He walked away from his evangelical roots to escape feeling suffocated

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

NPR's Rachel Martin is back with us now, and that's because it is time for another conversation in our special series on how to build a life of meaning. It's called Enlighten Me.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: How's it feel to have this out in the world?

JON WARD: It's a little scary.

MARTIN: This is Jon Ward. He's a senior correspondent for Yahoo News, and he's the author of a memoir called "Testimony: Inside The Evangelical Movement That Failed A Generation," which explains why he was feeling nervous because Jon isn't some outsider writing a book about the failures of evangelical Christianity. This was his whole world. This was his family, his church, his community, his music...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD")

CHRIS TOMLIN: (Singing) Name above...

MARTIN: ...His whole identity. And he broke away.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD")

TOMLIN: (Singing) You are worthy.

WARD: I felt a sense of suffocation from being in an environment where everyone thought the same thing and sang to the same chord structure.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

TOMLIN: (Singing) My heart will say, how great is our God.

MARTIN: I wanted to understand what that choice to step away looked like and the consequences of living with it. Jon was born to spiritual seekers. His dad had been a Catholic, his mom a disenchanted Presbyterian.

WARD: They were both caught up in something called the Jesus movement, or the Jesus revolution, where a lot of people were looking for something fresh and new in religion. And I think they were also disenchanted with the way the country had gone during the late '60s. And so this religion, this Christianity, was very informal - a lot of hippie culture involved. And they began holding Bible studies in the D.C. area that became very popular. The style was kind of a rock 'n' roll worship service with a full band, drums, electric guitar and all that, and then some dynamic preaching. And my dad was one of the leaders of this group that was meeting. His high school best friend, C.J. Mahaney, was one of the top guys - one of the top leaders. And so that's the world that I was born into in '77. And I was the first infant dedicated at the church that they started on their own.

MARTIN: Wow.

WARD: Yeah.

MARTIN: Dedicated, like baptized.

WARD: I don't know.

MARTIN: No?

WARD: They might have sprinkled some water on our heads. I'm not - it was pretty informal, you know? It was like, we're just going to have the parents up on stage and pray over the child, essentially. Yeah.

MARTIN: You write that the worst thing you could be called by an adult member of your church community was lukewarm. Can you explain that?

WARD: This is such an important topic. They would quote a passage of scripture which talks about God literally spitting you out of his mouth if you are lukewarm. And it was often used, especially in youth group culture, to essentially communicate to us that we needed to be all in and on fire for God.

MARTIN: And there was a real priority given to the emotional experience, right?

WARD: Yeah.

MARTIN: You personally felt that you had to get caught up in the emotional fervor of the church to not be viewed as, quote, "lukewarm," but it started to feel false to you. Can you tell me about the time that the minister of your church placed hands on you and explain what that means?

WARD: Sure. I mean, the emotional aspect of it - we conceived of authentic faith as having very strong emotions for God. The moment you refer to took place in the mid-'90s. And our church, like a lot of churches in the country at that time, was having services where they would invite people up to the front, and people would be prayed for. And then people would fall down, all under the auspices of a move of the Holy Spirit. And I went up to be prayed for late high school, early college. My parents, I believe, were with me. And the same pastor who my dad was friends with in high school, C.J. Mahaney, came up and prayed for me. And at a certain point I just felt like, this has been going on for a while, and I don't feel anything outside of my body.

MARTIN: Like, as he's putting his hand on you, you're like, I'm supposed to be feeling something now. Holy Spirit is going to...

WARD: Correct. Yeah.

MARTIN: ...Get to me any second.

WARD: Right. And so I'm waiting for something to happen to me. And as it doesn't, he kind of nudged my forehead as if a signal to say, now is the time for you to go down.

MARTIN: Wait, he nudged you?

WARD: Yes. Yes. I felt pressure to make it happen to me myself. So at a certain point, I did do that. And kind of - I have a vague memory of, actually, as I'm going down to the ground - and, you know, people would catch you if that happened. But as I was in the process of going to the ground, I believe I had this feeling of that kind of shame in the fact that I had faked it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: So where did your faith move from there? There was a juncture where you decided, well, to not be lukewarm, I guess, anymore and to just go all in.

WARD: Right. Two years later, I've been in college for two years, and I've started to experiment with the really crazy lifestyle of occasionally having a beer.

MARTIN: Because that was not allowed. That was taboo.

WARD: Yes. Yes.

MARTIN: There was no alcohol, even though you were of age, right?

WARD: Yeah. Midway through college, I had interpreted it at the time as this sort of move of God outside of me, on me, to grab hold of me and to stop me from going down the path of, you know, partying and all that. And so I went all in on church, cut off all my relationships with friends who were not on the same page as that and spent all my time going to church services. And part of that - I tried to recreate, in a daily sense, in my room, in my private life, that same emotional euphoria that my parents had felt as young people, that I had felt at times. And that became my entire world.

MARTIN: So when you were in this particular chapter and you were really committing your life to the church and to your identity as a Christian, how did that jibe with the rest of your life? How did that work with - I mean, you were a single guy. What was it like dating?

WARD: Well, you've opened up a whole can of worms by asking about...

MARTIN: Let's open it up.

WARD: ...What it's like to be a young guy in that setting. It's important to just kind of explain the theology that we were embracing at that time, that I became a religious zealot around age 20. We focused on our own basic badness. And we would call it indwelling sin or original sin. But it led to a very intense focus on what I was doing wrong, a suspicion of my motives in all cases. And a lot of us young men started, I think, at the encouragement of some of the pastors or leaders, having these meetings where we would talk about, you know, how often we had looked at pornography and even, you know, greater detail about, you know, our terrible sins on the internet. And it was not a happy period, Rachel, if that's...

MARTIN: Because you had to share all this in a group, right?

WARD: Correct. Yeah - sometimes in somebody's kitchen, sometimes at a Starbucks. And I - you know, I write about how I just remember trying to pull my chair as close as possible to the person next to me so that people - we could talk as quietly as possible. And I just was sitting there going, like, why are we doing this in the Starbucks again? And I - you know, I might have wondered, why are we doing this at all? But when you're caught up in something, it's hard to pump the brakes a lot of times.

MARTIN: But it wasn't just the fear of public embarrassment over talking about, you know, any porn consumption at a Starbucks. In the book, you describe almost - I mean, not almost - you describe a self-loathing...

WARD: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...That came over you when it came to sex or any kind of even sexual thought.

WARD: Yeah. The vigor which with we were encouraged to try to root out the impurity inside us led to a huge sense of shame anytime I fell short. And, you know, we would talk about passages of scripture where it talks about if you look at a woman lustfully, you've committed adultery. And we would kind of take that and say, you know, how much worse is it if you are, you know, looking at porn? But basically, it's the same as if you had committed adultery. So there's obviously, like, philosophical problems with interpreting that passage too literally, but that's the way we interpreted it. And so it just - you walk around feeling really, really bad about yourself, and then you try to work your way back up to a place of atonement, atoning for your sin. You know, obviously, the teaching is that Christ would have atoned for it, but you just can't help but try to atone for it yourself.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: In 2012, the pastor of your family's church was accused of covering up crimes of child sex abuse. Besides the hideous nature of that crime, what did that revelation uncover for you about how some evangelical congregations operate?

WARD: If you are continually operating in a world in which you believe God is speaking to you and, as a leader, in a particular way to you and that you have answers about ultimate reality and right and wrong that a lot of other people don't have, I think it actually predisposes you to think that you know better than law enforcement or people - anybody who's not in your world and doesn't think like you. So I think a lot of that cover-up, so to speak, was just them saying, hey, we're going to handle things internally, according to the way we think is best, and that's the right thing to do. And they might still think that.

MARTIN: But by this point, you had already broken with the church. Can you tell me what precipitated that? Like, what, in the end, made you decide that you needed to find your own spiritual path, really?

WARD: Yeah, right. That's a good way of putting it. I mean, by the time the sex abuse cases issue came to a head in 2012, '13, '14, I had been out of that church congregation for about a decade. And, really, it was just a case of becoming exhausted from that cycle of failure and atonement that I described earlier. And I had to get out of there. I also felt a sense of suffocation from being in an environment where everyone thought the same thing and sang to the same chord structure. I've always felt like it was a good thing to be around people who thought differently, who thought different than I did, who could challenge my thinking. And as a result of working on this book, I've come to believe that journalism saved me from fundamentalism.

MARTIN: Can you say more about that? Why?

WARD: It's taught me how truth is not a set of answers that you begin with and then retroactively fit the questions to. It's something that requires rigor and modesty and a lot of work, and also a recognition that a lot of things that we would like to put in boxes labeled true and false just defy our ability to do that. And so I think fundamentalism is just this desire to have those answers, put them out of reach of questioning and then - really, just, there's a sense of control inside fundamentalism. And one - I think one of the icebreaking sort of statements for me has been a very simple one, and it's just, I could be wrong. And I think as I've embraced that over the years, it's been so liberating in many ways.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: That idea of certainty...

WARD: Right.

MARTIN: ...That sort of opens the door to my next question. When Donald Trump came along and white evangelicals painted him as some kind of savior, it was completely confounding to most people in the media and Americans who didn't have a connection to the evangelical church, but this did not shock you. Can you explain why this bizarre marriage between Donald Trump and white evangelicals made sense to you as someone from that world?

WARD: I don't know that it did make a ton of sense, to be honest. I guess I've come to understand it in retrospect, but - and there are still parts of it that I still don't get 'cause there were some Christians - some evangelicals who painted Trump as, you know, God's man. But a lot of the evangelicals that I knew, both personally and sort of as public figures, were of the type that were repulsed by Trump and then came to a place of either trying to just sort of ignore politics or, as in the case of my own family, rationalized their way to sort of embracing him. And then once you get into the general election time frame in 2016 and beyond, I think tribal political identities overtake religious identities and then you're into the presidency, and Trump was very good at provoking outrage, which further solidified his supporters' attachment to him. But there was that process in 2015 and '16 of revulsion, resignation and then rationalization. And then once it was Republican versus Democrat, the political identities snapped into place.

MARTIN: How's your faith now?

WARD: I still, I think, affirm a lot of the same core teachings of Christianity that a lot of evangelicals do, but I hold it with a more open hand, and I think just the epistemic modesty - the sense of being aware of how much we don't know and embracing the sense that I could be wrong has given me a more open-handed stance towards faith. And I just love the idea that, like, if I say I know it, then I've kind of eliminated the need for faith. And that's - to me, that's become such an exciting thing about faith - is I actually don't know if this is true or real, and so I'm on a quest to continue onward and upward, as my dad likes to quote C.S. Lewis saying, in reliance on that faith.

MARTIN: Jon Ward - his book is called "Testimony: Inside The Evangelical Movement That Failed A Generation." Jon, thank you so much.

WARD: Rachel, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

DETROW: And you can hear more of Rachel Martin's Enlighten Me series next Sunday, same bat time, same bat channel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.