Walker begins by recounting the same sort of familial creation myths that I believed in so implicitly as a child: stories about one’s own family, repeated over and over, that explained why you lived where and how you did, why the way your family did things was right, why they were essentially ordained by God. In Walker’s family, it was the story of the night her parents, disquieted by a weekend they had spent partying with friends, burned their playing cards in the furnace and resolved to live holier lives, set apart from such activities. (In mine, it was that when my parents were invited to be missionaries to South America, my mother responded, “Isn’t God blessing us here in North Carolina?” but then changed her mind and agreed to go after a weekend’s silent prayer retreat.) Repeated often enough, stories like these can take on almost Biblical proportions. In describing a childhood organized around these family myths and full of church, Christian community, Bible memorization, shared meals, and more, Walker writes, “I had no inkling then, of course, that their fervent beliefs and language could be called an ideology. I thought it was just obviously and simply the truth.” I was nodding along: yes, exactly, that’s exactly how it was for me too.

But for most of us, that kind of absolute certainty can’t last for long. What makes this book so lovely is that Walker doesn’t discount the experiences she had before the cracks appeared. Instead, she lovingly and compassionately paints a picture of the cracks—from her love for a glow-in-the-dark plastic cross necklace that violates her church’s proscription of religious images, to the jealousy and cattiness of the teenage counselors at Bible camp, to making a friend at school who is Not Fundamentalist and who Walker worries is therefore Not Saved (the friend’s family is Lutheran). Wherever she comes in contact with the outside world, in short, her certainty grows a little thinner—until, as she describes in the prologue, she’s sitting on her bed one day, aged 16, listening to “The Purple People Eater,” and the thought suddenly occurs to her: “Suppose none of this is true?” Looking back, Walker can see that that is the moment when her journey of faith began, but she manages to show too how utterly unmooring an experience like that can be—how “fraught with grief and confusion and astonishment.” 

Looking back at her parents, Walker writes, “My fundamentalist parents were always driven by anxiety about change… they wanted something they could count on at any cost.” But there is a cost to the kind of denial that that sort of certainty demands. If you are going to maintain the kind of absolute certainty that fundamentalist belief calls for, the world you are going to inhabit will have to be very small indeed. Like Walker’s mother and many of her fondly described “fundamentalist people” (and like my own father, a staunch fundamentalist until the day he died), there are those who are capable of maintaining that stance all their lives, firmly shutting their minds to doubts (or maybe even not experiencing doubt, even though that’s difficult for me to imagine). Some, perhaps many, of those people are loving, generous, and deeply sincere. Walker depicts those she knew and loved with humility, acknowledging her own faults and missteps along the way—the ways she clung to certainty in her own right, and the painful process of letting go. 

But, she writes, “Certainty is one of the fundamentalist values I don’t believe is possible anymore. I say that with sadness. Who doesn’t long to be certain?” In its place, she says, “I nominate faith.” As limited, mortal creatures, we humans can only be so certain about anything. For the things we hope for but cannot see, faith is all we have. Faith is much scarier than certainty, Walker writes, but, like the rickety steps that lead up to the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, it has held so far, no matter how many pilgrims entrust their weight and lives to it. It can sustain things like the loss of parents and brothers and communities as well as, if not better than, certainty—as Walker has reason to know. And the further gift of that faith was, for Walker, “a more capacious world, [and becoming] someone who, through sustained attention to the imaginative language of metaphor and symbol, allusion and ambiguity, came to inhabit a wider and more vibrant sense of the world—and of God as its creator and redeemer.” In carefully narrating the ways in which that gift has come to her, again and again, Walker has done a great service to people like me, who have also left behind certainty and entrusted ourselves to faith.