From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
No Ordinary Path
Columbia doctoral student Lauren Winner outs herself as a Christian.
Lauren Winner says she's worried. Though it is not immediately clear why: She is attractive, smart and cool enough to wear cat-eye glasses with rhinestones. Moreover, at age 25, she is about to publish her first book--"Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Religious Life" (Algonquin).
But here's the rub. She is also a graduate student, in the middle of writing a doctoral dissertation on the Anglican Church in colonial Virginia. And her book, a confessional Christian memoir, will expose her as a devout and orthodox Christian and as a writer of a trade book. This is a double whammy of weirdness in a community of secular scholars. "It is not clear," she says carefully, "that it is intellectually respectable to be religious. And publishing a spiritual autobiography might further undercut my ability to be taken seriously."
Of course, she is absolutely correct. Christian scholars, particularly those who belong to evangelical denominations, are systemically cut off from the academic mainstream. But this class of worry is not novel for Ms. Winner. She is, after all, a person who threw off her upbringing with a secular Jewish father and a mother who was a lapsed Southern Baptist to become an orthodox Jew.
In her freshman year at Columbia University in New York, after years of studying and somewhat tortured consideration, she immersed herself in the ritual bath, the mikvah, and converted. And thus Ms. Winner spent her college years doing things that were considered exceedingly weird by most of her peers: She wore long skirts, never exposed her upper arms, kept a kosher kitchen, didn't engage in random sex--indeed in her entire undergraduate career, she went to only two parties outside the orthodox Jewish community.
In short, she did everything a good orthodox Jewish woman should do, right down to baking two loaves of challah every Friday. Except for one thing. She began to doubt. And she had a dream about Jesus. She woke up in a state of certitude, deeply convinced that the dream was sent from God and that Jesus was "real and true and sure." By her senior year, Ms. Winner was feeling both disaffected from the orthodox Jewish community and spiritually blah. She was, in the God-talk phrase, having a dry spell. And, of course, there was that dream.
So Ms. Winner focused her scholarly attention on Christianity: She read books; she wrote papers about the Great Awakening. And, a few years later, when she was at Cambridge University getting a master's degree, she was baptized into the Church of England and became a Christian. A committed Christian--Ms. Winner has mastered the Book of Common Prayer, is active in a church, studies the Bible, practices a prayer discipline and worries about sin.
But the Cambridge experience did not end her anxieties. How could she go back to Columbia for doctoral study--to a neighborhood where everyone knew her as an orthodox Jew--and present herself as a cross-wearing Christian? Her first strategy, which she now admits was suboptimal, was not to tell anyone. She didn't want to appear ditsy. After all, she says good-humoredly, "it is flaky to be religious at all, and then it is really flaky to switch religions from orthodox Judaism to orthodox Christianity."
Now she has written about her journey, although--true to form--she hasn't told her colleagues at Columbia about her book, to be published Oct. 15. Those worries again. So, why, I ask, is she outing herself as a practicing Christian and a popularizer by writing the book in the first place? She says that it is her way of giving witness to the awesome impact that God has had on her life. "I am a decent writer," she says, "and this is an effective way to witness for me."
But I also wonder whether she has larger worries. This has been a long and twisty path for a 25-year-old--is she worried that the path will turn away from Christianity? She is ready for that question. She flips back her long brown hair and answers immediately and intensely: "God in his graciousness has made me a Christian. The institution that I will give my life to is the church." About this, at least, Lauren Winner is not worried.
Ms. Lee is a member of the Journal's editorial board and a student at General Theological Seminary in New York.
