Girl Dumps God

I wanted to love Not That Kind of Girl, a new memoir from "recovering evangelical" Carlene Bauer. On the surface, Bauer and I have a lot in common. We're women who love the Bible, literature, and pop culture. We are aspiring writers who landed in publishing. She even grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs like me, entrenched in the evangelical subculture. And from early reviews, it was unclear just what, exactly, "recovering evangelical" meant. In the first chapter, Bauer describes her first encounter with the End Times, via a church basement screening of A Thief in the Night with her Christian classmates. At 8, her biggest fears suddenly included the government installing a bar code on her forehead or the back of her hand under a blood-red moon. She goes to bed at night earnestly whispering to God, "Could I live until I fell in love?"

This girl is -me, I thought. I vividly remember telling my mom, myself at 8 years old, that I wanted to be excited for Jesus to come back, but if he could, it would be great if he could wait until I went to college, got married, and had a career and kids.

What critics are heralding as a "good-girl memoir" is actually a tragic story of faith, slowly and painfully lost. Bauer writes for a generation raised in the church of Dare to Discipline: "I sometimes wondered, sitting in church listening to ancient tales of obstinacy, if I had been born with original sin, because stealing and lying and saying mean things had never held an appeal." For Bauer, faith comes easily at first, and even as she grows up and enters public school, she finds it easy to resist sex and alcohol.

But as her faith lingers during her college years at a Catholic university, belief in God feels like something she would shake off if she could only find the proper motive. Faith is a convenient foil to her introverted tendencies and dislike of the drunken parties and casual sex that consume her classmates. She secretly envies her friend Jane, who came to Christ in college, because it offers her a "platform for radical self-invention."

Megan Hustad's review for the Daily Beast identifies the conceit that makes Bauer's memoir one of interest for evangelicals:

[Bauer] aspires not only to be truly hip, she also wants to be taken seriously in New York's snobbish literary scene. And she seeks to accomplish both of these goals while hanging on to her fervent faith in Jesus Christ. If life maneuvers received scores for technical difficulty, Bauer would be competing for gold.

I so wanted to see Bauer accomplish this Herculean task; Bauer writes for Salon, Elle, and The New York Times Magazine, and an accessible story of faith cultivated in such a world would surely impress the intellectual types that Bauer reveals in the book to be quite narrow-minded when it comes to Christianity. But it's that balancing act—one that relegates faith to a "hanging on"—that undoes any progress I hoped this book might achieve.

Bauer finds glimmers of hope along her quest. She says of her college campus ministry, "It was true that the members believed in ice cream socials and acoustic guitars, and attended a church that believed in worship teams and met in a middle school auditorium. I'd had enough of these evangelical clichfamp;copy;s. But many of the members had been raised Catholic before they turned to evangelical Christianity, which meant that their faith was serious but that they had not been steeped in the attitudes and vocabulary, which meant that I heard them speaking as people, not as Christians."

Unfortunately, she can't quite recapture this experience after graduating and moving to New York City. There she bounces from church to church, gradually letting go of her moral convictions in order to "experience life" in the way she'd desired at age 8, in whispered prayers. After a brief stint with the Catholic Church (selected primarily because, as the "church of Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene and Walker Percy, it embraces literature, isn't afraid of moderate intake of alcohol, and encourages social activism"), Bauer's faith crumbles under the weight of her doubts and questions. Living through 9/11 as a resident of NYC presents an image of suffering she is unable to reconcile with God. "I've exhausted it all," she says. "I've got nothing left to give him." She desires certainty, but a philosophical ideal of truth—"Thinking you know anything makes it impossible to say that God is light"—leads her away from the church and its confident professions of faith.

What is ultimately missing from Bauer's account is any sense of real community to support her amid her fleeting convictions. Roommates, friends, and love interests, Christian and non-Christian, come and go, and none is particularly memorable. Though Iris Murdoch's observation that "love is the extremely uncomfortable realization that something other than oneself is real" first led Bauer to the Catholic Church, we never see her live out the "uncomfortable" reality. "If I had to love someone the way I had to love God, I would have to leave," she says, after she has already left God.

Bauer's is a truly thoughtful de-conversion story, and that makes it particularly heartbreaking. She seems like the kind of person you could talk to over coffee for hours. Unfortunately, hers is an all-too-common story: disaffected with the church, capital C, she gives up on God. But while I expected to mourn a lost opportunity for that gold-medal move, this book provided a reminder that we can never expect or ask anyone to singularly represent our faith. That's something we must do every day, as persons who aspire to show not just what kind of girls we are, but also what kind of God we serve.