Christine Wicker was raised in Oklahoma, Texas and other parts of the South. Her mother’s grandfather was an itinerant Baptist preacher and her dad’s father was a Kentucky coal miner. She is the first journalist in her family. Upon hearing of her profession, her grandmother once comforted her by saying, “That’s all right. Just tell people you’re a waitress.”

During her 17 years at The Dallas Morning News, she was a feature writer, columnist and religion reporter. Her work took her from demonstrations in Nairobi to peace communes in Belfast. She slept in Mexican chicken shacks, trailed homeless people through Dallas alleys and tracked down East Germans who had worked for the Communist secret police. She covered Lady Diana’s funeral in England and Pope John II’s historic visit to Cuba.

Her first book was a true crime tale co-authored with a Dallas street cop named John Matthews. Matthews solved one of the city’s most gruesome serial killing sprees: three prostitutes whose eyes were removed by the killer after they were murdered. He and his partner, a young African-American woman, showed up the city’s more senior detectives by piecing together stories told by prostitutes who worked the West Dallas streets they patrolled. The book, which came out in paperback, was entitled The Eyeball Killer.

Her second book was a spiritual autobiography called God Knows My Heart. In it, she struggled to win free of the kind of Southern Baptist Christianity she’d accepted at the age of nine. The book is an exploration and challenge to the traditional Christian insistence that God could only come to humans through a conversion experience with Jesus. As the book was being published, the publicist called and wailed to her husband, Philip, “Oh, no. This is terrible. Some person named Christine Wicker has written a book called The Eyeball Killer. What can we do?” Philip paused hoping she would collect herself, and then said, “I have some bad news for you.”

Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead was written after Philip, who was a Southern Methodist University journalism professor, accepted the Lucius W. Nieman Professorship of Journalism at Marquette University. Christine left her job as a newspaper reporter when they moved to a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She had previously visited Lily Dale, a community of Spiritualists in Western New York, and written about it for the Dallas Morning News. The community so charmed her that she went home hoping to return some day and write a book about what she’d found there. But returning to Lily Dale, which was 1,600 miles from Dallas, didn’t seem likely. However, as her first winter in Wisconsin was coming to a close, she pulled out a map and looked for Lily Dale. It was 600 miles from her new home. She called, made reservations at one of the community’s guest houses and within a few weeks was on her way.

Her fourth book, on the magical community, started with a visit to Salem, Massachusetts. She had planned to write about Wiccans and witches, but while she was there one of the town’s most prominent witches mentioned that a California wizard was scheduled to visit Salem soon.

“Wizard,” Christine said. “I didn’t know there were any.”

“Well, there must be since he is one,” the witch said.

“Who says he’s a wizard?” Christine asked.

“He does,” the witch said. “Everyone in the magical community knows him.”

“Magical community,” Christine said. “I didn’t know there was one.”

And thus began Not in Kansas Anymore: The Curious Tale of How Magic is Transforming America.

Christine’s new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, will be in bookstores April 29th.

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