eX-skeptic

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has been an atheist and also been a Christian. Through listening to their story, we listen to both perspectives, from someone who has thought and lived on the other side.

At different points in our lives, we all ask the big questions. Who am I? What am I doing with my life? What am I pursuing or not? What’s wrong with me? What, if anything, can make my life better? Where am I looking for answers? Am I looking in all the wrong places? Or am I on the right path? How can I know which way to go? Who’s telling the truth? Who can I trust?

We ask the questions, but that doesn’t mean we really are looking for answers, but sometimes different circumstances force our hand and cause us to take a closer look. They prompt us to stop and ask the big questions, to actually search for answers. Suddenly, all the temporary noise and busyness and distractions are removed. We look more closely at ourselves and our lives to not only ask probing questions of ourselves, whether we’ve been pursuing the right path, but also to find answers in order to make sense of our lives. Life interruptions can also make us wonder whether or not there is a God. Is God the key that can help us answer our big questions? Is He real? Can He be found? Does He have anything to say that can help us make sense of our lives?

Our podcast guest today, Jeremy Evans, had a devastating circumstance that caused him to take a closer look at his own life to see if atheism held the answers he needed or whether he should look for something else, something different, something more. Come along with me to listen to his story.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeremy. It’s wonderful to have you with us today!

Good morning. Thank you for having me.

As we’re getting started, Jeremy, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Yeah. So I am from Pekin, Illinois, which is a little town outside of Peoria, and currently reside in Evansville, Indiana, with my wife and three kids. My kids are nine, seven, and six, and I work for a Christian nonprofit organization here in Evansville that does neighborhood revitalization and work with kids and families to try to connect them to God’s will for their life and help them be successful and self sufficient.

Sounds wonderful. I’d love to hear more about that, perhaps later as we’re talking about what you’re doing now. But let’s get started back at the beginning of your story, because I know that you weren’t always interested in Christian ministry, for sure. You were a long way from that. So I know that you were a former atheist, and I want to know how that really birthed in you, what your beginnings were, how you grew up with your family, and their view of God and how that informed you.

Yeah, so I’m the eldest of three sons in my family, and I remember at an early age not going to church, and I remember my dad’s father, my grandfather, taking me to church at a very young age separate from the rest of my family. And I remember it was the kind of church experience where they would give the kids something to doodle on, and then eventually, they would bring the kids up to the front, and the pastor would talk just to the kids for a little while, and then they’d send the kids off to Sunday School. And I remember kind of being a ham, which is kind of how I grew up.

Then the next real experience I remember of church was a Baptist church in our hometown in Pekin that we got involved with primarily because of sports. So I remember my brothers playing in basketball tournaments. I remember—it’s a funny story. My dad actually coached me and my brothers in baseball growing up, and I remember the only time my dad got thrown out of a baseball game was actually by the pastor of that church. He was the umpire, and he threw my dad out, and I remember thinking, “That’s a substantial moment, when your pastor throws you out of a baseball game.”

Yes, yes.

But I would say, in childhood, only real experience of church was connected to sports. And then I grew up, was in high school and then college. And in college it was a really interesting mix because I attended a Christian music festival called Cornerstone in Illinois, and I had friends who were connected to faith, and I remember that vividly, but then kind of moved away from those friend circles and ended up in a circle of people who I wouldn’t say were hostile to faith but just really didn’t care. It just really wasn’t a significant part of that group of friends’ lives. And so I remember being sort of swayed, not necessarily in the direction of atheism, but just kind of away from things of faith through that time in my life.

Jeremy, as you were growing up, all the way through high school, because a lot of people, especially through their teenage years, start to question what is church? Or who is God? And what is all of this? Did you have any belief in God? I mean, you were going to church-related activities, but was there anything personal about God to you at all? Or was it just kind of in the periphery of what you were doing in sports?

Yeah. So I would certainly say nothing like what I have now. Nothing even close. My parents, for better or worse, just didn’t. We just didn’t go there. We just didn’t talk about faith-related things. We didn’t get the opportunity to deal with big picture questions about life and death. But there was never any kind of—the Bible wasn’t part of our lives growing up. It just wasn’t a significant influence, if that makes sense, and so no, there was no personal connection to it at all. It was very much something that was just in the periphery, and I never really had an experience that I could draw on in my childhood and say that it was sort of a formative spiritual experience.

Although you did have some Christian friends. Would you say that those Christian friends took their faith seriously?

I think it was more of a social structure than anything else. Heavy focus on music, and I had several friends who were in Christian bands and walking through that particular cultural landscape. I would say it was more of a social focus than anything. It was more of a, “Let’s get together. Let’s hang out. And this is kind of a unifying bond between us.” But I don’t remember any significant Bible studies. I don’t remember any significant, again, formative experiences that drew all that together. It was more just something to do.

So it was really more of a nonissue in your life, it seems, until you got to college, and then you started kind of leaving whatever that social construct was, Christianity or God, and started becoming acquainted with perhaps some other ways of thinking. That’s what you do at university, right? You meet new people, you encounter new ideas, and tell me about that time in your life.

Yeah. So I would, unfortunately, given the current cultural landscape, I would draw some of this almost back to politics. I remember sort of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case as having really impacted me towards a more liberal way of thinking and a more liberal way of processing the world. And I really tied those sort of political ideas to my personal beliefs about the world, and so I started to explore what more liberal voices were saying, and I’ll go back to, again, got married during this process, and the individual—my first wife, so we’re now divorced. But my first wife had no real connection to religion in her life, her family. No real connection to religion in our family. And so that was a formative experience in terms of getting married to that person and almost affirming that idea, that you can live sort of independent from these things.

And as I continued to explore those more liberal ideas, I sort of found myself drawn to the idea that Christians could be sort of lazy in terms of their intellectual thinking and processing, and I was heavily turned off by the idea that a Christian would say that something was a mystery or that God was mysterious. It felt very much like a cop-out to me. And so I started reading Dawkins, started reading Harris. Letter to a Christian Nation was an important book for me during that time, and I would say it was more accidental than anything but eventually started to call myself an atheist.

Accidentally.

Yeah. It’s funny because the end of the story kind of goes the same way for me. I wasn’t part of Facebook groups. I wasn’t out bragging about it or trying to convert people or anything. It was more just that, on analysis and on reviewing the available information, I had sold myself that bill of goods and said, “This is how it’s going to be.” And so I think almost because faith was not an important factor, it almost felt like atheism was just as not an important factor in my life. Because the whole idea of faith was just so foreign.

So as you were embracing somewhat I guess intellectually but perhaps not in a truly embodied way this atheism that you had intellectually assented to, obviously there are some very strong ideas in those books in terms of what God is, what religious faith is. Were you being informed about God and Christianity in those negative terms? Was that something that became a part of your way of thinking and vocabulary about faith? Or was it just kind of a nonissue? You didn’t really care one way or another about faith and religion.

No. I think, because of the political component of it, I became really convinced that I could justify my beliefs about faith based on Christian misbehavior, as it were. So when I saw Christians doing and saying hypocritical things, when I saw Christians—it felt like at the time, and we know this to be true, that you don’t have to go very far without seeing a Christian leader sort of fail or fall or struggle with their own personal demons and individual issues, and I let all of those things sort of justify my belief. I kind of let the people do the talking as it related to whether I thought Christianity was something worth exploring, rather than letting the Gospel do the talking. So that was sort of a slippery slope, and I would say, if you set aside the Gospel and set aside what the Bible says and just base your belief about Christianity on just what you see coming out of the lives of Christians, unfortunately, I think you can justify pretty much any worldview that you really want to, based on what you see Christians doing. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does. It does. I mean, like you say, you can look at any worldview and look at the warts and all, as you would see them, and then justify yourself or your own worldview. That would be an easy thing to do because we’re all fallen people, right?

Yeah.

Ideas aren’t pure, in a sense, but like you say sometimes it’s easy to look at the people who call themselves Christians and accuse God, rather than, like you say, looking at the Gospel or the Bible. So in your mind, I guess, Christianity and religion itself was really nothing but a social construct, as you mentioned earlier. So it wasn’t really much worth thinking about at that time. So, as you’re moving along and you’re seeing that atheism… You’ve kind of taken on that identity. You put on that hat. How was that working for you in a sense? I know you read Harris and Dawkins, but did you really look into the grounding for atheistic ideas or the implications of where those ideas go?

No. And it’s funny, because when I was reading those, what I recognize as like the American pop cultural atheism books, I was feeding myself a line that, “Well, I’m going to be more intellectual than Christians, and I’m actually going to seek out the answers for myself, and I’m going to actually do the work intellectually to figure out the answers to these questions, and the reality was that I was just sort of taking a very surface level dive into those issues, finding what justified me, and then moving on down the road. And so I recognize that now, but at the time—and probably largely because it just wasn’t a very important part of my life, as I said. It wasn’t something that factored in in a deep way, and so I didn’t feel a need or a connection to try to study that in a deep way. The other thing I would say is that, again sort of driven by social constructions, I had surrounded myself at that point in my life with people who had similar beliefs and thought processes to what we’re describing here, and so it was very easy to justify sort of just going about my business, and I was never really challenged by the people around me to think about things any differently.

Yeah. It is easy to do, isn’t it?

Unfortunately. And that exists in the world today. We tend to surround ourselves with that echo chamber of people who we know are going to speak and think and feel the same way we speak and think and feel because that helps justify us, right? It helps us feel good about how we feel. And even today I struggle with that.

Yeah. I think we’re all tempted towards that. So what was it, then, that perhaps breached your life or caused you to stop and think a little bit more closely about your atheistic identity or worldview and perhaps become open to another perspective?

Yeah. So Andy Stanley says that you can—this is a terrible paraphrase—but you can do the intellectual thing with someone who’s not a Christian until you’re blue in the face, but the reality is that it takes more than an intellectual approach to get somebody over the line of faith. It almost takes some sort of emotional catalyst to get them thinking differently about their life and about the world around them, and that was certainly true for me. My wife at the time left me and was unfaithful, and that was sort of a shock to the system, right? That was sort of a seminal moment for me personally because I just was lost. I was completely shocked by that, completely blown away, and really didn’t know what to do. And it really turned my whole life upside down in a good way, looking back now. At the time, it didn’t feel like a good way, but it got me really thinking about everything in my life and about whether I was making good choices and whether I was spending time with the right people and those sorts of things.

I can’t imagine what that would feel like. I know that your life probably was turned upside down, inside out, and it caused you to really, I guess, stop and reconsider your life choices, your life perspectives, and really look more at yourself, I presume? Did that lead you towards thinking, “Well, maybe there’s more to life. Maybe there’s a God who exists. Maybe there’s a better way to make sense of my life.” Was it causing you to ask those kinds of questions?

Yeah. It was everything. I try to think about life then, and it’s just really difficult to put in perspective, even, because it was just so wildly different, but really I think there was this foundation underneath me that I had built my life upon that these things are true, these things are not true, and this is how we’re going to live. And it really all got blown up by this experience, and so I really had to step back and sort of live on my own, or live with my own perspective, rather than sort of cheating and taking some of those things for granted, if that makes sense.

So it was this, I guess, time in the wilderness, as it were. When your life is, like you say, kind of blown up and you’re in this new place and you’re trying to figure things out. Did it cause you to just want to meet new or different people or reconsider or atheism? Did you see a problem with the way that you were living or thinking? Or that caused you to reconsider your life choices? Perhaps you wanted to go a different direction. What brought you towards reconsidering God?

Well, certainly I would have to say that my wife was an important part of that conversation, so if it’s okay, let me kind of transition and talk a little bit about it.

Absolutely.

So my wife, Tara, I met her shortly after my divorce, and she was a really interesting person to me. She was a follower of Jesus and was very straightforward with me about that. But Tara was sort of uncanny to me. That seems like a weird word, but it’s really the only one I can think of. Because she challenged all my assumptions. She was willing to invest in me relationally regardless of my status, regardless of whether she felt like she was going to win me over or not. And that was new to me in terms of communicating and interacting with Christians because in my past history it always kind of felt like, with Christians, it was about putting one on the scoreboard, you know?

But this woman was not about that. She was about knowing me and understanding who I was and coming to understand what I believed, and I remember, on our first date, I was very straightforward with her and told her what I thought, and she was sort of open to discussing that and was sort of respectful to that, which was all totally disarming and off putting, like I remember thinking, “Who is this lady? She’s not following any of the rules. And that’s a good thing.” It was almost that—I think of it from the inside now, but it was almost that sweetness that we hear about and talk about when we think about the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit works on us and that sort of uncanny way that He has of convicting and not condemning and of helping lead us to the truth when it seems like nobody else can. And so I know that God used Tara in all of this and in these challenging moments in my life to draw me closer to Him and to, ironically, put one on the scoreboard and, [because without Tara, I don’t know that I ever would have come to these conclusions on my own, if that makes sense.

Yes, yes. So she countered all the negative stereotypes you had of Christians, it sounds like.

Yes. That’s right! That’s right.

And brought plausibility, perhaps, and an attraction towards Christianity that was, it sounds like, very unexpected.

Yeah. So this is going to sound like a crazy thing to cite as a positive, but she just didn’t want to argue about it. She was open with me about her faith and introduced me to her friends, and I got to become part of her community of people, but it was not a… “And the reason why we’re doing that is because we want to get you from here to here.” It was just a genuineness. It was a kindness and sort of a willingness to invest that I personally had never experienced from Christians before, at least that I could say that I was sure of basically, or that I knew of. And that was sweet. It was exactly what I needed to feel safe and to feel the opportunity to start to explore. And she was absolutely instrumental. But through this process with Tara, I got introduced to her friend, Bob.

They weren’t pouncing on you, as it were, to try to make you a Christian. They actually gave you room and space and accepted you as who you were and gave you an opportunity to be with them and observe their, I presume, genuine Christianity. It sounds like they weren’t necessarily trying to give you apologetic arguments or trying to convince you. They were giving you an example of embodied Christianity, that sweetness. They invested in you. They were generous toward you. They wanted to know who you were. I’m sure that would have been quite surprising. It sounds like you were intrigued by who they were as people, that that goodness kind of opened the door towards a more intellectual searching. Is that how you found it?

Absolutely yes. I mean I think their genuineness and their kindness was what helped me. I feel, as Christians, when we talk about these sorts of things, we kind of take them for granted sometimes, but I know that one of the things that we say as Christians is that we want people around us to notice that there’s something different about us, right? And I guess let this story be the proof in the pudding, that that does actually happen. And that that does actually make a difference. Because I noticed that there was something different about these people who I was being placed around. And it was attractive. It was something that I wanted to have, started to explore more.

Good, good. So it gave you, in a sense, a possibility of a life well lived and so that you were willing to look behind the curtain, as it were, for the grounding for this life. So you were talking about someone named Bob. So I’m wondering who that is and if he provides a little bit of the next step towards an intellectual understanding of the grounding and truth of the Christian worldview.

Yeah, so Bob is a good friend of Tara’s and mine still today. He is an apologist, I think is a good way to describe him. He’s one of those guys that you’ve just got to know him to understand just how unique he really is. And was good friends with Tara at the time that we started to interact and so was very intrigued by our relationship and also by the fact that I kind of called myself an atheist. And he wanted to know more about that. And so we had the opportunity to interact on a number of occasions, and Bob was willing to walk through anything. He was willing to explore and deal with and try to respond to pretty much anything that I had to say, and that, of course, was a big deal for me. He really walked me through the historicity of the gospels. And so we talked about the stories about Jesus that didn’t make any sense that they were written. The ideas that there were people who had nothing to gain who were telling these same stories and who were consistent in the way they were telling these stories. And that really was deeply challenging to me and my worldview at the time. I can’t even articulate it.

And he very gently and slowly walked me through those things, would talk them through, and would provide input and guidance and all that sort of thing and was just instrumental, and again, sort of like to your point about allowing the space for those conversations to happen and for those things to be learned. And really, I would say too, to his credit, challenged me on this idea that I was going to be all intellectual in a world where I had not really adequately explored the alternative. And so I remember it very vividly. He and Tara and I were sitting in a bookstore, and he was asking me why I wasn’t stepping across the line of faith, and I said, “Well, I’m not sure yet. I just don’t know,” and he asked me a series of questions, and I answered that I felt like all those things were true, and at the end of the conversation, he said, “Well, you know what Jeremy, if I had a cross around my neck I’d give it to you. You’re a Christian,” and he got up and walked away. It was this movie moment where it’s like, “Wow! Okay. Now what do I do?” And it was just fascinating that he was willing to invest the way that he did and sort of walk me across the line of faith in the way that he did. It was definitely a life changing moment.

Wow! So just to be clear. So there was historical evidence that made it sound as if there was a solid historicity to these stories about Jesus, that there was adequate evidence that the reliability of the text was solid and that perhaps the stories were worth believing. There is a sense in which you can believe the intellectual grounding, as it were, for the text itself, and that perhaps the stories did happen, but that’s a very different thing than… You know, as Christians, we’ll say, “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” That’s a very different kind of thing that involves a life commitment. It involves your heart, your willingness to give your life, as it were, to this person called Jesus. So it sounds as if almost like he rushed you to the finish line, like the Christians you had talked about before who were trying to get a notch in their belt. Did it feel that way? It sounds almost as if you had to catch your breath and then think, “Okay, what just happened here? Did I become a Christian? Was that my decision or his?” That what it kind of sounds like.

So it was definitely that moment, and I will tell you, to kind of encapsulate it in a way that made sense to me at the time, he challenged me to put all the rest of it aside, right? So I remember having a lot of friends who were gay, still do to this day, and thinking the way Christians treat homosexuals isn’t fair. And I remember having all those same political thoughts that I did when I was an atheist and thinking, “I hate the way that Christians interact with all this,” and I remember Bob saying, “Yeah, I understand all that, and that’s completely fair, and we’ve earned our reputation on some of those things, but just for a moment, just put all that aside and talk to me about Jesus. And let’s answer these questions about whether Jesus was born of a virgin, died and was resurrected, claimed to be God incarnate, and died for my sins, and so yeah, I get all that stuff. Peace to all that. That’s all relevant. That’s all valid. Those are important questions that you need to answer, but don’t you feel like you owe it to yourself to answer them from the inside if you believe these other things are true. And that was the defining moment in all of it for me, was to think of all this through that lens, if that makes sense. And that’s what got me out of the concern that this was all a sales pitch, right? It was because, in my own mind, I was internalizing it and figuring it out for myself, whereas, given the perspective going forward, I know now that it was God doing all that work. And so that was the difference. That’s what made the difference for me, was setting all the rest of it aside and just answering these questions about Jesus.

So Jesus was true, like true incarnate, and you were convinced that the resurrection was valid and that His claims to Godhood were valid based upon His resurrection and all of that. So you were convinced that that was true intellectually but, His death had some application to you personally, that He saved you. I mean that’s what the Gospel is, right? That He came, and it’s not just a set of intellectual or historical events that you believe happened in the past but somehow, like you were saying, it supernaturally applied to you. Is that what you’re trying to say? That it really became very personal for you and you understood that and you understood what you were saying when you said, “Yes, it’s true,” but it’s also personally—it’s internally true.

So it was interesting, Jana. I would say that was almost the afterthought, right? Like the process of thinking it through, and I recognize the sort of silliness of all this now down the road, and so forgive me, but in my mind, the process of thinking it through for myself and coming to these conclusions for myself and having all these answers that I went and got, that somehow sort of freed me in this to be able to believe these things. That was what I was telling myself at the time. And that was challenging, without a doubt. But it was an important part of it for me. Does that make sense?

Yes, absolutely. So that was kind of the pivotal turning point for you, in which you took off your atheist hat and you took on an identity as a Christian. So tell me about your world after that. Did that worldview become more grounded as you went on? Or just experientially, intellectually, in every way? How did that work for you? How did it change your life? How did you find yourself pursuing Christianity in a way that you hadn’t before?

Yeah. So interestingly, in accepting Jesus and accepting the truth of Jesus, none of those other problems that I had went away. Or just sort of disappeared on their own obviously. Those were all still things that I wanted to be able to process through and figure out, and to this day, I’m still dealing with some of those things. It became more natural at that point to think about… So going back to the idea of it being related to social structures, it became very natural at that point to think of all this in the context of it as a social structure, so I started to attend church regularly, got involved in volunteering at church, started to participate in small groups and thinking about my life that way, but also started to study more and try to learn more, so the way I met you, Jana, I think was through the Unbelievable podcast, and so shout out to our friends with Unbelievable. They were a really important force for me when I first started exploring this and when I came across a line of faith I wanted to learn more about what the answers to some of these questions were, listening to Unbelievable made a huge difference for me. Because it helped me answer a lot of questions, and it gave me a resource to go to, and I felt like, to the point about it being an intellectual process, I felt like they really paid homage to the debate and to the ability to go back and forth between different voices and hear different voices. You know, we just don’t have that in American culture today. And so shout out to Justin at Unbelievable because he made a big difference in my life as I started to try to learn more about what all this meant.

Yeah. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Unbelievable podcast by Justin Brierley, it’s typically a conversation between an atheist and a Christian, where they’re discussing issues of culture, of philosophy, of apologetics, of all kinds of things, but done, like you say, in a very diplomatic way. Usually.

Usually.

There’s no better moderator than Justin Brierley.

So I presume that, like you say, as you were becoming more of an embodied Christian like your wife, Tara, and that group, that you were learning to see your life and see the answers to questions that you had about your life in a very different way, because, as you know, the way that you believe affects the way that you feel and the way that you live. Your worldview kind of trickles down to your world, as it were. So moving from atheism to Christianity is a tremendous transformation in the way that you look at the world. So just the work that you do tells me that you’ve made a fairly substantial transformation in the way you think, the way you live, and the way that you move in your life. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. Boy. So one thing I want to mention is that initial process led to a lot of questioning from non-believing friends, who really didn’t understand. A lot of non-believing friends who felt like this decision I had made was sort of a smack in the face of their worldview and their lifestyle. And lost some friendships. Had some relationships go sour over it. And look back on that and hope to have opportunities to reconnect with those people eventually, but I have worked in the nonprofit world my whole life, and coming across the line of faith to Christianity really fit in the context of everything I believed about the way the world ought to be through my experience with working in nonprofits. So that was very natural, I would say, and sort of made a lot of sense.

Ended up in this role that I’m in now, where I’m actually able to live out my faith authentically every day. I’m surrounded by people who sort of believe the same things I believe but want to use that belief to make a difference in the world and want to use the things that we believe to bring the kingdom here on earth. And so that’s a big change for me and a big deal, and it’s all been sort of self-affirming, like it’s been this cycle that has helped me to grow.

In the meantime, I’ve got my own kids now, and we have been able to address and talk about issues of faith with our kids, and I think back on my childhood and about kind of what I missed and what I lost by not having faith in my life, and one thing I know I’m sure of is that my kids won’t have that experience, that as best I can, as long as I have a voice in it, they’ll be able to benefit from the experience of faith in Jesus throughout their lives.

So it’s been quite a transformation, and living now and working now in this field where I’m able to live it out every day is just a dream come true. It’s everything I could have hoped for.

Wow! That’s really wonderful. I’m going to play skeptic here for just a moment.

Bring it on.

I can imagine some people are listening and saying, “Oh, you had a bad thing happen in your life. You met a nice girl. You had some emotional needs. You’d just come off a divorce. You had a desire for social belonging and that kind of thing. How do you know that Christianity is true? You just moved from one social set to another. How do you know that Christianity is real and true, that God exists, and that Christianity is worth believing?”

Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think that you can easily look at things like that, and I think this is hard for a nonbeliever to hear, and I don’t know exactly how to process it, and so they’ll have to forgive me if they hear me say this, but the realization that it had nothing to do with me, that it wasn’t me coming across the line, that it wasn’t me deciding that these were the right answers, but that it was everything to do with what God was doing in me, is the thing that has catalyzed my faith and my growth in faith in Christ ever since that day. And so that day that I came across the line of faith, I wouldn’t have told you that I thought that was true, but I recognize now that it’s not something I did, and it’s not something we do that helps make the world work.

I would also say one of the things that I would always—and I mentioned it earlier—but one of the things I would always come back to Christians with was, “Well, you just answer everything with, ‘It’s mysterious,’ and just a cop-out answer. You’re just going to tell me, ‘God’s a mystery, and we just don’t know.'” And there are very real issues in our world that can lead us into a place of questioning God. And COVID is certainly a very good example of that this year, and there have been times in my private prayer life where I’ve come to God and said, “You know what? I don’t like this, and I don’t understand what you’re doing, and I hope you’ll help me understand.” But at the end of the day, what I’ve landed on there, sort of my finish line on that idea, that Christians seem hypocritical when they talk about things being mysterious, is that, if God created a world that Jeremy could understand all the ins and outs of, it’s just not that impressive. If the all-powerful Creator of the universe built it in such a way that we could figure out, big deal. There better be some things that we don’t understand. There had better be some things that our limited brains can’t comprehend because otherwise it’s just a movie that we wrote, right? It’s just a story that we can write ourselves, and that’s just not all that impressive.

And so to those who would question and to those who are skeptical, I would say I’ve been there and I understand that perspective, and I would say keep trying to learn and keep trying to grow, and then to Christians, I would definitely want to say build relationships. And build unconditional relationships with people. Friendships where you’re going to love them no matter what, and you’re going to show them the love of Christ no matter what. Because it’s that diligence and determination that ultimately is going to surprise people and cause people to say, “Wow! This person seems different.” The fact that she was not—I’ve got a picture of her sitting next to my computer here, and I keep looking over at her. The fact that Tara was willing to commit to being in a relationship with me—and maybe it wouldn’t have been a longer-term relationship. Maybe it just would have been a friendship if things had gone differently, but the fact that she was willing to love me and be in relationship with me regardless of the outcome made all the difference in the world, and so I would say to Christians, “Go find somebody that doesn’t believe what you do and try to talk them into it. Try to bring them across the line of faith. Try to relate them into it, and be kind to them and show them the love of Christ and show them what Christ has done for us.” Because ultimately I think that’s one of the best ways that we have to attract people to God.

Yeah, that’s certainly how God attracts us to Himself is through His great kindness, isn’t it?

Yeah.

It leads us to see ourselves in a way that we need Him. So wow, this has been really, really wonderful, Jeremy. You have walked us through your story. It’s been a really great story because I think it incorporates so many things that help us see that conversion is not just an intellectual idea. It’s a really fully orbed life [confusion?], that there’s so much involved and that we as Christians have an opportunity just by embodying our Christianity with grace and goodness and love, that we can open the door towards people. I loved the word you used. You said safe. That we can create a place of safety for people to explore it without feeling like we are trying to pounce on someone to convince them that our way is the best way. So you have so much wisdom, I think, coming from both perspectives. And I think we have a lot to learn from your experience as an atheist, as well as a Christian, so thank you for being with us today.

Well, thank you so much, Jana.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jeremy’s story. You can find out more about his nonprofit by visiting his website in the episode notes, as well as find a link to the Unbelievable podcast as well. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

Former skeptic Rachel embraced atheism until her intellectual curiosity regarding God’s existence led her to Jesus.

Learn more about Rachel and her book at www.rachelgilson.com

Recommended Resources:

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Rachel. It’s so great to have you with me today.

It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me, and tell the listeners, a little bit about yourself before we get into your story?

Yeah. Well, I’m a California sojourner in New England. I currently work for Cru, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, on the national theological development and culture team. I write a little bit. I speak a little bit. I parent a 7-year-old a little bit, so that’s a little bit of where I am right now in life.

And you’re pursuing a PhD at the moment as well?

Yes. I’m working on my PhD in public theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Okay. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, maybe we’ll hear a little bit more about those bits and pieces as we go. As we’re starting with your story, as you know, this podcast is talking with former atheists who found their way from atheism to Christianity, and sometimes that’s quite a long journey, from one ideology to the other and one life to another, but it all starts somewhere, and I’d like to start with your childhood and your culture, your family, your community, just kind of how you grew up. Shape that for us. Tell us how your journey or your story started. Was God in that story at all as a child?

Yeah. I love context. I was a history major in college, so these are my favorite.

Yes, context means a lot.

Context is a big one.

Yeah.

So the bigger context is my mother had grown up in a practicing Catholic household but not really serious. She ditched it at a young age, so by the time she was raising me, nothing of that was in her life. She had really gone far away from Catholic doctrinal teaching, moral teaching, all of that. My dad similarly didn’t have religion in his life when he was raising me. He had grown up not church going at all, like poor in the hills of Appalachia. He had met some Jesus people along the way, he says, but there was just no faith in his life, even as a young boy, so by the time my parents were bringing up my brother and I, we were just never in the church, not even Christmas or Easter. It just wasn’t a thing that was talked about. It wasn’t a part of our fabric. Now, the community I grew up in is north of Santa Barbara, California, and sometimes people here California and think really, really liberal, and obviously that’s true, but actually where I grew up was very rural, in a lot of ways conservative. My high school had a working farm on it and a place where you could tie up your horse, like that kind of rural. The town it was in literally had one stop light. And so I knew that a lot of people around me were churchgoers, but as a child, I didn’t really know what that meant. It was just sort of a fact in people’s lives, and I never really thought about it as a kid.

So there was no childhood belief in God, no prayer, I mean-

Nothing.

… there was nothing in there to give you a context for that kind of belief at all.

No. I did have some babysitters when I was a young girl who were Mormons, and I have a distinct memory of… they had a picture on their wall, you know, of that feather-haired 1970s white Jesus who’s staring softly into the middle distance?

Yes, yes.

And I remember sort of making fun of that picture and getting a timeout for making fun of Jesus. So that was my first real encounter with Jesus as a concept.

Wow. All right. So that was your childhood, and so, as you were getting older and going to school, still no cultural or contextual references, even for Christmas or things like that?

Well, Christmas I loved, but it was definitely that weird porridge of Santa and Rudolph and Baby Jesus and Frosty the Snowman. It’s a little unclear what Baby Jesus had to do with any of it.

Right!

It was just the full-on tree, presents, commercialism type of thing. And Easter, like I got an Easter basket, but to me, Easter was entirely a rabbit who laid eggs or a rabbit who carried eggs. It’s entirely unclear what exactly is going on there. Chocolate is heavily involved. The resurrection? Not even mentioned.

So no religious references at all to those holidays?

No, no.

Okay. Take us forward a little bit. So you’re growing up in elementary school, and you know, middle school is a time where you start really looking around, questioning, and I imagine you would be a thoughtful, introspective kind of person, or you read that way. Why don’t you tell us about who you were and if you were asking big questions or thinking about those things.

I have a distinct memory of being in, like, the fourth grade and sitting up on top of a play structure, kind of looking down on the playground during a recess, and trying to work out whether fate existed or not. Like, “Are my actions all determined beforehand? And if so, does that limit my freedom? Or do I actually have real freedom?” Looking back on that, I think, “Well, that’s sort of a weird thing to be thinking about on the playground as a 9-year-old, but I do know that I’ve always been interested in big ideas.

Actually, the summer after my eighth grade year, my grandfather, my mom’s dad, so a very not-practicing Catholic, gave me a bunch of books to read to earn money, and I was really into this. And one of the books was—I think it was popular in the 1950s. It was called The Robe. It was a historical fiction about one of the centurions who was at the crucifixion of Jesus, and so I read this book just because Grandpa assigned it. I remember reading it and thinking, “This is a really interesting story,” and at that point, right on the hinge towards high school, I did start asking a couple of my friends who I knew were churchgoers vaguely religious questions. I don’t remember now what they were, but I was sort of like, “Oh, well they must know some sort of things about this,” and I remember the answers I got just being utterly disappointing, shallow, like not really knowing what I was talking about, and so fairly quickly, I had an association of, like, “Well, maybe Christians aren’t people who think for themselves? Maybe they aren’t people who know what they’re talking about. Maybe it’s just a thing that’s sort of a crutch when you need something happy.”

But at that point, my freshman year in high school, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of that in a cruel way or a dismissive way, but it was just where my interviews led me. And I remember even being invited to… The Presbyterian church had a youth group on one of the weeknights, and there was pizza and basketball, and so I would go because that’s where other kids were, but I remember often sitting in the back of the room during presentation time, thinking, “I don’t understand why you need Jesus and God,” so there was a little bit of exposure, but my early exposures really only hardened me against it. I could put it that way.

It seemed rather nonsensical, and there was no one there to provide any kind of substantive answer or explanation for what it was or anything like that. So you lost respect for it, essentially.

Yeah. I did lose respect for it, and over time in high school, I also lost respect for the Christians my age, so on the one hand, I started to think more and more, “I think the big ideas deserve real answers, and I’m not seeing those in Christianity.” The other thing that I was discovering about myself in high school, which was interesting that’s based on a cultural change we’ve had, but I realized, “Gosh, the way that my peers feel about other young men really is how I feel about other young women.” This was in 2001 when I first realized this and started having romantic and sexual relationships with other young women. This is right before Texas struck down its sodomy law in 2003, right before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, so it was just a weird little hinge period as we were moving, but I was also like, “Well, I’m pretty sure that Christians hate gay people, and I want to marry a woman someday, so not only is this intellectually dis-respectable,” is that the way to put it? Intellectually silly. “But it’s hateful for no reason,” and I saw the kids who identified as Christians also at some of the parties that I went to, doing some of the same stupid [UNKNOWN 9:21] things as me. I was like, “Well, at the end of the day, what really is this? It seems to be nothing.”

So it was a combination of a lot of things, it sounds like, that really pushed you away from Christianity. It wasn’t intellectually respectable, morally respectable, I presume-

Right.

… and also those who believed were hypocritical. And what was it pushing you towards?

That’s a great question. I really wanted to know what was true. It’s sort of cliché, I guess, but sort of like the true, the good, and the beautiful. I wanted to know what those things were. I took a lot of cues from culture. The kind of things that you read and watch and listen to. There were two high school teachers I had who both identified as atheists, which was kind of cool in my little small cow town, and they were warm, nurturing, wonderful people. And people who took interest in me, who invested in me, who listened to me. I really adored both of them. And so I think that having those type of role models who were so appealing also really helped me think about the fact that a humanistic life, an atheistic life, could be a life of virtue and goodness and of true living.

And obviously you respected them. They invested in you. Did they provide, did you think, the answers? Those intellectual answers that you thought were true with regard to atheism? Were you reading?

I don’t think they were interested in providing me any types of answers. I think they were interested in just providing me a scaffolding for how to become a thinking person. Which I think is ultimately probably why I respected them. I wasn’t necessarily even asking them the questions. I was looking to them as models for a way to live.

So it was during high school, I presume, that you took their role model and you embraced it as your own.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you would consider yourself an atheist in high school?

Oh, definitely. By the time I was a senior in high school, my senior year English teacher, who was one of these teachers, I started affectionately turning in my English papers to her with, instead of my name at the top, I just wrote the word Satan.

Kind of antagonistic. Condescending, perhaps?

Condescending, yeah.

Maybe a little contentious?

Arrogant for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I was a jerk, basically.

And what do you think informed that sense of condescension or arrogance towards Christians?

Part of it’s a personality defect. I think I’m arrogant by disposition. And so if I don’t have any moral check on it, that’s the direction I’m going to go. I’ve heard my whole life that I’m very funny, and one of the things I can absolutely do quickly is decide to use that against people. And the obvious targets in my context were sort of this picture I had of dumb Christians. People who weren’t thinking. That kind of thing.

So you embraced the identity of not only same-sex attraction but also atheist.

Yeah. Definitely.

And so that identity moved you into college?

Yeah.

So tell me about that.

And I was really excited. Again, I grew up in sort of an unimpressive place, but I got into Yale, which was really exciting for me. I thought, “Finally, I’m going to be at a place where I can explore big ideas with like-minded people. Finally, I’m going to be in a place where I can give some elbow room to my sexuality a little more.” I had never actually faced any persecution or anything like that related to my same-sex relationships, but it just—it wasn’t a lot. There wasn’t a big market exactly. I was just like, “I want to get to the broader world.” So I was excited. I showed up in New Haven kind of ready and raring to go, for sure.

And what did you find there? Did you find those people who were willing to explore those big ideas? Did you find like-minded atheists?

I found everybody who was smarter than me.

I imagine there are a lot of smart people at Yale.

Everyone who had received better training or was just naturally kind of further ahead than I was. But I did. I found people who were interesting and exciting and wanted to talk about this stuff and also just wanted to have fun. You get assigned in groups each to your freshman counselor, and they make you go to all these meetings at the beginning of the year, so you can talk about things, and we all just liked to complain about it, really.

But I remember being in one of these freshman counselor meetings very early in my freshman year, and my counselor was leading us through a conversation. He must have asked something like, “What’s your experience here been like so far?” I’m not exactly sure what the question he asked was, but there was a classmate of mine, a young man, who responded, “You know, I get the sense that a lot of people think that faith or religion is only for stupid people, and I don’t think that’s true at all.” He was clearly speaking from some sort of faith perspective, and he offered that up, and my first response was like, “Yeah, we’ll you’re wrong,” and my freshman counselor was like, “Yeah, can’t you believe how silly and ignorant that is?” So I remember being like, “Wait a minute. Oh, is that not a thing we’re supposed to think?”

So that was a weird first little entry point into having my assumption that religion was for idiots questioned. Now, over the course of my time in Yale, I absolutely encountered anti-Christian, anti-religious, sort of condescension or bias or these types of things, so I’m not trying to say that it was a beautiful and only open and affirming type of environment for people with faith, but that moment was really important for me, and there was more toleration and more encouragement of free exchange of thoughts than I think is sometimes portrayed of campus life in places like that.

So this was an intellectual place, but obviously everyone did not have the same worldview or ideology.

Yeah.

Because these are thinking people and were willing to explore ideas, did they really explore—those who were naturalistic or atheistic or materialistic in their understanding of the world—did they explore those, do you think, in depth? Looked at the implications of their worldview?

That’s a great question. I fell in quickly with people who were similar to me, and usually, when you’re in groups of people who are similar to you, you don’t spend a lot of time talking about your presuppositions necessarily. You end up more having a lot of stupid, fun conversations, but a lot of conversations more about implications sometimes, you know? Like what does it mean to live well? I’m not sure we phrased it that way. But like who are we supposed to be? What are we supposed to choose? What are the right kinds of things? And mostly refracted through politics. Or maybe not mostly, but politics was definitely a piece of it. Kind of Democrat/Republican types of things. Or policy types of things. Sometimes ethical types of things.

I was in a program for freshman. You had to apply into it. That was sort of an intensive course through the humanities of the Western world. So you did philosophy and literature and politics. So a lot of really fun conversations over the classic texts of the Western tradition. So that was fun, too. It was a little more detached from everyday life but still interesting. I remember trying to read John Locke and just, like, throwing it across the room, because I was like, “What is he even saying?” It was pressing the edges. It was what I needed. What I’d encountered in high school was actually too easy for me, and so it led me into a false confidence.

I was encountering some texts and some ideas that were stretching for me and helpful for me, and it was just good. It was rich. But it was also really, really destabilizing. So on the one hand I look back on it now and I see the trajectory that I’ve been on, and I feel so thankful for the ways that I’ve grown as a thinker and my ability to approach texts and approach ideas, but in the first throes of it, ultimately I was feeling just a little bit lost. A lot of my peers had been trained already in seminar contexts, already interacting with primary sources. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and so I was flying around on instinct and my lack of training, which ultimately gave really checkered results academically.

So you were becoming a critical thinker.

Yeah.

And perhaps your presumptions were being questioned, destabilized, whether it would be through academic study or even that one moment where your presumption was questioned as to whether or not Christianity… Was it really all that ignorant and silly? Or is there something more? So you’re moving through this process of learning and growing, as we all do when you expose yourself to other ideas and other people, right? Somehow those engagements and those interactions cause you sometimes to stop and question.

Yeah. And they should.

What else happened at Yale? Were you being further destabilized by ideas and people? Or were you being more affirmed in your atheism?

I think I was being affirmed in my atheism but destabilized in my position as a thinker. I was just immature. I wasn’t probably as ready as I should’ve been. Which is okay. And people there were legitimately smarter than me, which is also okay. But one of the big rocks of my freshman year was the fact that my really important romantic relationship with my girlfriend at the time just exploded. And there were a lot of different reasons for that, but also it was a contributing factor to my emotional slump. Teenage breakups are hard. I resorted to plenty of drinking. I mean not like irresponsibly, not like not going to class or not doing my homework, but just sort of that’s what seemed to be the acceptable way to deal with sadness, and by the time I came back to the beginning of the spring semester, which is really the dead of winter, January, I was cold for the first time. I was heartbroken. I wasn’t sure that I belonged at this place. It was a lot of instability.

I cannot underplay, too, how growing up in southern California does not prepare you to be cold for the first time. I was so miserable! I was miserable.

So you were being thrown off your feet, not only with regard to your thinking a little bit but also relationally. That’s always, like you say, difficult and destabilizing. So what happened then?

So what else are you supposed to do? I needed some identity, and I remember trying on, like, “Oh, should I go to the gym more? No, I’m really lazy. Should I write for the school newspaper? No. That doesn’t even interest me. I’m not smart enough.” So I just kept going to class. It’s like you put one foot in front of the other, and I happened to be in a lecture one day where they were introducing us to René Descartes, you know the old dead French guy who coined the phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” and developed from a phrase a whole proof for the existence of God. So I remember sitting in the audience, hearing the lecturer sort of explaining how Descartes was working through his thought, and I remember sitting there, thinking, “This is a really stupid proof for the existence of God,” like, “I don’t buy it.” And I still don’t buy it, really.

But while I was sitting there, I did think, “What if there are other good proofs for the existence of God?” which immediately made me tense up and sort of want to push it away. Like, “No, that’s not what we think about. Faith, Christianity, that’s for stupid bigots. We don’t go there.” But at the same time I couldn’t really shake the interest that had been stirred in me. I was like, “Well, shouldn’t I know the better ones even so I could refute them?” or, “What if there’s something there?” I don’t know. I just felt like a good angel/bad angel but atheist angels? I’m not really sure exactly. Sort of pulling me.

So I’m a Millennial, right? The natural thing to do when you have serious and secretive questions is to ask the internet, you know? So I would go back to my room, open my gigantic Dell laptop. You know, you needed an upper body workout thing just to lift those. And I would just type religious search terms into Google, doing that whole internet rabbit trail thing, you know? Where you don’t even know how you ended up in a certain place. You’re just following hyperlinks and reading different stuff. And I definitely did that way more than I should have. I definitely did that way more than my French homework, for example, and my grade absolutely reflected that. And that was a really interesting time I was encountering ideas.

But I also sort of kept coming back to reading about Jesus, like stories about Jesus. I don’t know if I was reading the gospels or reading what talked about the gospels, but His character was becoming more interesting to me. Like, “Oh, He’s clearly quite intelligent. There’s a lot of moral dignity here. I can see why He’s an interesting person.” I felt sort of drawn to Him. I also remember reading a lot of articles, maybe not a lot but at least articles that made an impression on me on the historical reliability of the resurrection account. I guess I always assumed out of hand that that was ridiculous, and I was reading different defenses of it. I was like, “Whoa! There’s some interesting evidence here. I’m not saying I believe it, but there’s some really interesting evidence here.” So kind of dancing around mostly the person of Jesus, with some other random topics thrown in. But really quickly, with that, I was like, “Well, I want to marry a woman someday. Am I even allowed to be interested in Jesus as a character? I’m not saying I want to be a religious person, but isn’t this against everything?”

The only two Christians I knew at Yale, or at least people who identified as Christians, were these two girls who were dating each other. And one of them was actually training, en route to be a Lutheran minister. I knew this because she and I were in marching band together, which is the lamest thing you could possibly admit to in some contexts, but it’s true.

So I remember thinking, “Well, I should go to my friends and just ask them what they think,” like, “Clearly, they don’t think that. Otherwise, their whole lives wouldn’t be the way that it is.” So I went to them. And they were sweet, lovely girls. I was sort of like, “Well, this doesn’t make sense to me. How does it make sense to you?” They were like, “Well, it’s all been a big misunderstanding. The Bible actually supports monogamous same-sex relationships,” and I was like, “Really?” Like, “If you believe that—you’re smart people. You’re here. Maybe it’s true.” And so I remember them giving me sort of a packet of information explaining how the Bible actually affirmed monogamous same-sex relationships. And I was kind of excited. I’m like, “If this is in the Bible, that’s super interesting. That opens up some other doors.”

So I remember taking it back to my room and reading through it. I love packets to deconstruct and look for evidence for and stuff like this. So I remember reading it and finding it pretty persuasive. Like, “Ooh! These are really good arguments. I could see how this makes sense. Maybe they’re really onto something. This is good!” But I also thought, “Well, I probably should actually read the text of the Bible it’s talking about. I mean, I’m not a Bible scholar, but it does seem, in general, that you should read the primary sources.” So I didn’t have a Bible, right? So I just pulled up these texts on my computer screen. I remember looking at my computer screen, down at the packet, comparing, working through, and then ultimately, it’s like, “Well, I don’t think these arguments look as good actually compared to the original text as they did just on their own.” Like, “It’s really nice that these girls want to believe that, but this just seems to have too many problems to get around.” And I remember feeling, on the one hand, sort of relieved, like I didn’t want the Bible to actually have a hold on me, but two, also sort of stupid for even having pursued it and kind of disappointed. I remember just throwing it in my cheap dorm trash can and being like, “Whatever. This isn’t even a thing that should be pursued.” And I’m pretty sure I just never talked to the girls about it again, and they were polite and didn’t harass me about it, you know?

So it seems like you would be at a very interesting crossroads, looking at some things intellectually, finding them interesting. It’s pulling your interest. But yet on a personal level finding things about Christianity that may not cohere with your lifestyle.

Right! With what I wanted for my future, what I assumed was going to make me happy.

Yeah! But in a sense, as someone who’s a pursuer of truth, as you were, and you can’t kind of unsee what you have seen or unhear or unread or whatever what you had already started being exposed to, what did you do with that? You had a choice of moving forward to continue to explore or to disengage.

Well, I was confronted with a different circumstance. I’d kind of let it go a little bit. Also, frankly, I was behind on my homework. But I remember being in the bedroom of one of my acquaintances. So she wasn’t necessarily a friend. We didn’t hang out a lot. We’d have breakfast a lot together, but we weren’t buddies, but for whatever reason, this day I went to her room. She had a bookshelf next to her doorway, and one of my favorite hobbies is looking at people’s bookshelves and judging them, right?

So I was looking through her bookshelf, and I knew that she was a non-practicing Catholic. She had a copy of Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. The title of the book was really interesting, and I thought, “Oh! I want to read that book,” like, “Of course I should be reading books and not just the internet.” But I was embarrassed by my interest. I didn’t want to ask my friend to borrow the book. I didn’t want to have conversations with her. I didn’t want her to know that I was even remotely thinking about this, so I just stole the book off her shelf. She wasn’t looking. It’s a small volume. It fit right into my shoulder bag. So I just took it. Again, I didn’t also believe in any moral transcendence, so it was like, “You’re not really hurting anyone,” which stealing a book is kind of… obviously it’s her property, but anyway, “If you’re not hurting anyone and you don’t get caught, no big deal.”

So it was while I was reading. I just started reading this book. I remember being roughly halfway through it one day between classes. And I remember… I don’t remember what chapter I was in. I don’t remember the paragraph, even the point that Lewis was making. But I do remember sitting there, in the middle of reading it, and suddenly being… I don’t really know how to describe it other than overwhelmed with the sure knowledge that God existed. Not like a generic store brand God but the God Who created everything, Who made me. Very much… the God who was holy. I didn’t know that vocabulary word, but that was the pressing sense. Not only does He exist, but His existence in perfection has implications.

Really the front edge was just this, like, “God exists, and I am very bad.” Arrogant. I was a liar. I was sexually immoral. I made fun of people. I cheated on things. I was reading a stolen book. All of the chips were pushed into the guilty category. That was the thing that I felt. But with that—I was just talking to a friend of mine recently who’s been an atheist for a long time, and he’s like, “Tell me how you converted.” I’m like, “Dave, I don’t really know how to explain it to you.” On some level, the Lord moved. I also really understood right in that moment, when I was feeling my sin in front of a holy God, that part of the reason Jesus had come was to place Himself as a barrier between God’s wrath and me. That He would end up absorbing it, and the only way to be safe was to run towards Him, not away from Him.

I’m pretty sure that’s not what Lewis had written on that page. I just understood. And I remember thinking, “I don’t want to become a Christian! That’s so lame! Christians are lame!” But I also was sitting there thinking, “Well, I can’t pretend this isn’t true just because it’s inconvenient for my life. That also seems really stupid. I’m not going to get a better deal than this. I’ve got to take this deal.” Very transactional on some level. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’ve fallen in love with the beauty of God.” I’m sort of like, “Ugh.”

Kind of the Pascal’s wager almost.

Yeah, yeah. Which I obviously didn’t know about at that point.

Right, yeah.

And so I didn’t have a nice pastor or campus minister sitting there with me, like, “Well, I’ll lead you in prayer,” but I kind of knew that I needed to pray. So I closed my eyes, and I was like, “Fine! I’ll become a Christian.” And it just was like, “Uh, well I guess I’ll go to class.” Like I didn’t really know what else to do, you know?

It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s story, where he claims himself to be.

The most reluctant convert of all England. It’s not something he-

When I read his story later, I was like, “Oh, yeah! I resonate with that.”

Your story is very similar.

My old dead Anglican friend.

Yes.

Mr. Lewis.

So that was stunning for you, and I imagine it was surprising for those around you.

Yeah. Yes, definitely.

So you went on to class. Were you a bit subversive about your new Christian identity? Is it something that you-

I didn’t know what to—the immediate aftermath, I was just sort of like, “Okay.” I don’t even remember what class I went to. It was probably one of my humanities classes, like a seminar, where you just go talk about your reading or whatever. But I know later that day I saw a little advertisement. Yale Students for Christ was going to have a Valentine’s party that Saturday. So I remember seeing that advertisement and thinking, “I didn’t even know we had a Yale Students for Christ.”

So Saturday, the 14th, Valentine’s Day happened, and I showed up at this party pretending I was there by accident, because I still didn’t even know what to do with myself, so I was like, “Oh, I just stumbled in here.” The first person I saw was this other freshman who was in my literature section, and back in the fall, when we had been talking about the Bible as literature, I mean I had a field day just sort of like stomping all over the Bible, and he had been in that section with me, and so when he saw me walk in, his face did sort of like, “Uh oh,” thing. And I saw him and recognized him and thought, “Oh, I’m in the right place.”

So I went to them, and I was like, “Hi. So I became a Christian two days ago,” and they were all like, “What?” And they just sort of passed me to the other freshmen. And I was like, “Hi, here I am,” and they were like, “What?” They didn’t really know what to do with me. So they were like, “Okay, so do you want to come to freshman prayer on Monday?” And I was like, “Sure.” Then they were like, “Do you want to come to freshman Bible study on Tuesday?” I was like, “Sure.” I just followed them around like a baby quail, like copying them. Sort of like, “Oh, okay. So this is what we do. We raise our hands when we sing. We read the Bible together. We don’t ever cuss. Our music is pretty bad.” You know, just the things you needed to be a young Christian.

I started spending a lot of time with them. No time with my other friends. But definitely the excitement of discovering what the Gospel was overwhelmed me. It’s crazy to me now, thinking about, as a 17-year-old, I thought that Christianity was just for stupid people, when Christianity is one of the deepest and greatest intellectual traditions that has literally ever existed. I think it was such a gift to me that the first Christians I got to do life and discipleship with were thoughtful academic people. Not perfect people. And young people, like me. But people who really did care that it was true, not just, “This is what my parents did,” or any of those types of excuses.

Now it took me a long time to understand that my faith is so much more than just like memorizing a book, that actually our relationship with God is demonstrated in the lives that He wants to transform. That took a while. It’s like you learn math, you just learn math facts. You learn history, you learn history facts. So, like, Christian, learn Christian facts. I was slow on the uptake in a lot of ways. My life was so deeply imperfect as an early disciple. I mean not that it’s perfect now. A lot of failure. A lot of stupidity. But also real joy. Good answers to hard questions and good admissions to when the answers weren’t sure. Such, for me, learning about where the Bible came from and what a trustworthy document it is. Especially when you compare it to any other document in its class or time. That just gave me such a deep confidence to be able to pursue it, even in the places where there was confusion or tension, especially around what it had to say about sexuality, which is something functionally I’ve been working out for the past 18 years.

So it was an intellectual explosion for me, but also ultimately it just came back to the person of Christ. I had a moment early in my discipleship where my ex-girlfriend functionally offered to get back with me, and I could’ve left the good answers. I could’ve left my new Christian friends, as great as they were. Because I did still love her in many ways. But ultimately what I couldn’t leave was Christ. I couldn’t leave Him. And so it’s not just an intellectual thing, but that intellectual piece, it’s been really helpful for me in a lot of ways.

You found the substance, the riches, like you say, the depth of Christian thinkers and the Christian worldview, that many have no idea about. It, for some, seems very-

And I don’t blame them, frankly. The way that Christianity is lived out in our country would not ever give you a clue as to the depth of its intellectual rigor and joy. What’s comforting to me is when the Lord talks to His people in the scriptures, they’re just always failing, so I’m like, “Well, we’re not unique in the fact that we fail. I think our failures are grievous, and I do lament them, but I don’t blame people when they think of Christianity as all kinds of silly things. Because a lot of us have made it look silly.

You have come such a long way, it sounds like, in your life. Having that perspective on one side of thinking Christianity is silly, for ignorant people, it’s just nonsense, now to the place where you’re actually engaged in the riches of the intellectual depth of Christian worldview and deep in your relationship with Christ. I’m so impressed that you actually, at a very pivotal point in your life, actually chose Christ, and whatever relationship you had with Him and whatever He offered you was so much more important than your personal choice of how you would’ve rather lived your life. But it was… You wanted to live how Christ wanted you to live because, at some point, you made that conversion over from pleasing yourself to pleasing Christ.

It’s never easy. That decision. And that’s an ongoing choice for all of us, all of the time. Fighting against our own desires for the sake of the one who saved us, right? The one who is that barrier, the one who loved us so. That Gospel that you spoke of is transforming when you understand the depth and riches of His love for you. Wow. Your story has taken a great 180 change.

Well, the Lord has a good sense of humor.

Yeah, I would imagine you would’ve never seen yourself as being in this place.

No, not even remotely. Not even remotely.

Because I think you referenced at the very beginning, when you talked about who you are and what you do, that you are actually engaged in some kind of ministry. It’s not that this is just for you. You believe in it, and you live it, and you love it so much that you want others to know Christ in the same way that you do. Tell me about that.

I do. Absolutely. I want everyone to know there’s a God Who made them and forgives them and Who wants to actually—He wants us to thrive. And sometimes we just see the things God says no to, and we miss his bigger yeses. But also I want to approach the people in my life who do not know the Lord with the respect that they deserve. We need to prove. We need to show the evidence that God is good. Not because He’s shown himself bad, but because we’ve not done a good job representing Him. I always want to approach the people in my life invitationally and taking them seriously. I take seriously the objections and the arguments of other people. They’ve got really valid experiences. I really want people to know who He is, and if I don’t actually love the person in front of me, I don’t think there’s any way for that to happen.

I think there’s deep wisdom there. Also a heart for others and probably a lot of experience at engaging, especially at the college level. You’re a campus minister of sorts?

Yeah. I am a campus minister. I’m not on campus with students right now because of my PhD and my role with the theological team. I do different trainings of our staff and stuff, but honestly, even—the street that I live on. None of my neighbors know or trust the Lord. But I love them deeply, and I have real relationship with them, and it’s an opportunity to learn from them and also share with them. They’re delightful. It’s not just a thing that happens. In college, we’re all allowed to talk about big ideas. Actually, other people want to talk about big ideas, too, but they want to talk about them when they know that you actually care what they think, too.

I think that’s profound and so needed among our conversation and on our walk today as Christians. You do engage with those who don’t believe, and if someone is a curious skeptic actually listening in and listening to you and to your story, what would you advise someone who actually may be a closet curious skeptic, like you were at one time? Perhaps looking on the internet and all sorts of places, trying to figure out what Christianity is. What would you say to a curious skeptic?

Well it so depends because personality wise we’re all very different. The things that draw us are different. But you cannot go wrong with looking to Christ, like who is He? Who are His claims? Do they hold up? We have all the tools of the professional historian to be able to tell whether things are strong arguments or weak arguments, probable or improbable, and I think if you examine Christ, who He is historically, who He is ethically, He just holds up. And He came for us. He didn’t have to come. He came for us. I would even encourage people frankly to pray. I don’t think it hurts, “God, give me Your Spirit. Help me understand.” I mean you might feel stupid. You might not really believe it. But the Lord loves to answer weak and silly prayers sometimes, you know? He came to save the lost and to meet the seeker and to answer questions and to open the door to people who knock. So I think we’ve just got to keep knocking.

Perhaps even read Mere Christianity. Like you did.

Yeah maybe. Or perhaps read something great, like The Reason for God by Tim Keller or Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin. There are some really good contemporary books that talk about some of these things as well.

Yeah, I think that’s great advice, and we will definitely include all of your recommendations in the episode notes. Is there anything else about your story that you would like to include here as we wrap up?

Just that I don’t want anyone to hear my story and laminate it onto anyone else. We each have our own experience in front of the Lord, and what happened in my life isn’t anything that I achieved or anything I should really be praised for. It was just the movement of the Lord, and so if we want the Lord to move in our life, we need to look for Him and ask for it, and if we want the Lord to move in other people’s lives, we need to ask for it. We need to be prayerful people and expect that God’s ways are going to be a little different than we might choose but that He is still good.

I think, at the end of the day, it looks like you actually found the One who is true, good, and beautiful.

Yeah.

I know you were searching for that, and there is a depth and a richness, riches in Christ that can really be found nowhere else, and so I thank you for your story and for the way that you’ve been transparent with your life and just deeply vulnerable. So I think that that’s incredibly important, too, as we approach other people that we demonstrate a life transformed but also we’re not afraid to show and to tell the ways that we were, the ways that we still struggle, and the ways that the Lord has brought us unto Himself. So thank you for your story today, Rachel.

Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Former atheist Dr. Mike Bird tells his story of moving from a culturally-informed skepticism and caricatured Christianity to finding that perhaps his presumptions were mistaken. You can find out more about Mike here: Twitter: @mbird12 Blog: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/ Books: The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (2019) How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature – A Response to Bart D. Ehrman (2014) Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction (2013)

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Whether or not an atheist or a Christian or something else, you have a view of reality. For most of us, we’ve typically caught our view of the world, rather than taught it. Just like the coronavirus, we’re constantly exposed to different ideas, even when we don’t or even can’t recognize or escape them. We hear and see messages from movies and music and news media and social media. Sometimes obvious, sometimes much more subtle. We tend to absorb messages without questioning, without really thinking about it. Messages slip in the back door and tell us how to think, what is true, and we believe it.

Unfortunately, in our polarized culture, we often believe the negative stereotypes of the other side without really listening to what that side really is or what that other person really thinks. Guarding our own position will do. Sitting down with another person is, well, too personal, too demanding, and perhaps too vulnerable. It’s easier to build a straw man and knock it down than to really engage with the ideas and the people who believe them. It’s easier to construct stereotypes and caricatures and dismiss without consideration. But what if we are dismissing something before we even give it a chance? What if we are missing something, something that actually answers life’s biggest questions in a way that is good and true and life giving? What if, just what if we actually listen without shutting down and turning off? We might be amazed at what we find.

That’s why I love the story that we’ll be listening to today. It’s the story of someone who had listened to the messages of culture, readily stereotyped and dismissed Christians as totally irrelevant, and yet today finds himself on the other side, because he took the time to figure out what Christianity really was and who Jesus really is.

Michael Bird was a former atheist that is now a Christian. He is a brilliant academic who writes and speaks in the areas of theology and apologetics. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mike.

Well, thank you for having me.

So, as we’re getting started, Mike, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, your academic background, and what you do right now, and then we’ll start at the beginning of your story.

Okay. Well, I am Michael Bird. I am the academic dean and lecturer in theology at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve lived pretty much most of my life in Australia, growing up mostly in Brisbane, although I’ve done a few stints in different places around Australia, and I also lived in Scotland for a number of years. I am also married to my wonderful wife, Naomi, and together, we have four children. I graduated from Malyon College in Brisbane and the University of Queensland, where I did my doctorate on Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission. I’ve written and edited around about 30 or so books on the early church, Jesus, the New Testament, theology, Christian thought, probably am most well known for a book, The New Testament in its World, which I co-wrote with Tom Wright, and a textbook called Evangelical Theology. So that, in a nutshell, is where I am and who I am.

That’s quite impressive, I must say. Set the context for us in terms of the world you grew up in and the way that they looked at religion and Christianity.

Yeah. Australia is a very peculiar country on the religious front. We were founded, or settled—this is obviously after or beside the local indigenous population. We were settled largely as a penal colony for the British, largely after another colony decided they no longer wanted to be in league with Britain, which I think would be your own America. So for roughly 200 years, Australia’s been settled, and it’s never really been known for having strong or very big religious commitment. And when Australia became federated as its own country in 1900, it was created to be deliberately secular, but secular in the sense it wasn’t going to be sectarian. We did not want to import the debates and divisions from United Kingdom largely between Protestant and Catholic and the fragmentation of Protestantism, so the Australian political setup could be described as something of a half way house between the British system and the American system, so our constitution is almost like a British appropriation of the American constitution when it comes to religion. We have kind of like a free exercise clause and sort of a non-establishment cause as well.

We have had a few moments of religious revival in Australia, mostly associated with the 1959 Billy Graham Crusade, which did have a big impact on the demographics and the religious contours of Australia. So Australia itself is sort of, in some sense culturally secular. It does have a Christian background. It’s generally had relative high rates of religious identification but not necessarily high rates of religious participation. And since the Second World War and the immigration that we’ve had, we’ve become religiously far more diverse, with people coming to Australia from all around the world, especially from Asia, since we’re closer to Asia than we are to the rest of the world. So Australia is a multicultural secular country. And it’s interesting. It’s different to America in many regards. We have more Buddhists than we have Baptists, for an interesting statistic. The largest denominations are, first of all Catholic, then Pentecostal, and then third Anglican. I can also say, of our twenty largest churches in Australia, all but one are Pentecostal in terms of their size. Only about I think maybe 10% to 15% of Australians would be involved with a church on a regular basis, and if you’re going for a real sort of core religious devotion, who attend church regularly, you’re looking at maybe 5% of the population.

Someone once said that religion in Australia is something of a private affair. Australians like the idea of other people being religious. They like the idea of other people being religious, but they don’t like the idea of having to do it themselves. But things, I think, have turned fairly more negative since the 1990s, where religion is now associated largely with terrorism in the case of Islam and clergy sexual abuse in regards to the Catholic Church, and I think Christians can generally be regarded almost as like a right-wing pressure group in some sense.

So we do have a somewhat adversarial context. In fact, on some global indices, Australia doesn’t have large amounts of government coercion in religion, but we do have a high rate of social hostility towards religion, and that can express itself in Islamophobia, antisemitism, and in attacks on churches. I’m an Anglican priest, and I’ve worn my clerical attire in downtown Melbourne only twice, and both times I’ve been attacked, once verbally, once physically. So it can be a somewhat adversarial context,  someone once described religion in Australia for most people—most Australians kind of float on a sea of apathy with a thin veneer of hostility, which is probably the best way to describe what religion is like in Australia.

So talk with me, then, about the context of religion in your home and in your community growing up.

Yeah. I grew in a fairly secular household in suburban Brisbane, where religion was pretty much a nonentity. We didn’t go to church. No one was particularly devout. There was no real religion. I think my stepfather had some sort of connection with his mother, who I think was Catholic or perhaps Orthodox. I don’t know for certain. My mother would really verbally abuse Jehovah’s Witnesses if they ever came to the door. She was not particularly interested in any sort of religious conversation. She also could be quite adversarial. Growing up, I had a little bit of religious education at school. My mother just sent me off to Church of England because that’s vaguely what she felt connected with since we were from the United Kingdom. There was the odd TV show. But pretty much growing up the only sort of religious influence I had was from watching Ned Flanders on the TV sitcom The Simpsons. That was pretty much the amount of education in Christianity, which meant most of what I understood and saw of it was based more on caricature or reputation than actual substance or actually knowing any Christians. I didn’t really know any Christians. And everything I thought and believed of them was largely based on this cultural caricature that I would see in various places.

So the stereotype is what you saw, and that wasn’t a very positive image of Christianity.

No, no. Yeah, that’s right. It was definitely sort of negative. People had a very determinist… God said so, so I believe it. That settles it. And a kind of blind faith. And willing to do things that were irrational and immoral in the Name of God.

So there really wasn’t much in your world that gave any kind of a positive image of Christianity at all. You didn’t know anyone personally. There was very little in the culture of lived or embodied Christianity, so the only thing that you were getting is from, I guess, a little bit of religious education at school and the negative messaging from culture. So it painted a fairly negative portrait for you. Nothing appealing about it, I presume. Nothing worth consideration. Yeah?

There was no sort of initial enticement. I didn’t really read the Bible. I may have seen the odd, I mean, like at 5 AM if I got up early enough, there may have been some sort of Christian Broadcasting Network cartoon, the odd maybe Easter Day Parade, something like that, maybe some vague suggestion of Christianity, but for the most part, it was simply a nonentity in the world that I grew up in and inhabited.

So it was totally just irrelevant. It was off the radar in a sense. Or if it came across the radar, it wasn’t pretty.

Yep. That’s correct, that’s correct.

So I presume the same for your friends and anyone around you, that it was just off the radar, just not a consideration.

Yeah. That’s right. I mean, out of all of my friends, none of them were religious. None of them went to church. We never discussed things about the nature of reality or God or the hereafter or who was Jesus. It was definitely the case where religion was simply a nonentity.

So you grew up that way, through school and despite whatever religious education you had. In religious education, did they talk about Christianity at all?

They did, they did. You would normally have the equivalent of a local school’s Sunday school teacher would come and teach us, and we’d sing a few songs, things like “Rock My Soul on the Bosom of Abraham,” which was fun. I didn’t mind that when you’re six, seven, or eight and you have this one hour of singing some funky songs. A little bit of a Bible story, which was mostly, I think, more moralisms than anything else. It’s not like we were being taken through the Nicene Creed or anything. It was not terribly theological.

Mike, as you were graduating and finishing high school, was there anything at that point, that pivotal point in your life where you were thinking about what was ahead, were there any religious touch points there?

Yeah, you know what? In hindsight, there was one. There was one. Now I have to say, for me, high school was a miserable experience. I had a very difficult home life. I had parents who were going through addiction issues and mental health issues, and it was a really miserable time. I didn’t have too many friends. I was okay academically. I got bullied a lot. Girls didn’t really like me in any sense. And it was a difficult time, so I was very eager to leave. And I’ve never been back to a high school reunion, but the last day of high school was weird. And it was weird because we had this like graduation speech. It wasn’t like a big American graduation. It was just a little bit more low key. But it was a weird day. They brought out three different speakers, and one was a local businessman who was explaining how he got his restaurant up and going, and we also had a wonderful doctor come in, and then the local Baptist pastor got up, and I thought, “Oh, man! Could this be any worse?”

And he went up and gave a few things you can’t do and you shouldn’t do with your life. But he did say something which did lodge in my mind, and years later, I would recall it. And again, I don’t know why it stuck because at the time it was just water off a duck’s back at the time. He said, “The most important decision you’ll ever make is whether you choose to accept or reject Jesus Christ.” And he said it with such pathos. He said it with real conviction. Now, at the time, I just said, “Okay, fine, whatever.” It didn’t mean anything. But I remembered his words, and I remember that day vividly, and it wasn’t until I went back, actually, as I would do later on down the track of visiting a church. Eventually, those words were recalled to me. I don’t remember a lot what happened to me in high school. I don’t remember anything about trigonometry or algebra. I got some basic typing skills, but that is literally… Besides typing, I got nothing good out of high school. Just that and a lot of bad memories. But I remember that Baptist pastor’s words, that the greatest decision you’ll ever make is whether you choose to accept or reject Jesus Christ. And years later, a few years later, that did resonate with me, and I have to say the man was right.

So religion to you at that time, it was a class in school, perhaps a few moral precepts, but what was religion? Was it just something that people needed or that people made up? What did you think religion was?

Religion was something that other people did that I didn’t need. And I didn’t really understand what it was about. It was something I haven’t given, to be honest, a lot of thought about. It was like some people like ice hockey. It was kind of like at that level. That’s what other people do, and I’m not other people. It was of no interest and concern to me, and I’d only had very limited exposures to certain aspects of it or its messaging.

So it was just something curious, a hobby that people did, but that was about it. So you’re going through high school and you graduate from high school, and what’s next on your journey?

Well, number one was to get away from my parents. My mother and stepfather were quite dysfunctional in their relationships. They both had some addiction issues. Home was not a terribly pleasant place for me. Living with them was spasmodically abusive in several different ways. The problem was I couldn’t go off to college or university because my grades weren’t that good. I was basically like a B student. I got good marks but for fairly easy subjects, which doesn’t work out well when you’re calculating your score to go into university, and that was difficult, so I couldn’t go off and do a course on psychology or criminology like I was hoping to do. I could maybe have done something like meat works inspection or horticulture at a regional university for farming or something. But that had no real interest to me. So the next option was to go and join the Australian Army, which was an odd decision, since I was certainly not built to be a soldier. When I was 17, I weighed about 47 kg, which is I think about 140 or 150 pounds, so joining the Army, going through the training, was physically, mentally, emotionally quite draining and quite taxing on a scrawny 17-year-old, but that’s what I went off and did next.

So what was your experience like in the Army? I guess that didn’t… Or did it bring you any closer to God along your journey? Or did it push you farther away?

I think it did draw me a little bit closer in several ways. The good thing is, it gave me a distraction. It helped me develop physically, mentally, and emotionally, and to fully mature from an adolescent into a proper adult, we would say. So it was good in my personal development. And when you’re part of the army, they do have chaplains, and those chaplains are, more often than not, a very good pastoral source. They’re there to help and advocate on behalf of the soldiers and the airmen and women and naval personnel and the like, so I’d go along to chapel once a week, because we all had to go, so that’s what we all did. And we’d spend a few days with the chaplains, doing things like character formation, and you got a few snippets of Christian faith. That wasn’t too bad. But there was nothing particularly like a lightning bolt. No aha moment. It was just a few snippets or a few appearances of their faith, but there was nothing that really rocked my world or shook me in any way. But I did mention it, and I did come across some genuine Christian people, and it was when I got to my first unit.

I mean I ended up becoming, of all things, a paratrooper as my first posting. I did meet some Christians, though, who I worked with, one of whom invited me along to church. And yeah, I went along. I was kind of bored because pretty much all I was doing was working hard during the day and just going out with guys at night to a pub or a nightclub, and I was getting pretty bored and sick and tired of that, so I thought I’d just do anything, and so I got invited to go along to church, and yeah, just out of curiosity and boredom, I went along. And I was expecting this church to be filled with a bunch of moralizing geriatrics, sort of people who were worried that somewhere, somehow someone was smiling. And I went along to this church, and it was nothing like that. They weren’t a bunch of senile, moralizing geriatrics. They were just very nice, normal people. They were schoolteachers, mums, dads, kids, teenagers, accountants, plumbers, secretaries, and the like.

And I got to know some of them, and they were very, very kind and nice to me, and they opened themselves up to me, opened up their homes to me, I got to know them, and I realized there was something different about them. Something very different. And it wasn’t just that they were nice people with good manners. There was something truly different about them. The difference was they knew the Lord Jesus Christ. And I kept going along to this church and eventually I heard the gospel message, that God sent Jesus to be our reconciler. He died on the cross for my sins, and He rose from the dead, and He offers us eternal life and a place with His family, and in 1994, I prayed to receive Christ, and the world was a different place after that and has been ever since.

What do you mean by that? The world has been a different place.

I guess, for me, things changed in my life. I had more joy in my life. I was less somber and melancholic, so I had a new sense of profound joy. Another thing I had is I just felt myself alive in a new way. There were also certain habits I won’t go into, but there were certain things… Certain desires in my life changed. There were certain things I no longer desired, so I had a reordering of my desires, so there was a change on that ground. And I felt myself drawn to doing things I would not otherwise have normally done, like reading the Bible. I developed an insatiable hunger to read the Bible and know more about it and to go to God, in my own church to the morning service. They didn’t have an evening service, so I went to a different church for the evening service. And that type of a thing. I was very comfortable talking about my faith and what I believed, and I even started doing, on my own, my own initiative, a little bit of lay apologetics and that type of thing. So it was that wonderful joy and glow of new life that I think I was experiencing.

It sounds like it was quite a transformation. You mentioned that you started reading the Bible. Had you ever read the Bible before that time in your life? What did you think that the Bible was? What did you find that perhaps was unexpected? Was it more than you thought it would be, I guess.

Yeah. It certainly was far more than I thought it would be. I mean I didn’t grow up with people quoting the Bible. I mean you’d hear the odd reference to it here and there. If anything, I might of got a little bit of Bible via Shakespeare or something like that. But I did not grow up in a home, a school, a family, a culture where the Bible is frequently quoted and mentioned. And it’s a culture where it’s very easy to be biblically illiterate and to not even know that you’re illiterate and that kind of thing. So reading the Bible for me was a brand new event, and there were all these things here, and I remember the first time I read the Gospel of John, that was an amazing experience. Looking at this Jesus, the God man who promises us eternal life. Reading Paul’s letter to the Romans for the first time. These are all very important and eye-opening things that cause these various lights in your spiritual life to suddenly flicker on, and you becoming thinking and reflecting. “Okay, what does it mean to live a life of holiness?” “What does it mean to obey the law of Jesus?” “How do I be a good Christian?” That type of a thing.

So reading the Bible was a profound experience, and it took me a while. Initially, I would read a bit, but then, as I kept reading more and more and more, I got a real big hunger for it, and I really enjoyed learning about what was in there and I enjoyed the sermons. I enjoyed the reflection. And being able to understand what was going on. I enjoyed attending Bible study. I enjoyed being discipled via a very, very lovely young pastor. So it was a real good time of initial warmth, hunger, and growth in the Christian faith.

That sounds wonderful! I’d like to back up for just a moment because, as I’m sitting here thinking that you went to church and you were expecting a rather senile version of Ned Flanders to be there and that’s not what you found. You found a group of warm and loving people that were quite different qualitatively in their life, and it was attractive. There was something that drew you in. You understood the gospel, and it obviously felt true or rang true enough to you that you accepted it as true. As an atheist moving into that, you obviously were open to what you were finding. You were actually surprised. Perhaps maybe your stereotypes were broken down.

And you found something good, but there’s a difference, I guess, between, “Wow, this is good, and these people seem good, and the message seems good,” and it being substantively true. More than just a story. It is a story. There are a lot of religious stories. But what is it about Christianity… As an atheist moving into that, and it sounds like you moved towards Christianity quite quickly, did you have any doubts? Were you scratching your head, saying, “This sounds good, but is it too good to be true? Is it historically true?” Did those questions come into your mind?

Yeah. They did a bit. Probably two ways. I would say the first thing was, becoming a Christian, it allowed things in my world to suddenly make sense. Now, I kind of recognized if there was no God, then ultimately we were living in a nihilistic universe and that everything about human life was… Ethics was… I wouldn’t have used this language at the time, but ethics without God or something transcendent is just a game with words. And is quite meaningless and is just something we pretend. We pretend that certain things are wrong. Whether you push an old lady in front of a bus or help her across the road, you could argue that, in an atheist universe, these actions are meaningless. They have no objective or real moral quality. They’re just things we project onto them. And what you project onto them is no more authoritative than what someone else might project onto them. So I knew that I lived in a morally meaningless universe.

The problem was I couldn’t live without moral meaning, and I knew some things were absolutely wrong, some things were evil, but I did not have a metaphysics that could support that kind of ethic. So when I became a Christian, it was suddenly the lights tripped on, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah! This is the reason why I believe evil exists.” “This is the reason why I believe in good.” “This is why people look at the stars and kind of wonder about things divine or heavenly.” A whole bunch of things made sense. That was kind of the more transcendental aspect of how believing in God allowed me to make sense of the world I experienced, rather than this sort of fragmented way I experienced things, of which atheism or unbelief was just something you had to put up with and just live with the contradiction of having a morally meaningless world but believing that things are morally meaningful.

On the other side, the question was who was Jesus? And I became convinced fairly quickly that he wasn’t just a religious teacher. He wasn’t myth. He wasn’t legend. He was a real historical person. I read on that a little bit, and I was convinced. I also began watching a few William Lane Craig debates around the same time, and that had a very profound effect on me, too. William Lane Craig was a brilliant communicator, brilliant defender of the faith. I think early in my faith I actually wrote to him, back in the mid 1990s, and he kindly wrote back to me. And that was very encouraging. So I got into a little bit of apologetic stuff around that same time, reading the usual classics, More Than a Carpenter and Evidence that Demands a Verdict and a bit of R.C. Sproul, a bit of this, bit of that.

But I think, yeah, atheism makes great boasts, like Ozymandias in that poem.  But it doesn’t really deliver. It claims to have the master story of the universe, but it’s a fairly bleak and sad view of the universe and one that didn’t actually make sense of my experience as a human being.

So it sounds like existentially, morally, and even intellectually, the pieces were starting to come together, so that you could make sense of life in a very holistic way, rather than, like you say, just trying to make sense from fragments of things within atheism that couldn’t provide that sense of cohesion in terms of making sense of your morality and your desire for meaning and purpose and all those things.

Yeah. That’s exactly right. And it was like there was a whole… It’s kind of like being in a room where all the lights are off, and then, one by one, all the lights begin to flicker on, and you suddenly see the pattern, you suddenly see what’s around you, and your environment begins to make sense. And that’s just basically how it was. And it’s remained that way pretty much ever since. My world makes a lot more sense to me now as a Christian than it ever did before.

So, Mike, it sounds like you started developing a thinking faith and that you started pursuing apologetics. Can you talk about what apologetics is, for those who are listening who have no idea what that term means?

Yeah. Apologetics is the defense of the Christian faith against criticism, whether that’s coming from atheists, Muslims, or anyone who says it ain’t necessarily so. There is no God, or Jesus is just not God or anything like that. I did a discipleship course with my pastor, and we went through all sorts of things. What is the Bible? Who is Jesus? And all sorts of questions like that. And I got really interested in that.

And the good thing was, the pastor I was with, he could see that I was getting into the more intellectual side of things, and he really supported me and encouraged me in that. In fact, after two years of being at that church and being very well discipled, it was time for me to move on to a different posting in northern Australia, and as a going-away present, the pastor gave me a copy of Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, which I thought was quite… how would you call it? A kind of foreshadowing of the direction I was soon to go into. So I devoured Erickson’s Christian Theology. It was a very good little textbook introducing me to systematic theology or Christian thought, and that was terrific.

And then when I moved to Townsville in northern Australia I attended another really good church with another really great group of pastors. And they had one chap there who was a Southern Baptist pastor from Georgia. He was from Griffin, and he helped pastor the church and run a little theological college as an annex to the church, and I got into more theological education while I was there. I took courses on 1 Corinthians, on basic Christian beliefs, and that type of thing, and I learned more from that, and that’s when I decided I wanted to leave the army and go to theological college, maybe with a view to becoming an army chaplain or maybe doing something like becoming a seminary professor. So eventually I did end up doing a bit of theological education and really craving more.

It sounds like you really found something very rich, worth studying, and you also, from a B student, it sounds like also that you really moved towards a very strong intellectual bent.

Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I did have a kind of natural sort of a writing ability, which I had a little bit in high school. It never got refined or polished, but I did have a kind of writing ability. And when I moved out of infantry and went into military intelligence, I was then in an environment where you’re having to take in a lot of information, process it, and then write reports and give oral presentations to very important people, and that helped refine my abilities all the more. So after a few years of that, I think I was really ready to start tertiary study. I was disciplined. I was motivated. And I think a gifting was beginning to open up in my ability to study and explain the Bible and Christian thought.

It sounds like you’ve moved very far from your perceived caricaturing of Christian faith as Ned Flanders. You are no Ned Flanders. You are very, very far from that. The people that you met broke down your stereotypes, and then you’ve become something… someone extremely respectable intellectually, that you understand the grounding for your faith, that you live in a way that makes Christianity plausible and complex in a good way. It’s very rich. It sounds like you have a fullness of life that makes sense from every perspective. You’ve come a very long way, to the point where I guess you’ve invested your life in the Christian worldview and not only knowing more and more about it but also teaching it. You said you’re a college professor and a writer?

Yeah. Yeah. I’ve pretty much committed myself, everything to this. The advance of the gospel, the building up of the church, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. I’ve enjoyed the many institutions I’ve taught at the Highland Theological College, the Brisbane School of Theology, and now, more recently at Ridley College.

That’s quite a life transformation, I must say. As we’re thinking about your life and really the insights and perspectives that you’ve gained in moving from atheism to Christianity, knowing what it’s like as an atheist and thinking very little of the Christian faith, but now finding that it really is everything to you, if you could speak to the nonbeliever or perhaps a curious skeptic who’s listening, what would you want to say to them?

I would say don’t rely on the caricatures you have received around you for what Christianity is about. Now that can be very different in different places in the world. If you’re somewhere like… well maybe like where you are, in Georgia, where there is certainly a very strong history and culture of Christianity, but in many ways it can be at the level of the culture. That type of a thing. And it can be easy to assume there’s a certain hypocrisy. But if you actually meet genuine Christians, people who know their Christian faith and who are earnestly committed to it, I think you’ll discover that they are far more different than what you’ve assumed about them, or what you’ve been told about them. And it can lead to many pleasant, wonderful, and astounding surprises when you see Christian faith not as a political tool, not something of cultural conditioning but of real conviction, of real spiritual depth and richness. If you meet those kind of people, they certainly will transform everything you believe about Christian faith, about who is God and importantly who is Jesus.

I think that’s good advice. It’s always good to look into what you really don’t understand, to take another look, to pull back the layers a little bit and see if your presumptions are right or mistaken. I think you were actually willing to do that when you were willing to actually even go to a church service, which I think probably a lot of people wouldn’t do. But you were actually willing to actually take a look. And you found something very different than what you expected. I think that’s really great advice.

To Christians or believers, perhaps in addressing and engaging with those who really don’t understand Christianity or perhaps perceive Christianity in a very caricatured way, how would you encourage Christians to live in this very secularized culture that we have today?

I think the number one thing I would say is, if you’re going to make a difference, you need to be different. And you can’t simply imitate the worst of the culture around you. If you are different in your disposition, your attitude, your joy, the things that you run from and the things that you run to. If you can embody the story of Jesus Christ in your own relationships, people around you will notice. They may not tell you they notice, but they will notice. The authentic living out of Christian faith is one of the best apologetic strategies that you can provide. You may not be a world-class debater like a William Lane Craig. You may not be a biblical scholar. You may not have the answer to everyone’s question, but if you can show that Jesus really does make a difference in your life and in how you treat other people, I think that will speak volumes to the people around, and even those who may not believe with you will at least respect you for your conviction and your Christlikeness.

Excellent. Excellent. Mike, this has been such a pleasure to have you on the Side B Podcast, to hear your story. It’s been intriguing and interesting and really quite wonderful to hear from someone who’s made quite a leap, quite a change in your journey. I do wonder, as a last question, those around you in your life, in your world, your friends and family. Once you became a Christian, how was that accepted? Did anyone push back with you on that?

Oh, yeah, yeah. My parents did not take the news well. When I told them I’ve been going to church, it was like, “Church!” I mean they did not respond particularly well, and they just thought it was a phase I was going through, like if you change sporting teams or something. They thought it was just a phase I was going through. But it’s a phase that’s been going on now for well over 20 years, I have to say, some 25 years I would have to say. So they were quite negative and quite abrupt, and they could even be quite… particularly my mother could be quite condescending and malicious about it, which was disappointing. Some of my immediate friends were a little bit weirded out, but they just… “Okay, fair enough. Okay, Mike. That’s who Mike is now, and who he is and what he does,” so yeah, that was kind of… It was a little bit difficult. But I’d also established a whole bunch of new friends. I mean the other thing is, being in the army, you kind of have to pick up and move every few years, anyway, so I was able to make new friends largely through the churches I visited in my various travels.

Very good. Yeah. It’s hard that you can’t predict how people around you will respond, but obviously it was worth it, whatever that you found was worth it. I guess the disappointment around you. But hopefully they can see, as you encouraged Christians to be embodied, that they can see that the difference was worth it. And that they, even though, like you say, they may not say anything, they certainly notice.

Yeah.

So thank you again, Mike, for being part of the show, and I just appreciate your time and your coming on, and we loved having you on.

Okay. Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure. All blessings to you and your listeners.

Thanks for listening to the Side B Podcast to hear Mike’s story. You can hear more from Mike by looking at his books, his blogs, and his Twitter account, all of which I’ve included in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

The Side B Podcast was recently listed as #16 on Top 35 Christian Women Podcasts. Check out the full list now!

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Life is busy. Who has time to think about God when there’s so much else to do? To think about and consider? We simply presume we’re right no matter which side we’re on. Many atheists presume that science has made religion passe. We no longer need the God hypothesis to explain anything. Christianity is not plausible but rather mere superstition. Thinking people have no time or desire to deal with it. It’s simply off the radar.

In my research with over 50 former atheists, nearly two-thirds, 63%, thought that atheism was true and no evidence could convince them otherwise. But in light of the fact that I was interviewing former atheists who had become Christians, it begged the question: What made someone so closed off to God open up and become willing to change. That’s the million dollar question.

I hasten to add that, as a group, these were highly educated people. Nearly half held advanced degrees. These are thoughtful people who, for some reason, decided to take another look at the God question and found themselves strongly believing and advocating what they had once thought was not important or just plain nonsense. Sometimes looking more closely, beyond mere presumptions of belief, causes someone to become open to another perspective, especially if their own worldview doesn’t seem to be providing adequate answers to the questions they’re asking, whether it be science or other questions of life or even death.

That’s the case for the former atheist in our podcast today. Robert Kunda tells his journey from disbelief in God to belief. He was challenged to take a closer look at his atheistic presumptions, and that closer look made all the difference.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Robert. It’s so great to have you on today.

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, perhaps where you live.

My name’s Robert Kunda. I live in southern Oregon, Grant’s Pass specifically, with my wife and our three dot dot dot kids. We have two girls and a boy, eleven, nine, and five, but we also have a fluctuating number of kids, as we are currently foster parents. We have one 1-1/2-year-old baby who, I guess she’s almost a toddler now, but we’re hoping to adopt. So hopefully she’ll be staying around. And then just the number of foster kids we have varies at any given moment. We just had a placement. A girl that was with us for four or five months left this last Friday, and so now we technically have only the baby as a foster kid. We do have a boy and a girl that we’re watching just for a week for someone else, but they’re not living with us permanently.

So you have six children in your home right now, eleven and younger?

Yes.

That’s a full house.

A busy life, it sounds like. Amazing!

It’s busy. It’s nice. My wife stays home. She homeschools our kids, which is something that she always wanted to do, which is something that we’d never have been able to afford when we were in southern California, so the lower cost of living up in Oregon is helpful. It’s nice.

I want to know about the kind of place you grew up that helped to inform and shape your views.  I wonder about your childhood experience. Your family, your community. Were there references to God at all? Or Christianity? Or religion? And what did that look like?

Kind of. In my house, not so much. For maybe three or four years, when we were really young, when we lived out near Pomona area, it was just my mom, my sister, and I, and we were in a private Christian school for some time, because, It was a rough area. So we had weekly chapel and references to God in that school, but other than that, we didn’t go to church. My mom wasn’t a believer. We moved a lot when I was younger, basically all through high school. And after that, there was no going to church. There was no other sort of Christian exposure, except for having friends that were believers.

So when you were a child growing up and you went to this Christian school, was it anything that you believed? Or was it just something that they talked about the school but it really had no personal impact on you in terms of… Did you pray to God or anything like that?

Probably not. At the time, if I could go back and ask myself, I would say at least for a period of time I probably believed it. What that really actually meant… Now I wouldn’t know. Kids can often just kind of repeat things by memorization and hold multiple conflicting ideas in their heads together, but I didn’t pray. I didn’t have any sort of experience with any of it. It was just almost like another class. You moved from English to science to chapel, and it’s just information that you can kind of repeat, but I didn’t have any sort of ownership of it. And whatever was there died off in my later elementary through high school age, anyway.

So you said you had some Christian friends. Would you say that they took their faith very seriously? Were they the type that were very active and intentional in their Christianity? Or was it just something that they, too, were perhaps… called themselves Christians, but it wasn’t much more than that.

It was kind of a mixed bag. And when I said Christian friends, I was mostly thinking of a few of the circles of friends that I had when I was in high school. Most of them, especially the closest ones, were not Christians, but I had another circle of friends that I used to hang out with. They were all part of the same church, and I used to go with them to Christian concerts because it was fun. One of those actually ended up being my wife who I’m married to now.

Oh, okay. Well, that worked out well for you.

But the whole group was kind of a mixed bag. You have some that didn’t stay in any sort of Christian community after high school. You had some that, later on, fell away. And you have a couple that are still there, my wife included. So it was kind of all over the board.

So as you were growing up and you saw this kind of social reference to God and Christianity and you had a few friends who called themselves that, but it’s just not something that evidently was attractive to you or meant anything to you or… How would you describe religion growing up?

That’s a good question. I probably would’ve thought of it as something… almost like a preference. Like, “Certain families do this. Some families watch football on Sundays, and some like to go to church,” and it’s just… almost like a relativistic approach. Different flavors for different people. I wouldn’t have the vocabulary, but it would’ve basically been like, “Well, that’s true for you, and what’s true for me is something different. It’s all just preference.”

So what was becoming true to you at that time? How old were you when you were moving towards atheism or identifying with that kind of thinking or way of looking at the world?

I want to say probably early middle school age. I don’t really remember thinking anything about it at all. I don’t think I really had much of an opinion. Through high school, I would say I strongly ventured towards the atheism side. I’m trying to think what the best way to describe it would be.

Was it school or education? Were you influenced by your science classes? What was it, do you think, that was influencing you towards atheism?

Yeah, I would say it’s probably all of those. Secular naturalism was definitely prevalent as far as the worldview that was presented in school, which I adopted without question. Predominantly, my family and closest friends, none of them were Christian, so I just kind of, basically from every end, that’s the way I adopted it. Also my home growing up wasn’t wonderful, so… Again, I wouldn’t have had the categories for it at the time, but the existential problem of evil was something that I felt tremendously without any sort of answer for, and I’m like, “The world’s too ugly for there to be a God.”

Right, right. So it was really a combination of a lot of different things in your world, your home, your experience, your observation of the world, your friends, school. Did your science classes kind of feed into that understanding, too? You mentioned secular naturalism. For those who may not be familiar with that, can you describe what that is? Or what that was that you believed?

Yeah. I was taught macro evolution in school. You’re really not taught anything spiritual, for lack of a better world. The material world is all that exists. There’s nothing that’s immaterial. Yeah.

And it just made sense to you? It was just a pragmatic view of life?

Yeah. It wasn’t really a view that I was argued into. It was just sort of the underlying presupposition of everything, and that’s just how I viewed everything.

Yeah. So it was just kind of a presumed point of view.

Right.

If you had this kind of presumed perspective of life, naturalism. Did you consider any of the implications that might come along with that way of thinking? In terms of what it meant for your life or your own humanity, freedom, conscience, right and wrong, anything? Purpose, death?

Yeah, I would say it’s kind of a mixed bag. On one end, the morality idea was a big one. I mean, I was like, “There’s no bearded man in the sky that makes doing this or that wrong or right or obligatory.” So I wasn’t really persuaded by a theistic case for the necessity of morality at the time. By God’s grace, I’ve always had a fairly moralistic bent, as far as… I definitely made my share of mistakes, but I was nowhere near as bad as I could have been in a lot of areas. I would say the biggest impact that I had, thinking through the outworkings of atheism, was just the idea of death was terrifying. I mean, I remember I used to just agonize for hours on end… Not every day or all day, but there were periods of time where you just try to understand what the world is, what it means. I’m like, “Okay. I’m conscious. I can think about things that happen. And at some point, I’m just going to be dead, and nothing will matter. And I won’t know that it won’t matter. There’ll just be nothing. It’ll just be emptiness.” And just that thought was so terrifying.

So I presume you tried not to think about that so much.

Well, I don’t think it will in unconsciousness now, so it doesn’t bother me the same way it used to. But at the time it was just horrifying. You get in these kind of ruts, and you’re like, “Why does anything I do matter? Why does it mean anything?” “And in the end, I won’t know.” The idea of being able to know that you won’t know, looking forward, to me, was just so haunting.

So there were some things that really bothered you as an atheist, but then you didn’t know quite what to do with them. So how does your story then progress from there? You were in high school. What did you do after high school?

After high school, I went into the military. I was in the military for four years. When I came back, my mom and my stepdad had gotten divorced, and so I didn’t really have a home to go back to at the time. And so I went to go live with my former best friend from high school. He and his family were basically my second family through middle school and high school, and so I lived with them for a while. Through him, I actually got in touch with my wife, Asia. They ran into each other three, three and a half years after graduating high school, and she found out that I was coming back. She’s like, “Oh, have Robert give me a call when he gets home.”

So I got a hold of her when I came back because I almost had no friends locally, so I was trying to get in touch with people that I remembered, and I got in touch with her. She, from my perspective at the time, had unfortunately still continued going to church and do all that kind of stuff, which meant, for multiple nights a week, or days a week, she was sort of occupied doing church things. And then, as we started to get closer, I became quite aware if I wanted to spend time with her I had to suffer through some of those churchy things.

So she obviously took her Christian faith quite seriously if she was involved several days a week in her church.

She did. She was. I mean, she went to church on Sundays and then… it escapes me. It was one or two nights a week they would usually have some sort of young adult things in the evening or church services midweek, and so I went to those occasionally as well.

So was that odd, as an atheist, to go to church services? What was that like?

It was. Most of the people that I interacted with were all pretty nice. I mean, I’ve typically been able to get along with most people fairly well. The church that she was in at the time, they had not wonderful theology, and so, from the atheist side looking in, it seemed extra wacky to me, and so it was easy, for a long period of time, to sort of roll my eyes and deal with the medicine that I had to swallow in order to spend time with this girl that I liked.

Well, you must’ve really liked her.

I did. And we’d known each other, at that point, for more than ten years. We were good friends. We never dated in high school. I did ask her to prom my senior year, and she told me no.

it wasn’t a real ask. The person that she wanted to go with was unavailable, so I said, “Well, hey, I’ll go with you,” and she’s like, “No. I don’t want to go,” and so I just went with someone else. It didn’t mean much at the time, but it is funny to look back on and say that, “I asked her to prom, and she shot me down, but we ended up getting married, so in the end, I won.”

Yes, you did. You sure did. So how long were you going to church with her thinking this was extra wacky and trying to make sense of what was happening? I know you probably went in with a skeptical lens, obviously. Was there any genuine curiosity to you during this time?

I wouldn’t say genuine curiosity. I definitely went in with a skeptical lens. I didn’t really talk to her about it at the time. Nothing says romance like trying to beat your partner into submission by telling them how dumb they are.

But because I was becoming so much more immersed in a completely different worldview, I started reading a bunch of different books, both atheist and Christian sides, because I kind of wanted to be able to mentally state explicitly why Christianity was false. And so the books I started reading were really to sort of combat that, so when I got into a discussion with someone, instead of just being like, “You’re dumb. You’re wrong,” I could be like, “Here’s why.”

Right.

And so what I first started reading was in order to do that. Unfortunately, it seems to have backfired, and I went the opposite direction. Fortunately now but at the time I would have considered it unfortunate.

Ah. So what kinds of things were you reading? I presume, like you said, it was a fairly balanced reading on both sides? Atheism and Christianity?

So I wasn’t in any sort of research program, so I didn’t really pick a well versed catalog, but I did read a couple of Christian science books. Not Christian science, but… It’s been a long time. I can’t remember all the titles, but I think I read one or two books by Hugh Ross at the time, looking at creation arguments. I read at least one or two Richard Dawkins books. Let’s see, what else? I’ve read a number of C.S. Lewis books as well. Stuff that was recommended kind of by both sides.

Right. And during that time as well were you reading… Did you pick up the Bible? I’m curious, since it was the Christian text. Did you read the Bible?

Intermittently. At the time, not a whole lot, not in scope. There would be times where I would go reference something or read a section, but there was no systematic reading through. Again, at the time, I didn’t think it was something worth taking seriously, so I didn’t go to the original sources.

Okay, okay. But you were reading back and forth on these opposing worldviews, and you were finding, I presume, something surprising about what you were reading from Christian thinkers?

Yes.

Because obviously you were being persuaded towards that direction.

Yeah, I think that was what sort of surprised me is, as you look at different authors, which… It wasn’t like a formal debate where they’re interacting with each other directly, but you have guys that are interacting with similar ideas, and in doing that, they’re presenting the other side and then their own arguments as to the way the world actually works, and it became fairly evident to me early on that the Christian side was much more accurate in their representation of the opposing side than vice versa.

Yes, yes. So there seemed to be more fairness by the Christian authors on their view of atheism, as compared to vice versa. But you mentioned that it seemed to also provide, I guess, a clearer or more cogent view of reality. What do you mean by that? That they were able to answer some of those bigger questions? Or did the pieces seem to fit together in terms of the universe, the cosmos? You said you read Hugh Ross. Did things seem to make sense in terms of cause and effect or fine tuning or-

Yeah. The two things that I think really sunk with me first was, on one hand… Lewis was very helpful to me early on, in getting me to think about certain ideas, but I want to say it was like the argument from desire. I mentioned before the idea of dying was terrifying because I don’t want to not exist anymore. And his argument was sort of that we long for fulfillment in certain areas, and Christianity can offer answers to those that are ultimately satisfying, whereas atheism cannot. Now that’s not, by itself, an argument in favor of Christianity’s truthfulness or not. Just because we want something doesn’t really make it so, but it did seem to me that many of the atheists weren’t necessarily taking the seriousness of their own implications seriously. I think this is one of the biggest issues that I’ve had with Richard Dawkins, is that he really maintains almost a Christian worldview from the perspective of being able to call things wrong, but if naturalism is true, why does he care? He’s just chemicals fizzing together in a different way than someone else. So why is he against injustices of the world?

Atheists of old used to understand this, and a lot of the current atheists just completely disregard it. They want to borrow the benefits of Christian thought while casting off the foundations. And so that seemed very inconsistent to me.

I would say the other side that was a big influence for me as well was I used to love listening to moderated debates with atheists and Christians on a whole variety of topics. I’ve probably listened to at least three dozen Bill Craig debates. But some of the most interesting debates were the ones for and against evolution and watching how the evolutionists conducted themselves in debates, both with their arguments and argumentativeness, was just so, frankly, embarrassing from someone at the time who was sympathetic to evolution as not only just a scientific theory but a whole worldview. Watching how poorly some of them performed and behaved themselves was just, to me, horrifying.

So it was content and manner?

Right. I mean, if you’re approaching it where you have the intellectual arguments in the bag and the other side is literally just making stuff up out of thin air, you should be able to present a solid argument explaining why your own view has merit, rather than just literally mocking the other side, and none of the debates that I watched did that.

So was that disappointing to you in a way? That the atheists weren’t able to rise to the occasion intellectually or pragmatically, I guess you could say?

Yeah. And at this point I was probably kind of mid trajectory in going some other direction, and I wasn’t sure. I wouldn’t say that it was disappointing at the time. It was illuminating, in that I was less confident in how true my outlook was at the world. I thought, “Maybe I don’t know everything that I think I do,” or, “Maybe the world isn’t the way that I have assumed it was.”

Hm. And as you were moving through this process of listening to pro and con and different debates and you were reading books, were you discussing your thinking, your findings, how you were being illuminated with Asia or with any Christians or any atheists? Or were you just kind of going on this journey by yourself?

It was largely by myself. At the time, I was not super eager to share some of the specifics with Asia.

Because you were just trying to figure this out on your own, I presume, before-

Yeah, I mean it really started off as a quest to argue against Christianity and then shifted into sort of trying to understand what I actually do believe, like what’s the proper way to understand the way world is and how it works.

So it was a process, really. How long were you in this journeying of finding clarity with regard to your own thinking, as well as these worldviews?

I want to say it was probably… anywhere between three to five years. I don’t know if it’s completely closed because I think I’m continuing to develop in my thinking, although at this point I think I’m much more just firming up weak points rather than a complete change in worldview, but it was a very slow, long process. I never had like a Blues Brothers moment of conversion, where all of a sudden I recognized that I believed God’s word, I believed the Gospels. It was a much more delayed, slow process, to where, at some point I understood what the material was, and eventually I crossed over into the, “Okay, I actually do believe this now,” but it was very slow, and it was not instant for me.

It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s conversion, where he went through a very long journeying, too. Of moving from atheism to Christianity, and then n a sense it was all of a sudden, but it was really capped on a very long process of… He said it was almost as a sleeping man becoming awake, and, “All of a sudden, I believed,” and it made sense. It’s like the pieces fell into place. I think not every conversion is any kind of a sudden, like you called it, a Blues Brothers moment. I love that. For many people, it is a gradual… I mean, when you think of the weight of shifting your worldview, of thinking reality one way and then moving towards another way of considering reality, that is… or it seems like it would be, or should be, even, a prolonged process. And like you say, it seems like a process that is ongoing. It’s not something that you can grasp fully. It’s something we’re always becoming more and more acquainted with, I guess you could say. But there must have been a point, kind of a tipping point? Would you call it something like that?

And I know Christianity is not just believing evidence. That’s part of it, but it’s so much more than that, because, in Christianity, it’s not just believing certain propositions are true, it’s actually a relationship with a Person who you believe is Truth.

Right.

So there’s a lot more to it than that. So did that come into play? I know there’s the intellectual part, but then there’s so much more than that. So talk with me about that.

I haven’t put some of this into words before. But honestly, looking back, I don’t think I would consider myself a believer until actually well after we were married. I look back, and my wife shouldn’t have married me at the time. One of her few failings in life. She ended up lucking out, and I’m quite a catch now, but I wouldn’t have encouraged to have married me back at the time. But I remember I became much less hostile to Christianity after a period of thought and consideration, but I didn’t consider myself part of the group. I became content to sort of coexist in sort of a relativistic fashion, like, “Hey, I know you guys believe all the fancy Jesus stuff, and I don’t really believe that, but I have no problems sharing a meal together,” you know, doing life together.

So we dated for quite a while, and then, at some point, I actually asked her if we could leave the church that she was at because I didn’t think Christianity was true, but I knew that whatever the church that she was at the time believed wasn’t even really Christianity. And so we did. We left there and went to an EV Free church, and we were there for… Without doing the math, I want to say maybe eight or nine years. And it was over a period of years, being in that church, where I really became solidified in my conversion and confident in the faith that I had in Christ. And I think the point where that happened, that I can kind of point to, was I remember one of the pastors had called me one day and said, “Hey, it might be time for you to get baptized.” And, at first, I was like, “Well, that’s kind of a big step,” and as I was talking through it with him and I was thinking about it, I was like, “Actually, I don’t really have a problem. I think that is probably appropriate. Because I do believe these things now.” And I probably did before, but I hadn’t really codified it in my own thinking. But that was a number of years into us being married.

So you moved through what you consider a conversion process, and I’m curious as to all those bits and pieces that seemed to bother you as an atheist, like issues of death and grounding morality and those kinds of things… Once you became a Christian, did you find that those things that were somewhat missing in your atheistic worldview you were able to find within your Christianity?

Yeah. And I think that’s where a lot of the apologetic arguments and discussions have really helped me, much more as a believer than when I was an atheist. So that Christianity has an afterlife, to me, was never an argument in favor of Christianity. I mean, most of the religions have an afterlife, but that was not persuasive enough to say, “Oh, well therefore that worldview is right.” But now, believing that Christianity is true and recognizing that, in fact, it does have answers for those things that I thought atheism was, if not deficient on, gave answers that weren’t really fulfilling, and now, having a worldview that, in turn, does fulfill those desires is an incredible blessing, and so I found that with a lot of the apologetic arguments.

Everything from the typical bag that Bill Craig carries around, the cosmological argument. That wasn’t appealing to me at the time. I’m like, “Okay, whatever. The Christian sect used fancy words,” or whatever, but now that I’m a believer and I can hear these arguments, especially a philosophical defense of Christianity, I look, and I’m like, “Wow! These are really, really good arguments,” especially when you consider them with an open mind, so to me, apologetics has been much more of a useful tool for building and strengthening the confidence that believers have in their own faith, rather than necessarily just a straight tool to evangelize with.

So as you became a Christian, I guess you could say that you found the philosophical, the intellectual aspects of Christianity to be solid in terms of your ability to make sense of the world and existentially, in terms of your life, it also was fulfilling those things, and so it gave you somewhat of a fully orbed worldview, in a sense. More than what you had in your atheism. Tell me, as you became a Christian, you said you’re rather a student. Did you pursue further education.

after I got out of the military, I went to just a local community college, and I was taking classes there, working towards an AA. After some period of time, I actually… I want to say maybe 2005, 2006 is when I actually enrolled in Biola. After I was firmly in the believer camp. I decided I wanted to have a more biblical education than what I was getting at a secular school, and so I enrolled in Biola. I went through my bachelor’s there, and then I ended up doing my Master’s in Apologetics there as well.

Okay. So you did take this very, very seriously, in terms of grounding your own worldview.

Yeah. Once they got me, they got me.

Yeah. I guess you could say that, for sure. As we’re listening to your story and really considering that you’ve come quite a distance and you understand what it feels like to live and think as an atheist and live and think as a Christian, in your story you had presumptions that atheism was true but perhaps, when you took a closer look, it unearthed, some real doubts for you as you were looking at it more closely. What would you like to say to the curious skeptic who might be listening today in terms of perhaps investigating their own atheism, much less Christianity?

I guess it would be twofold. On one hand, I mentioned that I really did find a lot of moderated debates very useful. I used to just Google debates and just find something that looked interesting and listen through that. And interactions between Christians and atheists on different topics was just fascinating to me, and I benefited greatly from listening to those and watching how both sides conducted their arguments, how they behaved themselves, the merits on each side, but what I would encourage is something that I didn’t do early on, and that would be to actually just expose yourself to reading the Bible, to what’s actually in scripture. I think it would’ve made my process a lot less long and less painful. It’s one of those things that, if it’s true, you’ll see, and I think it is, so I think you will, but… It’s hard to say you don’t believe something when you actually don’t look at what the thing is and you only look at it through second or third-hand sources.

Yeah. That’s some good counsel. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people who were very, very surprised by what they found in the Bible when they actually read it for themselves. And for the Christian, how would you encourage them in terms of understanding the atheist more or someone who’s a skeptic or a nonbeliever or perhaps engaging with someone who has a different worldview or even equipping themselves in order to engage?

Yeah. So every person, their story’s a little bit different. I mentioned my wife before. She grew up in the church. She’s always been in a Christian home. And she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t believe. On the other hand, I was well into my twenties, my mid twenties, when I was converted. And in many ways I wish that I would have grown up a Christian, because there’s a lot of baggage that I carry around now that I wouldn’t have to deal with or think back on, but in other ways, it is kind of a blessing, in that I could see literally what I was saved from, not just to but from, and I can remember what it was like. And I think a lot of the times, Christians can forget who they once were, especially on the internet, which is maybe the worst place to argue about anything, let alone Christianity, but anything. But remember the grace that you have been shown and the position that you are now in. We didn’t just realize that something’s true and someone else is just too dumb to realize it. We’re literally given a grace by God in understanding. And those that don’t have it are in no better position than we ourselves were. So just to remember where we came from.

I think it was Greg Koukl who said, “The Gospel is offensive enough. Don’t add any offense to it.” Don’t take any of it away, but don’t be offensive in your delivery of it. Let God be the one that’s offensive, and let that be the mark that people remember and not your own manners and your presentation themselves.

I think that’s wise counsel. It makes me curious. When you were dating Asia for a period of time, did she allow you space? Was she pressuring you at all towards Christianity? Or did she allow you space for you to move at your own pace towards this journey that you were on to find truth?

Yeah. To be honest, we actually didn’t really talk about it. It wasn’t really front and center. Just by nature, she’s not a very argumentative person, which is why we typically never fight now.

It just was a topic that we did not discuss.

Okay. Yeah. So at least she wasn’t putting pressure on you in this regard.

No, it was probably the complete opposite.

The only pressure was, “Hey, I’m going to be at church on this day and this time. If you want to hang out with me, that’s where I’ll be.” That was the only pressure.

And so it was quite persuasive, apparently.

I guess you wanted to be with her, and that was a good thing. Thank you, Robert, for being a part of the Side B Podcast. It’s great to hear your story, and I truly appreciated hearing your journey and your honesty in all of it. So thank you for coming on.

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Robert’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

Hello and thanks for joining in.  I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast where we ‘see how skeptics flip the record of their lives.’  Each podcast we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who came to believe in God and Jesus to their own surprise. 

There are different reasons or catalysts that may stop someone in their tracks and reconsider their own skepticism towards God and faith, towards their own presumptions, their own way of looking at the world.  One of these catalysts is an unexpected sudden or significant event in the world.  Disruptive events or circumstances often demand our attention.  They raise our awareness beyond the mundane normal day-to-day activities to potentially consider the larger, deeper big questions of life. 

Those grand moments can sober us to think about our own beliefs, our direction, our purpose and meaning, what we think about death and beyond.  Some people take those interruptions seriously as an opportunity to look more closely at their own lives.  Others merely move on without deep regard or consideration for what it might mean for themselves, pursuing business as usual.

In today’s story, Brian Causey, a successful financial trader, was one of those experienced an event that rocked the world as an invitation to examine his own beliefs, his own life, to open the door to the possibility of belief beyond skepticism.  It jump started his intellectual quest to look for a better explanation for his life, to possibly trade what he knew and experienced of reality.  It compelled his search for the existence of God.

I hope you’ll come along to meet Brian and hear him tell his journeying from disbelief to belief.  And, I hope you’ll stay to the end to hear Brian’s advice to skeptics who may be considering the possibility of searching beyond their skepticism and his advice to Christians on engaging with those who don’t believe.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Brian. It’s so great to have you with me today.

Thanks, Jana. It’s so great to be here. I look forward to it.

Wonderful! Before we tell your story, which I can’t wait to hear, why don’t we learn more about who you are today, and tell me a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, sure. My name is Brian Causey. My day job is in the investment world, where I have kind of a strange and unique opportunity to work with some of the biggest pools of money in the world, mostly teachers’ pension funds and things like that. My side hustle is as an armchair theologian and an author. I get to live in Seattle, Washington, with the most amazing woman I know, my wife Karlie, our 2-year-old son Blaise, and Brodie the Burnedoodle.

Bernedoodle. That’s obviously a combination of Golden Retriever and Bernese Mountain Dog?

He’s Bernese Mountain Dog Poodle mix. Yes. And he’s in dire need of a summer cut. It’s too hot over here now.

So, as we’re getting started, Brian, in order to shape the fullness of the story, let’s go back to your childhood. Tell me about life growing up, your family, your friends, your culture, your community? Tell me what life was like. Was it with God? Was it without God referents? Were you from the Northwest all along? Talk to me about that.

Yeah, sure. Well, I grew up in a very loving home. I mean, my family is all very close still. My parents are headed towards their, I think, 57th wedding anniversary. But growing up, religion just wasn’t much of a consideration for us. We didn’t really talk about God or things like that. I kind of joke around with others that we were kind of like the Scandinavian countries. We had a foundation of Christian faith, but it wasn’t really part of our daily life. In many senses, I was just a classic none, N-O-N-E, which, in the lingo of polling, just means that I would have answered “none of the above” if I was asked what religion I belonged to.

I think I had probably a faint sense of the spiritual. I mean I wasn’t a materialist. I knew that much. I believe there was some kind of greater power out there, but I didn’t know what it was or if it wanted anything from me. At the same time, probably if you would have pressed me back then, I would have believed in almost anything, I suppose. UFOs, telepathy, reincarnation, that all religions were paths to God. I was spiritual but not religious. “You can’t pin me down. You can’t put me in a box.” And I think that’s one of the attractions, probably, of being a none, N-O-N-E again. None of the above. You can’t pin that person into a set of beliefs or doctrines or attach them to a certain organization. I think that’s part of the attraction and why the “none movement” is so rapidly rising in all of the polling data. I think organized religion just held no appeal to me at that point in my life. I mean, in reality, I think I belonged to a religion of one, where whatever I said or did or thought was acceptable, and that concepts like God and faith were just an accessory to my life that I could put on or take off whenever I felt like it. I could change my standards in line with my behavior, such that I could never be guilty of anything. And that was very appealing to me growing up.

So you had this kind of sense of self and independence, picking and choosing whatever fits at the time. Were there any Christians that intersected your world at all during elementary school or maybe middle or in high school?

Gosh. Really not much. It’s a very secular community up here in Seattle. Honestly, the only people that took religion seriously growing up were my Mormon friends. Their lives seemed to revolve around the church schedule and calendar, but yeah, there weren’t really many Christians that spoke into my life at that point in time. None that could really give me any hints of life’s real direction. And so I kind of felt like I was floating like a wave in the ocean without an anchor.

But you enjoyed the freedom of it?

I did. I did. I think that freedom was the best way for me to enjoy the fascinations of life. I, at that point in my life, enjoyed the party scene and enjoyed wanting to live forever as an adolescent.

I think it’s interesting that you had, in terms of an embodied picture of what religion was, it was Mormonism, which I know that there are some really beautiful and wonderful people and very moral people, but that religion as an embodied picture for you probably speak to rules and regulations and “do this” and “don’t do that,” and I would imagine that that kind of pushed against your sense of freedom and your ability to pick and choose whatever you wanted.  Again, you said you didn’t like organized religion. There was something very off putting about it. But what did you think religion was at that point? A construct of some sort? A hobby? How would you have described religion?

Yeah. Maybe as like a series of protocols. Things that you do. Might as well call it an exercise routine. Things you do, but the truth, whether it was true or not, I didn’t really think about that much at all. I don’t know why, but it just seemed like these were the steps. If you were a Christian or Mormon or whatever, these were the steps that you took because you belonged there. There was no why. It was all the what. “What do you do?” But not the, “Why are we doing it?” and “Why are we committing to something like that?”

It just didn’t seem attractive to you, right?

I wanted autonomy.  I wanted self reliance. If I was going to worship any god and I didn’t call it myself, it would be the god of self reliance. I wanted to be in control. I mean I wanted to have the power over my life. I wanted to be financially secure, such that I could do anything I wanted. Those were the things that I really pursued. I didn’t pursue any other authority but my own.

I think sometimes that seems so very attractive to so many people. This idea of independence and autonomy and that there are only positives that come from that way of thinking or being or living. You mentioned, those, that in some sense you felt like you were floating, like not grounded in something. I wonder if you felt any negative implications or ramifications from this kind of sense of autonomy. Did you make you feel isolated or too isolated? That you didn’t have a place of sense of belonging? Or were you just kind of the common teenager, “Hey, I’m just having fun! Let me eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,”?

There was definitely a time in my teenage life where I looked at the meaning question. I realized I didn’t know what life’s meaning was. And I fell into a depression, so bad that I really thought about suicide quite a lot, almost every day. And I went out of all sports and kind of went into my mind almost, retracted into my mind, stayed in my room a lot, and pondered the meaning question and what did it matter if I ended my life? There was no meaning to it. I was going to die and maybe be a part of the circle of life. And that was a real waking up for me. That was one of the many moments in my spiritual life that led me to who I’ve become today.

I went through a pretty bad period, and I did realize, at the end of that period, after I got out of it, was that… maybe two realizations. One, many other people have had this bout of doubt and meaning in their life. So I realized that there were other people in the same boat as me that got out of it. And that was very helpful for me, to basically mature in that direction. And maybe the other take-away for me was I realized I couldn’t solve this myself. I couldn’t keep looking inward and find the answers. I needed to start looking elsewhere. I needed advice. I needed good news, really. I needed to find what other people had thought about the big questions of life. Because I was struggling, and I needed some help.

So when you were in that place of openness of needing help, did you consider wondering whether there was a God who would have something to say about the meaning in your life or any other religious person? Where did you look when you started thinking you needed to look outside of yourself?

I think there were a few moments in my life where I started to look toward God or what I thought might have been God. And one class I took in college was really helpful, and it was called The Philosophy of Religion, and that introduced me to all of the faith beliefs. It introduced me to atheism, too. And we started with atheism in that class and read the classic atheistic thinkers and some current-day thinkers, and I was persuaded initially that this made a lot of sense to life. And then we countered that with great thinkers of believers, too. And so you want to hear both sides of the story, just like this podcast, and that’s what that class was doing. But at the end of that, I don’t think I really came to a conclusion. I still was waffling in these great themes that the university system was showing me. Everything from relativism, which is maybe the sneakiest of them all, that truth is subjective and that we each define our own truth. That’s definitely what I believed heading out of college. But also secular humanism and naturalism. Those were both huge themes in the university system that really influenced the way that I thought about things. And I think at the end, by the time I graduated, I was still in this camp of anything goes, that all religions are basically the same, that freedom and autonomy are always good and should never be impaired, that we each determine our own morality, that we can define truth for ourselves and that it’s okay to believe in whatever you want to believe.

I was in that camp, and I didn’t think there were any good reasons to question these things. And I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. I think a lot of my friends, a lot of my teachers probably were in this same cultural current, and again, with no real anchor, I just got swept up in that current, too.

So basically what you decided as a teenager, relativism, autonomy, they were only reinforced as you grew older. And the questions of meaning, I guess that would’ve been self determined, right? By the time you got out of college, it was still the same. The answer was still the same, that even though you had looked externally, I suppose, at other worldviews, or even considered what naturalism, atheism was, what secular humanism was, relativism, —you were learning more about it, but your sense or view of the world and of life became more educated but existentially the same, I would imagine.

Yeah.

That’s interesting.

And so it took a moment—it took a real game-changing moment in my life to shake up that worldview.

What was that?

It was 9/11. It was 9/11. And so the terrorist attacks just really were shocking to me, as to everybody I’m sure. I was in my early twenties. I was in the investment world. My job was going great. I had lots of friends, kind of was living as if I was invincible. And then 9/11 hit, and it really shook me up. It made me stop and wonder about my own mortality. I don’t know why this had such a big effect on me, being in Seattle, so far away from the terrorist attacks themselves, but this is the thing that forced me to say, “I need to figure out the big questions of life. I need to dive into what happens after I die, because I don’t know. I’m feeling a little naive here.”

And so the Sunday after 9/11 was the first time I really went to church. I was invited by a friend, thankfully, and I’m so thankful that that church was right next to the University of Washington, so it meant that it had very connections to a lot of academia. The library at this church was stock full. It was… I didn’t know churches had libraries, and many don’t still, but this one did, and it allowed me to do a lot of personal self reflection because it had things on audio tape, back then, where I could pop in a tape or a CD on my commute. I could check out books for free, and so I did a lot of that. I took the Alpha class, which they offered. And I really just dove in to trying to answer all of these tough, tough questions. And I had a lot of tough questions. I mean faith and doubt, science and religion, evolution, the age of the universe, miracles, lots of questions. And they had thoughtful responses to all of these, not just from the Christian perspective, but they would have interviews with scientists, world-class scientists, that would come and speak in person at the church. And have debates, have talks, all sorts of things that were just eye opening to me.

And so not only did I approach this whole challenge after 9/11 by diving in, but for whatever strange reason, 9/11 also was this turning point in this new movement called New Atheism. And the New Atheists kind of created a publishing sensation with all of these books that hit after 9/11 basically saying that a religious believer is illogical, unscientific, and probably harmful for the world. And that really blew through academia, it blew through the media, and really made a lot of people quite influenced by their thinking. And I had to kind of battle with all of those thoughts, too. Not only the classic thinkers and my own questions but a really in-your-face style approach of these skeptics.

That’s an interesting moment historically and as it intersects with your life because it was the moment that set you on a search, an intellectual search, but at the same time it was almost like this tsunami of intellectual atheists who were coming against what you were finding. I’m sure you were wrestling with both sides of those very diverse perspectives, one claiming one thing and another really piling on from the other side. How were you processing through those really dichotomous views at the same time?

It was really hard. It was hard. Because you have a lot of the classical Christian thinkers that are probably pulling more at the strings of your brain, I suppose. They’re not going after the emotional questions, but then these new New Atheist authors are going after the emotional side a little bit harder, and both are really challenging. They’re compelling and maybe rhetorically persuasive. So stepping back and trying to figure out how to approach this entire problem, and for me, I had a friend that just asked me the question that narrowed down my search, and it blocked all of this other noise that was coming into my filters. His question was, “Who do you think Jesus was?” and it’s such a basic question, but it’s the question, I think, the most important one that we all have to ask. And that just narrowed my search. Because if I could address that question, then it would frame all other questions. It was the most important thing that I needed to attack, and so that’s how I blocked a lot of the other challenges and noises that were coming my way.

So I started reading the Bible, read the Gospels, really came to know and love this character Jesus, and at the same time, doing all of the other research on the side which said, “There’s a lot of great reasons to think Jesus existed, that he is who he said he is, and here’s all the context of a first-century Jew,” which are really important, “and here’s all the context from the Old Testament that sort of brings everything into light once you consider Jesus, and man did that picture just make sense to me. And it was beautiful. And it softened my heart. I mean I suppose some people might read the Bible, and it could harden their heart. For me, the Bible was like a hammer that was more of a tenderizing hammer. It tenderized my heart. It somehow made this story pierce its walls. And I went through a season of this search. I say it lasted a long time, but in reality, it was only about two years. Because it was just so momentous to me. That two years was incredibly momentous. At the end of that season, I committed my life to Jesus.

So obviously, you went on a very intentional intellectual pathway towards this investigation of Christianity, of the person of Jesus. Reading the Bible, I’m sure you were probably very surprised what you found in the Bible. We have so many stereotypes or caricatures of… if you’ve never read the Bible before, what you think that it might be. But obviously you were open. Like you say, it was a tenderizing hammer toward you. So you allowed it to affect you.  It did its work on you.

It did its work.

Yeah. You found the person of Jesus.

Yeah. Man, He is such a fascinating character. As you know. But, I mean, you read the things that He says, and then you try and understand and unpack those and think about what it meant to the first century hearer, to the person that may have grown up with all of the Hebrew scriptures in mind, and then, man, he said some tough stuff! Some really hard things. I remember listening to a class from that church about the hard sayings of Jesus, and wow, that really just hit me about—He wasn’t this meek and mild all the time character. He was dynamic. There were a lot of things that He said which are still so challenging to me. And then to think that He’s not after just my actions. He’s after my heart. He wants to build a new heart from within, such that my actions and personality and things that come out of that heart reflect His Holy Spirit. There are just so many beautiful things that I’m still so enamored with Him, and especially with the cross. I mean, that was the thing that really worked for me is the cross. I did not understand the virgin birth. I didn’t understand the resurrection. It wasn’t even a focus of mine when I became a Christian. It was all about the cross. The cross is the thing that melted me.

This God Who created everything with the Word of His power loved me? He died for me? I’m a jerk. I’m a punk. I do not deserve this at all. I know who I am, and I’m sinful and wicked, and yet He loved me this much. I just couldn’t believe it. But that is what worked for me. And I’m blessed and I’m thankful that he did that for me.

That’s a beautiful explanation of the Gospel there, that none of us are deserving, and its not about dos and don’ts, right? It’s not about rules, like with the religion you had experienced earlier in your life. It was so much more than that in the Person of Christ. I can imagine someone listening and saying, “The stories sound good, and you can believe that, but—the Bible, obviously you were open to it. But there are so many things wrong with the Bible. It’s not reliable, the text, and it was written late, and Jesus is legendary, and all of these things were added.”  Did you have to resolve those controversial statements by the New Atheists? How were you trying to tease all of that out? In the one sense you were being drawn by the story and by the scripture and by what Christianity is as you were understanding it, but on the other hand, all of these counter arguments to it… How were you navigating through all of that?

Yeah. I think while I was reading the New Testament I was also listening to classes that talked about the history of the Bible, the collection of the Bible. Can we trust these books? That was the name of the class, was Can We Trust the Books? And so I was reading and listening to these classes at the same time, so I think I wouldn’t have the context. Let me rephrase, I think I needed the context in order to fully read the New Testament for me, for it to really resonate with me. I needed to know that the books were trustworthy. And there are a lot of wonderful reasons to trust this, not only just the number of copies of things that we have but the differences are so meaningless between the different copies that there’s a lot of great reasons and research to put your trust that this was recorded well. And there’s even great scholarly research right now about the hidden things in the New Testament, the hidden meaning. There’s not… Maybe Mark doesn’t explain something that John does. They all have a tight story when you think about all the different ways that they interact with each other. And that gave it more credibility to me.

I also needed to get over the science question in my mind before I could really hear the New Testament. And so that was one of the first obstacles that I had to overcome was I came in thinking science was the sole arbiter of truth. And I needed to kind of understand that there were limits to science. And I had to let go of that belief that science was the king. Instead, in seeing that were limits to science, I came to understand that maybe and science and religion are a little more like sibling rivals. They sort of challenge and enlighten each other, but they’re both in pursuit of truth. And I know that science can’t answer so many things. Even the house of the scientific materialist is built on a foundation of faith. There are tons of faithful commitments from the scientific materialist. I don’t need to go into all of those now, but there are plenty of assumptions, let’s say, going into such a belief. And so both of those things were hurdles for me in order to really hear what the text of the New Testament was saying.

So you had to really believe that it was worthy of belief from an intellectual or credibility perspective before you could embrace it personally, I would imagine. That the question of God, that there were good answers to belief that He exists, and that His name is Jesus, and that Jesus is worthy of belief. And I think probably one of the biggest hurdles that you may have had to jump over was that whole autonomy thing.

Oh yeah.

Because it’s more—when you come to the cross and you come to the person of Jesus, He’s giving you a beautiful gift of forgiveness and life and meaning and all of those things you were searching for, but in the process of doing that, it’s the process of coming forward and surrendering. In a sense, as He surrendered Himself for you, you surrender yourself to Him. That means your will, your independence, your control… But I’m curious, after years of living with the sense of autonomy and independence that you had, was it hard to lay that down? And what do you think that you got in exchange for that?

Oh, it’s continually hard to lay it down. I still desire control, and that’s not something that easily goes away. It’s a daily battle, but at the same time, when I went to church the Sunday after 9/11, the pastor there was a world-renowned C.S. Lewis scholar, and he would go around the world talking about C.S. Lewis, and so it didn’t take long for me to pick up Mere Christianity. And his chapter about pride was such a pivotal moment in my journey. I mean, that pride is basically the chief of all sins, that all other sins in comparison are like flea bites. Man, did that really just rock my world! I did not think pride was a bad thing. And turning that on its head opened my eyes to how selfish I was. Like I said, I wanted to be god. I wanted to be in charge of all of these things. But in my conversion, I really just had to take this really sober look at reality. The reality that some day I’m going to die. I can’t prevent that. In fact, the whole world will end, according to science, in the heat death of the universe. That I’m sinful. That God’s holy. That I’m super prideful. That I have this great and almost unquenchable desire for control. And that my heart is this selfish idol factory. This was my sober look at reality.

So in order to hear the good news, I had to recognize the bad news. I had to see the darkness to appreciate the light. And Lewis really helped me with that, in describing what pride was and that I needed to relinquish, and it’s, again I say, a daily battle to do this. But I knew Who’s in control. I know that I’m not in control. It doesn’t take long for me to go about my morning before I realize that’s the case, and so that’s why I’m on this very long and bumpy road called sanctification, where I’m trying to be more and more like Jesus and failing left and right but giving it back to Him and trying as hard as I can to let the Holy Spirit be the light that shines out.

It is a process. It is an ongoing process. It’s a struggle for us all.

Yes.

As you have also moved into Christianity and embracing the reality of God, you’re also embracing, I imagine, as you’ve been speaking of, the relevance of God in your life. Now, from an existential perspective, as a teenager, you were depressed because of the loss of meaning.  It was just out of reach. You were grappling for where to find meaning, whether it was yourself or outside of yourself, so what did you find with regard to that big question that has been kind of a driving motivator of your life, not only what happens with death and after death, but also in life?

Yeah. So what is the meaning and purpose of life. I guess the more that I’ve dived into that question, I come to the same answer, probably as a lot of folks in the Christian world, that my purpose is to glorify God, to enjoy Him forever, to have a relationship. I think relationships are the meaning of life. And you can think of that almost in terms of the ten commandments, too. You want a relationship upward, like a cross, the pointing upward part of the cross is to God. You want that relationship first. You want a relationship from side to side with your friends, your neighbors, your family. You want it in the middle with yourself. And you want it down below with the earth, with things that exist in this world, what we’re supposed to be good stewards of. And so all of this is relational in so many ways, just like God is relational, inherently relational. And man does that just make so much sense to me in so many ways.

And I would imagine, because you have gone on in your life, not only to explore the depths and riches of these relationships vertically, horizontally, with the world, with yourself, actually that you have found deep meaning and purpose, but I know of you that you’ve also done a lot of writing and work with apologetics, to the point that you’ve actually written down what you have found to be compelling evidence for the existence of God. I’ll hold up your book here. It’s called Trading Gods: A Rationale for Faith. Tell me what led you to write this book. And it’s contents are superb, for anybody who’s listening. I would encourage you to pick up this book that provides cogent, clear, accessible reasons for the reality of God. What drove you to write that book?

I really didn’t want to write a book, to be honest. It’s so hard to write a book. What I wanted to do was just teach a class at church. Again, I’ve already mentioned this a few times, but I benefited so much from those classes at church, many of which I didn’t attend in person, but I caught the audio archive of it and listened to it on my commute, and it was so influential in my spiritual journey that I wanted to pay it forward to the next generation of spiritual seekers, and so I wrote the book as—not a memoir but basically as a way of how I got from being a “none” to being a Jesus follower and all of the different things this had to combat, to address, along that way. I mean, this is the book that I wish I had when I was 23, 24, and 9/11 just hit. Again, I benefited so much from people going down a path before me and then reporting it back to me that I’m hoping this book will do the same for someone else.

I am sure that it will, and I hope those who are listening or watching will take a look at Brian’s book, Trading Gods. It’s an excellent book if you’re a seeker or skeptic or a Christian who wants to build more confidence in your faith. I’m also curious at this time of your conversion, were you married at that time? Or not? And I’m curious how your family embraced this newfound faith? Actually, probably they watched you over that two-year period, but I wondered how your family and/or friends accepted you, especially in a very secularized culture.

Yeah. It’s an interesting question, because again, for a secular community like Seattle, where no one really wants to talk about religion that much, my conversion meant a lot to a few people and didn’t mean a lot to most people. It was, “Oh, he’s into that now. Interesting. Okay. It’s a hobby or something on the side,” not knowing just how radically it changed my life. Again, this is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book, too, is for my friends and family. Because I wanted them to be able to read something that gave a really good, comprehensive case for the God hypothesis, that why I believe what I believe is not just a whim, but it has a really, really strong foundation. And this is how I’m going about addressing these big questions of life. And I know you’re probably—my friends and family that don’t believe. I know they probably don’t have great answers to these. Or they’re questioning it themselves, but maybe they also don’t want to have a conversation about it, but maybe they’ll read the book. Maybe they’ll approach these at their own pace.

And so after teaching a class at church, I realized that the book was the next thing that I had to do, and I spent the next couple of years putting that all together.

It really is a worthwhile read. Speaking of life change, how would you describe your life and how it has really changed since you embraced God’s existence and Christ as being King of the universe, essentially?

Yeah. I think before I was a Christian I was just easily persuaded that truth was relative, that science held all the answers, and all religions led to God. I mean, I thought that view was maybe the most loving interpretation of reality. But I think it was a perspective full of contradictions, too. So it was like a spineless tolerance instead of actual truth and real love. And I realized that I wanted to pursue actual truths and real love, so when I reflect on that time in my life, I feel like I was emotionally immature. I wanted all religions to be true so I wouldn’t have to do all the hard work to figure out which one I wanted, as well as to have something that might limit my freedoms or that might isolate me from my friends and family. I also think that, before becoming a Christian, I was maybe more of a shadow of a real man. An apparition that was generally apathetic to almost everything in life. Everything in life that mattered. With the exception of one thing, and that was myself. I mean I had no conception of whether there was a cause worth fighting for. Maybe a naive little boy that just wanted to do things my way, and my way almost had nothing to do with truth, love, or beauty or virtue.

Now that I’m a Jesus follower, I want to pursue those things. I want to pursue truth, beauty, and virtue. I acknowledge I’m still a wretched sinner, completely dependent on the love, grace, and mercy of a Savior, but now I’m on this path that I’m hoping will result in fruit being born somewhere, that these investments in my time and energy are exactly what the Holy Spirit wants me to be doing because they will help somebody, just like somebody helped me. People I didn’t even meet helped me so much. That’s what I’m feeling called to do.

What a beautiful story, Brian! So articulate and so forthcoming in the way that you talk about yourself and how you were and the things that you were searching for, the depths of your despair even, as a teenager, but how far you’ve come. But I also appreciate, I think, the diligence and the intentionality of your search. You were really looking for something, and you did due diligence, really, to search for the answers. And I hope that others will be inspired and challenged by your story.

If there are curious skeptics who are listening or watching this podcast, to your story, and are curious about God. Maybe they have had an event. It may not be a 9/11, but there may be other things in their lives that have sobered them to the possibility of even asking questions. Is there something more? Is there someone more? Is there something different than I know? What would you say to someone like that who might be listening in?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I love the name of the podcast. My first musical experience with listening to the other side of the record. Well, I guess for me it was a tape, but listening to the other side of the tape happening back in 1992. I was just a teenage punk in Seattle when my city exploded with what became known as grunge music. And I bought the tape, the single for Pearl Jam’s Jeremy. And I really connected with that song. It’s a dark song about teenage angst and school violence, but on the other side of Jeremy is this beautiful song called Yellow Ledbetter, and it is such a beautiful song. Even though the lyrics are almost entirely inaudible. But when I was at a Pearl Jam concert about eight years ago and they were going out for their encore, no one wanted to hear Jeremy. They all wanted to hear Yellow Ledbetter. And it brought the audience together, brought the audience and the band together in such a beautiful and dare I say transcendent kind of way, and so my point here is, flip the side of something dark, can be something beautiful.

But let me try and address this in a more practical way. I think my initial approach with a nonbeliever is to really try and build some trust. Be a good friend. Be sincere with my questions and really be sincere with my curiosity. And hopefully through that interchange, we can come to some area of commonality. An area that tends not to be all that controversial is just to say that the pursuit of truth is a noble and important endeavor, and hopefully that’s a good starting point. Another method to find common ground is maybe just to express that we all have faith beliefs. I talked about the scientific materialist, that there’s a lot of faith behind their belief, and it may not be so hard to point that out, but that can work with people of other religions, with agnostics, too. We’re all in this place where we do not have absolute knowledge with indisputable evidence. And so I think when it comes to things that really matter in life that is especially the case. Things like first and last things. We do not know. Things like how we should live. There’s a lot of faith built into those kinds of dilemmas.

But is there really a more important and fundamental question than is there a god? I mean, that was the question for me, was who was Jesus. I think the answer to that question just has ramifications for every other question in life, so ideally I want to move the skeptic from a state of complacency to a state of curiosity. I want them to wonder what’s on the other side of that record. So in the book, I try to give my best case for the rationality of that by looking at all of the evidence and kind of coming to my conclusions. And then somehow pointing all of these things to the Jesus story, as this curious resolution to all of these big questions. I mean, certainly the Jesus story should raise their suspicions that maybe there is something more to this, and so maybe a worldview of science only or materialist only or secular only just sort of has some serious gaps that maybe you can get them to be a little more curious, and maybe that this Jesus story is actually more credible. They already know it’s more beautiful and more hopeful, but is it more credible? And I think we can get them in that direction.

I’m actually very impressed that, since you live in a secular part of the United States, the northwest US and Seattle, that you actually were given a gift, like you say, of a church next to the University of Washington that appreciated the mind that weren’t threatened by the big questions, that provided deep resources, whether it be a library or classes or teachers, that they guided you in a way that you needed to find that credibility. I think so many seekers are looking, but they can’t seem to find those kind of rich resources, so again, I’ll point people back to your book, as well as perhaps to the Bible, or just keep looking.

There are so many wonderful thinkers who are dealing philosophically, scientifically, historically, archaeologically with these kinds of issues.

But I also appreciate your humility in our understanding of our own limitations. Not only science is limited, but we in our humanity are limited. That we’re all seeking for the best explanation of reality. So I appreciate that about you.

Brian, if you were to address believers directly in terms of their role and their influence with nonbelievers or those who are, perhaps, skeptical or “nones” who don’t seem to care, even, perhaps, what would you advise Christians to do or to think or to be?

Yeah. I think, to the Christian… Well, let me just say, a few times a year, I try to ask myself this question: What breaks my heart? And then to lean into that heartbreak, thinking about how I can help or how can I be used by the Holy Spirit. I think a person’s answer to that question is going to change during different seasons of their life, but one thing that breaks my heart right now is that there are so many nominal Christians out there. I mean, the polling data seems to suggest that the average Christian in the pews has a rather flimsy understanding of what they believe and why they believe it and that we’ve collectively been sort of drifting away from those core orthodox beliefs, probably swayed by the whims of the culture or the arguments of the New Atheists. So it’s no wonder that many people tend to fall away from their faith when they enter the secular university or enter the secular job force or when they simply just befriend an intelligent skeptic or an atheistic professor.

I think there are just far too many Christians out there whose faith is like a house built on sand. Or maybe to use a better reference would be Jesus’s parable of the sower, in which some people hear the word, and they believe, but because they have shallow roots, as soon as they’re tested, they fall away from their faith, and honestly, that’s what really breaks my heart right now. Because it just seems like those who fall away so quickly upon fairly shallow challenges… It’s like they don’t know how well Christianity addresses the tough questions. They’ve been raised on a diet of milk, but even as adults, they’re still drinking milk, and what they need is meat, and Christianity just has this super long and distinguished tradition of pursuing and defending the truth, and it is meat. It’s beautiful. It’s encouraging. And in my thinking, if they only knew the strength of their foundation and faith, they’d be better equipped to talk to their skeptical friends, to talk to the “nones” out there. If more Christians were encouraged by this intellectual history of our faith and the soundness of the arguments and our claims as Christians, then having these discussions with nonbelievers can just feel so much more natural. It can be less intimidating. We have to do this, of course, with gentleness and respect, but that would be my encouragement to the Christian out there, is get familiar with some of this stuff, because once you’re armed with that, you don’t need to use it as a weapon. You use it as an encouragement, and that way, you can bring up these types of topics with those skeptics out there.

That’s wonderful. I really appreciate that.

Thank you, Brian, for telling your story. Your wisdom, your advice, it’s all been so amazing. Truly. To see the change in your life and just the dedicated purpose and meaningful direction that you’ve taken. It’s obvious that you see your life as something bigger than yourself. So thank you for coming on board today.

Thanks, Jana. I really appreciate it.

Great.

Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Brian’s story.  You can find out more about his book Trading Gods: A Rationale for Faith and his website in the episode notes.

For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]

If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.