Believe it or not, there are intelligent, modern-day, 21st century people who are moving from atheism to believing that Jesus really is the son of God who rose again. With Easter upon us, this seems a good time to tell the story of one such person, who I recently featured in conversation on EP 15 of The Surprising Rebirth Of Belief In God. 

Molly Worthen is a journalist and associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For over a decade she has pursued a career researching the religious and intellectual history of North America. As well as authoring books she’s been a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic.

But Molly’s story recently took an interesting turn.

After growing up in a non-religious household Molly had been an agnostic for most of her life… until she was baptised in 2022. Having researched the good, the bad and the ugly of Christian history, Molly Worthen isn’t the first person you might expect to embrace faith. So what happened?

Discovering The Evidence

Molly explained that she had always felt a certain attraction towards aspects of Christianity especially some Eastern Orthodox and high church traditions she had encountered, but she had never managed to get much beyond a ‘wouldn't it be nice if it were true’ way of looking at it. She just found it too difficult to swallow all the supernatural claims she read in the Bible.

Things changed however when she was sent on assignment to interview J.D. Greear pastor of The Summit, one of America’s largest churches. After hearing some of Molly’s story, Greear challenged her to get off the agnostic fence and actually look into the evidence for Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Molly says: “JD helped me see was that Christianity is a bit unique. And really, it stands or falls on this single claim about this thing that Christians say happened in history. And that is that the tomb was empty, and that Jesus rose from the dead.

I'm a historian of Christianity, but to my embarrassment I had somehow just absorbed the Mid-20th-Century-Jesus-Seminar sort of New Testament criticism view that it’s all a bit fuzzy - like a game of ‘Telephone’. Who knows what really happened? But I’d never done my homework.”

Greear gave her some homework. He was able to connect Molly on email with some influential Christian scholars and thinkers, including New Testament historian NT Wright and New York pastor Tim Keller. Molly devoured their books as well as the scholarship of other leading historians of early Christianity such as Richard Bauckham, author of ‘Jesus And The Eyewitnesses’.

“It turns out that there is a lot more interesting, provocative and compelling historical evidence around that set of events than I had realised.”

A change of mind

As Molly was was exposed to the evidence for the reliability of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and death, and to the historical evidence for the claim that Jesus has really risen from the dead, she began to shift her thinking.

“What was really preventing me from engaging with this evidence is my own commitment to materialism and my own deep epistemological groove. But if I’m willing to suspend that, what happens?... You can walk right up to it and get to the point where you’re still faced with a leap of faith, but it’s no longer a ten-mile leap into the dark, it’s a leap based on a pretty reasonable body of evidence. And it turns out that to reject that leap is itself an act of faith.”

By the summer of 2022, Molly found herself teetering on the edge of belief. But, while she longed to have some sort of spiritual confirmation of where the evidence was leading her, she was also not the kind of person who would simply be swayed by an emotional experience.

Again, JD Greear helped:

“He said to me ‘Molly, God will not honour any conversion unless you are you are totally investigating this intellectually, you cannot turn your brain off.’ I really needed to hear that! I didn’t want to convert for a bribe. I’m only interested in the bribe if it’s attached to something true! I needed the whole process to be rigorous. I do think that God made this path for me that was very idiosyncratic but was exactly what I needed.”

Stepping into a relationship

By the end of that summer Molly found that, even without having any thunderous spiritual experience, she was in a position to make a commitment.

“I was talking with Christian friends and they said ‘Faith is a relationship with God. It’s like becoming friends with somebody.’ There’s a certain amount of intelligence you can gather about a person through investigation before you meet them. But at a certain point you can’t know what they’re like as a friend until you make yourself vulnerable and trust them and you take the step of entering into that relationship. Maybe to get the ‘feeling’ part that I was so hungry for - this ‘relationship with Jesus’ that evangelicals talk about - I had to actually take that step.”

It wasn’t that Molly had no more doubts. But she was able to see her doubts in the context of what she had become convinced was true.

“I took a lot of comfort in what Paul says in Romans 10:9 ‘If you believe with your heart that Jesus died for our sins and confess with your mouth that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.’ That’s at the core. And I could agree to struggle with all the other pieces and all the other doubts, but that is the core… and so I found myself confessing that.”

Molly Worthen was surprised… not only to discover that there was a historically credible basis to the story of Jesus in the Bible, but also to find that despite her suspicions of US evangelicalism, she found her spiritual home in a North Carolina megachurch where in August 2022 she was baptised by JD Greear.

I believe we are seeing a generation beginning to ask the same kinds of questions that had troubled Molly: Can secular culture deliver on its promises? Those myths about God and Jesus that seem to have shaped us so much…  wouldn't it be nice if they were really true? To her own amazement, Molly found it was true, as her questions and longings were met by a real life person from history who stepped out of the pages of scripture and into her world. 

And I’m led to think.. If it can happen to Molly Worthen maybe it can happen to anyone. 

Listen to Molly Worthen’s story in Episode 15 of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

Ep16 - An Oxford classicist discovers the resurrected Jesus - Get early access

Our next episode looks into the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and features Dr James Orr (a contemporary of mine as an undergraduate at Oxford University). James has an amazing story of how he come to faith that overlaps with Molly Worthen at various points.

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