A memoir of the profound destabilization that comes from losing one’s faith—and a young woman’s journey to reconcile her lack of belief with her love for her deeply religious family.
Growing up in poverty in the rural backwoods of southern Maryland, Jessica Wilbanks and her family built their lives around the Pentecostal church. At sixteen, though, driven by a desire to discover the world, Jessica walked away from the church, trading her faith for freedom and driving a wedge between her and her deeply religious family.
But fundamentalist faiths haunt their adherents long after belief fades; former believers frequently live in limbo, straddling two worldviews and trying to reconcile their past and present. Ten years after leaving home, struggling with guilt and shame, Jessica began a quest to recover her faith. It led her to West Africa, where she explored the Yorùbán roots of the Pentecostal religion and was once again swept up by the promises and power of the church. After a terrifying car crash, Jessica finally began the difficult work of forgiving herself for leaving the church and her family and for finding her own path.
When I Spoke in Tongues is a story of the painful and complicated process of losing one’s faith and moving across class divides. And in the end, it’s a story of how a family splintered by dogmatic faith can eventually be knit together again through love.
“Wilbanks’s slow deconstruction of her family-given religiosity is an evocative inversion of the average spiritual journey.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“This debut memoir conveys a down-home feel with a literary voice.”
—Library Journal
“An earnest account of an adult maintaining ties with her family of origin.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Wilbanks writes with a journalist’s keen eye, capturing the loving chaos of her family’s house and the fervent, bombastic clamor of revival meetings in both the US and Nigeria. . . . Her narrative provides a fascinating glimpse into a faith subculture whose popular image is often reduced to arm-waving televangelists. But even more compelling is Wilbanks’s honest rendering of the profound uncertainty that comes after leaving behind a place that hasn’t changed, but is no longer home.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Wilbanks has a fascinating story to tell, and she tells it well. Especially interesting is her report of her time in Nigeria, where Pentecostalism is hugely popular and potent. But is it viable? Wilbanks wonders, and so will readers like her who may be interested in learning about the roots of faith.”
—Booklist
“This compelling debut is shaped like a search for a long-lost friend, or an examination of a love affair that left the author forever changed. . . . Wilbanks weaves a fiercely candid account of reconciling with a faith whose tenets seem set in stone.”
—Bust
“It’s rare to come across individuals who can so precisely capture what it means to leave a unique and profound (religious) meaning system. Moreover, the ability to unravel the emotionally wrenching and often complex social psychological process of rebuilding a new life, after leaving a fundamentalist religion, is quite the undertaking. Jessica Wilbanks’s new memoir, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss, highlights her own process of leaving the Pentecostal faith and how it not only impacted her family relations, as it commonly does, but how she ultimately made sense of her exiting experience.”
—Religion Dispatches
“I have plenty of bright, well-educated friends who nevertheless can’t imagine any scenario in which they could genuinely believe in God, let alone get fully caught up in some kind of religious ecstasy. For such folks, and for us prodigals still haunted by preachers long left behind, and really for anyone who grew up feeling different from those they loved most—which means most of us—Jessica Wilbanks’s vivid memoir is a great and generous gift. This is what fiery faith really feels like on the inside, both coming and going, and this is how we use it to comfort and hurt each other, and this is what happens when it dies but you don’t, all in language stirring enough to earn Wilbanks a place beside Mary Karr and Anne Lamott on my top shelf. When I Spoke in Tongues is the book I will offer from now on, when my cradle-atheist friends wonder what it’s like to come of age truly fearing the Lord.”
—Bart Campolo, coauthor of Why I Left, Why I Stayed
“Jessica Wilbanks’s memoir of faith’s loss and her efforts to comprehend its significance is no less than an illuminating exploration of how to live meaningfully. Beautifully written, When I Spoke in Tongues is compelling, honest, and memorable.”
—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
“Fever dream—this is how Jessica Wilbanks describes the first time she spoke in tongues (as an eleven-year-old Pentecostal), which is as good a phrase as any to describe the experience of reading this lucid and hallucinatory memoir. The questions that float through these pages—What is belief? What is faith?—spoke to me in ways I hadn’t expected, or even knew to ask, and revealed a world running alongside our own, which we mock or ignore at our peril.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“In When I Spoke in Tongues, Jessica Wilbanks returns to the Pentecostal faith of her youth to search for the source of power and mystery that worship once awakened in her. Along the way, she gives us a moving and clear-eyed account of what happens when a person leaves behind her deeply-held religious beliefs, and what we find when we look within ourselves for redemption and grace.”
—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings
“When I Spoke in Tongues is the perfect antidote to the divisions of our day. As Jessica Wilbanks travels back into her impoverished Pentecostal past and through the Nigeria of the present, seeking a lost world of meaning and beauty and belonging, she becomes our guide—but not just through new realms that may be foreign to us. She shows us how to move with deep empathy into sometimes hostile terrain, how to seek the humanity in others, especially those with whom we fundamentally disagree. Even in writing a story about faith and its loss, then, Wilbanks ends up constructing a new home for herself—and maybe for us if we follow her lead—that is grounded in love.”
—Kimberly Meyer, author of The Book of Wanderings
“At the heart of When I Spoke in Tongues is the narrator’s fervent desire to do good and speak truth. That ideal, refracted through evangelical dogma or family loyalty, sets the course for this utterly absorbing journey of self-realization. One reaches the end feeling that it is possible to maintain personal integrity, as well as to be roundly committed to family, curiosity, world, and eternity.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once
“Faith is complicated. This is a story about loss of faith and yearning for that lost faith, by a woman raised as a deeply conservative Christian. Her story of a Pentecostal childhood will intrigue Christians and non-Christians alike.”
—T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back
“Jessica Wilbanks invites us to see the subtle ways that faith can thickly weave together lives, families, and places. When I Spoke in Tongues vividly and delicately describes the loss of faith, but it is perhaps just as much about the uncertain longing that accompanies that loss. It is a testimony to the ways faith continues, even in its absence.”
—Jason Bruner, author of Living Salvation in the East African Revival in Uganda
“This riveting personal account looks at the human freedom to assent to or move away from a faith tradition. It is a must-read for all who want to understand the pull and push of Pentecostalism.”
—Elias Kifon Bongmba, editor of The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa
PART I
CHAPTER 1
Ghost Language
CHAPTER 2
House-Hunting
CHAPTER 3
Upon This Rock
CHAPTER 4
Revival
CHAPTER 5
The Beach
CHAPTER 6
Ori and Joe
CHAPTER 7
Mushrooms
CHAPTER 8
Live Nativity
CHAPTER 9
Forgiven
PART II
CHAPTER 10
Left Behind
CHAPTER 11
Made in Nigeria
CHAPTER 12
The County
CHAPTER 13
Beloved, Feel Free
CHAPTER 14
Trigger of Africa
CHAPTER 15
The Virgin
CHAPTER 16
On the Far Side of the Fire
CHAPTER 17
The Edge of the Abyss
CHAPTER 18
Back Home
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
- “Wrestling with God: When I Spoke in Tongues,” Lone Star Literary, write-up
- “Great Literature Helped Me Escape My Fundamentalist Christian Past,” Patheos, original piece
- “When I Spoke in Tongues with Jessica Wilbanks,” Life After God, podcast interview
- “10 books from authors with Houston ties delve into all aspects of faith,” Houston Chronicle, included in faith-based book roundup
- “Losing My Religion,” THINK/KERA Radio (NPR Dallas), live in-studio interview
- “The Longreads 2018 Holiday Gift Book Guide,” Longreads, included in 2018 Holiday Gift Guide
- “Best of 2018: Non-Fiction Books,” Entropy Magazine, listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018
- “I walked away from my Pentecostal faith to live my own life — and nearly lost myself,” Salon, excerpt
- “Could I find myself again in Houston?” Houston Chronicle, excerpt
- “What It’s Lilke to be Rejected By Your Religious Family,” LitHub, excerpt
- “When I Spoke in Tongues,” Free Thought Radio/Freedom from Religion, interview
- “Writer Reflects On Faith And Its Loss In When I Spoke In Tongues,” Houston Matters/Houston Public Media, interview
- “333: When I Spoke in Tongues, with Jessica Wilbanks,” Humanize Me with Bart Compolo, podcast interview
- “Father of Disorder,” Longreads, adapted excerpt
- “My fundamentalist childhood: less like a temple, more like a cage,” The Guardian, excerpt
- “New Religion Books Embrace Women’s Sexuality,” Publishers Weekly, book quoted in Religion and Spirituality column