In today’s episode, historian Molly Worthen (UNC-Chapel Hill) discusses the most radical pivot of her life: becoming a Christian after years of religious skepticism.
Moderated by psychology professor Thad Polk (University of Michigan), you’ll hear Molly’s story of journeying from doubt to faith. She explores how the historical claims of Jesus’ Resurrection, existential questions about meaning, and honesty about her doubts led her to the Christian faith. She also answers questions from the student audience about what her life has looked like after becoming a Christian.
This forum was held at the University of Michigan in March 2026. Thank you to the student planning team for making this event possible.
Unlike every other metaphysical proposition about the universe, Christianity stands or falls on one thing that either did or did not happen in history: the resurrection of Jesus.
Christianity is fundamentally a proposition about reality. It's a story about God's entrance into history, and its truth does not depend on my feelings on a given day.
Faith is a relationship. It's a bit like developing a friendship with another human. There's a certain amount of due diligence you can do in advance—you can Google the person, look at their LinkedIn profile, ask around about what this person is like—but you can't actually know what the friendship is like until you take the leap and enter the relationship, and make yourself vulnerable.
You don't ever get to extinguish doubt. Tim Keller had a great way of putting it. He said, "Faith without doubt is like an immune system without antibodies."
If you feel locked in a relationship with the universe, you're not. You probably have a lot of questions that are behind the questions that you haven't articulated to yourself. And you won't articulate them until you get into a conversation.
It's interesting to me that some of the famous skeptics were frank in explaining that they lost their faith not as a result of their scholarship in science or in New Testament studies, but because of the problem of evil. Because of its incapacity to give them a satisfactory account for their own and for other people's suffering. I don't know why I would be immune from those struggles, except to recognize that Jesus is God who became man and entered into the human condition and dealt with the horrors of death. That gives us something to cling to, a source of understanding that is absent from other answers.
It is an incredible burden to be told that the universe means nothing and your life means nothing until you decide what it means, to go down the buffet of philosophical and religious traditions and simply pick and choose what feels nice and useful. I don't think you can really evaluate a philosophy or a religious tradition until you submit to it, until you admit your own limitations that you can't fully understand from the outside. So I think there is room, especially in college, for really full-throated, bold participatory exploration.
