Mary Jo recently discussed her book Why I Still Believe with John Stonestreet on his podcast Break Point.
John began by asking and answering an important question. “Do the hypocrisy and failings of Christians invalidate Christianity? Of course not, despite what the media or the waves of ‘I was a former evangelical’ narratives would have us believe.”
Mary Jo was a guest on Sean McDowell and Scott Rae’s podcast Think Biblically to discuss her book Why I Still Believe. Here’s a preview of the transcript:
Sean McDowell: Welcome to the podcast, Think Biblically, Conversations on Faith and Culture. I’m your host, Sean McDowell, professor of apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.
Scott Rae: I’m your cohost, Scott Rae, Dean of Faculty and professor of Christian ethics, also at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.
Sean McDowell: Today we’re here with a guest that I have been looking forward to having on for a long time. Number one, she’s a personal friend. Number two is a graduate of our Biola MA in Apologetics program. Mary Jo Sharp has written a new book that’s just wonderful. I want to commend to all our listeners, it’s called Why I Still Believe. She is a full-time professor at Houston Baptist University, writes and speaks, and has just made a wonderful contribution in the world of apologetics and beyond. Mary Jo, thanks for joining us.
Mary Jo Sharp: Hey guys, it’s so good to be on today.
Sean McDowell: In this book really is an apologetics book, but in another sense it’s your story, it’s your journey and you do apologetics, but just in a narrative fashion, which I love. Maybe let’s just start by you sharing your journey to faith, kind of from atheism to becoming a Christian.
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah. Well, part of my journey is that I didn’t grow up Christian and I think sometimes people have trouble with understanding that on the onset because they hear my name’s Mary Jo and that I have this Southern Baptist background. They think I was born and raised in the church in the South and that’s not the case. I actually grew up… I did not grow up in church and I grew up in a somewhat post-Christian culture in Portland, Oregon. In fact, I recently found an article about Oregon that said Oregon had one of the lowest participations in religion in the country back in even the ’50s.
Scott Rae: Wow, that far back, huh?
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah, I was pretty shocked when I found that. For me, Christianity wasn’t part of the culture I grew up in. It wasn’t a huge part. It was what it was, was what I saw on TV in the movies. It’s pretty shallow. But what I did experience growing up in that area was the great beauty of the Pacific Northwest. I saw the beauty and power of the ocean. We also had a rich cultural environment in that my parents love to take me to the symphony and to opera and anything that… Plays, anything they could get their hands on that way. I saw the beauty of what humans could do through the arts. Then my dad was just a huge nature and science buff. He really exposed me to Carl Sagan and what people could do through the sciences.
I think over the years these areas profoundly impacted me. They made me have awe and wonder at the goodness, truth, and beauty I found in the universe, so much so that I think it made me more receptive to discovering what was behind all of it. Well in high school, I had a high school band teacher and for those of you who don’t know, I actually went and got a degree in music education and taught band for a while. I really respected this guy and he was a Christian who hadn’t shared his faith with anyone before and he was burdened for me. My senior year of high school, he gave me a Bible and he said, “When you go off to college, you’re going to have hard questions, I hope you’ll turn to this.”
I actually started reading that Bible, came around to, yeah, I came around to thinking, “There’s probably a God. I should investigate this because it seems to be answering what is the source of all that beauty I found.” In college I went to church for the first time on my own and after looking around a little bit, I found a church that gave a clear presentation of the good news of the savior for mankind. It really brought everything together for me. I trusted in Jesus for my salvation.
Scott Rae: Wow. That’s so… Let me get this straight. Your high school music teacher gave you a Bible in an effort to do something that the culture might define as proselytizing and would probably be fired for today. Is that right?
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah. He actually, when he tells the story, he says he felt like he was going to get fired.
Scott Rae: Oh, is that right? Wow.
Mary Jo Sharp: Because I didn’t respond apparently real well, so he thought I was going to turn him in.
Scott Rae: He thought you were going to rat him out.
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah.
Scott Rae: Mary Jo, before you came to faith, you were a self-described atheist. What were your impressions of Christians and Christianity before you came to faith?
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah, my impressions of Christianity, as I mentioned earlier, I had a pretty shallow view because I didn’t know much about Christianity and my culture wasn’t culturally Christian. I sort of thought Christians were weird. They were the fringe of society. They weren’t normal people. normal people didn’t believe in God or didn’t have a need for that. But then there were these people that went to church, so they were sort of on the fringe of society. That was my view of Christians.
Now I wouldn’t have said it that way because I was taught if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I would never have said that to anybody. But that was, I didn’t know why they were Christians and then Christianity to me, I grew up in the 1980s and I saw the televangelists and some of the scandals that happened there. To me it looked like an institutional organization that just sort of asked for people’s money, but they weren’t to be trusted. I saw it as something that people kind of just did. They did it for whatever reason they needed that, but it wasn’t for the intelligent, compassionate human beings, but just for those people who needed something in their life that I didn’t need, and I’d probably would have seen it also as people who desired power and control. I would have that view of some of the pastors in Christianity.
Listen to the Podcast Interview and finish reading the transcript here
I grew up dreaming of a white Christmas with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney. Christmas was about red, green and white. It was about lights on houses, displays in stores and snowy weather. Christmas was a time of stressful hurrying about to make the desserts, see the family, give to charity, wrap up school work, find the perfect presents and watch that newest movie on which I waited all year. It was about parties and friends and church musicals. Oh…and it was also about Jesus. As the slogan reminds me, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Of course “Jesus is the reason,” but there were also so many expectations this time of year. Specifically, and prominently, there were my expectations of the holidays. All of these things seem to stem from traditions to which I have clung from childhood to the present. I wanted to feel a certain way, and I was going to pursue that feeling at all costs.
Yet something unexpected happened this holiday season. I finished reading The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis and his writing interrupted my entire holiday mindset. What did he do? Let me share three ways Lewis wrecked my American Christmas.
1) Lewis made me aware that what I thought I had to do, or had to have, during the holidays was all a pretense; traditions taking the place of real contentment and joy.
Traditions, in of themselves, are not inherently bad, but I hadn’t realized how much I was clinging to American Christmas ideology and visions for my happiness[1] at this time of year. All of these traditions should serve as signposts pointing toward the source of the traditions. Instead, the signposts have been replacing the source of joy. Lewis’ writing helped me to reflect upon my abuse of the traditions in the place of the source. He helped me to understand my humanity in a fallen world. From what or whom, exactly, do humans derive their contentedness? Where can I find real joy? Would I even recognize real joy? Even the human vision of what is beautiful and good has become distorted. Christmas should be a reminder of the pure goodness, beauty and joy found in the nature of God; a momentary vision of restoration.
2) Lewis made me long for an advent that was deeper and more mysterious than my wish to have family, quiet and the perfect gifts.
Every year, I seem to slam into the holidays with my head spinning. I rarely get a moment to process the meaning of Christmas, of the Incarnation of God. This time of year is the time to pull back the curtain of American culture—the heavy veil of individualistic desire—and to gaze upon the real story, salvation history. What was God doing so many years ago? Why did He send the second person of the Trinity as incarnate on earth? How does this act make a difference in my life? Where do I fit into the story of God’s redemption on earth? What does His gift mean for those around me? These are the questions of the Christmas mystery. God gave us the perfect gift of Himself, in a way that we didn’t expect. Nothing else I can procure or produce at Christmastime comes close to the vision of God’s act of beauty and goodness: His gift of peace on earth and His goodwill towards men.
3) Lewis gave me a sense of longing for another world of which I’ve never felt before. Everything else fades before the desire welling up in me for the goodness of His presence.
While I won’t trash all my American Christmas traditions, I will definitely enter into the season with a bit more caution for how I view and participate in those traditions. If I must have anything other than the beauty and wonder of the Lord Jesus in order to fulfill my heart at this time of year (that pumpkin spice latte, family gathering, or pristinely decorated tree), I have made that thing an idol; no matter how innocuous the thing appears.
So perhaps Lewis didn’t wreck my American Christmas but rather salvaged it by reminding me of the source of joy. Therefore, I’ll sing those holiday songs, decorate with red, white, and green, grab that perfect gift for someone I love…and do all things as a reflection of the goodness of God’s redemptive act in human history. Let the love that God has for you affect all those around you. Be reminded that God came into darkness as glorious light. He broke into our kingdom with his own kingdom. This season we celebrate the goodness of God. We celebrate His love of the creation.
[1] Not to mention the problem of seeking happiness, which itself comes with so much cultural baggage.
Thanks to John and Kathy for chatting the other day about Why I Still Believe. Listen to Mary Jo’s podcast interview The Ride Home with John & Kathy (WORD-FM) from November 4th here.
Mary Jo was interviewed by Kerby Anderson host of Point of View Radio Talk Show Thanks to Kerby for a great conversation.
Thank you to Outreach Ministries for featuring Why I Still Believe
Perhaps one of the more difficult problems with my questioning was that my doubt was directed toward a person, and I was basically unaware of it. My doubt had beginnings in distrust of people, human persons who professed allegiance and submission to another kind of person. In hindsight, I can see that my distrust of Christians had transferred to distrust of Jesus. I had experienced poor relationships, authoritarian leadership, and anti-intellectualism from the outset of my commitment to a local church body. I had very little Christian relational influence upon which to model my relational trust of God. It’s like people who can’t believe in God the Father because they themselves experienced a bad father. (Ironically, I had a good father, who generally didn’t mention God unless he was telling a particularly funny joke.) However, if asked, I would have told you that I was interested solely in discovering what was true. Unlike “those” people who had grown up in church, I had no background in Christianity, no commitments I had to uphold. I could see with the dry light of objectivity.
Can you see my hubris? What a mess! I do believe that, in whatever way was available to me, I went looking for the truth about God. Yet I tend to think that when I’m investigating an issue, such as belief in God, I’m going to look at things for “just the facts.” For instance, when I initially grappled with the question of Jesus’ resurrection, I treated the whole endeavor as an academic research project. Well, the facts suggest that either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not rise from the dead. Logically, both cannot be true. So I’m going to have to go with the hypothesis with the most explanatory power … wherever the data leads.
I had such an idealistic view of my endeavor. Curiously, I didn’t carefully think through that it wasn’t an abstract idea or impersonal hypothesis that I was investigating, but a person. At the end of my investigation, if I believed that God was real, I wasn’t just faced with accepting a set of facts but a real person. Why does that matter? Because not only did I wonder whether belief in Jesus was merited, but I still had a lingering distrust of people, and Jesus is a person.
Seth and Nirva are multi-talented artists I’m thankful to call friends. I really enjoyed our conversation about Why I Still Believe
Thank you to Jonathan Petersen for his wonderful article. Included is both a link to read and listen to the conversation.
Critics ask, “Why would anyone become a Christian when there’s so much hypocrisy in the church?” With de-conversion stories being reported, why is it that the church inadvertently produces atheists despite its life-giving message? Does atheism explain the human experience better than Christianity? How can the truth of Christianity matter when the behaviors of some Christians are reprehensible?
Bible Gateway interviewed Mary Jo Sharp (@MaryJoSharp), author of Why I Still Believe: A Former Atheist’s Reckoning with the Bad Reputation Christians Give a Good God (Zondervan, 2019).
Describe why you were an atheist as a young woman.
Mary Jo Sharp: I didn’t grow up in the church and didn’t know much about Christianity other than what I saw on TV and in the movies. The societal environment of my childhood years also lacked a cultural Christianity: Oregon has rated among the top states for least religious participation in America. So, I thought non-religious people were the standard or the normative people and that religious people were somewhat of the fringe of society.
I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist growing up because I didn’t encounter that term until later on when I encountered Christianity. I just didn’t believe in God, nor did I see why I needed to do so.
Read the rest of Jonathan’s article here.
Mary Jo had such a fun time chatting with Leah Chapman of Apologetics Simplified. They covered a lot of topics!
In this episode I interview Mary Jo Sharp about her new book Why I Still Believe. We talk about using our own personal wrestlings and faith struggles as an apologetic for God as she has done in her book. We also discuss the church, human nature, the Lord of the Rings, and The Good Place TV show, and Professor Snape! Tune in for a fun, nerdy conversation with Mary Jo and learn how to smell like Christ.
Mary Jo was interviewed by Laurie and Josh from Living in the Land of Oz Podcast
Author, professor and Christian apologist Dr. Mary Jo Sharp joins the Living in the Land of Oz podcast this week to share about her journey from atheism to Christianity. In her latest book, Why I Still Believe, Mary Jo unpacks the significance of marrying logical arguments with our personal stories in order to achieve a holistic apologetic for our faith, and she was kind enough to share some of these ideas with Laurie Nichols and Josh Laxton.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7oBrmxvkRRFmxdlTyE63Bv?si=XokWIhxuQBCqzbjO5DBjwg