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In the Land of Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church

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Gina Welch's In the Land of the Believers left me disturbed. To be fair, this might be my baseline state, per friends and family. But if one measure of a book's success is to get under the skin of the reader and stay there for awhile, In the Land of the Believers most definitely succeeds in this category.

The premise of this non-fiction book is simple: Gina Welch, a born and reared non-believer, goes undercover to join Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church (TRBC) in Lynchburg, Virginia, in a purported attempt to understand what she terms "Evangelicals". Welch contrasts herself with the Evangelicals: "I am a secular Jew raised by a single mother in Berkeley.... I cuss, I drink, and I am not a virgin." Falwell's church, ground zero for the now-eclipsed Moral Majority, was close enough geographically to serve Welch's purpose.

Welch starts with a trip to Scaremare, a church sponsored haunted house (termed a "hell house") designed to both metaphorically and literally scare the Hell out of participants. From this spooky beginning, Welch moves on to joining a TRBC sponsored singles group, EPIC (Experiencing Personal Intimacy with Christ), eventually being baptized (full immersion) and travelling to Alaska on a mission to capture one hundred souls for Christ (final tally 101 souls).

While the premise is simple, execution of the plan becomes complicated by Welch's penchant for developing relationships with the people she has gone undercover to observe. What might have been a documentary fact-finding expedition becomes instead a memoir about Welch herself as she gradually discovers that the church members are not caricatures, but humans, and how this discovery affects her. The primary theme evolves into a line written on the last page of the book (excluding the Epilogue): "So this--this became the basis of my love for Evangelicals: I was going to choose to see the mystical oneness. And once I started to see it that way, loving them wasn't very hard to do." Not "very" hard, but still hard. And therein lays a portion of what begins to get under my skin.

In the beginning of this tale, Welch sets the conflict up well. She describes her thoughts about TRBC pastor Jerry Falwell: "I considered him a homophobe, a fearmonger, a manipulator, and a misogynist--an alien creature from the most extreme backwater of evangelical culture." By the end of the story? Gina's feelings are...the same. Except that now she has some sincere affection for the old boy. Welch lays out her pre-conceptions about Evangelicals at the beginning of the story: "They were shrill and prudish, they loved bad music and guns and Nascar, told corny jokes, and spoke in sound bites.." By the end of the tale, she confirms all of the above, and adds on several occasions that Evangelicals have a very raunchy sense of humor. Additionally, we know that Evangelical men have an affinity for heavily pomaded hair (or conversely, shaved heads), and Evangelical women have a propensity for bright lipstick and clothing that brings to mind the Confederate Railroad country song lyrics "I like my women a little on the trashy side."

Why might this be disturbing? Welch states "The collateral damage of going undercover, I thought, was mitigated by the possibility that the enterprise would open channels of understanding writ large between Evangelicals and the rest of us." Given that the Evangelicals in the book, with rare exceptions, conform to Welch's pre-conceptions, it's a reach to say that her justification for deception succeeded in its aim.

One might ask about the notion of going undercover in the first place. Keep in mind that going undercover is something usually, if not always, done to investigate criminal activity. The FBI infiltrates extremist groups, with the aim of preventing terrorist acts. Investigative reporters go undercover to document crimes or corruption in progress. The CIA goes undercover to spy on enemies (ideally). The theme of undercover is this: It is justified only when significant harm to a community or a nation is threatened. Must one go undercover to investigate people legally accessing their freedom of religion? Welch's comment: "I sort of managed to balance the whole messy moral equation on an unsteady ball bearing of cliché: You have to break some eggs to make an omelette." Yes, Gina. But people are not eggs, and your omelette was not improved understanding of Evangelicals, it was a book from which profit will derive.

So, I'll come clean here about being disturbed. Two of my four brothers, and one of my three sisters, are Evangelicals. They are richly developed human beings, and each possess a broad and well developed sense of humor. My brothers don't pomade their hair. My sister dresses impeccably. Each of them contributes to the whole community that they live in, not just the narrow confines of their church communities. Welch would have learned far more about Evangelicals by simply introducing herself and talking to my siblings than by her elaborate deception. My siblings DO open channels of understanding between themselves and others that see the world differently.


Me? I'm a non-believer. I'm a work-my-tail-off-for-my-community, school board member, charity donating, non-believer. I feel no need to lie to my siblings, my patients (I'm a family physician), or my community about my views in order to "open channels of understanding." I just ask people questions, and answer them, a process that works amazingly well to promote understanding. And when a non-believer feels the need to participate in a two year long deception to get information available for the asking, it damages by association the reality of the integrity that so many non-believers take pride in. This disturbs me. In The Land of the Believers is an interesting book, Gina Welch is an above average writer, and discussion will be lively if your book club chooses it. That creepy feeling under my skin, though, will be there a long while.

When Gina Welch, a secular Jew from California, decided to infiltrate the world of Thomas Road Baptist Church (Jerry Falwell, founding pastor) in Virginia, it seems she had preconceived ideas of what she would find. She was surprised.

Instead of discovering a people who mindlessly followed charismatic leaders, Gina found sincere believers who were part of a loving community. She soon found herself drawn into the fellowship of people who honestly cared about her. Somewhere along the way, she came to love the music and found genuine friends.

While reading this book, I was surprised and challenged at several points. Because I am a Christian, sometimes it was a stretch to understand Gina's viewpoint and why she found certain aspects of the Christian culture peculiar. What she pointed out was often I the way I think and talk. I found it revealing and important to see the Christian culture from an outsider's viewpoint.

As I looked closely at my motivation for choosing this book, I realized my expectations were also unsupported. While the followers of Falwell's ministries are professing Christians, I express my Christian beliefs differently in some ways. As I read, I realized I had hoped that Gina would confirm my approach to the faith as a better approach.

To the contrary, I found myself humbled. As Gina described her experience, I found I have more in common with the people she encountered than differences, especially in terms of love for others and the essentials of faith.

Gina, the people you met at church are the people who accepted you, forgave your deception and still desire a relationship with you. They pointed to a God who still desires a relationship with you. Keep searching.

I really wanted to like this book. Evangelical Christianity has long been a mystery to me, and I love books that can give me an insight into these communities.

The main issue I had with this book is that Welch has an apologist tone for her actions. I get that she used deception, but the underlying embarrassment she has about her lying made the book unreadable for me.

What I knew would bother me most about this book was the fundamental dishonesty in a self-described atheist faking faith to write a book. That's what bothered the author the most too, as she realized how close she'd grown to folks she'd once viewed as alien.

What I liked best about the book was the attempt to truly reach across religious, political and cultural aisles - truly valuing people despite rejecting their ideas, and advocacy of truly getting to know and love those who think differently.

What still feels saddest to me is how much better everything might have gone if the author had been honest from the start. A better approach (though she didn't know enough about Evangelicals at the start to know that) would have been to simply be honest about every question and doubt.

A recent example of an atheist being open and honest while getting to know Christians is Hemant Mehta, who also wrote a book: I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist's Eyes Not only did Christians not reject Mehta; he was even invited to preach at Willow Creek, one of the largest Evangelical congregations.

By staying undercover, the author missed an opportunity to fully dialogue about topics dividing her from Evangelical friends, such as abortion, homosexuality, inerrancy of Scripture, evolution, just war, how best to help those in need, and the proper role of government. I felt sad as she seethed inside when hearing views contrary to her own rather than pushing back. If she had opened up, everyone might have learned more.

The author worried about committing apostasy (renouncing faith), but my concern for her was simony (selling Holy offices), in that having a book to write may have gotten in the way of finding ultimate answers.

Although I'm an Evangelical, Jerry Falwell's church was almost as alien to me as to the author, so I really appreciated this chance to get to know Thomas Road Baptist Church and its people, who really came alive for me in this book.

I also found this personally-helpful insight: "I called my new philosophy 'Positive Out, Positive In,' and it was simply about acceptance and adaptability; the more easygoing I became, the easier things were."

I found this book disturbing. Welch is a solid writer and she tells an okay if not overly-long story. That being said, what she did is wrong. I'm not opposed to the going undercover part, but what gets me is the utter lack of respect she has for the culture of Evangelicals. Her decision to get baptized and to participate regularly in Communion--sacred acts for Believers--is completely demeaning and dehumanizing. Would she approve this approach for any other culture--would she think it okay to imitate rituals of a tribal people or Hasidic Jews? It is dishonest and paints her own bias: she doesn't see these people as people, but as an "other" group not worthy of cultural respect. As a self-acknowledged liberal, this behavior comes across hypocritical and undermines the compassion she claims to have throughout the book.

Because Welch is biased going in, her mode of research is questionable. It is clear that after two years she still hasn't a clue what it means to be an Evangelical Christian. She defines the group based on externals: a style of worship, a set of political beliefs, a way of talking and dressing, a way of praying, a type of sermon, a particular view of money and even how they witness. What she misses completely is that being an Evangelical Christian is about having a set of core beliefs that are non-negotiable. Beyond that, Evangelicals Christians are as varied as any other group. My jaw dropped at the behavior of the Christians at Thomas Road, and her assumption that because they act and think this way all Christians do is insulting In the end, she does to Christians exactly what she accuses them of doing to others.

The other huge issue I have with this book is that she chooses the most extreme Evangelical church she can find, and then proceeds to clump all Evangelicals into this group. She is constantly describing how "Christians" act and attempting to analyze why this is so, but all she really accomplishes is a one-sided analysis of a particular group. The title of this book should read "An Evangelical Church" not "The Evangelical Church." She generalizes and stereotypes and does little (beyond bonding with certain individuals and enjoying herself more than she thought possible) to insightfully understand the group she set out to study.

Ever wonder how a committed unbeliever would feel in your church service?

Have you ever given thought to how evangelicals are viewed by those outside the church?

How many of your friends disagree with you politically? Theologically?

In the Land of Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church (Metropolitan, 2010) tells the story of Gina Welch. The book gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of Thomas Road Baptist Church (the church Jerry Falwell pastored) through the eyes of an atheistic, secularist, liberal young woman.

Welch faked a conversion experience, got baptized, and spent two years at Thomas Road. (She even participated in evangelism on a mission trip.) During this time, she kept a detailed journal of her experience, which she has now turned into a book that chronicles her journey into evangelical America.

If you're like me, your first reaction upon hearing about a book like this is to roll your eyes and think, Oh great! An exposé of evangelicals from someone who deliberately engaged in deceptive practices in order to show up evangelical hypocrisy. That was my initial reaction. But after reading a number of reviews, I was intrigued enough to pick up the book. I was pleasantly surprised by Welch's portrayal of evangelicals, and I was riveted by her account. While I abhor the deceit that grounds this book, I recommend that evangelicals read it for a number of reasons.

1. Unmasking Intolerant Tolerance

First, Welch clearly understands that "intolerance" is not a label that sticks only to the Religious Right. Coming from a liberal, secular background, Welch saw people within her circles speaking intolerantly of evangelicals. She realized that relying on the common stereotypes of evangelicals was leading her to an inaccurate picture:

I vacuumed up information about evangelicals, feeling it was necessary to educate myself... And yet the more I learned, the less I understood. My anthropological inquiries lit up only the most alarming fragments of the evangelical picture, turning up the contrast and blacking out the relatable qualities. They were shrill and prudish, they loved bad music and guns and NASCAR, told corny jokes and spoke in sound bites, were unshakably loyal to exposed liars, and their children were going to bully our children into prayer. They were scary, all right, but they didn't seem quite real... I wanted to try to take them on their own terms. Who, exactly, did they think they were?" (4-5)

Welch helpfully demonstrates that ignorance, intolerance and insularity can be just as much a characteristic of the Left as it can be of the Right. I appreciate the fact that Welch recognizes this inconsistency that is common in her circles.

2. Pointing Out Evangelical Inconsistencies

Another reason why this book is helpful is because Welch has no qualms about pointing out things she didn't quite understand. She is remarkably fair-minded in her portrayal of evangelicals, but she doesn't shy away from pointing out our inconsistencies. Some of these are big blind spots that we ought to consider.

Here are some examples:

Is getting saved to avoid hell a good motivation for becoming a Christian or not? Thomas Road gave her a conflicting answer. Welch's first encounter with this church was through "Scaremare" - a sort of "hell house" intended to scare you into the kingdom. But later she recalled a testimony that contradicted this sort of evangelism:

"Woody accepted the Lord when he was nine years old, but he only did it because he was afraid of going to hell. He said this mockingly, as if it was a cowardly reason, which I thought was a little odd considering the whole shake-'em-to-wake-'em conceit of Scaremare." (57)

Is quick conversion an evidence of success, or faithful discipleship? Listen to how she questions the "easy-believism" she sees at the church:

"How can you know if you've saved someone if there's never follow-up, never counseling, never a progress report? How can you be sure the person hasn't instantly reverted to his old ways? In other words, aren't you simply counting the people who prayed the prayer in that instant rather than counting new Christians?... If you're a sincere Christian you believe all it takes is that instant, as long as you're sincere. Once you've prayed the sinner's prayer, you're good to go. God is supposed to abide in you and guide you, but really your `ways' don't matter. Your name is written forever in the Lamb's book of life.' It seemed evident that evangelicals were padding their rosters." (254)

Is tithing motivated by gratitude or by a desire for financial reward? Welch writes that teaching on stewardship seemed like a way to get more from God, a sort of "card game strategy" (38).

Is there any distinction between giving to God and giving to the Church? Welch writes:

"I had always wondered how evangelicals regarded the gap between church and God. The answer, apparently, was that they didn't worry about it. When they gave, it wasn't that they implicitly trusted the church. They trusted God, who would see their offering and furnish their reward in heaven." (149)

If salvation is about making a conscious choice to believe the gospel, why the emphasis on baptizing small kids? Here Welch puts her finger on an issue I have posted about before. Two hundred years ago, most Baptists didn't baptize children under 18. Today, most Baptist congregations outside the U.S. still refrain from baptizing small children. Welch describes children's baptism in a way that should stir up numerous discussions about the nature of true faith:

"Here at Thomas Road, they baptize a lot of children who grow up in the church. When this happens, the child is often so small that he can't walk down into the pool - one pastor floats the child off into the arms of the baptizing pastor like a paper boat. When the child is immersed, sometimes he's so light that he has to be pushed under. And sometimes his legs fly up out of the water. This seemed strange to me: Woody had told me they didn't baptize babies at the church because they believed a person had to choose to get saved, had to understand what it meant to be a sinner and to have Jesus sacrifice on your behalf. How could a little child apprehend these concepts?" (82)

3. An Outsider's View of the Evangelical Church

Here's one more reason why you should read this book: Welch alerts us to the kind of vocabulary we employ, including the use of some words which seem to have no meaning. For example, what exactly is a "personal relationship with Jesus"? Welch writes:

"You often hear evangelicals use an inscrutable expression to describe their faith. They call it `a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.' For a literal thinker like me, those words had a corporate-speak detachment from content." (91)

"I still had a hard time holding on to an understanding of these words - a personal relationship with God. As in you and God stay up late talking? As in you and God are secret shares? I mean, I knew the rhetoric - an intimate relationship with God and a willingness to put Jesus first was the outward manifestation of real Christianity..."

"Evangelical language was a language of its own, where the rhetoric often didn't mean what the words seemed to signify in English. Words were encoded symbols used to describe feelings evangelicals understood. Sometimes I was able to understand these feelings and crack the code on a turn of the phrase. But not so with the personal relationship with God. With this I scraped and scraped for a more direct meaning, but each layer I revealed was just another picture of a picture." (236)

Welch also points out the subordination of the mind to the heart as a common theme in her evangelical journey:

"Brains could rationalize sin; hearts would hold us accountable. And so evangelicals acted according to what God told their spiritual organ, following whatever feelings were glowing inside them." (123)

This anti-intellectualism is certainly a problem in many evangelical circles, although not in all.

Final Thoughts

Reading through this book, I sometimes cringed at the portrayal of evangelicals here - not because Welch's picture was inaccurate, but because it was so on target. But I fear that my embarrassment at some of the expressions of low-culture evangelicalism is rooted in pride. So... despite my distaste for some of the typical expressions of evangelical faith, I must remember that these people are my brothers and sisters. Part of Christian maturity is recognizing that we are all a bunch of bungling believers. I'm often just as inconsistent and embarrassing as they seem to be.

I also felt torn between my distaste for Welch's journalistic tactics and a sincere desire for her to see beyond some of the evangelical silliness to the glory of Jesus Christ. I found myself hoping for a different ending, that she might recognize her sin and her need for a Savior. I still hope and pray that may be the case.

I wonder how her story would have been altered had she chosen a different church. Evangelicals are a diverse bunch of people. What if she had gone to Redeemer Presbyterian in New York? Or Saddleback Church? Or First Baptist Dallas? How would her story have changed?

In the end, get this book. It's well worth your time. Read it. Learn from it. Pass it on to others.

A well written story. As other reviews have said, more perhaps about the author than about the supposed subject of the book. Interesting to see a complete outsider's reactions both to the gospel and to Christians.

She chooses Falwell's church because it is so very different from her own experiences and values. But is Thomas Road Baptist Church a true representation of American Evangelical Christianity? Definitely not. It is a Fundamentalist church - very legalistic, anti-intellectual and doctrinally not too deep or sophisticated. In this respect it is very different from many Evangelical churches of various denominational affiliations. While all Fundamentalist churches are Evangelical, the reverse is not true. Had she chosen Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC or Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis or The Church of the Apostles in Atlanta,(to name only a few) perhaps she wouldn't have had so much to write about?! At least fewer superficial, cultural and regional issues. I suspect her reaction to Tim Keller, John Piper or Michael Youssef would not be as condescending as the way she thinks of Jerry Falwell.

It reflects poorly on Welch that someone who is clearly bright, reflective and well-educated didn't read widely of deeply enough to make clear these distinctions well before her journey at TRBC began. When she notes Franky Shaeffer and Jim Wallis for their "scholarship", that too is disappointing.

When I saw the title of this book, I could not wait to read it, but I was disappointed, and felt somewhat misled. The book reads a bit like a diary, one with very little historical context-setting or introspective reflection. It's more like "this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened," with some snarky comments thrown in here and there. As someone who has been on both the inside and the outside of the Evangelical milieu, I was hoping for a lot more intellectual rigor and deep reflection about the meaning of this experience and interpretation of Christianity. The writer shows no understanding of nuances in the faith or the many schisms and sub-sub cultures and infighting. There's just not a lot of depth about the faith here. It's more a story about the writer, and I just did not find her very interesting. I'm guessing there are some much better books about this topic that are not so well read because they did not have the catchy hook of going "undercover."

I chose to read this book because I wanted to get a glimpse of the evangelical community -- a serious one, and one unmotivated by any particular political agenda. After reading it, however, I feel that what I ended up with was more of a memoir -- I found I learned a lot about the author, Gina Welch, and a small number of evangelicals whom she came to know well, but that I wasn't learning nearly as much as I had hoped to or could have done about the world the latter inhabited because the focus remained primarily on Welch and her quest.

Part of the problem, ironically, is Welch's approach to her research. She chooses to be baptized and to join Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Church not out of religious faith but in order to pursue this project. That -- understandably -- makes her relations with those she writes about uncomfortable and artificial, at least on her side. As she reminds us, the reader, all too frequently. Indeed, sometimes that discomfort tips over into self-flagellation, and endless 'what if' self-questioning. It ends up as a theme that gets battered to death, as is that of her discomfort with some of the core assumptions of those she comes to know. We are reminded, over and over and over, of how nice and warm and welcoming her new church-based social circle is and thus how jarring their occasional homophobic comments become. As she writes, these moments "made it difficult . . . to push past my alienation to see our bonds and commonalities." True, and striking -- the first time or two. After more than 200 pages, these two points, repeated over and over again, lose their freshness. And start feeling tedious.

Overall, I think these problems are a reflection of a lack of focus for the narrative. It rambles, and there are a lot of anecdotes and stories and incidents that don't shed light on anything new, but felt to me as if they had just been included to add extra narrative color. Instead, it's just another random tidbit, not telling me anything new, not giving me a fresh 'aha' moment, and not moving the story forward at all.

Perhaps it was inevitable that while I was reading this, I'd be comparing it to The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, which I read last spring and thought was an excellent book. It tackled the identical question from a slightly different tangent, and even covered some of the same timer period. (Both Kevin Roose and Gina Welch are 'undercover' at Thomas Road/Liberty at the time that Jerry Falwell dies.) I had expected Welch's book to surpass Roose's, but it doesn't. Paradoxically, while Roose never gets baptized (but does participate in prayer sessions, etc. as a normal Liberty student would), he somehow seems to have more empathy for the people he is with, and arrives at a more nuanced understanding of that particular segment of the evangelical community. It's also a more focused narrative than Welch's, and I never felt as if I was trying to plod through it to the finish line.

That said, the book earns three stars because of its writing, which is solid throughout and occasionally extraordinarily good, and the fact that there are some intriguing insights here, however buried they may be. But if Welch arrived at a new understanding of evangelism, evangelicals, etc., as opposed to close friendships with a small number of people who happened to be evangelists, I didn't see that. The book's ending, to me, felt as if she had decided that the experiment (which unlike Roose's, wasn't 24 hours a day, seven days a week) was over. Certainly, any moments of clarity or understanding in the book up to then were dwarfed by the endless self-analysis over her own dishonesty in misrepresenting her conversion, over her own suspicions about evangelicals, about her ongoing discomfort with some of their beliefs and actions (like the fellow missionary who takes a gun with him to Alaska, just in case), etc. The point that I found most intriguing -- the fact that it wasn't until she was baptized and became a member of the church that she somehow became 'real' to people that she had met previously -- worthy of their attention and friendship -- was never really explored.

Overall, this was a disappointment to me. Still, in the absence of many other books of this nature, it's still worth skimming for those with an interest in the topic.

In the Land of Believers by Gina Welch
Metropolitan Books, 2010
328 pages
Non-fiction; Religion; Memoir

Summary: Gina Welch undertook a journey in to the church founded by controversial preacher Jerry Falwell in order to understand evangelicals in comparison to her own Jewish/atheist liberal background.

Thoughts: I saw several reviews of this in the blogosphere and I enjoyed reading Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple (which I recommend and read pre-blog), which seemed similar. His was only for a semester while hers was more long-term. I was pleased to see it in my library but this book seriously underwhelmed me.

I found Welch's introduction condescending as if evangelicals were lesser than her and those like her and were possibly not even human. But to her surprise, they turn out to be mostly nice people who struggle and mess up just like everyone else! I'm technically an evangelical Christian (although more liberal than those that Welch met) and I'm pretty confident that fundamentalists of all stripes, atheists, agnostics, pagans, etc, are just people who are in many ways similar to me. That's not groundbreaking.

I was also concerned with her deceit; while I've read that she didn't begin this book with a contract, she got it in the middle of writing, I feel like it was written for her profit. I was also uncomfortable with her decision to be baptized without believing. Baptism is important to the Christian faith and I believe very strongly that it is wrong to be baptized without believing. I don't know why she couldn't have attended the church and worked from there without going so far in her deception.

I did identify with her somewhat though in terms of not quite understanding all of the Christian-ese and being uncomfortable praying out loud as I have only been a Christian for two years. Her fear of evangelizing was also convicting for me; I believe in my faith and I should be less hesitant about sharing it with the world. I also identified when she talked about how friendly and warm and nice everyone seems and how it's a little scary. My college Christian community is filled with the nicest, most caring people I've ever met and I've been afraid that they'll look at me and find me wanting but instead I've found myself growing and emulating them (well, really emulating Jesus).

She also had valid concerns about the homophobia which appears. I'm in a more liberal place than she is but even so I've seen disconcerting happenings of homophobia within my particular Christian community.

Overall: 3/5. I found the basic premise somewhat insulting and I didn't think it was particularly well-written.

Cover: I like the plainness and color.