When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

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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, the Pentecostal church was at the core of Jessica Wilbanks' family life. At sixteen, 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 world views and trying to reconcile their past and present. Ten years later, struggling with guilt and shame, Jessica began a quest to recover her faith. It led her to West Africa, where she explored the Yor ba roots of the Pentecostal faith, and was once again swept up by the promises and power of the church. After a terrifying car crash, she finally began the difficult work of forgiving herself for leaving the church and her family and 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.

Reviews

Wilbankss 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 journalists keen eye, capturing the loving chaos of her familys 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 Wilbankss honest rendering of the profound uncertainty that comes after leaving behind a place that hasnt 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

Its 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 Wilbankss 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 cant 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 mostwhich means most of usJessica Wilbankss 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 dont, 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 its like to come of age truly fearing the Lord.
Bart Campolo, coauthor of Why I Left, Why I Stayed

Jessica Wilbankss memoir of faiths 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 dreamthis 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 pagesWhat is belief What is faithspoke to me in ways I hadnt 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 guidebut 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 herselfand maybe for us if we follow her leadthat is grounded in love.
Kimberly Meyer, author of The Book of Wanderings

At the heart of When I Spoke in Tongues is the narrators 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

Author Bio

Jessica Wilbanks is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well as creative nonfiction awards from Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Redivider, and Ruminate magazine. In 2014, she was selected as a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Journalism. Jessica received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Houston, where she served as nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son.