Texas native John Marks leaves his Northampton home behind this week for a nationwide tour promoting his first non-fiction book, Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind. A veteran journalist, former 60 Minutes producer and author of Fangland: a Novel, War Torn and The Wall, Marks spent two years traveling the country, interviewing evangelicals—pastors, musicians, activists, missionaries—whose faith he once shared. The result is an in-depth look at how religion fits into the secular world, Christianity's role in politics, and one man's spiritual struggle to understand how, or even if, his former faith fits into his present life. The Advocate sat down with Marks recently in Florence to discuss the issues raised in his book and an accompanying film, Purple State of Mind.
Advocate: In your book, you write that you were "born again" when you were 16. How did that happen?
Marks: My parents were Christians, first Methodist, then Presbyterian, but church for them was a Sunday kind of thing. After we moved to Dallas, I started going to Young Life meetings. Young Life [a nonprofit organization dedicated to recruiting youth to the ways of the gospel] had something called the "key kids" concept, where they targeted the popular kids, like those that played football. I had a lot of friends who were athletes that went, plus a lot of the girls I wanted to hang out with went, too. I went home one day and told my parents they were going to hell if they weren't saved. They weren't excited… Years later, my younger sister got even more into it than me. She and a group of her friends would get together after school and speak in tongues.
How did you lose your faith?
I stopped believing Jesus personally saved me in 1993. Before that, I had started learning about other faiths. As I would take questions to [evangelical leaders] they became less impressive to me, and things in the outside world became more impressive.
Then, in '93, I was on assignment in the Balkans in the city of Privoj. We had heard that some Muslim victims of ethnic cleansing were being held captive by the Serbian paramilitary after their village had been burned to the ground. I went to talk to these Muslims with an interpreter. There were about 20 of them, and I ended up sitting down with one of them. He was about 60 or so, and his village had also been razed six months before and his two sons were taken to a labor camp. Yet this man still had hope left.
"My village burned," he said. "My next door neighbor was shot. We lost everything. Now we've been here and we can't leave. But I know it will be okay. When this is over, they'll let my sons go and we'll all go somewhere else and start over."
It was at this point the interpreter leaned over and whispered in my ear, "I happen to know that this man's sons are dead."
What did you do? Did you tell him?
I couldn't do it. It would have been obscene. Just the horrible perversity of it—his sons were the only thing keeping him going. I asked the interpreter not to tell him either. It just changed my belief in this world. How could God exist? I didn't just casually let it drop. I wanted to believe.
How does your family feel about your lack of faith?
Well, my wife [who is Jewish] and I are raising our son Jewish. He's going to Hebrew school. I don't believe in God but I consider [doing so] to be a valid, real experience in the world. I don't want to deny my son the chance to experience his religious heritage. My dad knew this would happen the whole time. When I first converted, my father said, "Watch, he'll end up not believing in God at all." My mom is pretty upset about the idea of me completely rejecting Christianity.
So, after years away from your previous faith, what prompted you to write this book that required you to be immersed in the evangelical world for two years?
It started with a piece I was working on for 60 Minutes, "Left Behind," about a series of Christian novels about the apocalypse. I was in Texas interviewing a couple. At the end of the interview, the husband asked me if I was going to be left behind—if I'd accepted Jesus Christ as my savior. Within two weeks of the airing of the "Left Behind" piece, The Passion of the Christ came out. Most of the people around me were asking me, because of my religious background, "What the hell is going on?" They were saying, "Those same people got this president elected." They were feeling hostile, angry and scared about it… and the evangelicals were feeling misrepresented in the media and experiencing a real sense of disillusionment about Bush.
With Bush, they felt like one of their own was stepping up. He wooed them as a politician, and now they had the sense that they had been used and were being condescended to. I became uneasy with the gulf that was widening in the country. I hoped that my book could grease the wheels and get people talking.
Religion in politics is on the rise. Does that have anything to do with your decision to write this book?
It was a catalyst, yes. I think this is the beginning of religion in politics, and I think it's a good thing that evangelicals are in politics so they don't have a bunker mentality… [The evangelical world] is changing. There's a new generation of evangelicals that are becoming more aware. Their values aren't set in stone and hopefully they're thinking of religion fitting into a secular world in more interesting ways.
Was it hard talking to these people you once had a commonality with, but now differ significantly from?
I felt at home. I knew these kinds of people, and yet I wasn't like them anymore… One night I was breaking bread with a couple who was having trouble with their bipolar son. They had basically decided to commit him. I showed up at their house the next morning to attend church with them. They didn't tell me until we were already in the car driving that after I'd left last night, their son had walked up the on-ramp of the highway and was killed. They didn't tell me when I got to their house because they knew I wouldn't have gone [to church]. I called a friend of mine later that night and said, "You are never going to believe what happened to me today." He was horrified that that's how bad this couple wanted me to go to church with them, that they would use the death of their son. I think, though, that they wanted me to be there. Their other sons lived far away and it would have felt wrong of them not to have me there.
The sermon that day, however, was repugnant. The pastor was saying how even farmers in India who've never heard of Jesus Christ are still going to hell, they're still damned, and that being gay is not even a sin, it's a visible outpouring of God's wrath on the human civilization.
Do you think that man created religion?
Yes, I do. I think that religion is a collective memory. We have things we can't explain, and ways of coping with things we can't explain. Some religions change over time to accommodate us, some adapt, and others stay as a vestige of the past. A piece of [religion] is organic. It's alive.
