Two Great Books About Changing One’s Beliefs

Religion is a touchy matter, and it can become even more touchy when a person changes their beliefs, possibly estranging themselves from family and friends. Even so, if you’re willing to journey with me into this territory, I highly recommend two recently published books — one fiction, one nonfiction — about people who questioned and changed their beliefs but retained respect for the faith they were raised in.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, is about more than questioning one’s beliefs, but that questioning plays a major role in the book.

Gifty is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at Stanford University. She is haunted by her background: her broken family; the racism and xenophobia they faced; and her Pentecostal upbringing, which weighed heavily on her as a child. In Gifty’s words: “Back then, I approached my piety the same way I approached my studies: fastidiously. … I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear.”

By the time she was 11, her father had left the United States for Ghana, never to return; her brother had died from a heroin overdose; her mother was no longer able to care for her; and she was on the way to losing her faith. But while she resents how her strict religious upbringing affected her–“It wasn’t until my freshman year in college, in biology class, that I learned what and where a vagina truly was”–she also refuses to hate it. As an undergraduate student, she got into a discussion about religion, specifically Christianity, with some of her classmates. When one described religion as dangerous, saying “Religion has been used to justify everything from war to anti-LGBT legislation,” Gifty countered, “Belief can be powerful and intimate and transformative.”

Reflecting on the disagreement, Gifty tells us, “… though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me.”

Meanwhile, Gifty has exchanged her religious faith for a faith in science. With an almost religious fervor, she hopes that her hard work will save her from the fates of her brother and mother.

I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle. Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, stalking me, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. I had seen the alley. I had watched [my brother] walk into the alley and I had watched my mother go in after him, and I was so angry at them for not being strong enough to stay in the light. And so I did the hard thing.

Transcendent Kingdom, pp. 36-37

But as she pursues her Ph.D. research, Gifty realizes that science is failing her just like her childhood faith did, and so her quest for answers, for meaning, continues.

If you are looking for a clear sense of closure, you will be disappointed. Gyasi will give you hope, but she will also give you ambiguity. It is Gyasi’s willingness to sit with that ambiguity that makes Transcendent Kingdom such a beautiful book.

Sealed: An Unexpected Journey Into the Heart of Grace by Katie Langston

Sealed is a memoir chronicling Katie Langston’s journey from the Mormon faith to Christianity. While Gifty and Langston are lightyears apart in terms of their basic biographies, there are striking similarities between them. Like Gifty, Langston grew up in a profoundly religious home, and like Gifty, she was fastidious in her piety. From an early age she was haunted by the idea that “you can do something horribly wrong without knowing it.” Because worthiness through purity was central to her faith, Langston relentlessly pursued purity, even confessing to minor sins she hadn’t committed. “I was thinking of words that rhymed with lamb and I accidentally thought ‘damn,'” she told her mother. “I’m not sure, but I’m worried that I whispered it out loud.”

As she entered her teen years, she began to be troubled by what she had been taught. Faced with a God who requires you to earn your way to the Celestial Kingdom, Langston learned to hate him. “I hated his rules and requirements, his worthiness, tests, his severity,” she writes. “Most of all, I hated him for the fact that I was beginning to suspect that he had never loved me–and never would.”

Langston continued to be troubled by her faith into early adulthood. She checked all the boxes (and more) expected of her as a Mormon woman, serving as a missionary, getting married, and starting a family, but her endless fears of unworthiness fed her resentment toward God. When she first heard Mormon speakers arguing for a different view of God–a God whose favor does not need to be earned but who loves us as we are–it was a breath of fresh air leading her on a journey that eventually caused her to leave Mormonism to pursue ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Despite rejecting the faith of her family and the community she was raised in, she ultimately writes about that faith sympathetically. She cannot belong to it, but she loves her family members who embrace it, and she still cherishes some of its deepest values. “My [Christian] baptism was the final uncoupling with Mormonism,” she writes, “the last, definitive break. … Simultaneously, my baptism was the culmination of everything Mormonism taught me to value. Connection, togetherness, hope for a future unity: these are what God desires, and as creatures made in God’s image, we desire them, too.”

Like Gifty, Langston may have left her childhood faith, but she refuses to condemn her loved ones who still hold to Mormonism or to proclaim that faith as evil, even though she no longer agrees with it. Both books are honest, loving approaches to the story of someone questioning their faith, well worth reading if you are interested tackling this sensitive subject.

Full disclosure: I know Katie Langston, though not well, and we are both employed by the same organization, sometimes collaborating on projects. I read Sealed because I learned of it through my work and, as someone who lived in Utah for a couple of years, was interested in the topic. Katie did not ask me to review her book (she probably doesn’t know about my blog), and I did not do it as a favor for her; I am reviewing it here because it moved me and felt like a good companion to Transcendent Kingdom.