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A five-year-old girl loves her Sunday school, loves listening to her parents harmonize on the old gospel hymns, even loves the fire-and-brimstone preaching antics of Brother Munroe—loves everything about the First Church of God in Moultonboro, New Hampshire. In Mrs. Nichols' class she is memorizing the books of the New Testament, eagerly anticipating her reward—a gold necklace with a tiny glass bulb containing a real mustard seed, just like in Jesus' story.
But then everything goes wrong. Her father becomes so sick her mother must support the family by waitressing, which includes serving drinks. To the First Church of God, serving alcohol means "breaking the covenant." Hands of friends and neighbors are raised to vote the family out of the church. As Kate Young Caley writes in The House Where the Hardest Things Happened: A Memoir About Belonging: "And so I, who loved the church … I too was out."
Former friends now ignore them. Even Mrs. Nichols turns her back when little Kate runs into her in Ellen's General Store. Her family walks away from church and never returns. In her teens Kate tries a "Jesus People" church on her own, until the leader's wife receives a "prophecy" that Kate must give up her boyfriend because "God says" the wife's niece, not Kate, is intended for that boy. Kate enters young adulthood concluding, "As much as I wanted God, I was sick to death of His people."
Kate Caley sounds like one more statistic in the casualty list showcased by Ruth Tucker in Walking Away from Faith: Unraveling the Mystery of Belief and Unbelief. Tucker wants to understand how born-again Christians end up as seemingly contented agnostics or atheists. Early chapters offer the author's own struggle with unbelief, reflections on the mystery of knowing God, and case studies of the lives of author Hannah Whitall Smith and Chuck Templeton, a dynamic young partner of Billy Graham who followed an opposite trajectory. Drawing on personal interviews, biographies, and postings on "unfaith" websites, her profile of a typical "walk away" shows these not-too-surprising characteristics: fundamentalist or highly conservative background; inability to grapple with philosophical, theological, and/or scientific challenges to Scripture's reliability; painful life experiences eliciting deep disappointment with God or God's people.
Tucker devotes the middle third of the volume to a workmanlike summary of intellectual challenges to faith, from early Enlightenment skeptics to Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marcus Borg. At times she gets carried away: "It would be impossible to imagine how many once-professing Christians have abandoned their beliefs after having studied Freud and his negative views on religion." Yet as evangelicals celebrate the end of modernism, she rightly reminds us that Enlightenment intellectual challenges are still virulent for many Christians.
"Those who are troubled by scientific and philosophical complexities (fueled by modernism)," Tucker writes, "often deny religious belief altogether. On the other hand, those whose issues relate to psychological and lifestyle factors (fueled by postmodernism) redefine the terms of their religious faith to better fit their lifestyle and psychological needs." Her sample offers far more of the former; as a local church pastor, I see far more of the latter.
Tucker's compassion in really listening to those who "walk away" is nobly expressed in her best chapter, "Answering Doubt and Unbelief." She resists the common notion that intellectual questions are only a smokescreen for a rebellious will. Believers expressing doubts are not helped by well-meaning Christians angling for a "quick fix." Her Reformed commitment to the sovereignty of God suggests that bringing someone back to faith is ultimately not up to us; we can relax and listen lest our anxiety to argue or convince pushes them even further away. (Good and true advice,
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