Devout: A Memoir of Doubt

Young adults who grew up in evangelical homes and churches are asking lots of questions these days about the faith they were taught. Anna Gazmarian is one.

Here’s my book review of Anna Gazmarian’s new book; the review was published last week in the Englewood Review of Books…

Add Devout: A Memoir of Doubt to a long and growing list of books by evangelical and exvangelical writers who reflect on their faith (and their faith formation) in remarkably personal and often critical ways. Devout is Ann Gazmarian’s first book, and with her newly-minted MFA from Bennington College it is unlikely to be her last. I look forward to her future writing.

What makes Devout startling, given the religious environment in which she was raised and then that environment’s response to her mental health diagnosis (a response she acknowledges to be a kind of “religious trauma”), Gazmarian does not lose her faith, or reject it, or do all that much in the way of deconstructing it.

She seems to end her story with pretty much the same faith she started with, even though she writes in the preface that “I’ve been breaking down and rebuilding my concept of faith, searching for a faith that can exist alongside doubt, a faith that is built on trust rather than fear.” We will have to take her word for it. What Gazmarian describes as “breaking down and rebuilding” might also be described as earnest and thoughtful questioning, but she never strays far from the faith she received as a child. While some writers who have deconstructed their evangelical faith moved to mainline denominations (Rachel Held Evans), others have moved away from faith entirely to various forms of agnosticism (Abraham Piper). At this point Gazmarian seems unlikely to do either.

Gazmarian’s memoir covers only a few years of her life, from her early to mid-twenties, from college life to marriage and the birth of her first child. Her story begins with her first year of college in her native North Carolina. In early November, she receives a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder, a mental illness often characterized by mood swings between depression and hypomania, and one of her first questions, seemingly while still sitting in the psychiatrist’s office, is “why did God allow me to have abnormal brain chemistry?”

Gazmarian’s questions, we soon learn, take her throughout the book to the Bible, especially to gospel stories which she often recounts in great detail (though not always in great depth). The first such story is Jesus and the Gerasene Demoniac which, as Gazmarian notes, is found in all three Synoptic gospels. She makes a link between mental illness and demonic possession, and the reader learns that this link has been part of her faith formation. “To avoid these forces of evil,” Gazmarian writes, “I steered clear of Tarot cards, Harry Potter, and psychic readings. I feared being possessed by a demon and prayed every night, even in college, for God to protect me against the forces of evil.”

That Gazmarian should make such a quick leap from a bipolar diagnosis to “the forces of evil” is revealing not only of her spiritual life at the time but of the religious environment which shaped and formed her early faith. The response of her pastors to her diagnosis is, as she admits, disappointing but not surprising. She seems to anticipate what they will say, and in that sense they do not disappoint. The response of her friends, however, is no better. Only her parents, to their credit, are described throughout as unfailingly supportive, always paying for her treatment and medications, or going along with her changes in plans.

After leaving the college where she started, Gazmarian makes the curious decision to attend North Carolina State University in Raleigh (with its more than 36,000 students). When that school turns out to be unsuitable (“transferring to a school with forty times as many students as where I came from was a change I never embraced”), she eventually finds her way to Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, more than 800 miles north. Hope is a college of the Reformed Church in America, rooted in conservative, Reformed theology, but different in many important ways from the fervent evangelicalism of her childhood.

“What I liked about Hope,” she writes, “was that chapel services and practicing Christianity were not mandatory. I’d be free to participate in faith however I felt comfortable.”

Hope also introduced Gazmarian to a faculty member who is referred to only as “Dr. Glidsan.” In a note at the beginning of the book, Gazmarian alerts the reader that “this memoir is a work of creative nonfiction.” To that end, “some characters have been combined and renamed.” I suspect that this is true of Dr. Glidsan, whom I have been unable to find online. My friends on the faculty at Hope say they do not recognize the name. It was in Dr. Glidsan’s “Introduction to Poetry,” however, that Gazmarian discovered a kind of call – or at least a path forward in life. Dr. Glidsan says to Gazmarian, “You have what it takes to write.” And later, “You’re going to be alright.”

That Devout has found its way to a major New York publisher (Simon & Schuster) and has managed to be reviewed in national publications (like the New York Times) is a tribute both to her writing and to the timeliness of her topic. Though this seems to be an unsettling time for many in the evangelical world, Gazmarian, it seems important to note, steers clear of the political issues and culture wars sweeping that world. Wisely, she has narrowed the focus of her writing to mental illness and its connection to her life and faith.

I find myself wishing two things for Gazmarian: first, that the biblical reflections to which she is drawn become deeper than they are. One does not need a seminary degree to write thoughtfully and deeply about the biblical text. I hope her engagement with the text grows as she does because she has something to teach us. And then, I wish someone would introduce her to the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian and philosopher. I suspect that Gazmarian would find in him a kindred spirit, someone who is no stranger to despair and who dares to find spiritual meaning in it.