Five books to explain the weirdest parts of religion to secular people

Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She received her BA and PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Spellbound (2025), is a history of charisma as both a religious and a political concept from the Puritans to the Trump era. Apostles of Reason (2013) examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures. Her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost (2006), is a behind-the-scenes study of American diplomacy and higher education told through the lens of biography.

[Writers Read: Molly Worthen (November 2013); The Page 99 Test: Apostles of Reason]

At Shepherd Worthen tagged five of the "best books to help a secular person understand the weirdest parts of religion," including:

Testing Prayer by Candy Gunther Brown

When I picked up this book, I was vaguely aware that a lot of people pray when someone they know gets sick, and I had read that there’s interesting social science research on how religion helps people lead healthier, happier lives. But I had never really thought about whether prayer actually works.

Candy Gunther Brown takes up this dicey question of what scientists should do when people say that prayer cured cancer, restored sight to the blind, or even raised someone from the dead. She gets into the history of how people in the medical world and the church world have thought about whether it’s possible to “test prayer”—and, if it is, whether it’s a good idea to try.

I came to the subject of miraculous healing in a skeptical frame of mind, but Brown is so meticulous in going through medical records, clinical trials, a zillion surveys and interviews—plus, she is extremely cautious about drawing conclusions.

She made me think differently about the line between scientific investigation and religious belief, and question my own biases as a Western, minority-world person on a planet where most human beings rely at least as much on God for healing as on earthly medicine. I had to ask myself: am I really willing to say most of those people are nuts?

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue