Uh, I took in a course called The Art of Biography. We had to pick a subject for our final paper. It could be anyone, famous or not, living or dead. I really wanted to write about this professor I had had at Yale, who had a previous career that was sort of shrouded in mystery as a foreign service officer, a kind of highly placed person in the State Department under the really peaking in the Reagan years. But he had been kind of posted all over the world and dropped kind of breadcrumbs of stories about it over the, over the years. But I wanted an excuse to ask him questions.
It turned out he had this huge archive that was untapped. He had taken over 25,000 pages of contemporaneous verbatim notes of every conversation he had been a part of or overheard, and that’s just during his time serving in the Reagan administration alone. And no historian had ever looked at it. A lot of it had been classified seized by the FBI during the Iran-Contra investigation. And it, it evolved from a, a little piddling seminar paper into my senior thesis for my history major. And then a professor mentor found funding to basically support me for a year after graduation to turn it into a book.
The guy I was writing about, he, he cooperated, and I got to know him both you know, as a kind of subject of the professional biography, but I also got to know him personally. I became pretty good friends with his ex-wife. Nothing teaches you that your mentor has feet of clay like getting to know his, his ex-wife and kind of coming around on the other side of that to, to, to really still be full of admiration for him, but see him as a, as a mortal human being who makes mistakes.
Um, but that, that project, which resulted in a book that is two-thirds a kind of conventional diplomatic biography and one-third really memoir written in the first person about my experience as an undergraduate in the wake of 9/11, what kind of young Americans were hungering for at, at that point in culture. It helped me, I think, pull together a lot of the big questions that have motivated me ever since. And it gave me, it gave me a real taste for both archive work as well as doing a lot of oral history and talking to people. And so I’ve tried to kind of combine those two ever since.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Most scholars begin their efforts by focusing on what the guild will ask of them. Historians, you know, for example, then what historians and the historical associations with which they, you know, share in fellowship ask of them. Uh, and then expand their voice, you know, perhaps to then serve wider groups of, of audience members through publications, as I talked about earlier, that you’ve contributed to, like The New Yorker, Slate Christianity Today. You had this project with, you know, Charles Hill that then led to publication.
But in some ways, you sort of seem to have started your career more with, in reverse, where you contributed large numbers of pieces to these more popular periodicals, but then also have learned to hone your voice as a scholar. In what ways do you sort of find the ability to shift, you know, based on audience or outlet that you’re trying to reach?
Molly Worthen: I went to graduate school because I wanted to be a religion journalist, and I felt, I, you know, I had this kind of spotty knowledge. Uh, I knew a lot about Russian Orthodoxy, and I had taken the odd class in other corners of, of religious and history and theology. I knew nothing, though, about American religious history. I couldn’t have told you the difference between a Baptist and a Methodist. But I had this sense I wanted to be able to pitch articles to editors of American publications.
I had this instinct that, I don’t know, there was a certain shallowness to the coverage of especially conservative Christianity. Uh, I, I think the landscape has improved a lot. I, there’s a, there’s a number of working journalists now who I really admire. It was less true in the early 2000s. So I, I strategically chose a dissertation topic, you know, broadly American, conservative American evangelicals, that would be a vehicle for learning about those things. And of course, to, to understand the 20th century and religion in the 20th century, you have to do your homework really all the way back. So it, it became a vehicle for, for doing, you know, proper spade work in, you know, New, New Testament studies and Patristics and medieval history too, which I’m really grateful for.
And, and as you say, I mean, I was freelancing in from graduate school on, constantly looking for connections, where, where, where does my research kind of dovetail with something that seems like it could connect with today’s headlines? Striking out way more often than having success. I mean, just sending a lot of cold emails. Um, but always seeing the two endeavors as, as connected.
And I, I, I suppose I still see them as very connected. I mean, especially as someone who did not grow up in any religious tradition, it, I found it really helpful to be in kind of the discipline of putting my tentative conclusions that I was drawing from my historical research archives and, and my reading into conversation with what I was learning from living, breathing members of or descendants of these communities, kind of bouncing ideas off of people I was interviewing you know, as I was developing my historical knowledge. I found that to be a really useful exercise.
It has also always seemed to me that there’s, there are so many similarities between the work we do in the classroom and public writing. I mean, in, in both cases, you have a very limited amount of time or space, and you’re, you’re trying to reach a smart, you know, fairly curious or at least sort of open audience that probably doesn’t have much background in the subject.
Todd Ream: Depends on the day, whether they got sleep or not.
Molly Worthen: Exactly. Exactly. Same is true of the, you know, the average person opening New York Times in the morning, too. And, and you have to make hard choices, right? I mean, any, any professor putting together a syllabus at the beginning of the semester has faced these dilemmas, right? Like, how do you, how do you reduce something really complex to the limitations of your, you know, 12 or 15-week semester divided up into these, you know, 50 or 75-minute chunks of time? How do you simplify in a way that is helpful, that yields to the demands of the genre, but doesn’t compromise too much, doesn’t, doesn’t leave the reader, you know, with a false impression of, of the reality of the complexity of history and, and theology?
Those challenges are the same, I think. There’s, there’s a kind of seamlessness. Um, I do think, you know, in academia across the humanistic fields, there definitely are some bad habits that we, we are exposed to and kind of inadvertently trained in when it comes to our prose. But I think the same things that make for good journalistic writing, you know, clarity, vivid examples, avoiding jargon, these are, these are generally characteristics of, of good writing in a, you know, a, a history journal or certainly in a book, right?
I mean, I, I, I’m grateful to be in a discipline, history, that I do think lends itself maybe more than some others to writing, you know, for a broader audience. But I see the disciplines as, as very much aligned.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. I want to ask you now about your own story and then the details, some of which you’ve already mentioned. Uh, you grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, so within, speaking of evangelicals, within a stone’s throw, so to say, of Wheaton College. Uh, but then you moved to New Haven, Connecticut where you earned your undergraduate and doctoral degrees. Uh, does the discernment process then, can you expand a little bit upon what allowed you or compelled you then to pursue doctoral work?
Molly Worthen: I was good at school and liked school. And I, I suffered from a real I, I think an impoverished imagination when it comes to appreciating the range of stuff that grownups do.
Todd Ream: I, I’m good at this, so, and I’m enjoy being here, so I’m just going to stay here me.
Molly Worthen: Exactly. That is exactly right. I, I mean, I flirted with a few other things. I remember sending out some queries about maybe becoming a speechwriter in DC. My, my first project had been very much about the, the Washington scene and the State Department and, and politics and so forth. So that, that was a sensible avenue to explore.
But I was really, my first love was, was the, the history of religion, and I wanted to become someone who was qualified to write about religion in our own time. And so I thought I’ll, you know, I’ll, I’ll apply to a couple of graduate programs, and I don’t know what I would’ve done. Of course, we all know, right?
Like, those of us who have been in academia long enough have some exposure to the grim reality of graduate admissions. It is, it is such a crapshoot. I easily, I easily could have not gotten in, and I, I don’t know what I would be, what I would be doing. I, I, I think I was very intimidated by the entry points if I had attempted to go directly into journalism and really work my way up. I think my, my temperament is kind of risk-averse.
And so the idea of, you know, signing up for a PhD where, okay, I don’t know what’s at the other end, but at least I have my life sorted out for six years. Uh, someone is paying me a modest but sufficient amount to read books and, and write about them, and that sounds, that sounds great. So if that counts as discerning one’s vocation, I guess. I guess I was doing that. And then I, you know, I, I became socialized, I think, into really the luxuries of even doing journalistic work from a perch in a university with a great library and a community of really smart, interesting people.
Uh, and, you know, the longer you’re kind of in that space, I, you know, I think the more you want to, as you advance in a, in a, in a PhD program, you want to kinda give it a go yourself. And so I found myself at the other end of it thinking I should at least apply for academic positions. And, and so, you know, I’ve been, I my husband’s a historian as well, so it took us a little while to solve the two-body problem. But we’ve been at, at University of North Carolina for 14 years now.
Todd Ream: I was going to ask you the discernment process that then brought you and brought your husband then to Chapel Hill in part because you, you indicated that there were positions for both of you there, which I think it’s interesting to note you’re, you know, a US religious historian. He’s an international contemporary historian there too, which it’s got to make for some interesting conversations or at least different perspectives on conversations that you have there at home, but yeah.
Molly Worthen: It’s ideal. Yeah, I think we’re, we’re close enough, our fields are close enough that we can read each other’s work, but not so close that the department could not justify hiring both of us.
Todd Ream: Yeah, no, that’s great. Yeah. What brought you then also to Chapel Hill in addition to the, the opportunities? And what opportunities have you found while being there?
Molly Worthen: You know, we one thing you, you kind of sign up for when you embark on a humanities PhD and, and a, and you want a conventional academic career is you kind of give up control over where you live. There are just, there are so few jobs in any given year. Um, so we never planned to move to this part of the country, had no organic connections to it. As you said, I know I’m from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, my husband’s from Toronto, Ontario.
But I have felt really fortunate to have landed here, and it’s an especially rich place to teach and write about American religious history because, you know, it’s a, it’s the flagship public school in a complicated purple state that is in the South and has a, I mean, 82% of our students come from the state of North Carolina, and among them they represent, you know, a huge range of personal perspectives on religion. But the, the nature of North Carolina is such that, you know, even if they personally are staunch atheists, they have probably grown up around religious people, and they, you don’t have to convince them that religion is, is important and relevant to their lives.
It’s very different than teaching in the Northeast, where especially when I taught about conservative Christianity, I often felt as if I was teaching, you know, the history of Martian religion, not that there aren’t, there are plenty of conservative Christians in New Haven, Connecticut, but, but it’s, it’s a more of a subculture in a way that you know, it, it’s, it’s, it’s more embedded here. And I, I’ve really loved you know, being with students at a time in their lives when many of them are sorting out their own relationship to the, the faith tradition they grew up with, or maybe they grew up with none and are meeting people you know, who have different views of the universe, and they’re wrestling through that. And, and so those conversations are really rewarding.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. You’ve graciously shared your story of your conversion to Christianity with a number of audiences. Because it happened after you were already established in your career, but in what ways, if any, has it impacted your service as a public intellectual and your service as a scholar and a teacher?
Molly Worthen: I’ve been a Christian for three and a half years. Uh, was evangelized by a local Southern Baptist pastor I was writing a magazine article about. And he evangelized me, and I, I converted very much as a super cerebral historian through a pretty intense, very kinda academic study of the historical evidence for and against the Christian account of, of the resurrection. Uh, so my, you know, my process was really, my, my conversion to Christianity in that sense was quite integrated with my academic work. Um, and I have found it to be really intellectually exciting.
Uh, and I, I, I think on reflection, becoming a Christian has not drastically changed my approach to the historical method or how I teach. And I think that’s partly because in retrospect, I see that to some degree I was always borrowing Christian assumptions. I mean, I think, I think my whole anthropology, my, my theory of what humans are like and why they deserve our interest, why they have dignity, it doesn’t really have any foundations outside of a, at least a theistic framework, if not an expressly Christian one.
And in my teaching from the beginning, I’ve always been attentive to the places in which there is tension between the accounts offered by more secular-minded scholars focused on material, economic political factors and the understanding of Christian historical subjects. So I’ve always thought it was important and interesting to draw my students’ attention to the way in which, you know, the, the explanations that modern professional historians offer for the First Great Awakening might you know, are, are different, but I think complementary to the understanding of Christians there who narrated it as work of the Holy Spirit.
Um, and I’ve always wanted, I’ve always been committed to making the case to students, you know, many of whom are, are Christian of some variety, that you don’t have to choose one or the other. Uh, you don’t have to, you know, turn off your faith in order to do this historical project. But becoming a Christian has certainly, it’s attuned me to questions that I, I wasn’t really paying attention to before.
As much as I, throughout my career, up until that point, I really thought of myself as, as a very open-minded seeker. My intellectual hero was and, and remains, he’s still one of my heroes the pragmatist philosopher William James, whose whole epistemology is premised on a certain openness, a, a commitment to holding your presuppositions in a light grip and, and being willing to revise your working theory of the universe when you get new evidence. And I, I always thought that that described me. As I really got into investigating Christianity, I, I realized I, I had not been, been as open as I I fancied myself, and I had functionally occupied a closed universe in which I, I wasn’t really willing to entertain the possibility of supernatural intervention.
But once you conclude that the preponderance of historical evidence supports the resurrection of Jesus, if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief in the supernatural, and I, I, I had to confront the fact that I just didn’t have the warrant for my commitment to a closed universe that I, I thought that I had, once you’re willing to allow that, you know, ev- everything’s possible, and you have to, you have to start you have to take off the blinkers.
So my next kind of research project following my conversion was a pretty intense investigation of contemporaneous claims of miraculous healing. I got really interested in reading the literature on this, you know, learning especially from scholars like the New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, Craig Keener, who’s written some really great books on kinda compendia of miracle testimonies, both in our own time and New Testament times.
Also doing a, a number of interviews with a, a range of people, but, but mostly Christians who are in academia in some way, but also have had experiences that have really attuned them to the supernatural in a way that is countercultural, shall we say in, in the kinda mainstream of, of Western academia. And that’s a project, so I ended up writing a, a newspaper article on this question of, of is it, is it a worthwhile endeavor to attempt to scientifically prove claims of miraculous healings? And that, that’s a project that it never would’ve occurred to me to take that on or ask those questions prior to my conversion.
So, you know, that’s maybe an example of, of how I’m, I’m just slowly, I’m, I’m grappling with this huge epistemological shift. I mean, it’s not, it’s not a one-and-done thing. Like, it’s very, it’s very hard to get out of the epistemological grooves you’ve operated in for your whole adult life. And, and I’m, that I’m really still very much at the beginning of that process.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to talk more about your second and third book. We’ve already talked about your first book, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost, the book about Charles Hill. But then you have two other books Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Reason in American Evangelicalism, which Oxford University Press published in 2013, and then also Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, which Forum Books published in 2025.
If you would start by just sharing what it was that drew you to those particular topics then, and what you learned by working your way through them?
Molly Worthen: In the case of Apostles of Reason, that, that book grew out of my dissertation. I sought to construct a dissertation project that would give me a pretty well-rounded vehicle for learning about conservative Protestantism in America. Um, and I, I had become intrigued by a pattern in the historiography. Uh, many of the kind of the, the major books on conservative majority white post-war American Protestantism really foregrounded thinkers and traditions that we would, we broadly classify as being in the Reformed theological tradition.
And I was, I was just curious about this and wondered about whether, whether it really represented the, what I was already coming to sense was a pretty messy diversity of theological streams that feed into American evangelicalism. So I thought, what if I just kinda come up with a, an, a plan for archive digging that will give me the chance to take core samples from a, a range of traditions from kinda Pentecostal to Churches of Christ to Southern Baptist, some of these more kind of ecumenical higher educational institutions, Bible colleges, places like Wheaton College. You know, it was, it was a, it was, it depended to some extent on where I could get access, but that was my basic idea.
And I thought, I’m going to, I’m going to challenge and, and revise the, the great kind of fathers of, of modern American evangelical history, you know historians like Mark Noll and Joel Carpenter and people like this. And I ended up writing a book that in, in many ways tells the story of why it is the case that the Reformed evangelicals who are proportionately speaking you know, a fairly small fraction of American evangelicalism, why they have indeed come to kind of punch above their weight and have this, have this disproportionate influence, I think has been true since, since Puritan times. Um, and it, it ends up being a book really about kind of the, the intellectual fights and debates within evangelicalism, the, the intellectual backstory that yields the, the, the public-facing Christian right that we come to associate with the ’70s and, and ’80s.
But broadly, I was interested in questions of intellectual authority. Why, you know, and what is it about evangelicalism that is sort of uniquely modern and Western? And I do think that, you know, evangelical Protestantism grew up, grew up in constant conversation and tension with I mean, with the Enlightenment with the Pietist revivals and the evolving, increasingly pluralistic reality of the, the secular West in a way that is special to evangelicalism. Um, but I, I think that, that interest in, you know, why, why do people uh, accede to certain sources of authority when there’s no immediate source of duress? Why do they listen to the people they listen to? Why do they adopt certain theories of the universe? This is, this is what’s interesting to me.
So the third book is a history of the idea of charisma as both a religious concept, so charisma in the New Testament sense of, you know, the history of revivals and tongues and trance speaking, and all the, all the ways in which American Christians have looked for the intrusion of divine power into their lives, and how that’s intertwined with the history of charisma in the political sense that we’ve kind of inherited from the sociologist Max Weber, the sense of authority that does not reside in tradition or institutional position or the possession of a military force, but has some kind of ineffable residence in the leader as a person, and is this, is this relationship between a leader and followers that is usually quite baffling to people outside it.
And that ended up being a book that is partly about what happens to the religious impulse as a society becomes more secular, as the authority and, and affiliation with traditional institutions of organized religion declines. My operating assumption, I think my whole career certainly predating my conversion, has always been that humans are in a fundamental sense, religious creatures. We have this impulse to connect ourselves with a transcendent story, a transcendent source of meaning. And just because we no longer go to church as often as we once did on Sundays, it doesn’t mean that that impulse has evaporated. That impulse has simply moved. So the question is, where has it gone? And my, my working hypothesis going into that third book was maybe one interesting place to explore is in that relationship between leaders and followers.
Todd Ream: Thank you. If we add back in your first book into the equation your book on Charles Hill, when you look at those three books that you’ve done so far to date in your career, which one have you found most vocationally satisfying?
Molly Worthen: Oh, man. I mean, they played such different roles. I almost think, I don’t have, like, a big enough sample of books I’ve written to because, you know, one, one was really my first sort of finding my voice as a writer, learning what it is to be a historian. The dissertation, you know, anyone who’s been through a PhD knows a dissertation is a particular job. Um, the thing that was most satisfying about “Apostles of Reason” was the feedback I got from a lot of people who grew up in evangelical traditions, saying that they really saw themselves and their own formation in the story I was telling. And that was, that was so gratifying, especially because I did not grow up in it to hear that I had at least captured something.
Um, but, you know, as I, as I formed the ideas for my approach to my third book, I hit on what I, what I think is kind of my, is going to be my approach to pretty much any big book project going forward, which is the only part of a book project that you, the author, can control is what you learn in the course of researching and writing the book. You can’t control how it’s received. I don’t even think you can really control if it’s any good. Like, there, there’s this way in which a book sort of takes on a life of its own, and it, it kinda, once it’s underway, it, it becomes the book it wants to become, and you, you don’t actually, it sounds absurd if you haven’t written one yourself, but I think other authors can relate to this. There’s only so much you can do to sort of shape a project. It gains its own momentum, and then you kind of throw up your hands at a certain point.
You can’t control, I mean, especially as a historian, it takes us forever to write books. So you might conceive of a project at one point in the zeitgeist, and then by the time it comes out, it may or may not land, right? But you can control the, how the book functions as a syllabus for you as a student, right? And we’re all kind of continually students.
So, you know, to, to that extent, I, I found Spellbound, you know, really satisfying, just as a, a vehicle through which I learned a whole lot about corners of American political and religious history that I just didn’t know before. And, and I, I have found that way of thinking of book projects to be kind of liberating because it’s, helped me counteract that tendency we all have to focus on, you know, the peanuts that we get, right. The, like, little hits of recognition and acknowledgement that humans thrive on, but which become so addictive in a, in a very damaging way.
Todd Ream: Yeah. So if writing a book is somewhat akin to, and I’m going to create a, an image here, so push back if you don’t fully agree with it. It’s sort of akin to, I think I’m getting on a horse, and I’m going to ride it down a trail, but it turns out I’ve actually gotten onto a bull and I’m being entered into a ring here. But I have a syllabus that I that I have developed.
What advice then, thinking about the projects you’ve pursued so far to date, would you offer other historians or other authors?
Molly Worthen: It is so hard to, I mean, to, to come up with an original thought, right. Like just in general, the there, especially in our current moment when I mean, on the one hand, I, I love how we can access, you know, so many publications with the click of a mouse. I love walking into a big bookstore. But I also find the experience depressing because it, it overwhelms me with the reality of how much quite good intellectual production is out there in the world and, you know, more and more every minute. And here I’m slaving away on my, like, little brick that I’m adding to the wall, right. Like, why am I doing any of this?
So the question, the, the burden of, of, of how can I just have an original thought is one that looms large. And I think you maximize your chances of that, having an original thought, by deciding that there will be some, at least one if not more, areas of investigation that you will pursue that are perhaps a little bit off the beaten track for your cohort, if you’re in a, a PhD program or, or your, you know, your subfield in academia. Uh, something that you are a, a quasi-expert in that your colleagues might find maybe slightly eccentric. They, they certainly don’t all have an interest in it. But I think it is through bringing together areas of reading and research that are not typically brought into conversation that we stand the best chance of really making an original contribution.
Uh, for, for, in my case, I mean, it wasn’t, it wasn’t particularly strategic, but I was really interested in ancient history and medieval history and had a real, a strong sense of my own ignorance as someone who just knew, knew almost nothing about, about Christianity. So I did more homework, you could say, in the earlier history than is perhaps typical for someone who’s focused on American religious history.
And by the end of my PhD, that did leave me with some big gaps because I hadn’t done the spadework in, you know, the ins and outs of the New Deal and, you know, the Civil War. And, and I, I was just, I was kinda hazy on some basics I had to play catch up on later. But I had done this work on the kind of longue durée of the history of the Christian West that helped me put certain patterns into context in a, in a maybe a fresh way. And, and I belatedly learned that, you know, that, that actually made me a historian of ideas, that I was interested instinctively in these kind of long range patterns and intellectual genealogies.
So, you know, I think early on you, you need to pay attention to, you know, where you have interests that maybe zigzag away from what everyone else is doing and, and learn to see that maybe some of those are worth pursuing and, and may actually produce really original insights.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to go back to one of the threads in our conversation at the beginning, and unfortunately our time is beginning to come short here.
But as a historian, a journalist, a teacher, and a public intellectual, how do you define the academic vocation? What are the commitments that sort of prove most central to it? Um, and what opportunities have you sought to embrace that will continue to nurture it in that regard?
Molly Worthen: The point of the academic life is the pursuit of truth. I have been interested in the way in which some of my colleagues in, in secular academia are actually a little bit jarred by that word truth and would really prefer the word knowledge. So they prefer a narrative of what we’re doing that shies away from the notion that we are aiming at universal absolutes in any sense. And, and rather, can we present a more humble version of our endeavor, which is to offer a kind of continually revised, you know, revelation of new, of new you know, evidence that, that accumulates and can yield knowledge, but is always subject to revision.
And I, I take their point. I take, I take the, the value of that humility seriously, but at the same time, part of the current crisis of higher education is the abdication, I think, on the part of secular universities from their traditional, at least in the, in the history of American higher ed, their, their traditional commitment to forming students as a whole person and uh, tuning students to a, you know, a broad and ancient conversation about ultimate values.
And that to me goes, goes hand-in-hand with, with the more modern sort of German research university style, guild-governed, discipline-specific knowledge building that we’re also committed to. Uh, and what’s so simultaneously frustrating but also exciting about, I think, our current moment in higher ed is this crisis has really kind of come to a head. And I’m, I’m having more kind of open, explicit conversations with colleagues and with students about it than I can ever remember having before.
I mean, the, the American university is, you know, has, has evolved into this kind of weird hybrid of the classic you know, Christian-founded, early 19th century American teaching college, you know, usually founded by a Protestant denomination or, or church organization of some kind, very much focused on forming students’ character, passing down received wisdom. The teaching staff was generally, you know, amateurs, young men who were killing time before going on to pursue their own career in law or medicine or the cloth, what have you.
Uh, a combination of that model with the German research university model that, you know, began to really reach its peak in you know, the middle of the 19th century in Germany and was first imported here in the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876, which really prioritizes the discovery of new knowledge and research rather than teaching and you know, sees its ultimate authority, not any, you know, religious or philosophical body, but rather the, the professional guild of experts who recognize one another’s expertise. And there’s always been tension between the two. The incentive structures are not totally aligned.
Um, and then I think as, as the is the cause of, of some of what’s really generative and exciting about American higher ed, but also what has gotten so out of whack. So I, I think we’re at a time now where we’re really trying to figure that out and, and there are a number of kind of different experiments going on in different corners of higher ed to try to do this better. But I, I do think, you know, returning to that word truth and thinking about how it’s different from the pursuit of simply knowledge is an important part of understanding the academic vocation.
Todd Ream: In that pursuit of truth then have you found that any particular intellectual and/or moral virtues are more important perhaps than others to cultivate? Or are there perhaps even any theological virtues that are important to pray to receive in terms of fulfilling that vocation?
Molly Worthen: Boy, I guess I, I mean, I see the virtues as muscle groups and, you know, focusing on one to the neglect of the others is, you know, usually a mistake. Uh, I mean, what I, what I appreciate so much about, about my own students is the, the way they are kind of unselfconsciously curious. And I mean, I think that’s something that is harder and harder to recapture as you, as you advance in your career, whatever it might be but is so important.
I mean, as a Christian, I don’t think this is, don’t know if I would label this a virtue, but I think it is so important to remain consistently aware of how weird Christianity is. Like, there’s this way in which, especially in our culture even if, even if you’re a secular person, right, you probably think you know all about Christianity and, you know, what, what, what, what could anyone tell you that would surprise you?
But whether you’re secular or you’ve grown up in the Church, there’s a way in which Christianity’s gotten kind of domesticated. It becomes sort of the wallpaper of our culture. But every piece of it is just bananas. I mean, even forget, forget like the Jesus stuff, but even just start with, you know, a personal God who created the universe, but also numbers the hairs on your head and, like, cares what you had for breakfast this morning. I mean, it’s, it’s scandalous. It’s outrageous.
And I do think there’s this way in which one has to make a continual effort to remember to just sort of grapple with this, to not let it become overly familiar and not, not let, you know, the, the reality of what Christians believe about God’s grace to become just, you know, part, part of how the universe works, but to be continually in awe of it. And that, that does take work because it, it’s so exhausting to even think about, and it’s in the nature of God, right, that we cannot wrap our heads around Him. Um, we can only just sort of claw a little bit up the rock face and then slide back down. But there is a way in which you have to commit to continuing to make that effort and be kind of perpetually wide-eyed.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I can’t help but ask though too as we pursue truth then in the academic vocation, are any, are there any vices against you would caution us to be mindful and to be vigilant about detecting their presence?
Molly Worthen: Well, gosh, I mean, I think the social scientists have, with every study they’ve done on, you know, motivated reasoning they have simply confirmed what the theologians have known for millennia, which is that we have an unbelievable capacity to tune out evidence that does not confirm our presuppositions and our prejudices. And that doesn’t, I mean, that is sort of universally true. Like, it, it doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not or where you are on the political spectrum. I think at particular moments in history, it is more of a problem in some subcultures than others, but it is this kind of universal feature of, of humans. Uh, so I mean, I, I think that also is this important discipline of, of kind of calling ourselves to account.
And there’s a way in which humans, we naturally self-segregate, right. You know, you find your people. Uh, we don’t like friction and tension, most of us. Um, and so we tend to surround ourselves with people, you know, whether it’s your community at church or, you know, the people that you talk to in your academic department or the newspapers you read. We, we prefer those that essentially align with us. And I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but it’s something to be aware of and to, you know, prick every so often with a, a dose of something from the outside.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today I want to ask you, in what ways do you believe historians then moving forward, especially historians for those who are Christian, can be of greater service to the Church? But then also, in what ways can the Church be of greater service to historians?
Molly Worthen: I think that Americans generally, and, and maybe this is especially true of, of evangelical Protestants, of, of which I am one we tend to not be, we tend to both simultaneously sort of fetishize a tidy kind of convenient and propagandistic version of history without really having a high degree of awareness of ourselves as historical subjects. Um, and I, you know, I think there is this false notion that to, to study history seriously leads inevitably into a kind of cultural relativism in which everything is a product of its historical moment and there’s no truth. And, and that is totally at odds with, you know, the foundational fact of Christianity, which is that it is a story of God entering history at a specific moment in, in time.
Um, so, you know, I, I think I guess, I guess I think that the, the Church can help historians remain continually aware of the stakes of history in this sense, and the way in which, you know, Christianity is not, it’s not just like every other world religion. I mean, it’s a, it’s a specific, it’s unique in its reckoning with the human incapacity to save ourselves, but it’s also unique in that it is a story about history. Uh, and in some ways, it’s like the most exciting religion if you’re, if you’re a historian. I mean, this is, this has been the view that I’ve come to.
You know, historians, for their part, I think they need to be aware of some of the trends in their own subfields and, and the ways in which being, being a useful historian for the Church does require stepping up and above what, what happens to be in vogue and fashionable. I mean, right now it is very fashionable to study and define conservative Protestants especially, in terms of what they consume, in terms of kind of the, you know, capitalism and how they fit into capitalism and what they buy at Walmart and so forth.
And all that’s interesting and important, but, you know, fashions in academia, you know, they’re like fashions in, you know, in New York boutiques, right. Like, they swing far in one direction and, and leave behind a lot of great stuff in other directions. So I think pondering one’s vocation as a, as a historian who operates in the classroom but is also trying to be of service to the Church should result in a kind of doubly strong call to be cognizant of and somewhat immune to the, the fashions of our disciplines and see that there’s kind of wisdom from all these different types of approaches to the human predicament.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Molly Worthen, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Molly Worthen: Thanks, this has been fun.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
