Are you going to hell?

Former born-again Christian John Marks journeyed back into the evangelical America he'd left behind and discovered the promise -- and limitations -- of faith.

By Louis Bayard

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Feb. 25, 2008 | For news producer John Marks, it was the most loaded of questions. He had come to Dallas to interview evangelical Christians for a "60 Minutes" segment, and there he met Don and Lillie McWhinney. The McWhinneys were believers in the Rapture, the doctrine that Jesus will one day sweep his acolytes into heaven and leave the rest of humanity to suffer under the Antichrist. After answering Marks' questions, Don countered with one of his own.

"Will you be left behind?"

Marks had long since given up the born-again theology that claimed him at 16, but McWhinney's question resonated strongly enough to spark him on a two-year investigative odyssey through the heart of Christian America. Listening to the fiery testimony of megachurch preachers, traveling from Easter pageants and Focus on the Family seminars to Christian rock concerts and blogger conferences, Marks experienced firsthand both the promise and the limitations of the faith enterprise -- even as he queried, all over again, the grounds of his own beliefs.

The fascinating result, "Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind," is both generous and rigorous in its assaying of the evangelical mind -- and, in the end, cautiously hopeful that believers and non-believers can find patches of common ground.

Salon spoke with Marks by phone from Florida.

Your book comes on the heels of a raft of atheistic tracts: "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens, "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. Did you see your work as a middle way between the two extremes of atheism and fundamentalism?

This phenomenon of religious experience is one of the oldest in our documented history as a species. And so, rather than simply say, "There is no God, end of story, everyone who believes that is an idiot or deluded or weak-minded," I wanted to go out and embrace the idea that religious experience is a real and valuable part of existence -- regardless of whether you believe in God.

You describe at some length your own struggle with faith. Can you pinpoint the exact moment when you stopped believing?

It was in the Balkans where I really had my reckoning. I was a reporter in Serbia, and I went down to the city of Priboj on the Bosnian border, and I interviewed some refugees. I sat across from this old man, and he told me that he'd been driven out of his village, that his next-door neighbor had been murdered in front of his eyes, that he and his wife had nothing, that they didn't know what would happen to them. But he had this one hope, which was that his sons were alive. They had been taken off a bus and taken to a labor camp in northern Bosnia, and when the war was over, [the old man believed] he and his wife would be reunited with their sons, and they would all leave and everything would be fine. And then the interpreter leaned over and whispered in my ear, "I happen to know that this man's sons are dead."

I'd been through this whole experience of trying to hold on to the faith, and at that moment, whatever was left just collapsed. I had everything in the world, every complete advantage, and this old man had managed to survive every conceivable devastation, and he had this one hope, and it was just gone. And I knew that whatever had happened to him was going on all around me, in every part of the region. All of those things together ... something snapped.

So, having abandoned the faith community, what did you hope to gain by going back?

Well, "The Passion of the Christ" had just come out, and it was freaking out all these people who were not in the evangelical world. I thought, as a journalist and a writer, I might be able to bring some kind of insight into the human beings behind this phenomenon. I felt like maybe I could be a bridge between these two experiences, secular and evangelical.

But when I got into it, I discovered that I had some unfinished business. When I ceased to believe in Jesus, I had not shared my loss of faith with the people with whom I had shared that faith. And at some deep level, I think I needed to walk myself one more time through that decision in the company of people who believed.

Your wife and son are Jewish. At one point in your journey, you write that you feared losing your "human love" for them in exchange for "divine love." Was that an omnipresent fear, that you would be coaxed back into the old-time religion? Did your family fear that as well?

Well, yes. My wife and I had many conversations about it when I was coming back from trips. There were moments when she would say, jokingly, "Please tell me you're not going to be a born-again Christian."

Born again again.

Right. Reborn again.

I didn't dare to tell her what I was going through because I didn't yet know myself. I had no idea that I would have such a strong emotional response to these people and to this life. And I couldn't go back to Debra and say, "Listen, just to keep you up to date, there's a 30 percent chance that I'll find myself back in the church." But as I started to write, I began to understand where I was in this, and when I gave her the book, it was my way of saying you don't have a thing to worry about.

Those of us on the secular side of the equation are used to seeing the religious right presented as a monolithic force, and yet one of the virtues of your book is that you distinguish very carefully between, say, fundamentalism, which is focused on an inerrant Bible, and evangelicalism, which is focused on Christ. I was also shocked to learn that, according to one estimate, some 40 million unbelievers are attending church services. What the hell are they doing there?

Because they like the church, they believe in what it represents, they believe in the social stances, they believe in the political values. But when you get to this central question -- Do you believe that Jesus Christ redeemed you for all time and do you live as if that's true? -- most people cannot tell you how many real believers there are.

In a way, I've always envied the confidence of the truly faithful. When I look at a Jerry Falwell, a Pat Robertson, I see a kind of imperturbable self-regard. And yet you suggest there's "a deep strain of self-loathing in many Christians."

There are plenty of evangelicals who have this strong, exuberant sense of who they are. But you scratch the surface, you get this immediate defensiveness. All evangelicals know that, once they get out of their own personal sphere, they will be seen as ridiculous at best, evil at worst.

I'm wondering if this accounts for some of the toll the movement exacts on its preachers. You mention, for instance, that Tommy Nelson left Denton Bible Church after a severe bout of depression. We've seen some fairly spectacular flameouts from the likes of Ted Haggard, Richard Roberts and Earl Paulk. Do you think absolutist dogma creates a kind of psychic strain?

All of these people, particularly the pastors of the biggest churches, have this Janus-faced existence. They look inwards toward their congregations, who are needy at every level and constantly want the support and advice of their pastor. They look outwards toward the community, where they have to be not only affable and friendly but also exemplify their faith at a time when people are looking for cracks. That's a tough life.

Is that one of the reasons the megachurch is in decline?

The church has understood within its own ranks that it's reached the limits of growth. You can't continue to grow in these cities from, say, 22,000 to 30,000 without becoming a source of more problems than anything else. Your traffic problems increase. The relationship between the pastor and the congregation gets ever more tenuous. It's harder and harder to provide the individual believer with some kind of intimate experience. And so it's very easy for people to walk into these churches, but it's just as easy for them to walk out.

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