Everything Happens: Dr. Kate Bowler ’02 on Challenging Toxic Positivity and Our Obsession with Perfection

By Laura Billings Coleman

If you’ve ever suffered a devastating personal loss, a death in the family, a terrible diagnosis, or a defining moment that will forever mark the turning point between what came before and what came after, there’s a good chance you’ve discovered Dr. Kate Bowler ‘02 in your Instagram feed.

While other social media megastars are posting videos of five-star vacation finds and humblebrags about gifted kids and limitless possibilities, Bowler, the forty-four-year-old Duke Divinity School associate professor and host of the award-winning podcast “Everything Happens,” is here to challenge the popular notion that we can manifest health, wealth and happiness through good vibes and positive thinking. With her bright red lipstick and irreverent laugh, she trolls the culture of toxic positivity with blessings for people who are having the worst days of their lives, helpful thoughts about what to say when others are suffering (“Try not to start a sentence with the words ‘At least,’”) and occasional advice about finding joy in unlikely places. (She finds some of hers by visiting monumental roadside attractions. Akeley, Minnesota’s Paul Bunyan is a favorite.)

“One of the things I really love about social media is you get to go to the place which is designed to make you feel like you are failing to ‘live your best life now’ and just remind people of the humanity that they forgot the second they opened their app,” Bowler says during a video call from her office at Duke, against a rainbow-hued backdrop of self-help titles she’s planning to dissect in her next scholarly work. “I want to help take away the untrue stories that our culture gives us, especially women, about how we should have it all together, and give back some reassurance that most of life will be about endless reinventions, that things will come apart again and again and again, and that we owe each other things that we need to be reminded of.”

A Macalester religious studies major who went on to earn graduate degrees from Yale and Duke, Bowler came by these life lessons the hard way, through lived experience. In 2015, at the age of thirty-five, she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer and given less than a year to live, a crisis she chronicled in two best- selling memoirs: Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear). Written with real-time urgency, under the fluorescent glow of chemo infusion rooms and airport lounges, both books explore the sudden sense of exile that often accompanies illness and uncertainty. “That flurry of writing was really about feeling claustrophobic and eclipsed by something I hadn’t chosen,” she says. “I think the work of having to decide how scared to be is what changed me the most. But since then, it’s also been about the feeling of being part of this unlimited community of people who, like me, know that the world can come apart in a second. It really cracked open my world view.”

Last August, after years of treatment, managing chronic pain, and “spending fifteen hours a week on the phone with someone named Linda, who did not want to solve my billing problem,”

Bowler posted a video of herself waking up from anesthesia to announce that she was finally cancer-free, thanks to the success of an immunotherapy clinical trial. “But there’s no going back,” she says. “I am forever changed by what I discovered: life is so beautiful and life is so hard. For everyone.”

With recent New York Times bestsellers like Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day, and a TED Talk that’s been viewed more than 9 million times, Bowler has become the kind of cheerful public intellectual who gets invited back to Good Morning, America again and  again. “But she’s also recognized as a very serious scholar of American religious culture,” says Jim Laine, Mac’s Arnold H. Lowe Professor of Religious Studies, a former professor who remembers her flair for writing and acute cultural criticism. “Coming from Canada probably helped.”

The daughter of academics, Bowler grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she learned about the American college admissions process by watching Saved by the Bell. “My father always said there were a few things that Americans did really well, and that’s national parks, smooth roads, and small liberal arts colleges,” she says. Arriving at Macalester in 1998, her first real visit to the US, she remembers advice from the college’s required international student orientation programming: “They told us that when Americans say ‘See you later!’ they may not actually want to see you later. That was very helpful.”

During her time at Mac, Bowler sampled widely from the liberal arts, grumbling through physics-for-poets, playing cello in the orchestra, working in the Weyerhaeuser Chapel, and eventually finding her place in Macalester’s Religious Studies Department. “It was one of the best religion departments in the country, and the professors were all highly trained, highly specialized researchers who also loved teaching undergraduates, which was an unbelievable gift,” she says.

Religious studies also emerged as the right place to explore some of the central questions she had about how America works. “I think I gravitated toward history and religion because I really just couldn’t figure out Americans,” she remembers. “I couldn’t figure out why they thought health care was so terrible. I couldn’t figure out why they were so committed to stories about risk and reward. I couldn’t understand American civil religion in particular, the way that they felt chosen by God and by the world to be a beacon—that always was such a puzzle. Feeling like an outsider definitely in- formed my scholarly identity.”

One worldview that struck her as distinctly American was the Prosperity Gospel, the charismatic faith movement exemplified by leaders like Oral Roberts and Joel Osteen, that views material wealth as a sign of God’s will. When she found that some friends had fallen under the spell of a charismatic minister (“who requested a motorcycle from the congregation,” she adds), her curiosity eventually grew into a doctoral dissertation and the 2013 release Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. During the decade it took to write, Bowler interviewed charismatic church leaders in private jets, and traveled with parishioners who’d paid thousands for miracle cures, a process that “created this push-pull that is core to my identity, of feeling deeply critical, especially of exploitative leaders, and then simultaneously, totally in love with the people in the pews.’’ Her second scholarly work, The Preacher’s Wife, delved into the lives of evangelical women celebrities, offering a sympathetic take on the challenges of claiming power within conservative, male-dominated faith cultures.

“She has a wonderful way of not being judgmental about people, and trying to see the humanity in people, and in herself,” says Laine. Though her work is deeply critical of the Prosperity Gospel culture, “she’s also able to write about how there are aspects of that belief system that she kind of bought into, or wanted to. Like all of us, until you have a major tragedy in your life, you feel kind of immune.”

While Bowler now describes herself as a “cancer alumnus,” her experiences still inform her revealing and wide-ranging conversations on her podcast, “Everything Happens.” Now in its thirteenth season, with more than 18 million downloads, recent guests have included New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof; Charles Spencer, brother of Princess Diana; and “America’s Government Teacher” Sharon McMahon of Duluth, Minn.

Civic engagement and structural injustice have emerged as themes of the show, and “every single conversation this season is largely about the small ability we have to make a difference,” a notion of limited agency that Bowler believes is more effective for change-making than the extremes she calls “everything-is-possibleism and nothing-is-possibleism.” From the rise of election denial, to the growing distrust of scientists and experts, to the nearly 40 million Americans who’ve left their church over the last generation, she says, “the fragility of the structures that hold up how we trust each other, how we keep power in check, and how we care for each other beyond our own individual needs are openly deteriorating.”

Yet, as she tells people on her frequent speaking engagements, she sees plenty of cause for hope. “I think one reason I really care about pastors, and journalists, and doctors is because they’re not sure they can believe in their professions anymore,” she says. “But I believe that professional expertise is actually one of the most load-bearing things we can contribute.”

As we recover from the election season, “I just think it’s the right time to turn the volume down on our individual anxiety and our apocalypticism enough to remind ourselves that there are meaningful acts of love, trust, and courage that we can do right now that will help us rebuild a stronger sense of self, and a stronger sense of our belonging and value again in our communities,” Bowler says.

“And, as always, one of the fastest ways to get over yourself is to serve other people.”

St. Paul writer Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to Macalester Today.