Kate Boyd, An Untidy Faith: Journeying Back to the Joy of Following Jesus. Herald Press, 2023.
I agreed to this review an embarrassingly long time ago, which fills me with regret. I picked this book up and set it down repeatedly for well over a year because I simply couldn’t figure out for whom the book was written.
In theory, I’m the target audience for this book. Just like the author, I’m a 90s evangelical millennial, raised on Chris Tomlin, Left Behind novels, WWJD jewelry, purity culture, and I played for team “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Millions of words have been written about our cohort and our relationship (or lack thereof) with Christianity. Patron saints such as Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey, and Shane Claiborne, among others, jump-started conversations for a generation of evangelical millennials sorting out faith. As blogs shifted to social media and podcasts, the discourse continues to document the experiences of those who left their faith, as well as those who stayed or reinterpreted. Given the volume of name-checks, Kate Boyd is keenly aware of this discourse. This book follows her own process of doing the millennial deconstruction (preferring to call it “disentangle”), and she ultimately decides to stay.
The book is loosely structured around Boyd’s experiences traveling internationally as a communications professional for a mission organization. This provided her the opportunity to see Christianity take on different forms in different contexts. This raised questions for her around what parts of Christianity are culturally white evangelical American and birthed for her the revelation that “if it is biblical, it must be global” (30). The book is not a travelogue or a memoir. The chapters follow a consistent structure: international vignette, American application, and theological tools with scripture. The book has the formal tone of a text intended for small-group or Bible-study use.
With the intention stated to “wrestle with a kind of cultural Christianity shaped by American evangelicalism” (14), this might be the first time the reader might ask, who is the audience for this book? For one, the stories of international Christians are inspiring and often serve as a reality check on white American evangelical practices, yet this isn’t the context of most of Boyd’s readers. She admits directly that she has more to learn about low-income or Black and Brown churches in North America. For a book that aims to reconsider how context affects faith, it spends a lot of time elsewhere. At home, issues feel high-level and glossed over.
Boyd lands in a theological place where faith is more communal rather than individualistic, more context-informed, the Bible isn’t dogmatically literal, more beatitudes, less Evangelical industrial complex, less hierarchy, and more aware of reconciliation, justice, and the importance of meeting basic human needs. Overall, it largely feels true and consistent with many corners of the Anabaptist world. She gently touches on the white American evangelical expectation of cultural supremacy and softly signals support for Black Lives Matter as a justice issue. Interestingly, she comes out in favor of evangelism. She completely avoids discussion of hot-button American evangelical cultural issues.
Why does this matter? Because that question returns again to who the audience is for the book. Boyd aims to straddle a line of Jesus without the white evangelical cultural baggage, a faith that does not fit neatly into one box and tunes out loud voices on both ends (38). But in an era of high polarization in society and within the church itself, is it possible to transcend the carnal messiness? On one hand, the litmus tests and the culture wars within society and Christianity are exhausting. But the window for “third ways” is punishingly narrow. It can be debated whether convenient omissions create the environment in which trust between reader and leader can develop.
Finally, Boyd’s text also bucks the template of the millennial evangelical deconstruction (or disentanglement) story, which involves some level of self-disclosure. Though her travels are a plot device and the book is largely written from a first-person perspective, she shares little about herself. On one hand, the reader is not owed her personal journey beyond what she’s comfortable sharing. However, the few cultural and religious thought leaders who are able to straddle modern polarization and hold complex—even contradictory—views have built some level of credibility and trust with their audiences, often involving a degree of personal transparency. The overall effect is to add to the mystery of the book.
Which brings me back, one more time, to the question that delayed this review: For whom is this book intended? For those who have left, this is not for them. For those looking for a personal story of raw wrestling, also not for them. Ideally, this is for those who’ve deconstructed enough to decide to stay and are non-defensive enough to hear some critiques of white evangelicalism. I’m sure this camp exists, but it’s a narrow passage. Boyd sets an ambitious goal that doesn’t feel quite fulfilled. However, she has space ahead of her to continue developing an untidy theology.