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

By Gina Welch

An undercover exploration of the world of evangelicals, offering an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the faithful

Ever since evangelical Christians rose to national prominence, mainstream America has tracked their every move with a nervous eye. But in spite of this vigilance, our understanding hasn't gone beyond the caricatures. Who are evangelicals, really? What are they like in private, and what do they want? Is it possible that beneath the differences in culture and language, church and party, we might share with them some common purpose?

To find out, Gina Welch, a young secular Jew from Berkeley, joined Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. Over the course of nearly two years, Welch immersed herself in the life and language of the devout: she learned to interpret the world like an evangelical, weathered the death of Falwell, and embarked on a mission trip to Alaska intended to save one hundred souls. Alive to the meaning behind the music and the mind behind the slogans, Welch recognized the allure of evangelicalism, even for the godless, realizing that the congregation met needs and answered questions she didn't know she had.

What emerges is a riveting account of a skeptic's transformation from uninformed cynicism to compassionate understanding, and a rare view of how evangelicals see themselves. Revealing their generosity and hopefulness, as well as their prejudice and exceptionalism, In the Land of Believers is a call for comprehending, rather than dismissing, the impassioned believers who have become so central a force in American life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781429944717

Gina Welch

Gina Welch, a 2001 graduate of Yale University, teaches English at George Washington University. Her writing has previously appeared in Meridian, Time Out New York, and Playboy. In the Land of Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church is her first book.

Book preview

THE RABBIT HOLE

THE PART OF YOU

THAT’S YOU FOREVER

WHEN I BEGAN AT THOMAS ROAD IN THE FALL OF 2005, I WAS more worried about telegraphing a plausibly conservative image than I was about the scruples of telegraphing at all. It wasn’t that I had zero misgivings about going undercover—I did meditate on the wrongness of lying and the string of betrayals my project would likely leave behind—it was that 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. 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. I saw myself as an armchair anthropologist, mapping the evangelical culture; as reality TV troublemakers put it, I hadn’t come to make friends.

I defended this blithe attitude vigorously to myself, and it hardened into the carapace that allowed me to arrive in Lynchburg with confidence. I never expected to outgrow it.

INITIALLY, IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me that to become a member of Thomas Road I could just start showing up at church on Sunday, get talking to people and listen to the sermons. I didn’t know that no one needed to invite me and I didn’t have to be a Christian. In fact, this is the way many people eventually become Christians: you go and you go and you go and then one day a new panel in your brain illuminates, lighting up the once-inscrutable Gospel message, making it gleam with instant, permanent truth. I had no idea that this is part of the purpose of Sunday morning: win the lost.

I thought I had to be the subject of some kind of targeted evangelism effort to plausibly appear at church. So after doing a little research on the Thomas Road Baptist Church website, I decided to attend an evangelism event called Scaremare. It was several steps short of full-fledged church attendance, and here, I figured, I could force the epiphany that would lead me to Sunday services.

Scaremare is a hell house, a haunted house run by Christians capitalizing on Halloween’s spook appeal to draw in secular audiences, terrorize them with slasher scenes and then offer them the opportunity to repent and get saved. There are other, more notorious Christian hell houses, designed to erase the visitor’s perceived line between horror and hell, between fear and godlessness. These hell houses stage actual sin and damnation—dramatizing botched abortions using meat from butcher shops. Hell itself is often dramatized, evoked by foul odors, a heated room, and an encore performance by sinners now suffering under the cloven hooves of demons. One of the most prominent hell houses is run by Bloomfield, Colorado, pastor Keenan Roberts, who justifies the extremity this way: Sometimes you have got to shake ’em to wake ’em.

Scaremare is the original hell house, started at Liberty University in 1972. Though it too is intended to shake ’em awake, the enormity of its popularity in central Virginia is due to the fact that it can be enjoyed on a more basic level: the simple pleasure of being scared witless. The house opens at dusk for six nights in October, and Liberty reports around 20,000 visitors pass through each year.

I had read that in past years Liberty had staged Scaremare at horror-friendly locations like abandoned orphanages and hospitals. This year Scaremare was being held in a boarded-up brick building at the wooded edge of a soccer field. It was rumored to have been some kind of spooky abandoned tobacco storage house where someone may or may not have died at some point.

My visit to Scaremare was my second trip ever to Lynchburg. I was living two hours away, in Richmond, but before that I had lived an hour to the north in Charlottesville for three years as a graduate student and teacher. For most of that time all I knew of Lynchburg was what I had heard: it was a place with good thrift stores and lots of Jesus people. I had the opportunity to see for myself in November 2004, during the run-up to the presidential election, when I signed on to canvass for John Kerry in Lynchburg. On that trip I learned there was a dilapidated corner of town where demented-looking mutts prowled the streets uncollared and eviction notices stickered doors and windows. Almost everyone I met was going for Kerry.

This second trip was to be very different. To prepare to meet the Jesus people, I felt I had to forgo my usual tight jeans and T-shirt-with-the-neck-slashed-out and dress like somebody else. I put on boot-cut jeans and pearl earrings, a bulky sweater and a khaki jacket. I told myself I would fake it if I must, but that I would try very hard to be open to changing my life, believe the Gospel message, to be struck by the truth that Jesus died for my sins. A Charlottesville friend marveled that this was like forcing yourself to go insane, which should have clued me in to the impossibility of plotting to believe in something I distinctly did not. But by showing up in a sort of costume—stuffing another layer of distance between myself and Christians—I was preventing the likelihood of a real awakening. I was eavesdropping, not listening.

THE NIGHT I WENT the line for Scaremare was a hardship line, the kind people wait in for something they can’t live without—three and four abreast, leading away from the house under a series of canopies and through switchbacks up a hill, and then all around the soccer field. I got there at 11 p.m. and was one of the last to enter—a police officer closed the entrance gate shortly after I passed through.

A small movie screen stood in one corner of the soccer field to distract the crowd from the long wait. They were showing M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, to set a spooky mood, I guess. The movie was about a community of settlers living in a clearing, surrounded by a forest infested with dangerous beasts. The perimeter of their settlement is complexly booby-trapped so that any intruders will be instantly discovered. The settlers’ peasant rags and stilted diction suggest that the movie is set sometime in the eighteenth century. But at the film’s end, we find out that these pioneers are actually plain old late-twentieth-century Americans, so alienated by the lawlessness and vulgarity of modern life that they decide to wind back the clock, exiling themselves on a wild slab of private property, reinventing life without trade, without technology, and—most curious—without people of color.

I thought the movie was a pretty nifty metaphor for the self-segregation of evangelical Christians. I had read a theory that the modern evangelical mega church was meant to serve as an alternative to traditional secular communities, and that the desire for such an alternative had its genesis in the legacy of the Scopes trial, which opened up a chasm between creationists and evolutionists. After Scopes, Christians began to perceive they were being ridiculed as Philistines; add to that shame confrontation with a culture increasingly permissive of the Seven Deadlies, the theory went, and it was easy to see why Evangelicals found it necessary to build higher walls.

As I fell in line behind three sweatshirted Liberty boys, the leading lady in The Village—on a mission through the woods to get medicine for her fiancé—was shoving a beast into a ditch.

See, that’s why I love this movie, one of the boys ahead of me in line said. She’s so dedicated. She’s doing all this for her dude.

His friend, features shadowed under a white Liberty cap, noticed me smiling at this observation and asked if I was a Liberty student. I told him no, that I had gone to UVA for graduate school but now lived in Richmond.

We killed your guys’ golf team last week, said the first boy.

These boys weren’t local either—they had come to Liberty from New Jersey, South Carolina, and West Virginia. Tonight was the university’s night at Scaremare, they said, so I should go through with them for a discount. I was surprised: first that there were any Liberty students from the Northeast, more so that these guys—who exuded a warm, boozy odor, smoked cigarettes, and suggested I falsely present myself as one of them—were evangelical Christians.

They asked why I had come alone, so I told them a friend in Charlottesville had recommended Scaremare but didn’t feel like going again. This was half true: my friend had told me about Scaremare but she had never attended and I didn’t invite her along for fear she’d accidentally give me away.

That’s so awesome, the boy in the cap said. He and his friends were nodding and grinning at me intently, seemingly transfixed by my dull answer. I turned my back to watch the end of The Village. I wasn’t nervous they were going to whip out their Bibles—I thought I was prepared for that. It was more that I was suddenly pierced with the fear that one of them was going to ask me out.

The line moved forward almost imperceptibly. One of the boys ran across the soccer field and down the hill to buy kettle corn from a food trailer. People waiting formed circles, wrapped their arms around each other, and jumped up and down for warmth. In the distance, a chainsaw rumbled every few minutes from the vicinity of the boarded-up brick building, and a glowing white tent periodically released figures into the night.

After The Village’s final credits rolled, a short film made by Liberty students played. It opened on a blond college kid relaxing at his desk, chatting on the phone. It’s going to be a sweet party, dude, he says into the receiver.

When the kid gets off the phone and stands up to leave for the sweet party, there is a knock at the door. He opens it to find a boy in a collared blue shirt and khakis, a soft smile curving below his dewy cheeks.

Hey, Jesus, come on in, the kid says.

Jesus enters without saying a word.

The kid tries to urge Jesus over to the TV—You want to play a video game? But Jesus just stands there, looking at him.

The kid sits Jesus down on the couch and offers him a Bible as I might offer a beer, saying he’ll be back later, at one or two in the morning. It seems as if they have been through this routine before.

As the kid opens the door to leave, Jesus rises from the couch and moves toward him, still silent. The kid slams the door. I don’t want you following me everywhere I go, he says, approaching Jesus. I don’t want you in every part of my life. You have to stay here. As he speaks, he backs Jesus against a wall. Stay here! The kid lifts Jesus’ arms and begins to slowly drive imaginary nails into his hands with an imaginary hammer. Stay here! When he finishes crucifying Jesus on the wall of his dorm, he stalks off to his party. Jesus’ head lolls on his chest. The end.

Poor Jesus. Perhaps, I thought, using his power to see into the future, Jesus knew that the boy was going to get into a fatal car accident and wanted to protect him. Perhaps he just wanted to be invited to the party, too? In any event, he seemed to have the boy’s best interests in mind, which made him come across in this representation as a kind of unappreciated dad. In that way, this film seemed aimed at those who already had a relationship with Jesus—someone has to be in your life before you can undervalue him. The boy from the film knew Jesus well enough to express no surprise at finding him in the hallway outside his dorm room.

A family that had negotiated their way through the closed entrance gate noisily got in line behind me. Less wary now with other people nearby, I tried to strike up a conversation again with the Liberty boys. The one in the white cap—the rest, at this point, no longer seemed interested in talking to me—said he’d just transferred to Liberty from the Citadel. I asked if he had wanted to be in the military.

No, he said. The Citadel is a really good school. I didn’t want to go to a party school. I nodded, and suddenly realized that I hadn’t smelled booze on them at all. It was simply cologne.

The boy—Randall—pointed out that I was very tall but somehow still attractive, and he suggested we exchange information before leaving so that he could take me to his favorite steak house in Richmond. I told him I had a boyfriend. Randall nodded and asked me where my boyfriend was. I said that he was a musician and was working in the studio and couldn’t come. If you were my girlfriend, he said, I wouldn’t let you wait by yourself in line all night.

Then he turned around and didn’t speak for a long time. Echoes of his words passed through me like sonar waves; I felt warmed and impressed by his chivalry.

The line went on and on. A cop came by and told us some people had waited for six hours that day. Up ahead, a pizza trailer collapsed its awning and drove away. The teenage girls behind me took cell phone pictures of each other for something to do. Finally, Randall asked me if I’d ever been to one of these before.

No, I said.

He said, At the end they try to take you in a room and talk to you about the Gospel. I nodded. You don’t need someone to talk to you about the Gospel, do you?

I couldn’t read his tone. I don’t know, I said, wondering if I could work up the nerve to get religious right there on the soccer field should he start witnessing.

Well, don’t worry, Randall said. I’m not going to do it. There are some people who feel like they have to shove it down your throat, but I’m not like that.

Randall wasn’t the arrogant jock I had assumed he would be. I liked him. And liking Randall became the windowbox for my first seeds of guilt: I hadn’t been honest with him about why I was there and yes, I probably did need someone to talk to me about the Gospel.

Off to our left was the dark brick building we were waiting to enter, the tobacco house. With its windows boarded up it was sufficiently menacing.

After we paid at the ticket window we were herded into a brightly lit army tent. At the far end of the tent, Scaremare workers periodically waved groups through a heavy black curtain. After a few minutes, a person wearing a white mask and a black jheri-curled wig appeared on a television monitor in the corner of the tent, dispensing the Scaremare rules in a voice so slow it was as if his words were glued to his tongue. Turn off your cell phone. Don’t touch anything in Scaremare. Don’t touch anyone in Scaremare. No smoking. If you’re claustrophobic or have a heart condition, turn back now. After hours of waiting, it seemed a little late for that last slip of advice.

The Liberty boys and I were the last group of the night, passing through the curtain at 2 a.m. I wondered if I—or anyone else, for that matter—would have the energy to accept Christ at the end of the tour.

Randall held the curtain open for me. We were briefly outside again in the sting of night, stalled between the army tent and another curtain, and then we plunged through it into a corrugated steel tunnel, so pitch black I felt vertigo. Thrusting my hands in front of me, I teetered along what seemed to be planks of plywood on the floor of the tunnel. After a moment, I could hear some girls behind me, their squeals amplified by the metal walls. I thought back to the warning about claustrophobia and heart conditions and I wondered how far they were going to go to scare God into us. I mean, was I actually in danger? Would the ground drop away beneath my feet? Would I be separated from Randall, whom I suddenly felt was the only person looking out for me?

I crouched over and lurched forward, Quasimodo-style. After a minute or so of this, I emerged through another curtain into woods, where I hustled to keep up with the Liberty boys as zombies sprang from the bushes and hissed in my ear. We curved a U through the woods, the girls shrieking freely behind us, up toward the tobacco house. We passed a man maniacally swinging a chainsaw, followed a black tarp hanging along the side of the house—cringing at the roars and screams muffled by its walls—and came to the entrance to another metal tunnel. Here the floor planks were wet and canted downward so steeply I found myself wishing for cleated shoes.

Skidding along, it occurred to me that so far this haunted house was designed to deliver me into the arms of a very particular God. If at the end of our torturous little adventure I was supposed to be beaten-down, vulnerable, desperate for salvation (I was sort of feeling that way already), yearning for something to put out the fires of dread; if I was supposed to fear God’s absence more than his presence, then it was unlikely I was sliding into the wrathful fist of judgment. Instead, I would be nestling in the palm of a warmer, cuddlier God—the kind who loved me and delivered touchdowns to my home team.

The tunnel dumped us out in a flagstone courtyard in front of the tobacco house, where zombies milled about a stone fountain filled with blood. We entered the house.

The first room was a yellow-lit parlor, where lifelike mannequins in nightgowns swung from nooses along one wall, and several girls in Victorian dress screamed from their seats, their hair and faces clotted with blood. A boy in a suit churned around the room, laughing menacingly, as if delighted by their pain.

Passing another room patrolled by zombies, we entered a pitch-black hallway. The hall was so narrow that as you walked you could easily run your hands along the walls to find where it turned. Nevertheless I found myself crashing face-first into plaster. The girl behind me kept slamming into me and screaming, Who is that? Each time I assured her, ow, it was still me, and we’d walk awhile with her hand clutching at my shoulder.

Zombies leapt out from around corners. Sometimes the floor of the hall would tilt, leaning me into the wall. I kept sensing that something was going to come down and chop off my head. In places, the hallway narrowed so much that I had to turn sideways to pass through it. I thought of suggesting that Scaremare append a warning to its orientation video that visitors better not be fat.

Finally the hall released us into a ghoulish dentist’s office, where the patients looked like they’d eaten sloppy tomatoes. The dentist danced around, brandishing his glinting tools. In another hall, an open space where the lights flashed on as vertical coffins flew open, zombies sprang out for an instant before plunging back into the darkness. More gruesome scenes punctuated the twisting dark hallways: Dead Santa slumped over in a chair, a group of ghoulish construction workers in hardhats and flannel shirts wielding power saws as they careened around kicking over orange cones and sawhorses.

Another hallway delivered us to an operating room where patients were lying on the floor moaning with their guts spilled out, or sprawled across operating tables like blood-drenched overcoats. Two doctors in bloody smocks stomped around the room. One came so close to me that I turned away, cringing. He brought a glinting butcher knife up to my face.

Why are you turning away? he said. What are you afraid of?

I could see Randall pausing at the entrance to the next hallway, looking back to see if I needed him. I didn’t have a heart condition, but I felt one coming on.

Why won’t you look? the doctor screamed. Before I realized I could simply walk away, I felt he might actually touch his knife to my skin. I hurried to the next hallway without answering.

After one last strobe-lit bloody zombie scene, we came to a final, silent room, in which a boy posed as Jesus on the cross, wrists bound to the planks with wire. His feet rested on a little shelf and he was covered in drippy blood, just as the other victims of Scaremare had been. Like the Jesus in the Liberty video, his head lolled on his chest. Two women in burgundy robes knelt at his feet, weeping. The change in mood, from harrowing to solemn, was a little abrupt.

Outside at last, I felt like pulling the cold air down around me and kissing its face. Freedom!

Down a path, the three Liberty boys trudged ahead in silence, and I wondered if their subdued seriousness was a Jesus thing. I had a hard time seeing how it could have been: Jesus’ cameo was so out of the tenor of the event. For me the tour had been like apple, apple, apple, spaceship. The spaceship didn’t fit into the sequence, so my mind erased it.

We approached a glowing white tent. Two soap-star handsome teenagers in fleece jackets waited beside a rudimentary wooden cross stabbed into the ground.

Did you all enjoy it? one of them asked. This seemed like the wrong verb choice, but the Liberty boys answered yes, so I did, too. The teenagers in fleece herded us into one of the sectioned-off rooms in the large tent. There seemed to be no option to leave.

Inside, five or six people were already waiting, their expressions flat. Penitence, cynicism, exhaustion—what they felt wasn’t clear. We stood on a dirt floor, in the middle of which was a lumpy mound of dirt marked by a cardboard headstone with RIP written on it in black Sharpie. Everyone looked blankly at either the grave or their shoes.

Finally, the family that had been behind me arrived in the tent, and they were followed by one of the teenagers from outside. He had dark brown hair, rosy cheeks, and an easy smile. He stood at the head of the grave, clasped his hands together and asked what everyone’s favorite room was. Several people nominated the strobe-lit room just before Jesus’ room.

A lot of people have been saying that tonight, he said. I’m going to have to commend those guys. He smiled and looked around, taking in each of our faces. There was a good cop–bad cop disjunction in being treated with such warmth moments after having a knife held to my face. I mean, I know that Scaremare was make-believe hell, but many of the performances—particularly the doctor’s—seemed powered by something real and ferocious, which was hard to reconcile with the sweetie pie boy-next-door standing before me. What had they all been so worked up about?

Can anyone tell me what the theme of Scaremare is? the boy asked.

We all averted our eyes. The boy waited. Death? someone finally said.

The boy nodded encouragingly. That’s right: death. Because when you die, your body goes into the ground. It goes somewhere like this, he said, gesturing at the pile of dirt at his feet. "But your soul—the part of you that’s you forever—doesn’t go with your body. It ends up in one of two places: heaven or hell. And you can’t get to heaven just by being good and doing good deeds. Even if you go to church every day and you’re religious and you’re a good person, you’re not going to get into

Reviews for In the Land of Believers

[bnbooklady · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While Welch is certainly not the first writer to take this approach to understanding evangelical Christians (in fact, Kevin Roose was undercover at Falwell’s Liberty University writing The Unlikely Disciple at the same time that she was at TRBC), her approach is the most successful one I’ve found because she really does enter the experience as a true outsider with fresh eyes, and she stays long enough to form lasting relationships (Roose was only at Liberty for a semester). The ethnological aspects of In the Land of Believers are intelligent and insightful, and Welch’s reflections on her struggle to understand how she could come to feel deeply attached to a group of people whose fundamental tenets she finds unbelievable and occasionally frightening are fascinating.In the Land of Believers is a book for anyone looking for a deeper understanding of evangelical Christians (or just a really great read). It is a portrait of community that is both unique in its position atop the evangelical movement and stereotypical in its practices and beliefs, and it is a call for greater tolerance from both sides of the line. As a reader who grew up in mainline Protestant churches but who hasn’t practiced for some time and now find myself living in the south and surrounded by people who regularly inquire as to whether I’ve found Jesus, I saw bits of my own experiences within the pages of this book. But I think there’s something here for everyone, religious or not, and even evangelicals would do well to read this book, see themselves from the outside, and gain and understanding of how secular people experience them.This is a remarkable, informative, fresh perspective on a topic that is familiar and a cultural movement that is undeniable and unavoidable. Welch is fair, kind, and balanced (perhaps I should say “fair and balanced?”) in both her presentation of TRBC’s members and her exploration of what it means for her own identity that she comes to love many of them, to mourn Dr. Falwell’s death, and to continue singing church songs long after she leaves. In the Land of Believers will probably land Gina Welch on many a prayer list, but I’m hopeful that it will put her on many “to-be-read” and “best of” lists as well.Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog.

[gtwise · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If I were to rate this book by its stated intention, I would have given it two stars. As an attempt to bridge the gap between the secular world and the Evangelical world, the book contributes precious little of substance. Instead I rated this book on its value as a means to draw someone into an experience that is created through words: most of the book was about as interesting as any other well-written book detailing someone's investigation into some part of the world, but the ending actually gave me the nausea that I imagine she must have felt and made my skin crawl the way I assume her skin crawled before making the big reveal.But again, I'm judging the book based on how well it told the story of Gina Welch, its author; as an investigation into the 'Land of the Believers,' it offers little. The book begins with Welch's preconceptions of who Evangelicals are - the book then proceeds to confirm most of those preconceptions, but with affection. That is to say, Welch confirms that Evangelicals are every bit as homophobic and ignorant as she initially believes, but now they are taking up prime real estate of her Dunbar Number. She loves them, but yeah they are what you think they are.The book details the adventure of Californian Gina Welch discovering that her liberal worldview does not exclude her from the kind of prejudice she (prejudicially) assumes to be the domain of the Evangelical Christians surrounding her in the state of Virginia. She decides to take an anthropological journey into Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church, going so far as to try to have an experience she can point to as her conversion moment and joining certain smaller groups within the larger church, predominantly a singles ministry. Her heart is progressively won over; her mind remains steadfastly secular. Her journey reaches its zenith in a missions trip to Alaska where she participates in leading 101 people to accept Christ as their Lord and Savior, after which she decides that she can no longer continue lying to the people who have become dear friends to her and consequently bows out of their lives without explanation. The story as a whole tends to drag. Welch adds a lot of details that I believe were included to add flavor and to make subtle suggestions to lead the reader to certain conclusions (X Woman wore too much Y kind of makeup, implying vanity; I painted my nails in good girl pink before heading to church, implying scrutiny; his chivalry was reaching performance art levels, implying chauvinism), which is perfectly acceptable, reasonable, and desirable in a book like this, but after a while the details just feel like they are mucking up the pace. Then there are times when Welch discards the notion that the story is about the church and just begins talking about her day-to-day existence, which leads me to believe that Welch was aware that the fact that she made this journey was more interesting than anything she might have discovered in the course of it. Ideally I think the book could have shaved off a third of its length and been more effective, but that could just be my attention span talking (I would say the same about this review I'm writing, so, hypocrisy). By the third portion of the book, which details Welch's trip to Alaska, you become certain that this is no longer about Evangelical culture. She tries to keep the spotlight focused: she throws out general observations about Evangelicals based on particular occurrences with varying degrees of shoehorning, but they cease to feel organic at that point. Soon you realize that this is a story about the lengths this woman will go to to write a book. It's a story about someone feeling so little about an entire people group that rampant deception in the course of developing intimate relationships seemed perfectly acceptable to her, and then falling in love with those people while still holding onto this devastating deception.I quickly became bored reading about Alaska, but I didn't stop. The mundane events of the Alaskan mission trip are not interesting, but you feel the tension building because you know she has to reveal what she has done to her friends. The spotlight shifts from the group to Gina herself - who is becoming progressively more aware of the gravity of her deception.Approach it based on what it advertises and you will be disappointed. Approach it as what it is - a story of the depths one will go to in order to tell a story - and you might find yourself intrigued. Further, and perhaps this is the books greatest contribution, it is a cautionary tale about failing to see those who are different from you as still being people. This seemed to have been one of the goals of the book and this goal the book fulfills by virtue of existing. The book itself is the warning.

[schatzi_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Gina Welch, in an attempt to gain a better understanding of evangelical Christians, pretends to be interested in learning about Christianity (later, when that gets her virtually nowhere, she pretends to be a convert and is even baptized). Although she never espouses the beliefs of Thomas Road Baptist Church (made famous because of its founder, Jerry Falwell, who dies during Ms. Welch's study), she does make some genuine friends and realizes that evangelicals aren't nearly as alien as she thought.I come at this book differently than the author does; I once drank the kool-aid and was an evangelical Christian myself for several years. It was interesting to see a non-believer's take on the whole spectacle (and, really, it is one - I was pentecostal, and that denomination can be certifiably crazy). Although I agree, to a point, with the whole "we just need to understand one another" vibe of the book, there are some problems to the whole peace, love, and understanding conclusion. The first was experienced by Ms. Welch herself: until she pretended to be "saved," she couldn't go anywhere in the church. She never would have made her close friends had she continued to simply be interested in the church or religion; you have to go full-force into the lion's den. Otherwise, all you are ever seen as is a potential convert. You aren't a person. And I say this from my personal experience, both as a (FORMER) evangelical and as the one tossed outside of the circle because I wasn't a sheep (I don't mean that offensively; I was literally called a goat more than once). Secondly, it's relatively easy for Ms. Welch to gloss over the rampant homophobia present in evangelical circles. She does mention it a few times, but like the "disbelief" in climate change, it's not a central issue. And I didn't expect it to be; she's not gay. However, I am, and I've seen the ugly face of Christianity that Ms. Welch just didn't see because of it.Altogether, the book is okay, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would.

[texasbooklover · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the Land of BelieversAn Outsider's Extraordinary Journey Into the Heart of the Evangelical Church By Gina WelchPicador 333 pgs978-0-8050-8337-8Rating: 3.5 Gina Welch writes "...And you're never more like Christ than when you're forgiving the unforgivable."She also writes "...You can see anything you want if you've already decided what you're looking at."These are my favorite lines from Gina Welch's cultural experiment. Ms. Welch was raised a secular Jew by a single mother in Berkeley, California. She is a Yale graduate. She teaches English at George Washington University. She is a practicing atheist. I just wrote that last sentence and I'm not sure what it means. All of which I point out simply to say that she is not a typical attendee at church. And certainly not an evangelical Christian church. And never a member of Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church (TRBC.) But she was. She went undercover in the temple of the Moral Majority in Lynchburg, Virginia in the guise of a seeker.Ms. Welch successfully pitched the book idea for her to go incognito into the land of Evangelical Christians and return to tell the tale. Which I find a little weird because after all they aren't vegetable cult worshippers or something. Nevertheless, Believers is the story of her experiences at TRBC. Ms. Welch spent years at this endeavor. She was baptized; learned to appreciate Christian rock; studied her bible; joined the singles ministry; made friends; even went on a mission trip to Alaska.Gina Welch surprised me. This book is not the book I thought it would be. Ms. Welch expected to dislike the people she met. She expected to dislike the teachings. She expected to dislike the theology and doctrine. She expected to disagree with the politics. Ms. Welch also surprised herself. Her beliefs did not change fundamentally. But she made friends. She came to enjoy the sense of belonging. She felt the concern of people who genuinely practiced what they preached. She came to appreciate the teachings of a historical Jesus; a man whose values already meshed with hers.And then she had to confess to her pastor and her new friends that she was an impostor. This is the story of Ms. Welch's exploration; her answers; and the questions yet satisfied. This is a good book that could have been better. Ms. Welch is good at description: of people, places and sensations. I got bogged down now and then. The pace picked up during the Alaska mission trip. I found some of the claims of guilt feelings over her dishonesty to be unmoving. But some of these people were a pleasure to spend time with and know that they exist and are doing good in the world.I'll include this again because I like it. "...And you're never more like Christ than when you're forgiving the unforgivable."

[riverrust · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This interesting book by "secular Jew," Gina Welch, is a fun read for those who want to know more about a particular side of Evangelical faith. I think that Christians will be more likely to finish the book once they begin it because they will be familiar with the lifestyle portrayed and more interested in the outcome of this stealth reporting by the author. Ms. Welch went undercover to learn the ins and outs of "Evangelical" Christianity. She chose what she considered to be a bastion of Evangelical faith: Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University. While Thomas Road and Liberty can be considered Evangelical, I would go further and say they are Fundamentalist, and not necessarily representative of all conservative Christians. In her place I might have chosen a school like Wheaton College. Nevertheless, Christians (conservative ones at least) will gain insight into the way they are viewed by some who do not hold to their beliefs. Ms. Welch was very generous with regard to how she portrayed the lifestyles of the "believers" she observed. Still, as I read the book, I could not get out of my mind that Ms. Welch was constantly deceiving those around her. I couldn't imagine how someone could fake a conversion to a faith that puts such a strong emphasis on truth. I call to mind that Jesus said He is "...the way, the truth, and the life..." (John 14:6). All in all, the book held my attention, but it wasn't the page-turner I thought it might be.

[nobooksnolife_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of my reading themes for several years has been the promulgation of Christianity in East Asia, but I always have difficulty understanding the mindset/motivations of evangelical missionaries. When I found this new work about evangelicals in America I thought it might help me out a bit and indeed it turned into an interesting read. The basic dilemma in examining the evangelical movement (or any social effort which involves strong human emotions and beliefs) is how to manage bias or pre-prejudice, and this is certainly the case with In the Land of Believers. One can either read works by evangelicals themselves, or interview them directly, and receive one type of "bias", or one can do what this author did and join the evangelicals (although remaining a non-Christian herself) and try to maintain an objective viewpoint in order to describe their work without the bias of passion. Unfortunately, this tactic results in the author's moral self-examination which distracts somewhat from the central thrust of the narrative.Overall, however, this is a refreshing look at the breaking down of prejudice (the author thought she wouldn't be able to relate to the evangelical contacts but they became her friends) and she came to respect many of them. I still don't completely understand the motivation of people who want to preach and proselytize, but I did gain some insight. As a side-note, this is also an interesting travelogue through some tracts of America from Virginia to Alaska.

[caguerin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received this book as part of the Member's Giveaway program. My track record with these books and Early Reviewer's has been a little spotty so I was not expecting too much. That said, this is one of the better books I have read recently. Gina Welch's infiltration of Jerry Falwell's church was an intriguing story. I have read some of the reviews on Amazon where the reviewer seems to have a real problem with her deception. I get that. But, in my experience (as well as Ms. Welch's apparently) it's not always so easy to ask questions and receive honest answers from people that different from you. So I'm going to put aside any lingering discomfort I may have.What made this book so fantastic is that it is not a "conversion" story. Ms. Welch's core beliefs remain the same throughout her journey. What does change is her understanding of a different culture and her respect for those involved in the Evangelical Church.I really enjoyed this book and have recommended it to several people.

[mmhorman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Gina Welch is a secular Jew who infiltrate Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church on a mission to find out the truth about Evangelical Christians. When she starts out on her journey she is many things that are despised and feared by the Evangelical Christian right. She is a hip, secular Jew from California with a degree from Yale. Needless to say, it takes her a while to figure out the right way to infiltrate the Thomas Road Baptist Church but she eventually does and when she does she finds it easy to make friends and she finds that the members of the Church are kind hearted and friendly and provide her with a sense of community. This despite the fact that the church members had views which she found repugnant.I found the book to be well researched and well written and engaging. The subject of Evangelical Christians is a very important one given power shifts in this country over the last forty years. I do have one huge caveat. Throughout the entire book she seems to be bearing a lot of guilt for infiltrating the church and for making friends based on false pretenses. When she starts the book and even at the end she does not seem to know all that much about Christianity and seems to have many preconceived notions about the Evangelical Church. If being dishonest with her “fellow members” of the Thomas Road Baptist Church was going to cause her so much guilt (and frankly in my mind this should have caused her guilt), she might have used other more honest ways of getting to know the hearts and minds of evangelical Christians. I say this because she does tend to concentrate a lot in the book on her guilt, which has a tendency to be somewhat cringe inducing. On the upside it creates an interesting tension in the book. Will she get found out in this chapter?!Welch seems to have gone into her project with a preconception that because Evangelicals had such different views than her that there was no way for her to relate to them and nothing that she could learn from them. Because of that, when she found that she could relate and that she could learn, it took her by surprise and made it difficult and traumatic to disengage from the church.Nonetheless, I did enjoy the book. Welch's writing about her subjects was very sensitive. I just would have found it more enjoyable if she used interviews with present and former members and/or had observed the Church from the detached viewpoint of an impartial observer as opposed from the viewpoint of someone who by all appearances was completely engaged in the church. She might not have gotten as complete information as she did. However, because I felt that her crisis in “leaving” the church created a huge distraction, for me this would have resulted in a stronger book.

[reenum_4 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

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.

[lesliecp · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Author Gina Welsh decides to explore the world of Evangelical Christianity by infiltrating the Thomas Road Baptist Church founded by none other than the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Gina pretends to be a seeker and chooses to conceal her secular Jewish identity as she befriends people and participates in church activites. She also fails to disclose the fact that she is writing book about her experience. This choice ultimately creates a great deal of conflict for Gina and the people who come to love her.The author's experience rings true with me as someone who once joined and then left a similar congregation. She is honest about the sense of community, trust and friendship found within her church family. However, as she had feared, she is repulsed by some of the attitudes expressed, particularly, about the role of women and homosexuality.I found this to be a thought-provoking and timely read. I would be interested in reading more from this author in the future.

[librtea · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Author Gina Welch, a young secular Jew raised in Berkeley spent two years “undercover” at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. She wanted to learn firsthand about Evangelicals, so she pretended to be a prospective church member. Her book, In the Land of Believers, recounts the experience. During her exploration, Welch became acquainted with many church members and befriended a few of them. She attended church services and various church-related activities. She received the sacrament of Baptism and joined a group of missionaries on an evangelization trip to Alaska.Prior to her journey into the church, the author had many preconceived ideas, questions, and fears about Evangelicals and acknowledges this in the book’s introduction. It was such thoughts that prompted her to explore the church in the first place. The resulting book is an interesting and well-balanced account of her experience. I thought Welch might be unduly critical or mocking in her assessment of the church, but that wasn’t the case. As I read the introduction and noted Welch’s adamant assertion that “I cuss, I drink, I am not a virgin. I have never believed in God”, I wondered if her association with the Evangelicals would change her, and if so, how? Would she possibly become a Believer?I don’t know that the journey was “extraordinary” as the book’s title claims and I wouldn’t say that Welch had any revelations during that time, but there were quite a few enlightening experiences. Overall, In the Land of Believers is a thoughtful and unbiased account: an interesting and worthwhile read.

[florinda_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Trying to get a grasp of the forces driving much public opinion and political action during the last decade, Gina Welch decides to go to one of their sources: Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell. Welch understands that she won't learn much approaching as a reporter or an outsider, so she decides to go within, presenting her secular-Jewish self as a prospective church member. It's a little dicey at first, but as Gina becomes part of the church's young-adult ministry, she begins to learn Evangelical religious teachings and how they inform the worldview of their followers - and over time, is surprised to discover that some of it makes sense to her. And as she develops more connections within the TRBC community, she grows more anxious that they'll discover she isn't truly one of them. When she returns from a mission trip to Alaska with some members of the ministry, it all comes to a head.I was fascinated by this memoir. The "will she be unmasked?" element added a bit of suspense, but I was absorbed by Gina's undercover journey, particularly as her ambivalence grew. I was interested in the information she conveyed about the workings of TRBC in particular and Evangelicals and their practices in general; as a former Southerner, I've known a few, and I feel that I have a little better understanding of them now - which isn't the same thing as agreeing with them. I think Welch reached similar conclusions. While she is honest about her skepticism, which doesn't ever really go away, her portrayal of the people she gets to know at TRBC is pretty even-handed, and at times even compassionate. She acknowledges the elements that provoke snark about Evangelicals among the less-reverent - including her non-church grad-school friends in Charlottesville - but rarely engages in it herself. Welch's writing doesn't call a lot of attention to itself, and my only real issue with it is that some of the church members she talked about didn't make individual impressions on me; I suspect that those were people she didn't get as close to in real life, though, and therefore wasn't as capable of differentiating them for the reader.This could be seen as a "stunt" memoir - a project undertaken just to produce a book - but I don't think that's entirely correct or fair. Gina Welch's investigation was motivated by her own desire to learn and understand, although she did land a book contract after it was in progress. Her personal growth over the course of her two years in TRBC comes across in her story, and the perspective she gains is enlightening to both herself and her reader.

[jsewvello · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The idea of a writer going undercover to attend and observe an evangelical church is a great premise, but I found many parts of this book tedious to read. She often goes into great detail about what happens in a religious service that I would have no interest in attending and I have even less interest in reading about. After spending so much time among evangelicals, most of her insights are not that illuminating. Any person who has followed the evangelical movement through the media or has communicated with evangelicals in their daily lives is already familiar with evangelicals and this book won’t add much understanding.

[tothewest_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church for many Americans was, and still is, the flagship evangelical institution. So, perhaps its not surprising that it drew, not one, but two self-proclaimed liberals to Lynchburg, Virginia to go undercover and observe the evangelical movement in the finest participant-observer tradition. The first of these accounts was Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, published last year. However, rather than focusing on Liberty University, Gina Welch set out to tackle the church proper, which resulted in In the Land of Believers.At times irreverant, but always respectful, the author weaves an account sensitive to the evangelicals, but never apologizes for them. She finds some beliefs indefensible and points tehm out. I found it a welcome read and informative. She explores, for example, why evangelical Christians can be so generous and helpful to one another, but seemingly cold and indifferent to those who aren't "saved". While I thought Welch's approach sensitive, it bothered me that she deceived so many people, many of whom she got to know very well. The sense of unease this created detracted from my enjoyment of the book. To Welch's credit, she also writes that she felt guilty. However, I wonder if she truly considered the ethics of her actions. Perhaps the reason this sort of exposé is so unique, is it wouldn't make it past the approval committee in an academic setting, solely because it lacks informed consent by the participants. Still, if the reader can overlook the ethical considerations, I'd recommend this book with few reservations.

[kaelirenee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Gina Welch is obviously a curious and opportunistic woman. Evangelical Christianity is a hot-button issue that outsiders try to understand and she took the initiative to try and understand the people, not just the figure heads. In her book, she attempts to infiltrate THE Evangelical Church, the Thomas Road Baptist Church, by guessing how she could pass as a seeking Christian. This part was hilarious to me. I was also raised to be fairly secular, but I've lived in the Bible Belt my entire life. I know all you have to do is tell someone you've been thinking about going to church a lot and they'll drag you to every meeting you can fit into your schedule. No sneaking around necessary. While I don't think this book examined the theology and social structures and ideas of the church fully, I understand why this absence exists. I don't know many Baptists who have considered these things. Welch does an excellent job of showing what Baptists, as a group, are. She considers them as people, not as labels (eventually, it takes her a couple hundred pages, though).

[carlym_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author of this book--a liberal, secular Jew with a Master's degree--decided to start attending Jerry Falwell's church in Lynchburg, Virginia so that she could come to a better understanding of what Evangelical Christians are about. SHe pretends to be a potential convert (and then an actual convert) so that she can fit in and see what really goes on and what the people are like. I found her story to be tremendously interesting and written in a sensitive but honest way. I am a liberal Christian--not an Evangelical--so I could relate to some of her concerns about Falwell's beliefs (the role of women, abortion, etc.), and some of the practices of Falwell's church were certainly new to me as well. But it was also interesting to me to see how a non-believer who has never really been to church perceived a church service, the music, the attitude of the congregation to visitors, and the overall experience. I think this book could be interesting both to non-Christians who are curious about an unknown world and to Christians who want to see how outsiders perceive them.The author finds that, although she does not share many of the beliefs of the church members, she nonetheless has things in common with them and that many of them are nice, genuine people. I appreciated that she went into the experience with an open mind and tried not to be mocking or judgmental (even when she must have wanted to roll her eyes). I thought she found a nice balance between describing the events, and her reactions to them, honestly, and in describing them in a way that the church members probably would not find too offensive. She says that her mission was to promote tolerance between liberals and Evangelicals, and I think the book really shows that attitude.

[jocainster · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was expecting more perspective and more of an outsider's viewpoint in this book. Without that, I found it a slow read and a bit of a chore to finish. I would have liked to know more of what the author was feeling throughout the experience. Instead of that insight, I was left to read chapters filled with simple descriptions of events.