Can Anything Good Come from a Southern Baptist Megachurch?

On Molly Worthen’s evangelical conversion

If one reads scholars who study evangelicalism, pundits who pontificate about evangelicalism on social media, or Christian writers who engage in certain forms of progressive activism, a picture emerges of an evangelical movement defined by racism, patriarchy, and Christian nationalism. Evangelicalism, they argue, is not primarily a spiritual or theological movement rooted in conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and evangelism—the so-called “Bebbington Quadrilateral.” Rather, it is a movement responsible for national fracture, complicit with injustice, focused on the subjugation of others, and engaged in this or that form of extremism.

Don’t get me wrong: Evangelicalism has a bad track record on all of these issues. I’ve written about the movement’s failures extensively, as an insider, throughout my career. But most writing on evangelicals today, the stuff published by academics and so-called progressive Christian “thought leaders,” is woefully flat. It lacks complexity and nuance. And it cannot make sense of what just happened to Molly Worthen. 

In case you missed it, Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, a New York Times writer, and one of the country’s leading American religious historians, recently converted to evangelical Christianity. She is a tenured professor at one of the top public research universities in the country, a scholar of American evangelicalism, and one of our best public intellectuals. These kinds of conversions don’t happen very often, especially among professors who study the humanities. To embrace the claims of the Gospel in this context requires courage, humility, and conviction. Molly Worthen appears to possess all of these virtues.

But what is even more striking about Worthen’s conversion is that it happened in a complementarian, largely white megachurch pastored by J.D. Greear, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Humanists are hard to find in such churches. Even at the Christian college where I teach most of my friends in the humanities find a home in Catholic, mainline Protestant, or left-leaning Anabaptist congregations. Yet Worthen, through the prompting of the Holy Spirit, went all in. She even donned a black “Jesus in My Place” t-shirt (church-issued) and was baptized by Greear in a Southern Baptist jacuzzi. 

And then Worthen turned to a Gospel Coalition podcast to share her testimony. This is the same Gospel Coalition, founded by New Testament scholar D.A. Carson and New York City pastor Timothy Keller (another of Worthen’s mentors), that advances a Reformed view of the world, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and a complementarian view of men and women. 

My favorite line in Worthen’s podcast testimonial is when she imagines how God orchestrated His will for her life: “My short summary of this whole business is that God read Apostles of Reason [her book on American evangelicalism], and He was like, ‘I see how this has to go down. And I know exactly the way this girl has to be humbled to cut her down to size a little bit and I have exactly the guy for the job,’ [and] the Holy Spirit gave J.D.[Greear] my file.” She adds, “I could not have become a Christian in any other context [than in Greear’s Summit Church].”

There were times when Worthen’s testimony took my breath away and moved me to tears. She struggled with the claims of the Gospel, she immersed herself in the arguments of apologists (especially Oxford University’s N.T. Wright, a scholar whose work has more than once buoyed my faith in times of doubt), eventually embraced the Easter story, and then realized that a belief in the resurrection required her to “change my working hypothesis of the universe.” 

There are numerous times in this interview when she expresses longings for Christian fellowship and a desire to know God more deeply. Heck, she is even reading the Puritans in a devotional way! This is the transforming power of evangelical Christianity. I experienced it as a teenager and it changed the trajectory of my life. I am rejoicing that Molly Worthen is experiencing something similar.

So far the Christian scholars and social media pundits who criticize evangelicalism have said very little, if anything, about Molly Worthen’s conversion. That might be because virtually nothing about “What happened to historian Molly Worthen” fits very well in the prevailing narrative that paints evangelicals as racists, patriarchs, and Christian nationalists. I am sure some of these folks are baffled by the circumstances surrounding her conversion. But yes, good things—transcendent things, holy things—can happen in a white Southern Baptist megachurch led by a complementarian pastor. And yes, sometimes a University of North Carolina history professor can be “impressed by the open-mindedness” and “humanity” of conservative evangelical Christians.

I am sure there are many who will try to co-opt Worthen’s conversion for their culture war battles or in defense of a particular version of evangelicalism. But Worthen will eventually draw her own conclusions about how her newfound faith applies to the social issues facing American culture and the church. I am sure she will disappoint some and please others as she sorts these things out and writes about them. But for now her testimony reminds us that God works in ways that do not fit our human-made narratives. 

In 2014, Worthen interviewed N.T Wright at a Veritas Forum event at the University of North Carolina. She asked Wright about his experience as a Christian student at the intellectually diverse Oxford University. As part of his response Wright talked about presenting the claims of the Gospel to his non-Christian friends: “I think the real question for many people was . . . the existential [question]: ‘What could [accepting the Gospel] mean for me?’ Some people genuinely wanted to know, and others [were] genuinely worried that if Christianity did turn out to be true then this would mean quite a revolution in their life, for which they just weren’t ready.”

Molly Worthen is ready.

John Fea is Executive Editor of Current