Why I'm still a Christian

Ask a Reformed girl, get a Reformed answer

A couple months back, Holy Post asked me if I’d be willing to participate in a little series they had planned, “Why I’m Still a Christian.” I love Holy Post, but this ask gave me pause, for several reasons.

Although I’m very open about talking about my personal faith in face-to-face settings when asked, and although I’ll talk about all sorts of topics related to my faith with great candor with students, friends, and fellow Christians, it’s not usually something I lead with. And by “usually,” I mean never.

The whole reason I’m any sort of public figure is because of my historical scholarship. I continue to insist that while my personal convictions may be interesting to readers, my scholarship stands regardless of one’s agreement or disagreement with my faith.

That said, I study evangelicals, so it didn’t surprise me when I started getting questions about my faith after the book came out. When this series was announced a couple weeks ago, one commenter posted something to the effect of: “When I heard about the book, I just assumed the author wasn’t a Christian.” She later read it and saw otherwise, but there’s a lot to unpack here. First, there’s the possible conflation of “white evangelical” and “Christian.” Many white evangelicals have grown up conflating their particular cultural and religious values with timeless, essential Christianity. My book contests these assumptions, but it makes sense that some may mistakenly conclude that any book critical of aspects of white evangelicalism must be anti-Christian. There’s also the (not unrelated) fact that evangelicals have largely succeeded in controlling their own narratives. A little critique around the edges is ok, but there are limits to what is deemed acceptable. More substantive critiques are (more commonly) ignored or (on occasion) denounced as biased, as not demonstrating sufficient understanding of religion, or the like.

Most careful readers were perceptive enough to understand that a book like Jesus and John Wayne could be written by a Christian. But here, too, I’ve seen many evangelicals try to defend the integrity of my scholarship by pointing to my Christian faith. “Hey guys, we can trust her…she is a Christian. She has to be, she teaches at Calvin University!” Truth be told, I cringed a bit when I read these kind-hearted and well-intentioned defenses. I happen to think Christians should be open to engaging careful scholarship even when (maybe even especially when) it is written by people outside the fold. I’m the first to acknowledge that no historian is perfectly neutral or objective, and I don't know any historian who would pretend otherwise. But we also have rules of evidence and argument. We routinely read works and find value in studies that are written by people who hold very different views from our own. In fact, we often have no idea about fellow scholars’ faith commitments. (Fun fact: Just after Jesus and John Wayne released, I saw a conservative evangelical denouncing the book as worthless because I had an endorsement by a “pro-lgbtq scholar.” I had no idea who they were talking about. I’d never queried potential endorsers on their views on lgbtq rights, but looking over the list, I surmised that every single one of them likely fit the bill. It turns out they were talking about Kathryn Lofton, a brilliant dean at Yale and one of the leading scholars of religion and culture. It was a harbinger of what was to come.)

As a Reformed Christian scholar, I do talk about faith in my classroom, my own faith, my students’ faith, and, on occasion, the faith of historians we’re discussing. But the purpose is never to accept or dismiss a scholar’s work based on whether they pass or fail a religion test. Rather, it’s to explore how a person’s faith might have shaped their scholarship. How might Laurel Ulrich’s Mormonism be reflected in the topics she chooses to write about, and in the methods she employs? How might the fact that this author became a voudou priestess herself while writing on voudou shape the way she wrote the book? Is there a Christian way to do history? Or many Christian ways? What can we learn from discussions of Christian historiography in the Reformed tradition, and outside that tradition? We don’t limit our discussions of commitments and identities to religion. Why does Mike Davis identify himself as a Teamster in the intro to his book? How does that shape the way you read the book, and why did he really want you to know this? The idea of dismissing a scholar’s work because we don’t share certain preconceptions is utterly foreign to historians’ methods. We have other, far more productive ways of critically engaging scholarship.

Now, three years out from my book’s publication, I know what I’m getting myself into. I have no doubt that anything I say on the topic of my faith can and will be used against me. This interview will be clipped and spliced and carried into toxic spaces and used to bolster claims that I am a wolf, a false teacher, a child of the devil, or other such things.

So why did I agree to do this?

A couple reasons. First off, I try not to make decisions based on what critics will say. I’m not working for them. This just came up in conversation around my next book, in fact. A couple weeks back, I was drafting an early version of the introduction and mentioned to my husband that there is a lot more of my personal story in it. (The book, after all, is a cultural history of white Christian womanhood.) “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “You know it will be used against you, especially as a woman, and critics will write off the whole book as biased by a personal agenda, or emotions, or harm…” I have no idea if the material will make it into a final version, but if it doesn’t, it won’t be because of potential critics. Although I’m aware of them, I’m not writing for them. If it helps the book do what it’s meant to do, it will be in there.

The main reason I agreed to do this interview, however, is because I get what Holy Post is trying to do, and I support that effort. I know that millions of Christians are experiencing some form of “deconstruction.” Some are leaving their faith entirely, many are stripping away aspects to reveal what they hope is a more solid foundation. As I’ve said before (and I think I say in this interview), I am glad that the book can be of use to those “deconstructing” in various ways, but I don’t personally identify with the term. I’m not deconstructing my faith. I’m living into the faith I’ve inherited. Not in static ways, but also not in ways that have required a wholescale or even substantial deconstruction.

This interview is for Christians who are struggling to hold onto their faith, for those raised evangelical who absorbed the idea that there was only one way to be a Christian and that was the white evangelical youth group/praise team sort of way, or for anyone curious about how a scholar can also be a Christian.

As you can tell from the interview, opening up in this way doesn’t come naturally to me. As a Reformed Christian who grew up in a Dutch immigrant community, the whole evangelical testimony thing isn’t really our thing. We’re a bit more taciturn. It’s also frankly a bit bewildering to find myself, as a scholar, in this public role. You know, with Lacrae. But here we are.

In the end, I think that the answer to “Why I’m still a Christian” comes down to the fact that, as a Reformed Christian, I have a deep sense that my faith doesn’t ultimately come down to me. If it doesn’t come down to me, it also doesn’t come down to the occasionally appalling behavior of fellow Christians. This conviction does not mean we can’t or shouldn’t ask why Christians behave in appalling ways, and what there might be about our teachings, communities, practices, and traditions that make such behavior possible. I spend a lot of my time on those subjects, but this interview is something different.