Review: "Testimony" by Jon Ward

 

Testimony by Jon Ward
Published April 2023 via Brazos Press
★★★

The tumult of the last few years has forced me to reassess what I really believe (a process I've gone through a few times in my life now). I've had to pull myself away from the easy anger of opposition and redouble the search to know what I stand for, not just what I'm against. And of course, beyond the what is the why, a set of questions that require even more work to answer. (loc. 148)

Growing up in Evangelical Christianity, Ward was taught that the answers were all there—if only you listened to the people who had them. Give yourself over to God and you will be blessed, I suppose. Only later did he start to dig into the teachings he'd grown up with and to ask himself whether the American Evangelical Christianity he knew was aligned with what Jesus said and did in the Bible, and with the gospel teachings he aimed to stay true to.

I'll say this up front (or as up front as paragraph 3 can be): it's a rhetoric that I'm familiar with because I read too much and am curious about church cultures like the one Ward grew up in, but it's not one that I have personal experience with. I read religious memoirs, and more broadly books about religion, because they interest me, but I am well aware that I (born and bred liberal, not raised with Christianity) am rarely the target audience. Here, the target audience is almost certainly someone closer in background to Ward—a white man who grew up in a certain brand of conservative religion but has since questioned it, or started to question it. So if that sounds like you, this will probably make for a bang-up read, especially if you're interested in the way religion and politics have dovetailed in the US in recent (and not so recent) years.

Ward has clearly put years of work into unpicking what he grew up blindly believing, and even if I don't share his beliefs I can comfortably get on board with what he believes about his beliefs, if that makes sense. Take this summary of the idea of faith: If we say we know something to be true 100 percent with no doubts, then we don't need faith. It's only when we realize we could be wrong, and we can't know for sure, that we must rely on belief. Easier said than done (loc. 2917). In a time when so much gets polarized, or stripped down to its simplest form (not in the sense of "truest form" but rather in the sense of "child's finger painting vs. finely detailed portrait"), Ward is looking for what is complicated and complete.

There is a lot about recent politics here, far more than I expected. Ward is a journalist with extensive experience covering national American politics, and he ties the rise of Evangelicalism neatly with the rise of (sigh) the things that led to the absolute train wreck of political nightmare that was the 2016 presidential election and presidency that followed—and the political nightmare of a power-grab that, under the guise of religion, continues. It's not entirely what I want to be reading (it's not new material if you read too much news from respectable outlets, and I try to limit my political reading to said news because just that raises my blood pressure as it is), but it's concisely and precisely done and would be useful for those who have closer ties to Evangelical circles.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.