{Gina Welch. In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church. Metropolitan Books 2010. 352 pp. $25.00}

Gina Welch grew up in an atheistic, anti-religious household in Berkeley, California.  After she moved to Virginia for graduate school, she found herself surrounded by evangelicals, at the very time that evangelicals were credited (and often blamed) for the re-election of George Bush.  To investigate what makes evangelicals tick, and to confront her own personal prejudices, Gina resolved to go “undercover” and fake a conversion at the fundamentalist Thomas Road Baptist Church, where the pastor was a certain Jerry Falwell.

Patheos’ Tim Dalrymple recently interviewed Gina Welch, author of In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church.

Why did you undertake this project in the first place?  Why would an Atheist Jew devote such time and energy to examining evangelicals?

The idea for the book came about in 2005.  I had been living in Virginia for three years, and had been startled to find myself uncomfortable around the evangelical community, which was very strong in central Virginia.  I had always thought of myself as someone who was comfortable with whatever personal identities people might subscribe to, yet I found that I had this particular problem with evangelical Christians.  Part of that problem was based on conservative politics.  But part of it was an aesthetic judgment.  Since I was raised in an actively anti-religious household in the Bay Area of California, conservative evangelicalism wasn’t something I had had to confront before that point in my life.  In Virginia, I found that I felt a sense of superiority.  That troubled me, because I hadn’t thought of myself as judgmental. [Read more...]