The recent health care “debate” had both the blue team AND the red team stooping to lows of hysteria and vitriol, getting Americans riled up rather than taking advantage of an opportunity for understanding and education. So it is refreshing to see someone take the latter path, rather than the former, for a change.
Gina Welch, raised in a secular household in California, moved to Virginia to attend graduate school. Once here, she found herself in a rather different culture than what she was used to in California. She got interested in investigating the core of the differences in these belief/cultural/spiritual systems, and committed years of her life to this effort.
In her new book, In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church
Why Thomas Road Baptist Church?
Regionally, church membership was in the thousands and growing and Liberty University was fast becoming what the founder had hoped it would be: a Brigham Young University for Evangelicals.
The founder, of course, being Jerry Falwell.
Note, however, that the matter of Gina joining Thomas Road Baptist Church was not a trivial step. Says Gina:
I am a secular Jew raised by a single mother in Berkeley…. I cuss, I drink, and I am not a virgin.
She realizes that the people she wants to learn about would not be forthcoming if they knew she was writing a book about them, so she invents a story about herself. This deception allows her to join the church and make friends there, but comes back to haunt her in the end.
The book is mostly about her experiences in joining the church and developing relationships with people. But while in the church she witnesses several key events in the history of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, including the transition from the original church site to the new site (formerly the Ericsson cell phone plant) as well as the death of Jerry Falwell.
Also, in her journey she herself becomes changed, and discovers flaws in the caricatures the media paints of “Christian America”. There are actually real people behind those images:
And yet…against logic, as a liberal secular Jew, born to a Communist father, raised in Berkeley, educated in the Ivy League—I had been charmed by Jerry Falwell.
Gina takes a fair look at the church and its members, and, I think, all sides—the pro, the con, and the indifferent—can learn something from her experiences.
In the end, Gina has to deal with the deceptions she has committed, as well as the friendships she has created.
The result, I think, is a valuable insight into a segment of society where, currently, at the interface with the rest of the world, there is some distrust and misunderstanding.