A young pastor wearing an acid-wash denim shirt and designer glasses shaped like safety goggles recently announced on Twitter that the location of his new church is in your pocket. He created an app-based worship service, an online hub where people can log on and “fully experience church” without actually, physically gathering together. This platform is, in the pastor’s words, tailored to “meet you where you are.”
Contrast this vision of church with that of First Reformed writer/director Paul Schrader, who told NPR that “you don’t walk out of church ’cause you’re bored. You go to church to be bored.” For Schrader, Sunday worship isn’t designed to meet someone where they are; it’s meant to provide an earnest, contemplative space that people can’t find anywhere else. Reducing church to a consumeristic experience would betray its identity, neuter one of its core functions.
The (in)consistency between identity and appearance, between belief and practice, is a dynamic Meghan O’Gieblyn obsesses over in her debut essay collection, Interior States, published earlier this fall. In the preface O’Gieblyn writes that what unites her essays, if anything, is an interest in loss, “particularly the loss of direction that occurs after the decline of a doctrine, an economy, or an entire worldview.” But I think the real thematic spine of her work is an interest in coherence and authenticity. Many essays in Interior States investigate the claims and arguments of everyone from conservative evangelicals to Midwestern tourism marketers to secular scientists, shaking their pockets to see if something genuine or tenable turns up.
O’Gieblyn was raised in a home where Bible camp attendance was expected, secular music was banned, and prepper food was stocked with apocalyptic fervor. Though she abandoned her faith after briefly attending Moody Bible Institute, O’Gieblyn still can’t fully shake its lingering effects. “To be a former believer,” she confesses, “is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime.” The metanarrative that once gave purpose and direction troubles her imagination like a partial splinter not yet plucked.
For O’Gieblyn, American evangelicalism traded its identity away, forsaking its defining characteristic as an alternative community in order to score short-term political points and claim cultural relevance. (App-based churches are arguably in view here.)
In “Sniffing Glue,” the author writes that the church’s eagerness to adopt the secular world’s marketing strategies and public relations acumen while still claiming to reject the secular world itself contributed to her rejection of the faith. “In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity,” O’Gieblyn writes. “If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market.”
This argument comes to full flower in “Hell,” an essay that traces the development of both the church’s doctrine of damnation and O’Gieblyn’s stages of disbelief. “Over the course of my teenage years, Christians began to slip into awkward reticence about the doctrine of damnation,” she observes. “Believers still talked about the afterlife, but the language was increasingly euphemistic and vague.” As a young student, O’Gieblyn wondered why a seeker-sensitive megachurch failed to mention repentance and hell. Now, she chalks it up to marketing: “It goes without saying that pastors who are trying to ‘sell’ God won’t mention hell any more than a Gap ad will call attention to child labor. Under the new business model, hell became the meatpacking plant, the sweatshop, the behind-the-scenes horror the consumer doesn’t want to know about.”
Christianity is weird and offensive to modern sensibilities. O’Gieblyn is put off by its doctrine, to be sure, but she is more alarmed that the church would rather spin this fact than own it. The “church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue.”
Following these lines, the essay “A Species of Origins” recalls an ironic visit to Ark Encounter, the creationist theme park featuring a life-sized Noah’s Ark exhibit. “I’d expected to find some remnant of this older, near-extinct form of Christianity—one unconcerned with passing fashions, one that was secure in the mysteries of scripture. Instead,” O’Gieblyn discovers, “I found the church’s latest attempt to bewitch unbelievers with glitzy multi-million-dollar productions.”
Similar to the way she interrogates the market-tested doublespeak of evangelicalism, O’Gieblyn takes on the manicured identity of the Midwest in “Midwestworld.” She writes of her visit to Greenfield Village, a living historical museum outside Detroit that recreates the sights and sounds of an old Midwestern town and is more or less emblematic of Midwestern nostalgia. This underscores the fact that the Midwest tends to reach for myths as a reaction to a fast-changing world.
Greenfield Village opened its doors during the Great Depression, when people were broke, but still considered it worthwhile to pay for the potent evocations of a more successful era. A place like Greenfield Village helps scratch the itch of people who, like the author’s grandfather, cling to stories that express “a longing for a time when the country still relied on the brawn of men like themselves who had, despite coming from humble origins and not going to college, managed to lift their families into the middle class.”
Greenfield Village is a museum of nostalgia, a telescope aimed at the north star of the Midwest’s imagination. “The irony, of course,” O’Gieblyn reminds us, “was that the way of life the park romanticized was precisely that which [Henry Ford, the Village’s creator] had helped usher into obsolescence with the automobile and the modern factory.” Michigan was never a perfect place, and “the Midwest” is only the heart of America in our imaginations—it’s always had ugliness if you knew where to look.
O’Gieblyn further examines this idea in the essay “Pure Michigan.” Pure Michigan is the Great Lake State’s tourist slogan, used to romanticize its offerings and potentially woo vacationers. But as idyllic as the billboards and commercials paint Michigan to be, O’Gieblyn notices the cracks in the acrylic: “There was a time when I loved the Pure Michigan ads because they mirrored the way the terrain of my childhood existed in my imagination,” however, “when you live here year-round, it’s difficult to sustain the illusion.” O’Gieblyn seems almost disappointed when reckoning with the fact that the reality doesn’t live up to the legend: “it’s tempting to believe that this is a place set apart: that the water itself is redemptive, that it will make us clean.”
Interior States doesn’t cherry-pick the Midwest or evangelicals. It points out the hypocritical notes of secular scientists, too. The essay “The Insane Idea” outlines the history of alcoholism treatment and examines recent, popular critiques hurled at Alcoholics Anonymous. One stream of new AA critics is all about tracking data; the drinker just needs more information to ultimately change their own behavior through sheer will, they say. Another leading critic of AA disagrees with the idea that a drinker can rationally think her way out of addiction, but he refutes AA’s core tenets, too. In fact, this critic dismisses the very notion of free will, insisting humans are “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” But until we can figure out the cure-all drug for alcoholism, this scientist claims, cognitive behavioral therapy will have to do. He asserts that free will does not exist, but in order to get and stay sober, “people need to feel that they have an ability to influence the course of their lives.”
O’Gieblyn doesn’t let this logical slip-up get past her. “Aren’t such strategies a contradiction in terms for someone who doesn’t believe in free will?” she asks. “If the leading scientific experts contend that recovery from addiction depends upon belief in a fictional entity—free will—why is it any more ‘irrational’ to believe in YHWH, the spirit of the universe, or the community of fellow alcoholics?” At the end of the day, we’re all just placing faith in the unknowable and claiming we know. A scientist and hip evangelical pastor both put on their safety goggles the same exact way.
The essay “Ghost in the Cloud” explores the similarities between the transhumanist movement (technologists attempting to thwart death) and the Christian teaching on resurrection and the afterlife. O’Gieblyn finds the promises of transhumanism compelling at first. “I had initially been drawn to transhumanism because it was grounded in science,” she writes. But she soon realizes she was merely escaping one tidy, totalizing system and running into the arms of another. “In the end, I became consumed with the kind of referential mania and blind longing that animates all religious belief.” Perhaps no ground is perfectly level.
Interior States is a significant work. Not only because of its fascinating exploration of American subcultures, its precise, dryly humorous prose, or its deft weave of cultural criticism and personal essay. This book is important because its author doesn’t let anyone off the hook, not even herself, as she aches for a different world, a different us.
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