Flawed to Perfection
If you don’t recognize Liz Curtis Higgs these days, maybe it’s because you remember her as Liz Curtis, the flirty-voiced radio personality on Louisville stations in the early 1980s. Maybe you heard a rumor or two back then about her wild ways with Southern Comfort, recreational drugs and a revolving lineup of all the wrong men. But in 1982, Curtis found two things: Jesus and herself. The combination turned out to be more than just personally transformative. It was also career dynamite.
Five years later she had a husband and new baby and had left radio to build a career as a motivational speaker. The venture prospered; by the early ’90s she was averaging a speaking engagement every two and a half days. Then she turned her oratorical skills into written form — Christianity-based books for both adults and children. Her Bible-study book Bad Girls of the Bible has sold more than 500,000 copies since its 1999 release. Her novel Thorn in My Heart, which resets a Biblical-family saga in 18th-century Scotland, topped sales in the Christian historical fiction category in 2003. She’s the author of 22 books, with more than two million copies in print. Grace in Thine Eyes, the fourth book in her Scottish series, is due out in March. In short, Liz Curtis Higgs has been on a decade-and-a-half professional roll.
And it’s not in spite of her bad-girl past but, in some measure, because of it. Higgs uses her failings, past and present (but especially those splashy drinking-smoking-and-screwing-around ones) to convince audiences that they don’t have to be perfect in order to be loved by God.
Higgs’ sin, in other words, is her shtick. And audiences eat it up.
Higgs’ background wouldn’t peg her as a candidate for wayward behavior. She grew up in “a nice, stable family” in Lititz, Penn. (75 miles west of Philadelphia), went to its evangelical Christian church regularly, joined Girl Scouts, made National Honor Society, et cetera. But she turned 16 in the permissive atmosphere of 1970. “As a girl who loved to have fun,” she says, “I just went for everything that was being offered. And everything was being offered.”
Her early radio career coincided with the advances of the women’s movement, which allowed her to become a program director, a position few other women in those days achieved. Her on-air times at Detroit station WWWW were coveted mornings and midday slots. But the rock radio milieu brought even more exposure to drugs.
When she came to Louisville in 1981 to work for WQMF, she spent long hours on barstools at Phoenix Hill Tavern, partying with friends. But by that time, her excesses had brought her low. “The good news about hitting bottom is that there’s nowhere else to look but up,” she says as she sits on the enclosed porch of the 19th-century Middletown farmhouse she shares with her husband, Bill Higgs, and teenagers Matthew and Lillian. “You can finally face who you really are . . . and you can begin to climb out of the pit — or in my case, be carried out of the pit sort of kicking and screaming by God.”
That transformation happened in 1982 via Tim and Ev Kelly, a married couple at WAKY, where she was then working. Higgs admired the couple’s sophistication and was surprised when they brought up their religious faith. The two took her under their wings, introduced her to the writings of C.S. Lewis, and eventually brought her to embrace Christianity. That same year she met Higgs, an Old Testament theologian, who would become her husband in 1986. The bad girl days were over. Gone, but never forgotten.
You might not see the former party girl in Higgs’ Unveiling Mary Magdalene Bible-study video — that is, not until you’ve been watching for a while. In the video, she looks every inch the respectable 50-year-old woman addressing a group of women in a church sanctuary. Though she’s dressed in a conservative black dress topped with a stylish, colorful scarf, her exuberant personality is front and center. She paces the platform with a microphone in one hand, gesturing nonstop with the other. She cracks jokes, pulls faces and occasionally breaks into song. Her message is that Mary Magdalene was no prostitute, but rather a mentally ill woman whom Jesus healed — a woman, despite her former disability, of importance to Jesus. Higgs points out that it was Mary Magdalene who first saw the risen Jesus and reported the news to his disciples. Why Mary? Because God loves to choose the least likely people to deliver
his message.
Cue the woman-with-a-past material. “He loves people who have ‘least likely to’ stamped all over them,” Higgs tells her audience, making stamping motions with her hand. “Am I not, like, a good example of that? ’Cause I wouldn’t pick me!” Her eyes widen at the thought. “Former bad girl? Sex, drugs and rock-’n’-roll mama?” By now the women are laughing and clapping in delight at her candor. But they’re also soaking up her point.
A self-described conservative evangelical, Higgs dubs her unorthodox presentation style “girlfri/files/storyimages/theology.” She tackles her topics with research, studying 14 Bible translations as well as scholarly commentaries, before packaging her conclusions as entertainment. “It is a relatable style,” she says. “It is fun, it’s upbeat. It’s a sister thing. We’re just having fun with it, but in the process . . . I always say, ‘When their mouths are hanging open laughing, I’m spooning in knowledge.’”
Bob Russell, senior minister of Southeast Christian Church, where Higgs is a member, sees Higgs’ good-time attitude as integral to her success. “She’s fun to be around,” he says. “Her self-deprecating humor is really beneficial to her. Her ability to make fun of her size really disarms people.” For example, Russell says, in explaining her decision to join the choir, “she tells people, ‘I love to sing, and they had a robe that fit.’
“She’s a very joyful person,” Russell says. “She, by her joy, gives women permission to be joyful in Christ, even though they’re not perfect.”
If her audience responds wholeheartedly to that message, in part that’s because she’s selected her audience carefully. Nine years into her speaking career, she arrived at the decision to speak exclusively to Christian women’s groups. “Mostly it was my own desire to be a 10 every time I hit the platform,” she explains. “And you can only be a 10 if the audience is a 10. If you’re a fit, if you’re with them, then the rest is easy.”
Over the years she has dramatically reduced her speaking load in order to sp/files/storyimages/more time with her writing and her family. In 1992 she did 141 appearances. In 2007 she’ll do just 13 week/files/storyimages/engagements around the country, from California to New Hampshire to Florida (though none locally). Even among Christian women’s groups, Higgs is careful to ascertain she’s the right speaker for the group. She’s aware that her brand of girlfri/files/storyimages/theology is not everyone’s cup of tea.
“I don’t fit into anybody’s typical conservative mold about anything,” she says. “I push envelopes quite a bit in the evangelical community. Because I am very honest about sin. Not just the sin of the past; I’ll tell you what I did wrong today.”
That openness makes many evangelical Christians uncomfortable, Higgs says. “They want to say, ‘OK, you were a bad girl, and then you came to know the Lord, and now you’re a good girl.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? The Bible says if you say you have no sin, you’re a liar.’ I know that I have sin. And I don’t want to be a liar.”
Higgs’ I’m-not-holier-than-thou attitude raises the question of just how far she pushes the evangelical envelope. On one hand, she describes her nature as rebellious, calls herself a questioner of authority, and asserts, “I don’t think there’s any one church that has all the right answers.” On the other hand, when asked if she has ever found herself challenging positions put forth by the leadership of Southeast Christian, she can’t come up with an example.
And here’s something interesting: In her Unveiling Mary Magdalene video, she declares, “I’m not a feminist — you know I’m not.” While that term carries different meanings for different people, it’s clear that in Higgs’ mind, her rejection of feminism in no way runs counter to her success as a speaker to female audiences about the women of the Bible. (In describing Higgs as one of the most gifted people he knows, Bob Russell runs down a litany of her career accomplishments before concluding, “And yet, she’s a really good mother.”) Nor, apparently, does Higgs consider her role as family breadwinner a feminist matter.
In 1995, she was employing three assistants just to keep up with her burgeoning career. One day, Higgs says, her husband noted that his salary as computer systems specialist for WHAS-TV more or less equaled the cost of employing those assistants. He suggested he quit his job and the two of them manage her career together, the better to simplify life and be more present for each other and their children. For the past decade they’ve run what she calls their “mom-and-pop business” out of a detached garage a few yards from their house.
While her career hasn’t made her rich, Higgs says, it has allowed her to support her family, including one child in college and another heading that way. When asked, she notes that “we give a lot away. . . . We give a ton to our church, obviously,” as well as make donations to Habitat for Humanity and, recently, to the Salvation Army’s Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
Higgs declines to discuss her income or speaker’s fee, though she will say she hasn’t raised her price in 10 years and, in fact, reduced it by two-thirds when she began speaking exclusively to Christian audiences. “If I just wanted to make money, I could go do one-hour funny presentations for corporate clients for $5,000 an hour,” she says. “But I didn’t want to choose the easy way. I want to make a difference if I can.” Her earnings remained stable despite the drop in speaking fees; by that time, her book sales had begun to take off.
Locally, Higgs’ books sell like hotcakes in religious bookstores, though less so elsewhere. Michael Boggs, co-owner of Carmichaels’ Bookstores, hasn’t had much luck selling Higgs titles, noting that they seem to lack general appeal. “The religion we do sell tends to be spirituality in general rather than Christian in specific,” he notes.
On the other hand, she’s a huge seller at Wellspring Christian Book Center. “I have to get her titles in in hundreds,” says Gil Billingsley, book buyer for both store locations, on Shelbyville Road and Dixie Manor. By way of comparison, Billingsley says, he typically buys just eight to 12 copies of most books he stocks. Wellspring has never had to return overstock of any of Higgs’ books.
Her greatest success is Bad Girls of the Bible: And What We Can Learn from Them. Its 10 chapters, each focusing on a different Biblical woman, begin with a contemporary version of the tale, told in romance-novel prose. (In the Garden of Eden story, innocent Evie is seduced by the darkly handsome Devin into entering the forbidden gazebo at the center of her father’s garden.) Next comes a commentary on the Biblical text, written with a sense of humor but intended to provoke thought. At the /files/storyimages/of each chapter is a section laying out the story’s lessons, followed by discussion questions.
Customer reviews of Bad Girls on Amazon.com are largely positive — one reviewer calls it “the best Christian book I’ve ever read!” In response to a negative review by a reader calling the text “misogynistic, narrow-minded, simplistic,” Higgs expresses sorrow that the reader chose to air her views in a monologue rather than writing a letter to the author. “Amazon frustrates me because I can’t minister to (the reader) personally,” she says. “Her response is perfectly valid; that’s her opinion. She’s allowed to have it. (But) if everybody had it, it wouldn’t have sold half a million copies.”
Not all of Higgs’ readers are of the evangelical stripe. Gail Henson, an elder at Bardstown Road Presbyterian Church, attends Bible studies at St. Paul United Methodist, where she’s studied Higgs’ Loved by God video series. Unlike Boggs, Henson, who is chair of the Department of Communications at Bellarmine University, sees Higgs’ appeal as wide. “She can communicate to a broad audience — cross-generational, multiracial, cross-cultural,” Henson observes. “She’s believable. Her skill is enhanced by her radio background, but her credibility comes from the passion she has for her faith.”
Henson isn’t bothered by the gap between her own mainstream Protestant grounding and Higgs’ evangelical beliefs, noting that the Bible transcends denominations. Henson, who has studied theology and Greek, notes that some of the Bible translations Higgs uses in her research are paraphrases rather than exact expressions from the original Greek or Hebrew. Still, Henson finds plenty to glean from Higgs’ work, though she doesn’t feel the need to agree with every one of the author’s theological conclusions. “You take what you will,” Henson says. “I think critical thinkers evaluate everything they hear anyway.”
In Bad Girls of the Bible, Higgs categorizes some of the women as “bad for a season but not forever.” That category is dear to Higgs’ heart — partly because it describes her own life, but also because she sees a hunger for that kind of story in her audience. The women she addresses “need to know they’re forgiven,” she says. Along with forgiveness, Higgs’ audience is looking for something else. At her speaking engagements, she says, “I see women out there looking at me, and their eyes are saying, ‘Please tell me that the troubles I’m facing, and the heartaches and the disappointments and the sin and the mistakes — please tell me that there’s hope. That there’s an answer to this.’
“Most of us hide all that stuff,” Higgs says. “I find it’s my strength in ministry to dig out my old stuff and minister
to people.”
