John Mark Reynolds: Welcome to Recollecting Glory. I’m John Mark Reynolds. I’m a philosopher and a member of St. Paul’s Orthodox Church here in Houston, and it’s my pleasure to have with me one of my colleagues today, Dr. Holly Ordway.

Hello, Dr. Holly Ordway.

Holly Ordway: It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

John Mark Reynolds: So, you are a typer person. You’re a Roman Catholic but we’re not going to get into inter, uh, ecumenical dialogue. I almost said interfaith dialogue but that’s ...

Holly Ordway: No, no, no, ecumenical.

John Mark Reynolds: It’s entirely inappropriate. We’re going to leave that side of it out because you have probably written, I think, one of the best conversion books done in the last 20 years in your walk from atheism into Christianity which is kind of the opposite story from that which we hear so often on Twitter. Talk to us about that. Say anything you want to set us up. How in the world does a grown-up—you’re a grown-up convert, not a little kid—move from atheism to Christianity?

Holly Ordway: Well, it’s kind of a long story, and it has different stages. I mean, one thing probably worthwhile mentioning, my book’s title is Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms, and the Not God ...

John Mark Reynolds: Which everyone should buy from Ignatius if they can.

Holly Ordway: Thank you.

John Mark Reynolds: I mean ‘cause it really is, it’s not only—so I’ll say something that might help people see what moved you—it’s not only an important story. It’s not only rationally written, as you would expect from a professor, but it’s beautifully written. Maybe we would expect it from a professor of English unless we never read anything by professors of English because they’re very rarely beautifully written, and beauty had a lot to do with your conversion from atheism to Christianity, didn’t it?

Holly Ordway: It did, and, you know, the title Not God’s Type reflected how I thought of myself for a long time because I was raised in a non-religious home. There were some elements of cultural Christianity, for instance, we had Christmas carols at Christmas, a nativity scene. So I wasn’t growing up anti-religious or atheist but I also wasn’t given any instruction. We had no Bible in the house. We never went to church.

John Mark Reynolds: When you were ten, if somebody had run up to you, “Do you believe in God?,” you might have said yes but not in any meaningful sense?

Holly Ordway: Well, interestingly, I actually had a conversation with a little boy at the bus stop when I was about eight, and I actually remembered this the other day where he asked me did I believe in God or not and I remember saying, “I don’t know.” And ...

John Mark Reynolds: You’re agnostic at eight.

Holly Ordway: And actually the reason I remember the story is that my neighbor, who is slightly a grade or two higher, said, “Oh, that mean’s you’re an agnostic,” and I remembered it because it was a new word, and I liked words.

John Mark Reynolds: Yeah, I find it really shocking that you would like words. I mean, not shocking at all. So at some point if I’m getting the book right, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this book—I tweeted my way through it most seriously—at some point you became kind of hostile to Christianity. What caused this?

Holly Ordway: Well, there were again two sort of shifts in that. I went off to college, my freshman year at school,

where I was not a believer but I wasn’t a non-believer either.

John Mark Reynolds: Right.

Holly Ordway: And I was spiritually open. And for instance I remember going out in the words at, you know, Yule. You know, I went to UMass Amherst. There was a lot of New Age stuff going on. I thought, “Well, that’s cool.”

And I started looking for some sense of spirituality and said, “Oh, Mother Nature,” and I didn’t get any vibes from Mother Nature, and I said “Oh well, OK, that’s nice.” But then as I went on the next few years as an undergraduate I gradually just absorbed this idea that Christianity and religion in general, but specifically Christianity, was just passé. It was not something that intelligent people really bothered with and I didn’t have any substance that I knew of the Christian faith to counteract that. Now I was reading some great Christian poets and great authors in my literature classes ...

John Mark Reynolds: Right.

Holly Ordway: ... that again, as you said John Mark, that beauty and that vision of a complex and interesting world was captivating my imagination just as my imagination had been captivated as a little girl with The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. But I didn’t have any context in which I asked, “Is this actually true?”

John Mark Reynolds: Lewis, who’s an Anglican, Tolkien, who is Roman Catholic, both talk about—though only wouldn’t use this phrase I think often—baptizing the imagination. Do you feel like your imagination was baptized when you were a little kid?

Holly Ordway: Yes. Yes, very much so.

John Mark Reynolds: So I have a lot of Orthodox listeners, that if they’re not careful, will baptize their child, as well they should

but they might not baptize the imagination of their child who grows up with violent video games or grows up not reading good books, wholesome books, interesting books, books that make you long for beauty and they don’t have to be Christian books, just beautifully written books and I’m wondering if you think maybe your parents didn’t set you up as a possible pre-convert by exposing you to a ton of beauty. Did they do that on purpose or were they just good people?

Holly Ordway: I don’t think they did it on purpose—about setting me up—but I think out of their instinct for beauty and for storytelling it was the right instinct, and my parents just loved books. Neither of them with a college education, very much working class but really believed in education, really believed in reading. We didn’t have any money when I was growing up but we went to the library every week, and I could always get as many books as I wanted, and if we had some spare money, my mom and dad would get me books. And so that kind of environment where I was really encouraged to read but also, you know, a certain mindfulness in getting me good things to read, good stories, and looking back now, I can see my response to Lewis and Tolkien in particular really was the baptism of my imagination because what I encountered there was grace and I didn’t know what it was but now I look back and I can put a name to it. I can remember the experiences that I had reading The Lord of the Rings, reading particularly The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and just having this vision of beauty and truth and something I could almost reach out and touch and that stuck with me and then in college again I encountered, you know, Hopkins and, for instance, Herbert, these great poets, but I didn’t hang on to it and I became more and more just assuming that “Oh, that was an old-time thing. People back in the day did it.” I still wasn’t a hostile atheist. That actually happened when I went to get my first master’s degree.

I went to North Carolina, to UNC Chapel Hill. I’m a New Englander; I went to the South. It was a culture shock, and one of the things that was part of the culture shock was that there was a fairly assertive kind of evangelism where people would walk up to you, and with all good intentions (I see now) say things like, “I’d love to tell you about Jesus” or “Are you saved?” and to me who had no language for this “What does it even mean ‘Am I saved’? Saved from what? How can Jesus love me? He’s a dead guy.” plus the fact I’m very reserved, and the brashness of a total stranger coming up and being in my face of “Well, you need to read the Gospel!,” it really put me off, and that led me to be really hostile about Christians and shifted my sort of passive atheism into an active atheism where I said, “OK, this is stupid.”

John Mark Reynolds: Right.

Holly Ordway: “It’s just people who cling to faith because they’ve got nothing better. Clearly, they’re not rational. You know, atheism is more rational.”

John Mark Reynolds: In one way, the smartest Christians you know are dead Christians.

Holly Ordway: Yeah.

John Mark Reynolds: And I think that if Orthodoxy isn’t careful, I mean here’s something most Roman Catholic and most Orthodox churches get right: that is, church itself is beautiful, the liturgy is beautiful, there’s some attention to beauty, there’s been some attention to the artwork, the iconography, not just artwork for the Orthodox or for Catholics.

So that’s good.  That’s a good thing.  But if we’re not careful, all the great Christian beauty we run into will be not of the twenty-first century, not alive. So it sounds like you read lots of beautiful dead Christians and met lots of obnoxious living Christians.

Holly Ordway: And there is nothing that would have gotten me into a church to see an actual worship service where I could’ve seen the beauty living ...

John Mark Reynolds: Yes.

Holly Ordway: ... but I would never have set foot in there because the people I met who I knew were Christians were obnoxious.

John Mark Reynolds: Well, I think, you know, Orthodox Christians need to be careful. If it is the case that what you ran into, and I’m guessing in North Carolina it was, were evangelical stereotypes, let’s remember that a kid can get turned off by Christianity by going to parish council or seeing the parish fight over, you know, what happened to the silverware after the last dinner. I mean the temple may be beautiful but the people inside of it can often be very nominal, very cold, more interested in their ethnicity than in Jesus, not really having lives transformed. I mean, the one thing you would have to say about the people who were being obnoxious to you is that maybe their lives were transformed. They were trying to live in the twenty-first century. Again, I think both of us we love old things but I find newer things—I’m immediately repelled by them in some ways unless it’s an iPhone. So we win that but we do want to know smart living Christians, people who take their faith seriously. Is that what brought you around? What do you feel, like, brought you around?

Holly Ordway: I would actually say it was the dead Christians who helped bring me around.

John Mark Reynolds: OK. So awesome, because the living Christians just let you down.

Holly Ordway: Well, there is a living Christian who’s very important in this.

But I actually did my PhD dissertation on Tolkien and fantasy and so this was really important in that even though I was an atheist and very hostile I was still drawn towards this literature that was so beautiful and so meaningful even though I thought it wasn’t true.

John Mark Reynolds: OK, so pushback. A lot of Christians think of Tolkien as the non-Christian fantasy writer. What’s Christian about Lord of the Rings?

Holly Ordway: Everything.

John Mark Reynolds: Yeah, I agree with this, of course.  But give us three things.

Holly Ordway: I would say its overall vision of the world - that there is beauty and there is brokenness ...

John Mark Reynolds: Mm.

Holly Ordway: ... and that beauty and truth matter and are in a sense more foundational than the brokenness. I would say what Tolkien calls the eucatastrophe, the good catastrophe, the happy ending, ...

John Mark Reynolds: Mm.

Holly Ordway: ... which is a story of the Resurrection enacted, so it lives out in the story of the joyful turn from the hope being crushed at Mordor or at the Crucifixion to waking up, you know, in Gondor or the Resurrection. It actually helps you live what it means that the Resurrection actually happened.

John Mark Reynolds: So many of us saw that at the fall of the Berlin Wall where this thing that we couldn’t imagine ever coming to an end in our lifetimes, if you’re my age,

came to an end really without a shot being fired by the power of the Holy Spirit. Give me a third thing. Lord of the Rings was Christian and helped you in what way?

Holly Ordway: Well, it has Christ figures. And so, for instance, Frodo, who is a Christ figure in his suffering and his sacrifice, but there’s also Aragorn, who is the Christ the King figure.

John Mark Reynolds: Yeah, Return of the King.

Holly Ordway: Yeah, and so there’s a multiplicity of Christ figures that helped show a complexity, a wholeness of what it means to see Christ.

John Mark Reynolds: That’s interesting because unlike Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia where Aslan isn’t Jesus but Aslan is like Jesus there isn’t one character in Lord of the Rings. Gandalf is like Jesus in some important ways but also very much not like Jesus in other ways.

Holly Ordway: Yeah, and I think I didn’t put those pieces together until much later but I was captivated by what I now see again as grace working in and through this and eventually I finished my PhD, I went off to teach literature, and finally I got to the point where there’s a dissonance where I finally recognized here are these dead Christian writers whose work I admire, whose work I find beautiful and meaningful, and yet I’m completely dismissing the faith that they hold.  And I realized there’s got to be something more here, ...

John Mark Reynolds: Right.

Holly Ordway: ... that I need to at least understand.

John Mark Reynolds: Well, I have listeners, you know, who have children, grandchildren, or they themselves are strugging with faith. Give us the name of the book again, and then tell us you’ll come back and finish the story at some point.

Holly Ordway: I will. The name of the book is Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms.

John Mark Reynolds: And it’s done by Ignatius, and I really would advocate, you know, that people get this book and buy it, not because they’re going to agree with every single thing you say but because you’re so unique, so rare, so worth hearing, and for those of us who love Christianity, it’s a story that needs to be told in our time.

Thank you, Holly Ordway.

Holly Ordway: Thank you.