It was nearly 12 years ago that The Washington Post reported, “Author Malcolm Gladwell finds his faith again.” Gladwell had grown up in a devoted religious family in southwestern Ontario in what he calls “the heart of a Mennonite community.”
In his books, “The Tipping Point,” “Outliers” and “Blink,” Gladwell became known for taking audiences on fascinating rides exploring surprising turns in social science. During this time of fame, he “drifted away a little bit” from the faith of his childhood and stopped attending any kind of religious fellowship.
But that changed when writing his 2013 book, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.” That experience, as he said in a Washington Post interview at the time, “brought me back into the fold.”
“I was so incredibly struck in writing these stories by the incredible power faith had in people’s lives,” he explained. Those experiences he witnessed had such a “profound impact” on him that he said at the time, “I am in the process of rediscovering my own faith again.”
It’s been over 10 years since that interview and another 2013 interview with the Deseret News. So, how have things changed for Gladwell since? In a 2022 interview on Carey Nieuwhof’s leadership podcast and a 2024 essay in Relevant Magazine, Gladwell makes very clear the continuing centrality of faith in his life.
‘What is beautiful about faith’
Gladwell told Nieuwhof in 2022 that “there are certain kinds of questions and problems that cannot be resolved in the absence of faith.”
He then describes the importance of understanding and coming to appreciate “what is beautiful” about faith. “You can’t make sense of the world or fully find joy in the world I think if you’ve turned your back on that aspect of spirituality.”
Nonetheless, he says, “it took a long time to understand that (and) appreciate that.” For him, he adds, “it took moving away and reflecting and the passage of 20 or 30 years” before he began making sense of some of those core spiritual lessons.
“It just takes a while sometimes for us to kind of grasp these notions.”
After doing a series of podcasts on how to think like a Jesuit, Gladwell also shared how he “discovered something of extraordinary beauty in the Catholic tradition.” That, he said, “made me think that there’s probably something like this in every tradition and that we should be open to exploring that kind of thing.”
The author encourages people now to engage with similar curiosity in “what different traditions have to teach us.”
“You can’t make sense of the world or fully find joy in the world I think if you’ve turned your back on that aspect of spirituality.”
— Malcolm Gladwell, 2022 interview
‘Something incredibly powerful and beautiful was missing’
It wasn’t a dramatic conversion experience that changed Gladwell. Rather, he describes how more gradually, “I realized what I had missed” — reflecting “a slow realization of something incredibly powerful and beautiful in the faith that I grew up with that I was missing.”
Years earlier, Gladwell had posted on his website, “I believe in God” — confirming in 2013 that he identified as a Christian. He explained that he felt it was important to his readers that they understood where he was coming from. “It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.”
This evolution of his faith, he said at the time, had led him to begin “asking different kinds of questions” and focus more on “individuals and the choices they make.”
“I find the discipline and practice of thinking of the world outside of oneself as enormously important,” Gladwell later told Arianna Huffington in 2018. “At its heart, I think religious practice is about putting God at the center of things, and not yourself. And that is the single most important thing I think human beings can do. It is clarifying and liberating and uplifting and all kinds of important things.”
A lot of people feel stress because “they have put themselves at the center of their own universe,” he said. “And when you remove yourself from that place, I think a lot of the pressure subsides.”
“At its heart, I think religious practice is about putting God at the center of things, and not yourself. And that is the single most important thing I think human beings can do.
— -Malcolm Gladwell, 2018 interview
Where do you find that kind of power?
Gladwell calls Jesus “one of the most revolutionary figures in history.” Jesus “comes from the humblest of beginnings. He never held elected office. He never had an army at his disposal. He never got rich; he had nothing that we would associate with power and advantage.
“Nonetheless, what does he accomplish? An unfathomable amount.”
As Gladwell wrote more about people in scripture and the modern day encountering “extraordinary circumstances,” he said, “it slowly dawned on me that I can have that too.”
There was one person’s experience, in particular, that had an oversized impact on the author. In researching for his 2013 book, Gladwell found out about Cliff and Wilma Derksen, whose 13-year-old daughter Candace was abducted in 1984 and found dead seven weeks later.
Gladwell was most struck after hearing what the Derksens said at the initial press conference. “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives,” said Cliff.
“Our main concern was to find Candace. We’ve found her,” Wilma added. “I can’t say at this point I forgive the person,” she said, before emphasizing, “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.”
Where do two people find the power to forgive in a moment like that? the author wondered, reaching out to ask them if they’d speak with him. “I wanted to know where the Derksens found the strength to say those things.”
The answer became very clear. “We were grateful that our faith in God gave us options other than vengeance, something other than remaining victims,” Wilma later wrote. “We both knew that in order to be truly free, we would have to turn what was meant for evil into good. We would have to forgive by faith — a step totally in the dark, a matter of decision.”
Even though it took 20 years to convict someone for the murder, in a trial that was eventually overturned, Gladwell told the Deseret News at the time how Wilma had emailed him after the court’s decision saying that “the beautiful thing about forgiveness is that her peace of mind is not contingent on the legal system disposing of the case in a way that is fair and just.”
“If you pin your hopes on the way the world out there is going to go about its business, you’re taking an enormous risk,” Gladwell added. “The outcome of the extraordinarily courageous act that Wilma Derksen took was that she found some measure of peace in the midst of all of this horror…She has made her peace with herself and with God.”
‘The weapons of the spirit’
If faith is so powerful, why can it be so hard to recognize that? This is what Gladwell calls “the great puzzle of the weapons of the spirit — which is why we find it so hard to see them.”
To answer that, he often tells the story of the Christian people of Le Chambon, a remote, mountainous region of France near the Italian and Swiss borders. This town, which had been home to dissident Protestant groups for centuries, became a well-known and central pocket of resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII.
Gladwell recounts in Relevant Magazine how a Christian (Huguenot) pastor encouraged parishioners to not go along if invading Germans asked them to do anything they considered contrary to the Gospel. Consequently, the schoolchildren of Le Chambon refused to give the fascist salute each morning, and teachers at the school refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the state. As the town got a reputation, the people in the town took in Jewish refugees in open defiance of Nazi law, even writing to a visiting government official, “We make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching.”
“Where did the people of Le Chambon find the strength to defy the Nazis?” Gladwell asks again. “The same place the Derksens found strength to forgive. They were armed with the weapons of the spirit,” he concludes, discovering for themselves that “the strength granted to them by their faith in God gave them the power to stand up to the soldiers and guns and laws of that state.”
These were a people hesitant to take up any arms. But Gladwell told the Deseret News in 2013, “Pacifism does not mean a reluctance to take on evil. It means, in the best sense, that you take on evil in a different form.
“Their way of fighting it was to stand up and say to any Jewish refugee in France, ‘come to our town, and we will treat you as if you are our own brother.’ And they put their lives on the line for the Jewish people in a way that very few French people actually did.”
About these people, Gladwell later adds, “They were simply people whose experience had taught them where true power lies: God’s power.”
As elaborated to The Washington Post in 2013, “When you understand that perspective, you understand that sometimes our instinct about where power comes from is wrong.”
Understanding his own drift from faith
When reflecting on why he “wandered off the path taken by the rest of my family,” Gladwell says, “What I understand now is that I was one of those who did not appreciate the weapons of the spirit. I have always been someone attracted to the quantifiable and the physical.
“I hate to admit it. But I don’t think I would have been able to do what the Huguenots did in Le Chambon. I would have counted up the number of soldiers and guns on each side and concluded it was too dangerous.
“I have always believed in God,” Gladwell added. “I have grasped the logic of Christian faith. What I have had a hard time seeing is God’s power.”
But that has changed for this world-renowned author, who explains, “Something happened to me when I sat in Wilma Derksen’s garden.”
After reflecting again on the witness of this Christian family, he writes, “Maybe we have difficulty seeing the weapons of the spirit because we don’t know where to look, or because we are distracted by the louder claims of material advantage. But I’ve seen them now, and I will never be the same.”