Why Religion?

Why Religion? Plot Summary

Introduction

In the spring of 1973, a young Harvard graduate student walked into the office of her advisor, only to be confronted with a startling question: "So really, why did you come here?" Stumbling momentarily, Elaine Pagels murmured something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. The professor stared down at her, then asked, "How do you know it has an essence?" In that moment, Pagels realized why she had chosen Harvard—to be challenged to rethink everything. This intellectual challenge would become a hallmark of Pagels' extraordinary journey as one of the most influential religious historians of our time. From her groundbreaking work on the Nag Hammadi texts, which revolutionized our understanding of early Christianity, to her deeply personal exploration of how humans make meaning amid suffering, Pagels has consistently pushed boundaries. Her quest goes far beyond academic inquiry, intertwining scholarly rigor with profound personal experience. Through devastating losses and spiritual searching, she has wrestled with fundamental questions about faith, suffering, and resilience that resonate across religious traditions and human experience. In Pagels' journey, we witness not only brilliant scholarship but also a courageous confrontation with life's most difficult questions—why we suffer, how we find meaning, and what it means to be human in a world filled with both wonder and pain.

Chapter 1: Early Years and Religious Awakening

Growing up in Palo Alto, California in the 1950s, Elaine Pagels was raised in what she described as a "giant marshmallow"—a comfortable suburban environment where the hard edges of life were carefully concealed. Her father, a research biologist who had converted from strict Presbyterianism to Darwinism, was certain that educated people would naturally shed religion like an outgrown skin. Her mother, emotionally reserved and anxious, offered little comfort or spiritual guidance. In this secular household, young Elaine found herself strangely drawn to the world of imagination—stories of Oz, Robin Hood, and various artistic pursuits that hinted at dimensions of existence her parents' world couldn't accommodate. At fifteen, a pivotal moment occurred when friends invited her to hear Billy Graham preach at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Moved by Graham's passionate condemnation of American moral failures and his promise of unconditional divine love, the teenage Pagels walked forward with thousands of others to be "born again." This moment opened "vast spaces of imagination" previously accessible only through stories and music. Her parents were horrified by her conversion, which secretly pleased her as confirmation she was striking out on her own path. This evangelical phase lasted for more than a year and a half until tragedy struck. When her close friend Paul died in a car accident, her Christian friends immediately asked, "Was he born again?" Learning he was Jewish, they declared, "Then he's in hell." Devastated by both the loss and this callous response, Pagels left the church, never to return to that form of Christianity. Yet questions persisted—why hadn't religion died out as her father predicted? What made her evangelical experience so powerfully compelling? These questions would later guide her academic pursuits. After graduating high school, Pagels attended Stanford University but found it offered nothing in religious studies. She spent a summer at UCLA in a course on "The Sociology of Mental Illness," working at Camarillo State Mental Hospital where she encountered human suffering up close. Meanwhile, she explored alternative communities in the Bay Area, connecting with musicians like Jerry Garcia (later of the Grateful Dead) and seeking meaning through dance, poetry, and artistic expression. When Paul's death opened questions about mortality and meaning, Pagels found herself drawn to explore how humans make sense of existence in the face of death. Despite her father's warning that graduate school would turn her into "one of those lonely women who carry a briefcase and go to the movies alone," Pagels applied to Harvard's doctoral program in religion. Initially denied admission because "women students always quit," she persisted and was eventually accepted. At Harvard, she discovered not only the tools of historical analysis but also something unexpected—a cache of recently discovered ancient texts that would transform both her career and her understanding of religious history.

Chapter 2: Harvard and the Secret Gospels

When Pagels arrived at Harvard in the late 1960s, she encountered a revolutionary development in the study of early Christianity. Hidden in file cabinets, stamped "TOP SECRET," were facsimiles of texts that few scholars had yet seen—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and dozens of other ancient writings transcribed from Greek to Coptic. Discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, these texts had only recently become available to scholars, and Harvard was one of only two universities in the United States where students could work with them. What Pagels found stunned her. For nearly two thousand years, Christian history had been written by the winners—those who called themselves "orthodox" and labeled their opponents "heretics." Now, for the first time, the so-called heretics could speak for themselves. While her professors had dismissed these texts as bizarre, Pagels was immediately captivated. When she first read the Gospel of Thomas, she encountered Jesus saying, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." This wasn't a statement demanding belief, but one articulating a psychological truth she immediately recognized. Life at Harvard presented other challenges beyond academics. The ancient university "breathed a spirit of having been designed by men and for men," and Pagels was one of very few women admitted to the doctoral program. More disturbingly, she found herself sexually targeted by a married professor who had invited her to babysit his children, then trapped her in his home overnight. For years, she dared not speak about these experiences, later learning this professor was known among therapists at Harvard Health Services as "Koester the Molester" for his predatory behavior toward female students. Despite these difficulties, Pagels thrived intellectually. She became part of a group of scholars working to translate, edit, and publish more than fifty texts from Nag Hammadi. Her professors, including the formidable Krister Stendahl, challenged her to think critically rather than accept easy answers. When she naively expressed hope to find the "real Christianity" by going back to first-century sources, Stendahl ironically called this desire to enter "play Bible land" and pushed her to recognize the complexity of historical inquiry. Through her Harvard years, Pagels also reconnected with spiritual practice, drawn to Boston's Church of the Ascension with its dramatic liturgy and ancient music. She began to understand religious ritual as addressing fundamental human needs—"What kind of hunger drives us to come together, sing, pray, and share a token meal?" The secret gospels suggested answers that differed from orthodox Christianity, speaking of self-knowledge and spiritual awakening rather than doctrinal conformity. By the time she completed her doctorate with distinction, Pagels had developed a unique approach that combined rigorous historical scholarship with attention to how religious ideas shape human experience. The secret gospels had opened up a far larger universe than the evangelical Christianity of her youth, revealing ancient spiritual traditions that spoke of awakening to the divine presence within—a message that would continue to resonate throughout her career and personal journey.

Chapter 3: Family Formation and Academic Success

In the spring of 1974, while visiting California, Pagels had a chance reunion with Heinz Pagels, a brilliant theoretical physicist she had known at Stanford. Their connection was immediate and profound. Despite his teasing question years earlier—"Why are you going to Harvard? You're going to price yourself right out of the market!"—they now found themselves drawn to each other's intellectual passion and warmth. After months of traveling between New York and Cambridge, they married in June 1975 in a simple Episcopal ceremony, followed by a joyful reception with dancing and music at Rockefeller University where Heinz worked. Their early years together were intellectually vibrant. While Heinz developed his work in physics, exploring chaos theory and quantum mechanics, Elaine began teaching at Barnard College and deepened her research on the Nag Hammadi texts. Their conversations crossed disciplinary boundaries—he challenged her to consider the real-world impact of her work on ancient religion, while she helped him appreciate how religious traditions shape human understanding. Together they explored psychedelic experiences, consciousness, and the boundaries between scientific and spiritual worldviews. A turning point in both Pagels' personal and professional life came in 1979 when she was invited to speak at Barnard's first Women's Conference. Initially reluctant—"We don't have enough information," she protested—she suddenly realized that the Nag Hammadi texts contained feminine images for God entirely overlooked by her male colleagues. The Secret Revelation of John, for instance, presents God saying, "I am the Father; I am the Mother, and I am the Son!" Other texts portrayed divine wisdom as feminine and even challenged traditional gender roles. When she presented these findings, the audience of two thousand women responded with thunderous applause, recognizing how these ancient texts spoke to contemporary concerns. That same year, her book The Gnostic Gospels was published to both acclaim and controversy. While some reviewers praised her accessible approach to complex historical material, others attacked her work. Raymond Brown criticized her on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, while her Oxford mentor Henry Chadwick accused her of promoting heresy. Her mailbox filled with letters expressing both enthusiastic appreciation and hate-filled condemnation. Yet the controversy only helped establish her as a major voice in religious studies. Meanwhile, Pagels and her husband longed for children. After years of fertility treatments and disappointments, they participated in a fertility ritual organized by Pagels' artist friend Mary Beth Edelson. Three weeks later, Pagels discovered she was pregnant. Their son Mark was born in October, but joy was tempered with concern when doctors discovered he had a hole in his heart that would require surgery. Despite this shadow, they embraced parenthood with devotion. The following year, Pagels received a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called "genius grant"—which offered five years of complete support with no requirements. This gift came at the perfect moment, allowing her more time with Mark during his recovery from successful heart surgery. The family's happiness continued to grow when they adopted their daughter Sarah. Their life settled into a rhythm of professional accomplishment and family joy, with summers spent in a cabin in the redwoods of California to protect Mark from the high altitude of Colorado where physicists gathered annually. In these years, Pagels managed to balance motherhood with continued scholarly productivity, working on her next book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, while treasuring what she had come to value most—the love she shared with her husband and children.

Chapter 4: Profound Loss and Confronting Mortality

On a routine visit to Mark's pediatric cardiologist when he was two and a half, Pagels and her husband received devastating news. Although the surgical repair to Mark's heart had been successful, doctors had discovered he had developed pulmonary hypertension—a rare, invariably fatal lung disease. "How long?" Pagels asked. "We don't know; a few months, maybe a few years," came the reply. Refusing further invasive procedures that would only gather data without helping their son, they took Mark home, determined to give him as normal a life as possible. For the next several years, they lived with this unbearable knowledge, keeping it largely private. Mark attended the Town School in New York, built with blocks, practiced karate, and watched cartoons like other children. Only his unusual thinness and the surgical scar on his chest hinted at his condition. Pagels described this period as walking through gray days—"sometimes lighter gray during the morning hours, darker in the afternoon." She struggled with depression and what a nurse later helped her recognize as anticipatory grief. Despite consulting specialists across the country, each confirmed the diagnosis: no treatment, no cure. During these years, Pagels served on the bioethics committee for the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital where Mark was treated. Witnessing medical professionals' tendency to prolong dying rather than accept death's inevitability, she gained perspective on her own situation. When her term ended, she surprised the staff by advising them, "For the sake of the children, please consider stopping earlier than you usually do." In April 1987, six-year-old Mark died suddenly while having blood drawn at the hospital. In a moment of profound mystery, Pagels sensed his presence lingering in the room after his heart stopped beating, then departing. At his funeral service, while standing at the back of the church weeping with her husband as friends came to embrace them, she experienced a vision of a vast net with enormous spaces between the knots—spaces through which one could be swept away—yet the knots themselves were connections with loved ones that kept them anchored in this world. Just fifteen months later, while the family was staying at their mountain home in Colorado, unimaginable lightning struck twice. Heinz Pagels, an experienced hiker, fell to his death while descending from Pyramid Peak. The path he knew well had suddenly given way under his feet. Pagels was left alone with two small children—Sarah, now two, and David, their recently adopted infant son. The double loss seemed beyond endurance. "If anything could destroy me," she later wrote, "especially after Mark's death, it would be this." In the aftermath, Pagels experienced not only devastating grief but also rage she could hardly acknowledge. When a policeman arriving to deliver the news said, "God never gives us more than we can handle," she felt fury but could not speak. Physical symptoms manifested—boils erupted over her body, diagnosed as acute traumatic stress reaction. When she insisted she would survive because she had gotten through Mark's death, a doctor told her bluntly, "Don't think that having survived your son's death makes you an expert. Actually, that makes it much worse." These losses forced Pagels to confront mortality directly, challenging her intellectually and spiritually. The questions that had once been academic—why do we suffer, why do we die, what happens after death?—became painfully personal. And as she would come to understand, these questions would fundamentally reshape not only her personal journey but also her scholarly work in the years ahead.

Chapter 5: Finding Meaning Through Ancient Texts

In the aftermath of these devastating losses, Pagels turned to her scholarly work not as an escape but as a lifeline—a way to make meaning when all meaning seemed shattered. Facing practical necessities as well as emotional devastation, she sold their New York apartment and moved with her children to Princeton, where she had accepted a teaching position. When Freeman Dyson invited her to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, she applied with a project that would become her book The Origin of Satan. What began as academic inquiry became deeply personal. Investigating how early Christians developed the figure of Satan, she discovered that demonizing one's enemies is a powerful way humans respond to conflict and suffering. "People who take Satan seriously," she realized, "aren't simply imagining ethereal spirits clashing in the stratosphere. Anyone who says 'Satan is trying to take over this country' has in mind certain people right here on the ground." This insight led her to recognize how the gospel writers, writing after the catastrophic Jewish-Roman War of 70 CE, constructed narratives that shifted blame for Jesus's crucifixion away from Roman authorities and onto Jewish leaders—narratives that would later fuel centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Pagels also revisited the Book of Job, reading it with new eyes. The ancient tale of a righteous man who suffers undeservedly now resonated differently. She recognized how Job's friends, insisting he must have done something to deserve his suffering, reflected the persistent human need to believe in a morally ordered universe—a need she had unconsciously harbored herself. "Was the guilt that weighed like a stone on my grief a legacy of Western culture, a hangover from ancient folktales?" she wondered. Coming to terms with randomness and chaos—concepts her physicist husband had explored—became part of her grieving process. At the same time, Pagels returned to the Nag Hammadi texts that had first captivated her, finding new resonance in their spiritual wisdom. The Gospel of Thomas, with its emphasis on finding the divine light within, spoke to her experience of that mysterious net of connection she had glimpsed at Mark's funeral. "These sayings suggest that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God," she wrote. The poem called Thunder, Complete Mind particularly moved her with its feminine divine voice speaking in paradox: "I am the first and the last. I am the one who is honored, and the one scorned... I am the one they call Life, and you have called Death." The poem's embrace of contradiction—finding the divine presence even in negative experiences like foolishness, shame, and fear—offered a framework for understanding her own suffering. Other texts like Allogenes and the Revelation of Zostrianos addressed spiritual breakthrough in the midst of despair. Zostrianos tells of a young man planning suicide who encounters a luminous presence asking, "Have you gone mad?" Allogenes prescribes meditation to overcome fear and mental turbulence. These ancient writings validated Pagels' intuition that healing comes not through denial of suffering but through engaging it fully while seeking deeper connection. Through her research, Pagels came to understand that the monks who preserved these diverse texts at Nag Hammadi were less concerned with doctrinal correctness than with spiritual practice. Like monastics today who might include Buddhist sutras alongside Christian writings in their libraries, these ancient monks collected texts that deepened contemplative experience, regardless of their theological alignment. This insight offered Pagels a more expansive vision of religious tradition—not as a set of beliefs to accept or reject but as resources for human transformation in the face of suffering.

Chapter 6: Wrestling with Faith and Tradition

As she moved through grief toward a new understanding, Pagels confronted fundamental questions about religious tradition itself. Her scholarly work had revealed how Christian orthodoxy was constructed through deliberate exclusion of diverse voices. Now she was personally grappling with theological assertions that suddenly seemed hollow or even cruel when faced with devastating loss. When, shortly after Mark's death, she visited the Church of the Heavenly Rest to arrange his funeral, she heard someone reading from the Gospel of John: "God so loved the world that he gave his only son" to die for our sins. "Our only son had just died," she later wrote. "At that moment, I felt that any god who did that—for whatever reason—would have to be crazy." This visceral response led her to question traditional atonement theology that presents Jesus's death as a necessary sacrifice for human sin. Similarly, Pagels bristled when well-meaning Christians suggested her losses might teach her some "spiritual lesson" or when a priest at Heinz's funeral warned mourners not to be "angry at God." Such platitudes conflicted with her lived experience of grief, which included not only sorrow but also rage, guilt, and profound disorientation. She recognized these emotions were part of being human, not spiritual failures requiring theological explanation or justification. Yet even as she rejected simplistic religious answers, Pagels found herself drawn to certain spiritual practices and communities. During her darkest days in Colorado after Heinz's death, she visited the Trappist monks at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass. In their chapel, enveloped by silence, she had the startling experience of what felt like communication with her husband. When she internally asked, "So how do you feel about this?" she heard a response that seemed to come from beyond herself: "This is fine with me; it's you I'm concerned about now." Though skeptical of such experiences, she was moved by this encounter and by the monks' compassionate presence. Father Joseph, the abbot at St. Benedict's, later offered a mass for Heinz despite knowing he wasn't Catholic. During the service, hearing a baby cry outside the chapel, Joseph spoke words that resonated deeply: "At this moment, we all feel like that child, crying in the hall; we don't understand; we are shaken with grief; we ask for the consolation of God's spirit." Here was religious language that acknowledged rather than explained away suffering—a stark contrast to those who offered easy answers. Pagels began to distinguish between religious doctrines that attempt to justify suffering and spiritual practices that help people endure it. Drawing on Viktor Frankl's insights from the concentration camps, she embraced his view that when life turns out differently than expected, we must "stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life." This perspective shifted her focus from seeking answers to accepting responsibility for creating meaning amid circumstances she never would have chosen. As an academic, Pagels continued to critique how religious traditions have been used to sanction violence and oppression. After the September 11 attacks, when President George W. Bush invoked religious imagery to justify the invasion of Iraq, she recognized how the Book of Revelation's apocalyptic visions were being deployed to frame conflict as cosmic battle between good and evil. Yet even as she critiqued such uses of religion, she maintained that imaginative engagement with religious traditions can also offer resources for confronting suffering with courage and compassion. In this way, Pagels came to a nuanced understanding of faith not as a set of beliefs but as a relationship with mystery. "What first we must come to know," she wrote, "is that we cannot fully know God, since that Source far transcends our understanding. But what we can know is that we're intimately connected with that divine Source, since 'in him we live and move and have our being.'"

Chapter 7: Transformative Scholarship and Personal Healing

In the decades following her losses, Pagels continued her groundbreaking scholarship while gradually finding her way toward healing. Her work took on new dimensions as she explored how religious ideas about suffering and evil shape human response to tragedy. Books like The Origin of Satan and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation demonstrated how ancient texts continue to influence contemporary culture, often in ways we fail to recognize. What distinguished Pagels from many other scholars was her willingness to acknowledge the personal dimensions of her intellectual work. In her writings, she increasingly drew connections between historical analysis and lived experience, recognizing that "anything written with passion, 'academic' or otherwise, inevitably engages whatever challenges we're confronting." While some colleagues objected that this approach departed from pure historical method, Pagels maintained that understanding religious texts requires engaging them not only intellectually but experientially. This integration of scholarship and personal journey reached its fullest expression in Why Religion?, published in 2018, where Pagels directly addressed her experiences of loss and how they shaped her understanding of religious traditions. The book represented a remarkable evolution for a scholar who had once sought to approach religious texts with detached historical analysis. Now she acknowledged that "we cannot interpret our own experience, much less that of our culture, without simultaneously engaging both imagination and rationality." Meanwhile, Pagels found ways to rebuild her life around what remained—her love for her children, her work, and the connections that sustained her. Sarah and David grew up with a mother who, despite her grief, remained deeply engaged with their lives. When David was about to turn two, she organized a birthday celebration with friends and their children, creating new patterns of joy and connection. As the children grew older, they became her partners in healing, their presence anchoring her to life when despair threatened to overwhelm. Professional recognition continued to affirm the value of Pagels' contributions. In 2015, she received an honorary degree from Harvard, the institution that had initially been reluctant to admit women to its doctoral program. At the ceremony, surrounded by thousands of graduates and their families, including her own grown children, Pagels experienced a breakthrough moment. "Suddenly a storm of tears and gratitude broke through me," she wrote, "as I felt, unexpectedly, that I was also graduating, along with those thousands of others. How, I wondered, had I somehow managed to pass the real tests—the tests I never could have imagined surviving?" This moment of recognition—that she had indeed survived what once seemed unsurvivable—marked a significant milestone in Pagels' healing journey. While she never minimized the pain of her losses or claimed complete resolution, she acknowledged that "hearts do heal, through what I can only call grace." This grace came not through theological explanations but through continued engagement with life—through scholarship, teaching, parenting, friendship, and spiritual practice. What emerged from Pagels' journey was not a conclusion but an ongoing conversation between intellect and experience, between ancient wisdom and contemporary understanding. She came to see religious traditions not as fixed doctrines but as resources for making meaning—texts and practices that, at their best, help us recognize our fundamental connectedness even in times of profound suffering. Rather than offering definitive answers about why we suffer or what happens after death, Pagels' work invites us into a more spacious understanding of what it means to be human—vulnerable to loss yet capable of creating meaning and discovering unexpected joy.

Summary

Elaine Pagels' life journey reveals how intellectual inquiry and personal experience can inform and transform each other. From her early rebellion against her parents' secularism to her groundbreaking scholarship on early Christianity and her courageous confrontation with devastating loss, Pagels demonstrates an unflinching commitment to facing reality while remaining open to mystery. Her most profound insight may be that religious traditions matter not because they provide easy answers but because they offer frameworks for engaging life's most difficult questions—frameworks that can be liberating or oppressive depending on how they are interpreted and applied. What makes Pagels' contribution so valuable is her refusal to settle for either naive religious certainty or dismissive secular skepticism. Instead, she models a third path: rigorous critical thinking coupled with openness to wonder and mystery. Through her work on the Nag Hammadi texts, she has recovered marginalized voices that speak of spiritual awakening rather than doctrinal conformity, helping contemporary seekers find resources within religious traditions that might otherwise seem irrelevant or harmful. And through her personal testimony about grief and resilience, she has shown how ancient wisdom can become newly relevant when engaged from the depths of human experience. For anyone wrestling with questions of meaning amid suffering, or seeking to understand how religious traditions shape human consciousness, Pagels offers not answers but companionship on the journey—a reminder that throughout human history, others have walked similar paths and left behind traces of their discoveries.

About Author

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Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels is a preeminent figure in the theological community whose scholarship has earned her international respect. The Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, she was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim & MacArthur Fellowships in three consecutive years.As a young researcher at Barnard College, she changed forever the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels, an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts that were unearthed in Egypt. Known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library, the manuscripts show the pluralistic nature of the early church & the role of women in the developing movement. As the early church moved toward becoming an orthodox body with a canon, rites & clergy, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were suppressed & deemed heretical. The Gnostic Gospels won both the Nat'l Book Critic’s Circle Award & the Nat'l Book Award & was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th Century.

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