GenXers and Evangelical Culture

My interview with author and journalist Jon Ward

Jon Ward

Today’s post is a Q&A with Jon Ward, the chief national correspondent at Yahoo! News, and the author of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation. 

I’ve known Jon for a few years, but reading Testimony made me feel like I knew him even better, in part because so much of his autobiography highlighted cultural moments salient to my own childhood. A quick stalk of his LinkedIn page confirmed that we are roughly the same age—we grew up at a similar time and in somewhat similar religious cultures. I’m excited to have him as a guest in today’s edition of Some Assembly Required. 

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John Inazu: Testimony is a very personal book that also enlists your journalistic gifts and training. Can you describe how you approached this kind of writing? What were the biggest surprises and the biggest challenges along the way?

Jon Ward: I’d wanted to write about my upbringing for a long time, for many years. I’d always been analyzing it, even as I lived it. I knew there was something that felt deeply, fundamentally wrong with the way I was taught to think and live. Perhaps the better way to say it was that I was taught how to not think and not live. But I also knew that there was something fiercely real that had happened to my parents and their generation in the 1970s. And I experienced good things growing up in church, of course, too. Most of the people there were good people. Or at least many were.

So when you have something that multi-layered, contradictory, and complex, if you’re a writer, you have to write about it. So that’s how it began for me, just writing down memories, which led to more memories. I tracked down old pieces of private writing: journals, poems, letters, e-mails, etc. I went through lots of photos. I talked to some people. But for a while it was just fragments, even though I’d decided in the summer of 2018 to explore actually writing something (I’ve written here about the moment in 2018 when I decided to do so, which also has a lot of detail about the process). And then in the summer of 2020, I got serious about sketching a structure for the book, and deciding what it was about, roughly speaking. I signed the book deal in summer of 2021.

And I think in terms of challenges this period of gestation was the hardest. Gathering memories is easy enough. But it doesn’t sustain the momentum you need to write a book. That comes from deciding on a structure, a path, a message. It’s when you do the hard work of figuring out what the book is going to say, and how you’re going to weave together multiple stories and histories—structurally speaking—that you’ve got a book. Then you just have to write it.

JI: Much of this book is about your own upbringing. One theme that emerges from your account of the church of your youth is how much the people your parents age wanted to build and cultivate an environment in which their kids could be deeply—and perhaps I should add, safely—formed into Christian faith. As a parent myself, I have some empathy for that desire. At the same time, I’ve been around a lot of Christian institutions that channel these concerns into fears and anxieties. Is there a way to be intentionally formational without being fearful or controlling?

JW: M. Night Shamalan's movie “The Village” is a good metaphor for how I was raised, and I guess it applies to lots of religious cultures. You try to keep your kids sheltered and isolated from as much as you can.

I don’t reject that idea totally. Of course you shield your kids from some things. But I also think many religious communities go too far in this, and end up teaching their children to demonize ideas, influences, and people they don’t agree with. That’s a shortcut, I think. The long way is to teach a child to think critically about these things. You can give them traditions and rituals and liturgies and so forth, and ground them in a faith’s teachings and stories, but at a certain point it’s up to them of course. So do you want them to just rely on dogma, which tends to erase the dignity of the individual? I think that defensive, weaponized thinking can be a harm that is perpetuated exponentially almost like a virus. Or do you want them to live an open-hearted, truth-seeking existence? That way requires far more vulnerability, but it is the work of healing, repair, and restoration.

I have thought a lot in recent years about how to pass on or hand off a heritage to the next generation. To me, raising kids to be Christian means they become a certain type of person: loving, humble, kind, curious, exhibiting the fruit of the Holy Spirit, living the way of the Sermon on the Mount. I’m not very concerned with making sure they have the right theological views, or that they even have a certain political or cultural point of view (though we do celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with gusto because I am of Irish descent). Because again, to be a Christian is to embody the teachings of Jesus. So passing on the faith, so to speak, is a matter of living, demonstrating, habituating, which comes through habits and rhythms—many of them small and repetitive—and also my own example and the example of others around them.

JI: Somewhat related to the last question, you write about the lack of formation in churches that has led to some of the cultural expressions of faith we are seeing today, especially those that seemed to be infused with politics and political ideology. What would good formation look like? Is anyone doing it well?

JW: I don’t know how equipped I am to answer this question, but Michael Wear's year-old institution, the Center for Christianity and Public Life, is one of the most promising projects I am personally aware of when it comes to training Christians in a more positive direction of spiritual formation.

JI: You write that the church culture you grew up in was “created from scratch out of nothing, precisely because my parents’ generation despised the traditions their parents had raised them in. We were making something new, and what had come before was dead and irrelevant.” And more normatively, you suggest toward the end of the book that “a faithful Christian presence would take part in the building and repair of key institutions that make healthy culture possible.” I have expressed similar thoughts about the importance of institutions. Why are institutions important? And how might we start to repair the institutions that have failed us?

JW: I spent several months in 2016 and 2017 stripping these very questions down to their nuts and bolts. What is an institution? What is the purpose of an institution? Why do they matter? I did interviews with Yuval Levin and Jonathan Rauch and others in which we explored these questions very intentionally.

I remain convinced—just as much as I was then—that most modern people have lost the ability to think institutionally. As Rauch said, institutions have become invisible. Even when we use the term “institution,” we don't really comprehend what the term means.

In short, an institution is an organized form of association that enables humans to do things they can’t do on their own. It empowers them to achieve goals, to solve problems, to overcome challenges, to meet issues of the day, and to do so together rather than as atomized individuals. Along the way, it shapes them into a kind of person that they couldn't become on their own (an insight from Levin). Finally, it protects them from both authoritarian control and from chaos, because institutions disperse and slow the exercise of power. They keep power from being used rashly, whether it's by a small group of authoritarians at the top of a structure or system, or whether it's from the passions of the masses.

Institutions have lost trust and confidence because they have failed us. The answer is not to lose hope in the idea of institutions. It is to dissolve the ones that cannot be saved, reform the ones that can, and build new ones for modern times.

JI: I listened to your recent podcast with Josh Harris, and I particularly liked your embrace of the posture “I could be wrong.” You elaborate in your book: “To struggle toward truth, to refuse easy answers, and to remain in a place where uncertainty and complexity present ongoing challenges—that seems closer to what Jesus would want.” With the help of Lesslie Newbigin, I’ve come to think of this as the difference between certainty and confidence. But many people I encounter worry this view will lead to relativism and an abandonment of faith. I don’t think of you as a relativist. Can you parse the difference?

The distinction between confidence and certainty is a good one. Another important distinction is between matters of faith and matters of fact. I’ve seen many people be absolutely certain of things in the realm of faith, and relativist about matters of fact when they don’t like the answer. Both of these attitudes are forms of escapism. That is relativism: choosing to ignore reality and fashion answers which suit “itching ears.”

JI: You worry that “the internet had destroyed the power of the press to serve as an independent check on those in power” because politicians can “go around the media and create their own reality for supporters, without accountability and the annoying requirement to tell the truth.” I share the worry. But isn’t mainstream media also complicit in this shift? As newsrooms cut seasoned reporters and careful editors, we seen more advocacy and less accuracy even among the most sophisticated outlets that hold themselves out as trusted and nonpartisan news sources. Is there any way out of this mess? And if so, who are the people and institutions who can help us?

JW: There is a lot to criticize in the mainstream press. They—we—have lost trust and credibility and relevance in spades. Much of mainstream media has no idea how irrelevant it is at this point to large swaths of the country. Or they don’t care. Some are content to write for those who already agree with them.

When it comes to describing the best attempt to ascertain the truth about the world, which is what journalism is supposed to be, I don’t want to just write for people who already think like I do. But what was discouraging about the last few years is I and many others spent much of 2020 giving ourselves to the pursuit of truth about voting, the possibilities of fraud and cheating, and the evidence for claims by some that the election had been unfair. And yet millions paid no attention and believed lies. That was deeply dispiriting, and as much as the press deserves lots of criticism for many things, the problem I’m describing is one driven by the quest for money and power.

I think the tribe of journalism continues to do good and sometimes great work every day to get to the facts of the matter. But the media is still a long way from figuring out that we’re not in Kansas anymore, because much of the country is going elsewhere for their information. I don’t think much of that alternative information is very reliable or trustworthy, but trust has to be earned and won back. At the same time, there are quite malignant forces in the right-wing echo chamber who don’t care about accuracy as long as their bottom line gets bigger, or their political power grows.

JI: Your book talks about some of the family strains you’ve had around politics. You also mentioned on your podcast that while your dad had a negative reaction to your book, you’ve found a deeper friendship with him in your ensuing conversations. Without giving away too much, in my new book, I write about a similar experience with my dad. He died of cancer in 2019, but in the year of his illness, we experienced a similar reconciliation even without reaching agreement about some of our beliefs. Anecdotally, you and I are not alone in our experiences. Do you have any reflections about these generational rifts? Do they happen inevitably, or are we in a unique moment? Do you have any advice on addressing them? 

There is obviously something cyclical about generational conflict. But this moment also is more pronounced than normal, I think. The 1960s may have felt similar, during the anti-war and civil rights movements.

I found it helpful to write a book. I didn’t find it helpful to engage in text exchanges, or even e-mail debates, with family members. I’m not sure what the lesson is from that, honestly. I guess one lesson is that you should really take your time to express yourself, and think hard about how to do it well, and with some strategy.

I think a firm expression of where one stands can be helpful for both sides, probably, in some cases. Not all. But protracted and sharp debate among family and friends is very hard to do productively. So, maybe another piece of advice would be, after you’ve thought long and hard about how and when to best say your piece, say it and move on. And then try to focus on things that make the relationship stronger. It’s so hard. I’ve avoided talking about politics with my dad, almost entirely.

JI: Speaking of deep differences, you were an undergraduate at the University of Maryland around the time that I was at Duke. This was in an era when Maryland was still in the ACC, and Maryland considered Duke to be a kind of rival. There were also a few epic games during that time—I still remember a particular closing stretch by Jay Williams against the Terps that had me standing on top of a table cheering in a sports bar. I guess I’m wondering if you have come around to being a Duke fan. 

JW: Nice try. Go Terps!