Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

of it. It was like the my life is whatever, this is, it's it's I could feel it go, you know, like it's all it's all gone now. That's Cape Bowler, a professor of Christianity at Duke's Divinity School, describing the moment she found out she had stage four colon cancer at age thirty five. Kate was shocked not only by the diagnosis, but by her reaction to it and what

it revealed to her about her faith. I spent years studying people who believe that they deserve what they get, and I never once imagine myself to be that kind of person, because you know, I'm part of this faith tradition which would never use the word deserve. And then when I could hear myself saying, but aren't I kind of a good person? It was like that bit was

so deeply humbling. That felt like like I like the shirt got turned inside out and I could just see all the seams of everything and I realized, like, oh, things, things come apart. On today's episode, a religious scholar re examines her own faith as she reckons with a cancer diagnosis. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Kate Bohler grew up in a Christian family of Mennonites and Manitoba, Canada.

She's always had a strong Christian faith, which for her has included the belief that everything happens for a reason. But as a religious scholar, Kate studied a different branch of Christianity called the Prosperity Gospel, known for its megachurches and televangelist preachers like Jim and Tammy, Faye Baker, and Joel Osteen. The Prosperity Gospel preaches that if you pray hard enough and your faith in God is strong, you deserve health, wealth, and happiness and will be rewarded with

those things during your life here on earth. Kate never believed in this idea of people deserving things, or so she thought, until her cancer diagnosis revealed to her that she had been buying into her own kind of prosperity gospel all along. And this realization surprised Kate and led her to re examine not only this belief, but also some of her more foundational beliefs, like whether everything really

does happen for a reason. Kate and I started off our conversation by talking about the prosperity Gospel, which had been the focus of her scholarly research for over a decade, to set up beliefs about the power of the mind to change your life, that if you have the right kind of positive words and the right kind of mental attitude, that you can bring health and wealth and overall happiness

like during your life here on earth. And that's always the kind of like caveat, because you know, Christianity typically has a kind of asterix beside it that says, yes, God is good, Yes God is loving, Yes God wants wholeness and love for you. But you may not to see all of your hopes come to fruition that all good things then get kind of deferred to an afterlife. But the prosperity Gospel has what we call an overrealized sense that all things will happen now for us who believe.

So it's a really it's an incredibly confident set of beliefs that says that you don't need to suffer, you don't even need to be lucky, because there will always be a way for you to figure out how to land on your feet. And what do you think drew you to that septic matter? I was really looking around for kind of an idea to fall in love with, and I didn't think though that I would mostly just pick something because it made me unbelievably angry. But I was a huge rage fast when I had my first

encounter with the prosperity Gospel. I thought, who did this to us? Why are Canadians? Because I grew up in Canada, and I was like, why are Canadians into this? And I was honestly kind of a about it. I was condescending, treating it kind of a like a car accident that I needed to really uncover and explore. It would take me a number of years even just to kind of settle into a sense that it was like not just a heresy, like a set of incorrect beliefs, but like

a worldview that I wanted to understand. So some of your your curiosity or interest in diving into this was around really just calling bullshit on it. Is that is that actually was okay? So you end up writing this book ironically called Blessed, which which chronicles the entire history of the Prosperity Gospel. It seems like Kate Bowler's life is also feeling pretty blessed, right. The lots of things

are falling into place. You get your dream job at Duke's Divinity School, and after years of infertility, you and your husband Toven, have this beautiful baby boy named Zach. Right yea, And yeah, first, I still resonate with those moments in life where you're like, and got it and you almost want to, like you want to catch it in your hands and put it into a bottle like no one can ever touch it. Yeah, You're like, I stuck the landing like there was Yeah, you can feel

yourself just hit it. And I I couldn't believe. I couldn't believe that it all lined up like I was just I had this gorgeous university job after having you know, grown up a shadow of you know, it always looked like the university manitobe was like constantly financing Stalinist architecture. Like when my parents on a campus, they were like, if you ever leave this place, I will murder you. Like I felt so lucky to be in this gorgeous place and finally have this smushy little you know baby

that smells like cookies all the time. And I really thought, then this this is my life, Like I could see it stretch out. I was gonna write all these books. I was gonna have an office with like gargoyle bookends, which I had a lot of strong feelings about, Like I was gonna have all these grateful graduate students, Like this was the site of my life. And I didn't mean to be as arrogant as that sounds, but like I was like really locked into this beautiful dream and

it like felt so good to me. I guess I for so long I had been paying into this imagined future and I all of it, all the like grind of it the and now you just have to write six hundred words and they'd better be footnoted properly. Like all the deferring felt like I was like this accountant and I was just gonna. I was having this. I would like add it all up, and then I would hit this moment and like congratulations me, Like all a

great math. Right, you go to the store, you give them your voucher, and you're like, okay, here it is. I'm raticularly, yeah, yeah, I'm put in I put in all that work. Yeah. Well, I'm wondering if you can take me back to what it was like at age thirty five when your life just turns completely upside down. I started getting really severe stomach pains and I immediately went to my doctor and I said, this seems really kind of very out of proportion. And then she said, well,

you know you're young. I don't think it's that much, but let me let me prefer you to the specialist. And I got bounced around between specialists with an increasing sense of panic, like I was chugging peptobismal. I was doubled over with pain, and I had such an intense grin and Barrett, it never really occurred to me that I could like press the emergency button, you know, that I was allowed to lose it because I was so

good at trying. So when I finally was supposed to get a surgery for what they thought was like a faulty gall bladder and then they said, well, the tests don't show quite enough to warrant that kind of surgery,

I just fucking lost it. I just I couldn't handle the boredom on the surgeon's face and the panic that I was experiencing that no one was it was it was half a year in that no one was going to take me seriously, and so I I just yelled in a very on Canadian way, and I was like, You're going to give me a scan and I'm not leaving, Like I'm just not leaving until you figure out something else for me. And and I really thought it was

just going to be like an inconvenience. So the next day, when I was just very casually in my office, just like prepping for a lecture, when I got a phone call in my office that I had stage four cancer and then I was going to have to walk from my office to the hospital to check myself in for an emergency procedure and who knows what, Like just it felt I don't think I'll ever experience time moving quite

so slowly because it was the horror of it. It was like the my life is whatever, this is, it's it's I could feel it go, you know, like it's all it's all gone now. I uh, I didn't realize that life can turn so quickly and that like whatever plans you have like don't count. So all I said was, um, but I have a son. Like I was arguing with her, you know, because she sounded so bored. And when I met her after the surgery to just check on some staples,

she said, Uh, how are you? And I said, um, actually, it's been really hard, and she said, well, the sooner you get used to the idea of dying, the better. And that was the That was the strange brutality of this like threshold moment, that like there was a before and an after in my life and that I was going to have to figure out how to live in

the after. But I just genuinely didn't know how Hey, I'm I'm trying to trying to understand in that moment how long it took for the news to really penetrate, because when you have that kind of whiplash, like yeah, what was that? I mean it felt honestly, it felt immediate to me. It felt like it was my job to learn to let go as fast as I could. But I didn't know what I was letting go of. Like the first thing you have to let go of

is your body. Like I walk into the hospital, I get admitted, I have to take off my dress, and it was the dress that I loved to lecture in, and I remember looking at it and thinking, I don't know if I'll ever get to wear this again. And and you put on a gown and they will shave you and paint you, and you'll feel though the heaviness of your limbs when they strap you down, and you'll be awake for so much of it that you have to tell yourself like it is my job to let go,

but not if it makes any sense. Like I couldn't picture not going home. When do I get to go home. I couldn't picture not being able to pick up my son because I was going to wake up with all these incisions. And then when I woke up there was I just remember how sad everyone was. And then a night when I was by myself and I realized it was the first time I'd been alone with a doctor

where I could just ask questions. And so that's when I said, m hey, like not to bug you or anything, but like nobody's told me if I'm going to live, and to be honest, I don't totally understand like where all the cancer was or went. He was like, well, I can only tell you by recounting the statistical average of someone with your diagnosis. And he said, well that like survival amounts to fourteen a fourteen percent chance of survival,

and that survival in the two years. Um, So I want to I want to dig into what your first reaction to this news was in terms of like zooming out at the thirty thout ye, because I've read that you you know, you were like that I'm I'm like special, and like, don't I had a kind of a good person. Yeah, there's yeah, that's so funny. That's great because there was

like a weird double reaction. Holy crap, of course it's me and this other version that was like the middle class hustler that was like, hadn't I worked really hard? Aren't I kind of a like a reasonably nice, decent person who And then I wanted so much to say, like deserve like who deserves to have this beautiful life?

And hadn't I earned it somehow? And then I was back to that like the math, like I made everything add up and now and now you're telling me that, like I like, I'm going to be the one that doesn't make it. I felt really outwaged. And it's just so funny, because you know, I'm part of this faith tradition which would never use the word deserve. I'm not

even American. And I realized, like I had such a deeply American belief that my individual effort, my hustle and hard work, my sort of inherent deservedness in finding that relationship between hard work and success, that I didn't even leave room for the possibility that you can do all the right things and and that and that, and that you can be deeply unlucky. And I spent years studying people who believe that they deserve what they get, and I never once imagine myself to be that kind of person.

And then when I could hear myself saying, but aren't I kind of a good person? Like do you do you see this personality in motion? I am working hard? I just like it was it was like that that bit was so deeply humbling that felt like like I like the shirt got turned inside out and I could just see all the seams of everything, and I realized, like, oh, things, things come apart. Say more about that. Yeah, I guess

I'm one of the strangest parts about being lucky. I suppose not knowing that you're lucky, believing that every one of your actions are supposed to add up to more and more and more is that um is that you begin to feel like you've earned your life, deserved your life, that you don't even need luck, like you bulldoze a path. And over the years I have steadily built up a belief system that said that I am the solution to every problem. I'm the center that holds, I'm the thing

that acts. I will make my own destiny, and and that if I can't, then you know, in this culture that always says, you know, there's there's no setbacks, there's just set ups. You know, people are always like closing doors, opening windows, that all of these kind of cultural cliches

and aphorisms are there too. Explain to me that pain was just like a like a tripping hazard or a lesson, and that it was my job to learn the lesson in order to overcome, but that there was never a version in which I was going to lose or else. If you lose, then you're a loser, if you fail to make that dream come true, like you really only have yourself to blame, and that feeling set in really quickly. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans.

I'm talking with Kate Bohler, a religious scholar at Duke University. She was thirty five years old when doctors told Kate she had staged four colon cancer and that her chance of survival was just fourteen percent. But then doctors told Kate she may or may not qualify for some novel

immunotherapies that could significantly increase her chance of survival. They said, I might be part of the ninety percent of people who just received chemotherapy and with a diagnosis like mine would likely die within six months, or part of a seven percent whose cancer would multiply unabated and there would be no point in doing treatment anyway, Or that I might be part of a three percent chance whose particular condition would open me up to being able to try

some of these novel immunotherapies that were being tested. So I, just because I am in the humanities, I was like, oh, okay, so I could probably die, I could absolutely die, or I could have magic cancer. And he was like, yeah, pretty much, so awesome great. So when I got like a phone call a couple of weeks later that just said, turns out you have the magic cancer, I was so. I was so thrilled because even though even though most of the people who were in that cohort wouldn't respond

to the immunotherapy, I might. I might, And so it was like the very first chance that there might be like a future for me. Yeah. I want to know whether you get this devastating cancer diagnosis and all of a sudden, this disbelief you've had along, which is you know, I'm special, I'm Kate, I'm a good person, I'm nice to people, starts to dissipate, but then you get this news that you do have the magic cancer, which you could imagine could seduce you back into this older way

of thinking. Yeah, And I think I felt like I was sometimes surrounded by that because people wanted to, you know, because the people who love you are delusional, and they start and we all start lying. You know, we're like, well, you know, it's going to be a miracle and God's going to find a way or science is going to find a way. Like we have all these hyper causalities that we then assume that because I am a somehow special person and they just mean, you know, because they

love me, and my death would be unthinkable. My death would end a world, right, it's just the way the way we love. And so people really wanted to believe that I was going to be part of this you have to live and I immediately I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it. And by not wanting to do it, what you mean is you didn't want to revert back into the old way of thinking that, yeah, I am special and I am exceptional, and I deserve what I put in, what I've put

into this life. Yeah, And I felt like I'd learned something I didn't want to unlearn. And my like procarity, the feeling of like teetering, I just felt like it was letting me see other things I hadn't seen before. And I don't know, I know it sounds like strange, at least it is to me, But like I found myself saying stuff like I don't want to go back, and of course, like I wanted to go back. I would have loved to go back to like a healthy,

delusional person I was before. But like I felt like, knowing then that the world can come undone, it like opened up in me a capacity to love other people in their procarity that I didn't I didn't know before. And I felt like the strange, shimmery kind of matrix feeling you get when you feel the truth of something, And that felt so precious, so fucking precious that like that, After that, I was more just trying to find the right relationship to hope without return learning to the like

that I deserve my life. You know, you talk about how in that moment there's this there's this tension right of you both want to to reoccupy the delusional state of mind because what a safe and joyful place to occupy,

right to. But on the other hand, you do feel like confronting the truth or what you believe to be the truth, but I believe to be the truth allows you to create a kind of empathy for others in their pain, in their suffering that you might not have been able to I want to know whether there was also, in that moment or since then, whether you felt that there was also an advantage to you of not rebuying

that lie. Yeah. Yeah, I mean sometimes I just felt like I can't afford to hope right now, Like I mean, I can't afford to take on a certainty that I'd have to take back. I do notice that people who've really been through something are very frequently very careful in the way that we both tell a story and then as if we don't want to say things that have to be unsaid. So ah, yeah, someone once called it

like um the fellowship of the afflicted. Always thought that was such like a lovely way of because you can feel that badge of belonging. Sometimes when we're not sloppy with our language, we don't hope for things. We don't hope for everything we are. Our hopes are like precious little gems and we have them we hold on tight,

but we don't hope for everything. So so it almost felt like self protective instinct then in that moment to think, look, I if I buy into this again, well, then in four weeks if I find out the immunotherapy doesn't work and I have to leave Zach. Well, then what what

what story do I tell myself? Then? Yeah, that so it's too flimsy ground, I see, Okay, Yeah, I think I was like I had just started treatment when I started trying to understand why I felt like I was living such a contradiction that like that I had wanted to believe in a world in which I had to serve what I get, and yet I was like here, stuck with these terrible sixty day intervals of life and

like and not guaranteed anymore. And so I wrote a short piece and a friend who had a friend at the New York Times encouraged me to sent it in and then it got published, which I was not in any way prepared for because I had been trying to write this little piece that was like, hey, sometimes I think I believed that everything was going to happen for a reason and that my life was going to have an order to it, And now I can see that sometimes you have to live without quite so many reasons

for the things that happened to you. And then I got just like hundreds and hundred and thousands of messages of people explaining to me why I deserved what I got, and it was it ranged. It was a wide range of reasons for surely I have committed some terrible sin. God has just let me die. You know. God has created a mystery and I have to live inside it faithfully. So a lot of like that I am unfaithful for

being angry at the unfairness of it. And then of course there's all that, just like um well meeting wellness people who are there to explain to me why every smovie or every failure to accept a nutritional supplement is like the reason for my impending death. So I guess like it's just funny because I had tried so hard to live without quite so many reasons. I feel like ever since, all I've been doing is drowning in them.

We had a neighbor come to the door one day and try to lovingly bring food, but also explained to my husband oman that everything happens for a reason, like you know, she's sort of like a throw like, well, everything happens for a reason. And he just looked at her dead eyed and was like, oh, I'd love to hear it, like I'd love to hear the reason my wife is dying. And it was a good um, she's like scampered away and im and now now I say the obligatory. I'm sure she meant well, But the desire

to poor reasons into the void. It's just like it feels irresistible, I think sometimes, and I think that's part of the insanity of living in this culture is every suffering person feels like we have to explain what's happening

to us is if our lives are an indictment. It's it's also so striking to me because and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm I'm imagining that there's this influx of letters coming from people all over the world who are saying, okay, let me explain to you why yeah, And on the one hand, you feel so in your sensibilities, are so offended by all of this, like what the

hell why are you no? Sorry, random person in ann Arbor, Like you don't actually get to explain my suffering, right, But then on the other hand, it feels like maybe pre cancer diagnosis, Kate might have wanted to do exactly the same thing that they were doing for you now, like maybe you would have wanted to explain away someone else is suffering, just to just right to find meaning in it, and it wouldn't and it might not even sound like oh what did they do? It might be like, well,

how how old was she was she married? Did she have a kid? How many kids? How long has she been married? What does she do? Like just the accounting, the feeling that in times of suffering, everybody's an accountant trying to tally up each other's life and our significance, and therefore how sad they should be. Yeah, it's like quantifying the loss, it really is. Yeah, that's so interesting. Were you able to again? I could imagine it's being infuriated by some of these messages like you know what

you drink? The organic smoothe Okay, yeah, yeah. I mean I think I was most mad, and I think I was most out at other Christians because I felt like they were supposed to be my like my soft place to fall. We have great compassionate you know chunks of scripture that are four moments like this, like the Book of Job, you're supposed to be able to say like there are no words, there are no words for this

kind of like undoing. But instead I got a lot of like, don't worry, Everything's going to be fine and soon you'll go home to heaven. And I just remember being like, oh, maybe you want to go home first.

It just feels like so snarky about after you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I mean I wouldn't want to get in your way here, I think especially, Um, it just kind of raised a lot of questions for me about like what what what would a faithful person do in a situation like this, Like if I was more faithful, would I have a certain kind of peace or confidence? Would I would I

be more able to let go? And I it just felt like a lie though to me that I should look at my my like little toddler with his giant, guppy eyes, that like I was supposed to look a look at him and say that like his life would still somehow be as good if I weren't there to be his mom and I They're just the like hollowness of all those reasons just made the whole thing um

just so like deeply like spiritually emotionally like unsatisfying. So I was like, yeah, I mean you can say all kinds of things, but like, don't lie to me, Like there's no world in which I shouldn't be this kid's mom. Yeah, I'm wondering, Kate, whether um, it was a diagnosis itself that led you to kind of examine what lies you had believed up until that point, or whether it was having these beliefs kind of aggressively thrown in your face through this op ed that that most led you to challenge.

And maybe they both played a role, but not as many people get that second experience where all the things that they might have thought to want to do for others or themselves is suddenly in your face from others, in the throes of your own horrible, horrible experience, right, Yeah, to be like the observer of and then the subject of immediately, And it did really become both like a source of tremendous pain but also like a real I feel like all for me, any good project, like something

I'm really interested in trying to understand and study, also feels like it's it's the heart of a question that I'm openly struggling against. And for me, it was how much how much truly is in our control? Like what kind of account of agency are we allowed to give in a moment where like all odds are against you? Because I wanted to know the answer, like how much. Am I supposed to save my own life right now? Or am I just supposed to, you know, let go

and let God? And because over the next couple of years, what I would eventually find is that I would have to try to save my own life a million more times, and that like surrender was just never going to be just like wise, Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Kate, because I feel like, um, at some point I did away with the view that things in my life are happening

for a reason. It's it's been so long now I no longer I no longer even remember what it was like to have that kind of psychological safety net in a moment of crisis. And I'm curious to know, you know that that discovery was more recent for you, And I just wonder what it's what it's like to to no longer have that. I mean, yeah, it's so comforting. It's so comforting, and it's it's like one of those things where like I thought about this, and I wonder

if you've had similar thoughts. It's like, Okay, I don't believe everything happens for a reason, but like what I secretly want my kid to believe it, just for their own sake, like what I want Zach? Like, do I kind of want Kate's son Zach to believe this just just so that he can ease like it can ease the death of his pain. Yeah. I think the problem with that everything happens for a reason is that hypersynthetic

coherence that it demands that everything have. On the other hand, I do believe in a big story about love, you know, in which like in our worst moments we are promised the love of one another, but we can like show up and be the person that brings socks and dumb presents, and you know, like I have such an intense belief now that love is one of the only guarantees in

the awful times. And I guess I always think of that now is like what is you know after or like the after we've cleared away all that everything happens for a reason. Like I really I believe that in the worst moments of our life the love is there. I have never fallen and not felt it, like even when I hit the ground. So that is that feels to me like not just a hope, but like a

like a thing I'd be willing to guarantee. My kid is like even if I was gone, even if the worst thing happened, Like even if I don't get to arrange a future in which we all get to be together, like I know that love will be there and that that feels like a truth well earned. Wow. Yeah, that's

that's beautiful. Um. And it sounds like you're you're still in the business at least of constructing meaning for yourself, right, Like, like to find the for a reason in the everything happened, you know, even at the universe necessarily, even if universe necessary didn't necessarily have that is a plan for you, right, Yeah, yeah, I do. It's a really perfect way of putting it. But yeah, yeah, because on the other side of hyper causality is not like nialism or despair. I think it's

just like more empathy for one another. Like if we really know that there is not like a fail safe rescue plan for everybody's pain, I think we would sure as hell show up a little faster for one another and believe in systems and good policies that prevent so much of human suffering in the first place. Yeah, would you say that, you know, one of the goals of your book and being a religious historian is is showing that you can also find some safety and permanence in

a world where you don't have those beliefs. Has that been kind of your mission? Okay, yes, yeah, I really like that. Also, just aside, you're so smart, and it's just so fun to talk to such a smart personal. I'm serious, it makes it so fun. Like I just like it makes you stop. I'm like stopping all the time because I want to come up with a better answer. You know, you don't deserve a shitty answer. I want

to have a better one. Sweet, But like I want people to not need a prosperity gospel to move forward. I really do that. I think that we have outsourced solutions to each other's pain when we forgot that we belonged to each other, assuming that if there's enough for everybody, that we don't have to make more for each other. I think with the right when you, when you can pour in other people, you can pour in the knowledge that you will never be really truly be alone, that

there is love there waiting for you. I don't think we'll need quite so many reasons anymore. Kate and I recorded this conversation in early twenty twenty two, six years after she was first diagnosed. Kate continues to respond positively to her immunotherapy treatments and receives scans every six months. Join me next week when I talked to Ethan Cross, an expert on the science of introspection and how our

inner voice can be a double edged sword. He gives us strategies for how we can reign in that inner voice when it turns negative and becomes what he calls chatter. So something bad happens, we turn our attention in. We're to try to make sense of the problem, but we get stuck in a negative thought loop. That's what I call chatter. You keep on trying to think and work through the problem, but you don't make any progress. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produce

by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes Tyler Green our senior producer, Emily Rosteck, our producer and fact checker, Jan Guera, our senior editor, Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries.

So big thanks to everyone there, including Nicolemrano, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Faine, and Carly Nigliori, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a slight change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker Tyler's Back. So I feel like there's an audio issue. This one has headphones and this one is looks like a microphone. I'm gonna sing all by myself while I do it. Just see you can get this come oh baa s has this feeling? Does it change at all?

I don't want to be oh by helping. It's really helping when I'm singing, and I feel