When my parents concluded a six-year stint as medical missionaries, moved the family back to the U.S., and put me in public school, I dressed up for Halloween as Amy Carmichael (1867-1951), the revered missionary to India. My peers mistook my white sari for a mummy costume. “Protestant missionary” was not one of the aisle tags in the costume department. Ten years later, I went off to college at a liberal arts school in the Northwest, ripped the Ichthus off the back bumper of my car, and—while sitting in smoke-haunted bars—came under the tutelage of “worldly” English majors who introduced me to James Joyce, Bob Dylan, and the blues. My decision at the time to leave behind my childhood faith was both a spiritual experiment—what do I really believe?—and a cultural one: What does life look like beyond the walls of the church?
In her memoir More Than Conquerors, Megan Hustad maps a similar story of growing up as a “third culture kid” who returns from the mission field, struggles to assimilate into American life, and embarks on a quest for faith and self-identity in a post-Christian context. Her book blends two genres: missionary memoir set overseas and spiritual memoir set in the city, reminiscent of The Virgin of Bennington by Kathleen Norris. (New York City, it seems, provides the perfect backdrop for the explorations of an awkward, midwestern-bred evangelical.)
After watching Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision in the comfort of their Minnesota home, Hustad’s parents moved the family to the Caribbean to serve as missionaries with a Christian organization called Trans World Radio (TWR). “Missionary kids [represent] a stronger strain of Christianity,” writes Hustad of her childhood on the island of Bonaire, “better equipped for boredom[,] … accustomed [in church] to the sound of our thighs unsticking from gunmetal folding chairs,” and trained to watch for scorpions in the shower and dead ants in their cereal. Her parents, too, are the resilient type. They punctuate their support letters with “PTL” for Praise the Lord. (The perfect texting shorthand before texting was a “thing.”) When TWR sends them to Holland to train itinerant evangelists in the art of radio outreach, “PTL.” When Hustad’s father has a falling out with the director and cuts ties with the organization, “PTL.” When the family moves back to Minnesota and struggles to make ends meet, even then, “PTL.”
The coming-of-age story starts in St. Paul, where Hustad watched her restless mother rearrange the furniture in their living room week after week. Her mother’s disillusionment became her own as she found herself lost and alone in the American homeland. “I was in the parking lot of Minnehaha Academy when I heard that the rapture was coming—and that this was something to look forward to,” she writes with her trademark dark humor. Her girlfriend plays tennis and reads Frank Peretti while Hustad reads Hemingway and tapes pictures of Sophie Scholl, the anti-Nazi hero, inside her locker door.
When as a young adult she packs up a Ryder truck and moves to New York with her boyfriend, her identity as an outsider only inverts itself. Rather than standing out as the cynic among evangelicals, she is distinct from her new secular peers precisely because of her evangelical background: “Wow, flushed faces at parties leaned in to ask, what was it like growing up with adults so hooked on fairy tales? My ability to quickly change the subject eventually outstripped my embarrassment.”
By way of escape, Hustad remakes herself. She attends parties held by “famous bad boy novelist[s],” takes a job at the Random House offices on Park Avenue, and after coming home from work, flings her manuscript bag onto the floor before stepping onto the fire escape to smoke in 40-degree weather. She is New York. And yet even then, she finds herself lost in a malaise, estranged both from the Christian church of her childhood and the urban temple of skyscrapers and city streets. Third-culture kids, she writes, feel “alienation in every cell of their body.” That alienation drives her search for social and spiritual belonging and also motivates the core question of the book: Is Christian faith worth keeping or is it, as her secular friends would say, “a vestigial cultural tail” she’s better off losing?
If Augustine’s Confessions is one of the first Western memoirs and defines the genre for us, then a good memoirist writes in a spirit of transparent struggle and skilled reflection that turns a critical eye on the self, not exclusively on others. Hustad writes with a subtle but insistent disdain for her parents, whose only major faults are being unsophisticated and a little too earnest—the kind of people who watch Fox News, stockpile food, and “[stomach their daughter’s] rebellion because they [hope] the light [will] eventually come back on.” She comes through less as a sympathetic memoirist lamenting her flawed childhood and more as an anthropologist, visiting the rooms of memory and turning over the artifacts of her youth with a detached care.
The result is that Hustad hides behind her parents’ story, positions herself more as a reactor and less as an actor, and offers very little access into her own spiritual life. She reckons not with faith itself or the tenets of faith but with a mediated version represented, on the one hand, by her bewildered parents and, on the other, by her secular acquaintances who cling to clichéd arguments against theism and conceive of God as “the enemy of all pleasure and independent thinking.” She’s too smart for their cynicism. She pushes back. But she’s not wise enough—not yet, at least—to see herself for what she is: always a devil’s advocate, never a disciple. She hovers above, descends only to fight against straw men and stereotypes (on both sides), and then retreats again to her place of hiding. Her one allegiance is to the vague beneficence of contemporary spirituality: “The energy that produced the world knows us. Wants us … likes us.”
One passage in particular, midway through the book, reveals her choice to reject community and commitment in favor of independence:
My people never found groups we wanted to remain in …. We had a knack for sullen independence. This sullen independence got us to the margins, and we felt most alive there. Wherever we belonged, we wanted out.
Hustad’s “sullen independence” (clearly savored) defines both her story and her style as a writer. Only briefly, in the last pages, does she invite us past the opaque exterior and into a vulnerable space where she talks about her struggle to discern God’s presence. “How can we know this God exists?” she asks. “We cannot. Only that sometimes, some days, some of us feel his absence. It stings the eyes, we blink.” Her longing is in a peculiar way its own apologetic: her desire for God might be evidence of God. Even the darkness reveals the sacred to her. “Walking from the Canal Street subway station to my apartment late at night feels holy,” she writes.
Maybe that will be the subject of a book still to come. Here and now, though, Hustad gives us neither a homecoming nor a departure. As a reader who’s gone through a similar crisis of faith, I want to say: take me somewhere. Hustad the restless pilgrim keeps herself always on the move and, with all her traveling, passes by the place that matters most—the country of the heart.
Andrea Palpant Dilley grew up in Kenya as the daughter of Quaker missionaries and spent the rest of her childhood in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of Faith and Other Flat Tires: Searching for God on the Rough Road of Doubt (Zondervan).
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