Former atheist Jon Noyes was driven to fully live out his life-long atheism, but his pursuit was challenged when he began to consider which worldview best fit with reality.   Recommended Resources A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions – Greg Koukl The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between – Greg Koukl The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus – Gary Habermas and Michael Licona   CSLI Events & Resources How to Pray for Others who are Suffering with Nancy Guthrie January 21, 2022 at 8:00 pm Eastern Registration Link   C.S. Lewis Institute Spiritual Checkup please go to www.cslewisinstitute.org/asc  Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. Often, those who are resolute in their own worldview don’t seem to change, but sometimes they do, and we are generally curious as to how that happens.  Today, we’ll be listening to Jon Noyes’ surprising journey from atheism to Christianity. As an atheist, Jon’s list for reasons for disbelief in God and Christianity was long. In my research survey, he listed twelve distinct reasons supporting his once-held atheism. They range from lack of intellectual evidence and rationality to negative experience with Christian hypocrisy, from social and moral disdain to a personal distaste for religious people and institutions. There was hardly an unchecked box on the survey. He even took extra time to type in his strongly atheistic view that Christians were deluded and superstitious people who needed to change their false presuppositions and false beliefs. For him, atheism was objective, known through science, logic, and experience. There was no doubt that God did not exist. He enjoyed the benefits of disbelief, not only intellectually but in social relationships it gave and the moral freedom it granted. He was quite happy as an atheist.  Jon was a convinced atheist with no intention towards changing. Yet today Jon’s passion is helping others discover the truth of Christianity, having completed an advanced degree in the study of worldview, and has worked full time in Christian ministry. It’s clear that a dramatic transformation has taken place. I hope you join in to hear his whole story, not only what informed his atheism but what breached those stalwart walls and prompted him to reconsider what he once thought so ignorant. What would cause someone so resolute to change his view about God? To move from an anti-theist, atheist position to becoming a passionate follower of Jesus Christ? I can’t wait to hear, and I hope you’ll come along.  Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jon. It’s great to have you on the podcast today.  Thank you so much, Jana, it’s great to be with you. I love the work that you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a few weeks now. Fantastic! Fantastic! As we’re getting started, Jon, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, so we’ll know who’s telling this story?  Sure. So my story is probably typical, average. I grew up in a town south of Boston, Massachusetts, called Plymouth. The home of the pilgrims. To a pretty normal family. I grew up playing soccer and enjoying life in a suburb of Boston, and I just had a great childhood. I went to Plymouth North High School. When I graduated there, I moved to Washington, DC, and went to study criminal justice at American University. And I loved DC and living in our nation’s capital for, well the four years of college, but then after that, I got my first job, different than what I thought I was going to be doing. I ended up actually being a paralegal at a fairly prestigious law firm in DC, working on a lot of appellate work in front of the Supreme Court and having just a lot of fun in Washington, DC, and then I felt a pull to pull me out to California, so about 15 years ago now, I hopped on a plane and moved to sunny southern California, where I’ve been ever since, and I absolutely love where I live. I live in Newbury Park, California. It’s maybe about 45 miles north of Los Angeles and 8 miles from the coast, and this valley that I live in, it’s just the best place to raise a family. And I have a beautiful wife. Her name is Riana, and she’s my rock. I love her with all my heart. And then I have four amazing little girls, so I have Eva, who’s ten. Phoebe, who’s almost nine. I’ve got Joelle, who’s seven, and then I have little Annette, who is four. She just turned four last month. So, as with everybody right now, I’m just figuring out life and how to raise a family and lead during this time of uncertainty. Yeah. This is definitely a time of uncertainty. But yeah. Thank you for giving us a little introduction to who you are. I can tell, even though you’ve been in California for a while, you certainly haven’t lost that Massachusetts accent. I can hear that popping through from time to time.  As I get more comfortable—so when I get passionate, and by passionate, I mean animated, it comes out. And then also as I get more comfortable, the accent really starts coming out. So if you don’t understand what I’m saying, I’m really, really sorry. Oh, no! I think we can—you have a really great voice, too, so I think we can all understand what you’re saying.  So, Jon, you said you grew up in Massachusetts. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about the religious culture there. Was there much of one? And what did that look like?  Yeah. That’s a great question. I have a few friends back East who would claim to be religious, and when I say religious, I mean Catholic mostly, but it’s a cultural Catholicism. When I say that, I mean they don’t really go to Mass. They don’t worship God. It’s more of, you know, “My family is Catholic, so I’m Catholic.” And that probably describes maybe a third of my friends growing up. And then the other two thirds, I would say, are those which now we consider the “nones,” right? They have no religious affiliation whatsoever. My family in particular, we have Catholic roots going back three or four generations, but my family, we never practiced anything, really. And what that did is, in the cultural climate, it kind of allowed—well, a good thing is it allowed me to explore worldviews. It allowed me to explore my own convictions. However, the bad part of that is I wasn’t guided at all, and I became an atheist. By the time I was in high school, I was an atheist, and nobody ever really pushed back on my atheism. It was just normal. And that, I think, is indicative of the culture in the Northeast. I’m not saying that there aren’t any Christians there. There certainly are some really, really great churches that are doing awesome things, just none really where I grew up. One of the most interesting things, actually. In Plymouth, I was just back East maybe two months ago and walking around the hometown where I grew up and kind of reminiscing, and we have a lot of obviously old architecture in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the first church that was ever built sits up on top of this hill. It still stands today. I think it was built in the late 1600s, and it’s still there. And it was a vibrant church for 150 years or whatnot, but now it’s actually a Universal Unitarian Church. And that is actually kind of the story, I feel like, of the Northeast. It started out with deep roots in the Christian faith, but then, over time, it kind of just gave way to a relativism and an inclusivism, and so now I would say most people, that I know at least, in the Northeast, in my circle of friends, my influences, are not religious really at all. It was interesting growing up. Actually, my earliest memory of church—so, for some strange reason—and we never went to church, ever. We never talked about God in my family. I mean I literally have no recollection of the topic of God or Jesus. I actually had very little understanding of who God was, accurately at least, or who Jesus is, until I became a Christian. But my earliest recollection of religion growing up is actually, for some strange reason, my parents wanted me to get my first communion in the Catholic Church. Again, it’s a cultural thing. This is what you do. So they had me go to Sunday school, CCD, and I ended up getting kicked out of CCD. I was a challenging child, so my earliest memory is the Catholic priest of the church right down the street from my house kind of walking me out by the collar of my neck because I had done something. I don’t know what, but I definitely deserved this, I’m sure, and I remember my mom pulling around the church cul-de-sac in her blue Ford station wagon, the priest opening up the door, gently guiding me inside the car. And it was the summer, so I remember the window open, passenger side window, and him leaning in and just saying to my mom, “I’d appreciate it if you’d just never bring your son back here again.” Oh, my!  And it sticks in my mind, you know? I’m not going to relate that or put much weight on that led me to becoming an atheist or anything like that. It’s just an interesting commentary that that’s my earliest memory of really anything religious in my life, anything significant at least. So it was—I mean I’m sure I deserved it. I’ve always been a questioner. I’ve asked questions ad nauseam of just about anything, but—part of it was seeking. Part of it was just trying to stump people, even when I was—how old are you with a first communion? Maybe thirteen or something. So not even that old. But that’s my earliest memory. And it’s interesting, and why I bring it up is because it’s the cultural component. That we do this simply because this is what we do. There’s no real meaning behind it. So my parents were willing to allow me to become catechized, willing to expose me to Catholic doctrine and teaching, but there was no meaning behind it at all. And that, for a kid, I think, produces a lot of confusion. Especially if you really do start leaning into these things and you realize that there’s significance to what we believe. It matters. Ideas have consequences. So in one instance you’re getting taught one thing at home. My mom would always say, “You do you. I’ll do me,” or whenever I was trouble or something like that, it was all relativism. But yet on the weekends they had no problem sending me to Catholic training, ultimately, where—well, I guess relativism has seeped in there, too, but I remember them trying to argue with me against relativism at the time at least. I mean, this is now, oh, my gosh! Like thirty years. I bet that would cause a bit of confusion if you really tried to think about it with some clarity. But you said also in there that you had the tendency to question and also to challenge. As you were growing up, and I’m sure you were just fine in leaving catechism and CCD behind when you got kicked out, that it was just something you didn’t have to do, but as you were growing up and through those—you said your teenage years. You said around thirteen, fourteen. Did you have an opportunity to challenge anyone, any Christian or anyone with that kind of a worldview, a religious worldview, when you were pushing away from it? Did you have anyone in your world who represented what you would consider to be a Christian?  Yeah. That’s a great question. I’d say through high school, no. I really didn’t know. My best friend growing up, to this day, he considers himself Catholic. I don’t know when the last time he’s been to Mass was. I don’t think he is truly sold out on the worldview. He certainly believes God exists. I think he’d probably say a few meaningful things about who Jesus is, but I never pressed into anybody, and when I did, they never had answers for me. And then up through college is really where I started leaning into my atheism. And when I say that is I tried to live my atheism out consistently. And so whenever anybody brought something up from a distinctly religious perspective, whether that be Christianity, Islam, Buddhist, whatever it might be. I liked to press into them and lead them in a conversation, trying to see if they could defend the things that they say are true. And I had a lot of fun doing it, to be honest with you. But during specifically the high school years or my young adulthood, early years I should say, no. I didn’t really have anybody—nobody took their faith seriously in my life. I guess it’s just a symptom of where I grew up. Until I became a Christian, honestly… actually, until I met my wife, I should say. Until I met my wife here in California, I hadn’t ever really met a Christian who was walking the walk. I’d met people who were talking the talk but then very quickly as I—I’d love to take them out for a cup of coffee. Or my favorite place was going to the bar and buying them a beer and talking about religious things. And I would press into them pretty hard. And that, I think, is actually one of the—there’s two sad components to that in my mind. One is the people who claimed to be Christians. And some of them, I think, were Christians. I mean, I’m not saying that they weren’t. But they didn’t really have a rational justification for why they believed what they believed. And when I would press them, they’d say, “I believe this because the Bible says so and so.” And at the time, I’d say, “I don’t care what the Bible says. Why should I trust the Bible?” And that’s where the conversation started. They also never really tried to share the Gospel with me at all. Again, I didn’t hear the Gospel until I was in my mid-twenties and after I had been kind of put on this journey from atheism to Christianity. And that’s something I think is just really important and should be fundamental in our lives. We should know what the Gospel is. And we should be willing to share that. And I always, in hindsight, when I think back on my story, that nobody ever shared the Gospel with me is concerning. I’m curious. You made the comment that you tried to live your atheism consistently. You challenged others, perhaps at the college level, to defend what they believed to be true. Did you look deeply at your own atheism in terms of its own implications for your life, for reality?  Yeah. I mean absolutely. So in college, I studied criminal justice, which, in its very nature, lots of moral conversations come up. When you’re talking about theories of justice, systems of justice, the judicial system, where laws come from. And Constitutional Law is one of the classes I took in undergrad, and by default, these conversations that we were having in class were moral from the get-go, so when I had friends in class… There was one gentleman I remember. His name was Chris, and he was from Connecticut, and him and I were, I guess, the loud ones in the class. We liked to participate in conversations and discussions, and he was Christian. And he would bring up the idea that there’s an objective morality, for example, to base our laws in. Certain things are wrong, not because we say they’re wrong but because they’re wrong in and of themselves, objectively wrong. And I would press back at him on that and then say, “Well, no. No, no. It’s obvious we came up with these laws. I mean this is the law of the land. The Constitution was written by men.” And we’d go back and forth. So there was great dialogue in that, and as I got older and digging into these classes, I really started to lean into my atheism, meaning I tried to live consistently with my worldview, and I realized that, as I pressed into the world around me… I guess I realized a few things. First is there’s an objective nature to reality. Meaning we don’t construct our own reality out there. The world isn’t how we want it to be. And I tried to I guess justify that according to my atheism. If atheism is true, ultimately might makes right, and I’m a pretty big guy. I’m 6’3″, 250 pounds. I probably wasn’t that heavy in college. But I was still big. And I was bigger than a lot of kids. So I should just be able to take what I want, do what I want. And I started trying to really lean into that and live that out, and it led to some really dark places really quickly. Greg Koukl, when he talks about this—he’s my boss at Stand to Reason now. And he calls them bumps in the reality, and this would be the bump of morality. The bump of ouch. And when I leaned into my atheism, I was realizing that, no, there are certain right and wrongs out there, and they’re independent of my feelings towards them personally, which led me to have to come to the conclusion that there’s an objective moral depth, moral law to the way things are. And that’s not the only place where I bumped into reality. It’s throughout my whole story. I remember, in California, because of the weather out here, it’s just so beautiful. I’d stay out at night, and I’d just look up into the sky, and an atheist, I’m thinking, like, you know… But I remember distinctly one night, in my back yard. I was living in Hollywood, and I remember reclining with a bunch of friends. We’re in lawn chairs in the back and just relaxing. A beautiful California night. Staring up into the sky and wondering, “Why is it all here?” and then how, “How is it here?” All the beautiful things that I was seeing in that sky and even the creation, the world around me, how’d it get here? And that’s another bump into reality, the bump of stuff, you know? And I think maybe a lot of your listeners are familiar with the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, and I didn’t know that this was what I was thinking about at the time, but I was thinking, “Well, nothing comes from nothing, so that means everything had to come from something. And what is that something? I see the world around me. It’s not a mental construct. We’re not these brains in vats. There’s a physical reality out there that exists. Where’d it come from?” Because it couldn’t just pop into existence. That’s anti scientific. So it had to come from somewhere, and as I dug into that, I started realizing the best explanation for the physical nature, the physical world around us, was an uncreated Creator ultimately. An unembodied mind, a creative mind that is immensely powerful and that had creative depth, that wanted this to come. I didn’t know how else to justify that. And again, my atheism—I had no category for that. So on two fronts now, atheism, my atheism, which I was sticking to hard, was failing me. It wasn’t able to explain the world around me, reality, the way things really are. And then I remember also… I call it the bump of me. There’s a clear aspect to us that’s nonphysical. In hindsight, me and you, Jana, we’d call it our soul, but as an atheist, I had no category for the existence of my mind, for example. I remember really thinking about what love is and, as an atheist, really, “Well, what is love?” And I was trying to live out my atheism. And I had no place for love in my worldview. Because I would’ve said it’s not even a feeling. I would’ve said it’s a reaction that’s happening chemically in your brain that’s making certain… Neurons are firing to make you feel a certain way towards something, but that’s clearly not true, because, for example, I love my Mom no matter how I think about her at the moment. Whether I’m mad at her or sad or whatever. I clearly love her, so there’s something that’s happening in me that’s controlled by me, not a product of a naturalistic process in my brain. And then also introspection. How can I be introspective? How can I even think the thoughts that I’m thinking and process stuff? Why am I even struggling with these existential issues as I press into my atheism? Because according to atheism I shouldn’t be doing that. There’s no place for that in my worldview. And now, kind of getting back to your question about talking to people about this stuff. It wasn’t until I met my wife, really, in southern California. I actually met Riana my very first night in California. I was literally right off the plane. I was at a party, and she walked in. And from the very moment I met her, she just enamored me. I was just… oh my gosh! Like, “Who is this girl?”  And we got to know each other, and we started dating. I didn’t know she was a Christian for a while, and then she did something crazy. She asked me to go to church with her. And I’ve done crazier things, Jana, for the affections of a woman than go to church on Sunday with her. So I said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll go to this weird place with you,” and it was. It was strange. It was really weird. But it was really good, too. And it wasn’t until then that I actually met people who took their worldview seriously. Up until then I never got answers from people. Ever. And then finally now, and there’s a group of men there that I’m still close with. I haven’t been to that church now in about ten years. I’ve just moved on. But I’m still really close with the pastor and a couple of the men that took me under their wing, even as an atheist, and were willing to put up with my… I guess I should say put up with. They were willing to humor my questions, even though they didn’t necessarily have the answers. And they were willing to give of themselves, give their time and their patience and really walk with me and struggle through certain things with me. Kind of a side note is we started going to this church, and my wife… She’s always been Christian. She would say that she has always… she was raised to believe in God. And the Christian God. And even though she was maybe backslidden a little bit, she wasn’t living it out, she would say that she had a strong faith. And she wanted to get involved in the church, and she wanted to become a member of this church, so I went to the membership classes with her. Trying to get more ammo against the Christian. And part of the membership process at this church was to meet with the pastor and his wife, and we met with them together, and I went into this meeting. I’m looking back on it now. I was so conceited and arrogant is probably the right word. I went in there with notes. I mean, I had a stack… I’m putting my fingers out. It’s probably about an inch thick of carbon dating, questions on evolution, proving that the Bible isn’t what it claims to be. All these errors in the Bible. I had in my mind that I was going to go into this meeting, and I was going to de-convert this pastor, and that would’ve been a notch on my belt, you know? Because I’ve never talked to a Christian to this point that’s been able to defend their worldview to my liking, so how cool would it be if I de-converted a pastor? And we’re sitting there, and I asked all my questions, and it was really great. Pastor Dave is Dave Polus, so patient, and he answered a lot of my questions to my satisfaction. To a lot of them, he said, “I don’t know. That’s a really great question. I never thought about it.” And the best thing is just he was just honest and real. He wasn’t trying to blow smoke at me or convince me, really, of anything. He was there to listen to me, and he answered my questions to the best of his ability. And at the end of the meeting, they hugged my wife, Pastor Dave and his wife, Amy. They hugged Riana, and they said, “We’d love to have you as a member.” Because my wife was Christian, clearly. And then Dave takes my hand in his, and he shakes it, and he says, “You know what, Jon? We have enough members now. Thanks for coming in.” Because if he had offered me membership, I would’ve been like, “This is exactly what I think that this is. This is all a crock. You just want my butt in your seat, and you want my bucks in your coffer, and that’s all you care about, exactly what I thought of the church.” And he didn’t. He said, “You know what? Keep coming around, but you can’t be a member here,” and I really respected that. And then the best part of this is that he, as he’s shaking my hand, he pulled a book off of the bookshelf, an apologetics book, and I’d never heard of the word apologetics in my entire life, and he gave it to me, and he said, “You know what? Some of the answers that you’re looking for, some of the answers to the questions that you’ve been asking that I couldn’t answer, I think they might be in this book.” And I took the book home and I read it probably a dozen times, and for the first time, I was getting intellectual answers, respectable answers to the deep questions that I had, and now you combine that with the soul searching I’ve been doing. I’ve been realizing that, as I was trying to live my atheism out in reality, I kept bumping into reality in those areas, and then you combined this—okay, now there’s intellectual answers out there, and that led me to another book and then another book and then another book. And then also right at that same time—God is just so good. Right at that same time, my future in-laws, they gave me my first Bible. They gave me a New Believer’s Bible. It’s the NLT, the New Living Translation. It’s, I think, edited by Greg Laurie, and it has cool commentary. Very simple. You know, “Who is Jesus?” “Who is Satan?” “Who is God?” “What’s the Trinity?” And these cornerstones of faith is what they call it in there. And I read that cover to cover over the span of three months. So I was being ministered to through just the nature of reality, trying to press into my worldview, seeing that the world is a certain way and my worldview wasn’t able to explain that. I was being ministered to by these Christian apologists who wrote phenomenal books that just put their ideas out there for people like me to struggle and wrestle with. And then I was also being ministered to by the word of God, and then that’s really—so my mind and my body were being ministered to, reality and the intellect, and now my soul was being ministered to through the word of God, and it was in that direct encounter really with the word of God, as I sat on my morning and afternoon train to and from work and read Genesis to Revelation, when I put the Bible down after interacting with it, struggling and wrestling with it, I had to draw the conclusion that God is the Christian God, and more specifically, Jesus is who He claimed to be. And that was a turning place for me. It led me into a deep study of the resurrection and trying to see if my naturalism, if my atheism could explain the facts surrounding the resurrection. And after that study, and I remember sitting on my couch, and I had the… This is when I relented. I was sitting on my couch, struggling with—you have all this evidence centered around specifically the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. There’s these core pieces. Habermas now says maybe there’s 18 agreed-upon facts centered around the resurrection of Jesus. And when I say that, it means there were 18 pieces of history, events in history that are believed to have happened regardless of our worldview, so Christians believe that these things happened, Muslims believe these things happened, atheists believe these things happened. One would be an empty tomb, which is a more recent one. Or Jesus’s crucifixion. He died on the cross. That’s what happened. We generally believe that Jesus actually died on the cross. His disciples had what they experienced or described as an experience with the risen Jesus. He was dead. He was buried. And then the disciples said they interacted with Him again alive. But these things, people across the worldview spectrum believe happened, so these are pieces of evidence for the resurrection. Now I have to put those—this is the way I thought, at least, at the time. “I have to take these pieces of evidence, these building blocks, and I need to come up with a hypothesis that explains them cohesively and together, not independent of one another.” And I remember sitting on this couch, and thought that went through my mind, Jana, was—this is really what I thought. And this is the turning point for me. “Maybe aliens came down and did something crazy futuristic to the body of Jesus, so that he got brought back to life.” And then I remember thinking, “If I’m willing to posit aliens and not God, I have a serious intellectual problem going on.” And right then and there, I said, “I’m cooked,” and then, as I’m saying this, the hairs are standing up on my arms because it was such a turning time, a turning place in my life. Everything changed for me. Everything. My focus of life and how I was living shifting dramatically. And I haven’t looked back since. I’ve just caught fire. And it’s just so cool even now, just talking about that it. That was a really long answer to your very short question. No, no. You know, what strikes me as you’re telling your story is that you—what I really appreciate really is that you were an intellectually driven atheist, honest about your worldview, pursuing whether or not it was true as related to the reality and the evidence that you were finding. You continued pursuing in light of the fact that you had some push back, some bumps in reality, but you were still trying to justify your atheism, but you were becoming open enough to consider another perspective. I think that that openness and your intellectual honesty is to be really praised, because I think we live in a time and a place where we have a tendency to just hold onto our worldview at any cost, no matter what other viewpoints may say or even what reality might say. We become so insular in our own perspectives that we’re not willing to even consider another point of view. It sounds like you went on a journey but you were willing to consider the evidence as it came. And I think that’s huge.  And that’s true even today, right? I don’t believe what I believe because it makes me feel good or because it’s—it certainly hasn’t made me any more money. I mean I was making really good money. I was having a ball, so it’s not like I’m having a better life now than I’m a Christian. I don’t believe for those reasons. It didn’t make me popular or gain me any type of fame or anything like this. I believe what I believe because it’s true. And I’ve always felt that way. And this is one of the pieces… I teach a class called Discipleship at a local small Christian high school, and as I’m discipling these boys, these seniors… Just yesterday, I was telling them our main goal in life is the pursuit of truth. We don’t ever want to believe anything that’s not true. And I was like that as an atheist, and I’m like that as a Christian. And my mind is still open. I would love to talk to anybody. If you think Christianity is false, then give me the case as to why it’s false and why your explanation of reality, your reasons to believe the world is a certain way, something that explains the world around us is better. If you want to explain that to me and prove that to me, I’m open to it. Because certainly if Christianity isn’t true, I don’t want to believe it. If Jesus hasn’t been raised from the dead… I mean this is scripture, right? So Paul says if Jesus hasn’t been raised from the dead, then we’re to be pitied above all men. Right.  Not only that, but we’re still dead in our sins. And I might as well… If Christianity isn’t true, I might as well go back to my atheistic living, my hedonism, pursuit of my own pleasures, than living this life I live now. So I believe what I believe because it’s true. And that’s what I’ve always felt. Truth has been paramount to me my entire life. Nobody likes being lied to. Nobody likes getting the wool pulled over their eyes. Why would that be any different with our worldview? We should apply that to our worldviews. And so we should all be digging into… Whoever your listening audience is, you should be digging into your worldview. You should be pressing at it. Even the Christian. Don’t ever get complacent in what your worldview has to offer. Don’t ever just take it for granted. Dig into it. Test all things, holding fast to that which is true is what the Bible says. This isn’t a blind faith. It never has been for me. There’s too much riding on it. Right. No, absolutely. Now you obviously, again, went through quite a journey of looking at truth, looking at reality, reading books, reading the Bible, and you came to a place, particularly, I guess, after considering the resurrection, that it was true. You came to a belief or an intellectual assent in the truth and reality of the Christian worldview. But, as you and I know, there’s more to it than intellectual belief. And you mentioned earlier something about the Gospel, that Christians had never told you about the Gospel. And I’m wondering how the Gospel played—what it is, first of all. How did you come to learn it? Was it through reading the Bible? Because you said you read it cover to cover on your train ride. And so I’m wondering how you put the pieces together between your intellectual assent and giving your life to someone?  Yeah. So part of my pursuit of my atheism, one of the things that became very clear to me is that the world isn’t as it ought to be. One of the common experiences we all share, and when I say we all, I mean every person who’s ever lived on this planet shares the understanding that something is deeply wrong with the world. Whether it be a political issue, whether it be a family issue, an issue with friends or an issue with your job, the world around us screams out that it’s not as it ought to be. And if there’s a way that it’s not as it ought to be, that means there was a way that it ought to be. And that led me into just a pursuit of, “Okay, how ought it be?” and that’s really where we find the start of the Gospel. And this experience that we’re talking about today, this is why I think, ultimately why the Christian worldview is true. It’s because of the Gospel. The Gospel is simply the good news of what God has done through and in Jesus Christ. And it finds its beginning in a perfect creation. Everything was created perfect and right. God, at the end of His creation days, looked at it, and He stepped back, and He said, “It’s good.” He created man and woman, and He said they are very good. And everything was as it was. But then something went wrong. A problem got introduced to the reality of the world. And that is sin. Eve had an interaction with the serpent and believed the lies. Did God really say? You know? And that’s something that we all struggle with. We all want… ultimately, we want to be our own kind of god. When I was little, I used to say, “I’m the boss of my own self,” you know? And that’s how we want to live life, and that was what happened with Eve. “Did God really say you can’t eat of that tree? He’s just trying to hold you back,” is what he said to her. And then she believed him and took of the fruit and ate and gave to her husband, to Adam, and he ate, and from that moment on, sin has entered the world, causing everything to kind of go awry. And that’s why things ain’t as it ought to be. But the cool thing about the Gospel is, unlike any other worldview that’s out there, there’s a solution in the Gospel. There’s a solution in Christianity to the fundamental problem that we all experience. And that solution is that Jesus bore our sins on the cross. He bore the penalty. He turned aside God’s judgment, God’s wrath from us as payment for our sins. He took these things on, the brokenness of our lives, and then through that action, through the crucifixion, we’re restored. That shattered relationship with God. So you see, when we fell into sin, the main problem—yes, the world isn’t as it ought to be. Yes, we harm and sin against each other. But the main issue that we sin against God. We break that relationship that we once had, that was once had with Adam and Eve that was perfect. And that shattered relationship, Jesus, He rebuilds it in the context of the crucifixion and the resurrection, and then that’s now played out in the existence of the church. There’s a new life that we human beings, we find in Christ, and it’s granted out of the sheer grace of God. It’s not received by anything that we do. There’s nothing that we can do to earn God’s favor. It’s a free gift as we repent of our sins and turn to Jesus. We confess Him as the Lord, and then we bow to Him joyfully as we come to realize these things. So the Gospel is the good news, and it’s the good news of what God has done in Jesus, by taking the fundamental problem of reality, that there’s something wrong with the world, and completely restoring it. Now, it’s not completely restored yet. We’re still waiting for the consummation, the final product, but it’s also something—just because it’s not here completely doesn’t mean we can’t experience it now, and I’ve experienced that in my life. As I took a deep look at the person that I was and the person I was becoming to be as I was chasing the morality that was granted to me through my atheism and then realizing that I was the problem! The problem wasn’t out there, like I used to think. As I started digging into my worldview, I realized that I was the problem. And it’s a personal problem and it needs a personal solution, but the solution, while it’s personal, is completely outside of us. Because I don’t have the capability to fix the problem. And it has to come from something else. And that’s where it came from. That’s the good news, the Gospel. That’s the Gospel, is that the solution to my personal problem comes through the Person, the life, and the work of Jesus Christ. As He lived the perfect life, the life that you and I, Jana—we should be living that perfect life, but we can’t because of sin. As He went to the cross and died that perfect death, the perfect death that you and I, that we, everybody listening, that we deserved to die because of our sin, paying a price that you and I, we can’t afford. There’s not enough money in existence or ever been in existence to pay that debt. But Jesus paid it on that cross. And then it doesn’t stop there as He died and was buried in the tomb. The best part of the good news is three days later—He didn’t lie dead, and this is really what separates Jesus from any other God out there. He didn’t remain dead. He walked again. Three days later, He rose from the dead. He was raised by his Father, by God the Father, and in so doing we find the promise that all long for. Everlasting life, complete healing. Every tear will be dried. Every disease and infirmity will be cured. Because of that resurrection, we’re guaranteed a promise of eternal life with God the Father and his beautiful Son, empowered by the Holy Spirit to live perfect, sinless lives in glory. And that’s when Jesus comes back and ushers in the new creation, obviously. But that’s the Gospel, the good news. The solution to the universal problem that we all experience, that we all know that’s out there. And I don’t know any other worldview that offers a more robust, accurate solution. It’s awesome. Wow! It sounds like you’re convinced you found reality, and that reality is in the Person of Jesus.  That’s right. It’s amazing! Yeah. It’s incredible! Now you mentioned that everything changed in your life after you accepted this truth, not only for all of reality but for yourself personally. How did things change in your life? How are you experiencing this good news as applied to you personally? How is your atheistic life different from what you’re experiencing now?  That’s a really, really good question, Jana. Wow. So there’s practical things. From what I choose to do and what I choose not to do. And I want to be kind of clear here. Before I was a Christian, when I was an atheist, I used to think Christians were boring. I didn’t want to be a Christian because I thought I’d have to be ruled by this Sky Daddy who was basically just sitting up in the sky waiting for me to do something wrong so he could punish me. And that’s so far from the truth. So when I say that my behavior has changed very practically, like practical living changed. How I spend my money, how I spend my time certainly. The relationships I chose to keep and the relationships that I chose to get rid of because they were extremely unhealthy. Not that they weren’t fun. They were unhealthy. So things like that changed, but it wasn’t because I was scared of a God that was waiting to send bolts of lightning down to punish me. My desires, my wants, and my focus shifted out of a reverence and a respect, as opposed to a fear of punishment. So obviously, as an atheist, I didn’t try to live my life according to the standards of Jesus. I tried to live my life according to my own standards, completely subjective. And there is some overlap there. I think I tried my best to love other people to the best of my understanding and knowledge of what love is, but it wasn’t until I became a Christian that I understand that we’re told, all people, we’re told to love God and love people. That’s the great commandment. So as I became a Christian, I tried to align my life very practically into how Jesus has told me to live my life. Certain behaviors had to stop. I used to drink a lot. I used to love to party and go out and have “fun.” That was my life. That had to stop clearly, and it’s not because… Again, it’s not this… I’m fearful of people listening who maybe don’t share my worldview or our worldview, Jana, thinking what I used to think, that this is your typical Christian who isn’t doing stuff because he’s fearful of punishment. I live and stand firm in the grace of God. There’s nothing that can separate you—if you’re a Christian, there is nothing that can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. There is now no condemnation in Jesus. That’s what the Bible tells us. So I don’t refrain from my sinful activity, and I don’t refrain from going out and drinking and having extramarital affairs because I’m worried about God’s judgment or punishment on me. I’m refraining from those things because I now want to honor God in all that I do, whether I eat, sleep, or drink, do all unto the glory of God, is what the Bible tells us. And that’s where my focus has shifted. And that’s where the dramatic shift comes in. I’m no longer the master of my own ship. I have a new Master, and He’s a good Master. And I know that He wants not only the best for my life… He not only wants me to have the best life now, but he also wants me to have the best life for ever and ever and ever. So my focus completely shifted off of pursuing my own desires to pursuing the desires of the One who created me, my Heavenly Father. I now get to serve God with every aspect of my being. And no comparison on a naturalistic perspective. That’s an incredibly transformed perspective. Loves and living. That’s amazing. Jon, as we’re coming to a close, I know that there are probably some skeptics out there. Perhaps they’re curious enough, as you were, to explore the evidence and to go where the evidence leads, and I wondered if you could speak or give advice to someone who perhaps is where you once were as an atheist.  Yeah. Absolutely. Press in to your worldview. Don’t take the common answers at face value. When somebody teaches you something or you hear something… In hindsight, Jana, when I’m thinking about my atheism, when I was an atheist, I carried with me all the atheistic slogans. I used what I would call the nail in God’s coffin, my argument from the problem of evil. I had a surface level understanding of the problem of evil, but then when I started digging into it, I actually realized that it’s not just… I mean, it is a problem for the Christians. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a problem for everybody, though. It was my problem, too. And when you get outside of yourself, you’ve got to kind of step back and be intellectually honest and say, “This is a problem for the Christian. What about my solution? And which one’s better here?” So pursue your own worldview to where it leads, and then not only that, but then, if you’re listening to this and you’re an atheist, live it out. Try to live it out in a consistent fashion. I have a really, really wonderful friend, and she claims to be a relativist. And she says that. She says, “No, I believe relativism is true. We make our own system of rights and wrongs.” Well, I leaned into her about that and said, “Well, how is that even possible?” There’s one political candidate that she just can’t stand, and I said, “But you’re rejecting this person on moral values, but those are just that person’s moral values, and those are up to him to make.” And so there’s this check there, and she actually was honest enough to say, “You know what? You might be right.” Now, that’s not an argument to convince her of the Christian worldview. I’m just saying let’s be consistent with our worldviews. Which worldview is most consistent with reality? Lean into it. Don’t take people’s words for it. Those atheistic slogans I used to carry with me. When I started actually really trying to dig into them and see what the meaning was behind them and where they came from, when I started reading deeply about evolution and where we came from, the solutions didn’t satisfy. So in one aspect, the answers are in your own worldview. If your worldview can’t give you the answers to certain fundamental things of reality. If they can’t answer the fundamental questions of reality, meaning, purpose, origins, destiny, morality, then you might want to consider a different worldview. And how well does that worldview line up with reality? And so that’s what I’d say is dig in to your questions. And that goes for the Christian, too. Don’t ever be satisfied with answers that don’t satisfy. Right.  One of my recommendations is, when I read scripture, and this is for Christian and non-Christian alike. If you’re going to dig into the scriptures, and I highly recommend that you do, start with the Gospel of Mark. It’s really quick. You can read it in three or four days. But don’t just power read it. Christian and non-Christian alike, read it, and when you come to a place that’s like, “What? What are you talking about? What’s this mean?” Stop and actually think about it. What does this mean? “What’s this? Let’s wrestle with this.” Don’t ever take your worldview for granted. Lean into it. Press into it. I said, earlier on, that there’s consequences. Ideas have consequences, and the consequences are dire. There is nothing more important to think about than the nature of reality and whether or not God exists. Because how you answer that question is going to dictate how you live practically your entire life. And especially as you seek to live out your life. Does your worldview explain the things that you’re trying to live out? So dig in, press in. And that’s the other thing, is don’t ever give up. Don’t take unsatisfying answers as gospel truth. Dig in, press in, don’t ever give up. And enjoy the process. No, no. That’s great. That’s great. And finally, if you wanted to just turn and talk to the Christian in terms of how they can best engage with those who don’t believe, perhaps the way they live their lives. You know, in a nutshell, in a moment, can you give a word of advice to the Christian?  Two things. One is be confident because we have a very powerful ally on our side, and that is reality. Reality, and when I say reality I mean the way things really are, is on our side. So we don’t ever need to shy away from any topic. We don’t ever need to worry about pressing into any issue. It all falls back on the fact that we don’t want to believe things that are false. We just don’t. So if it’s false, I want to know, and we need to lead with that perspective. We need to dig into the hard issues and with the understanding that reality is actually on our side. I think atheists especially, or certain other worldviews, come across as intellectually robust or maybe they have more answers, and it’s just not true. Christianity, in recent times, I feel like has gotten away from an intellectual stance. We were seen as… Christians are oftentimes seen as anti intellectual, and there’s nothing further from the truth. And the second piece goes along on this, on the coattails of this, read. If you’re a Christian, I hear it all the time as a pastor and as an apologist, “I don’t like to read.” Well, you’ve got to learn to like to read. Read widely. Read people you disagree with often. Read ancient works. Read the church fathers. And most importantly, read your Bibles. Every day, read your Bibles. Start memorizing, committing scripture to your mind. And you’ll see amazing things happen, and you’ll see confidence come through. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Some of us, the worst fear that we have is that we’ll talk to somebody and they’ll know more than us. I think that’s fantastic because it’s an opportunity for me personally, if this happens to me, I get a free education. I get to sit and ask some strategic questions to somebody and say, “Wow! You obviously know way more about this than me.” This happened to me with a friend. He’s a marine biologist. He has his PhD from MIT. I mean this guy is brilliant. And I didn’t know that when I started the conversation. And very quickly, I realized, as we were talking about evolution. Very quickly, I realized I was so far out of my depth with this man. I was like, “He’s playing a different sport,” and he was schooling me. But I don’t have a problem with that. Because, again, I don’t want to believe something that’s false, so instead of trying to prove my point, I’d just sit there and ask him, “Well, tell me. Tell me all about this. Why am I wrong? And where am I wrong? Show me and prove it. What can I be reading so I know more?” And one of the ways that we can learn how to converse really, really well is reading Koukl’s book. I don’t know if you’ve read it, Jana. The tactics book? Yes.  It’s phenomenal. And the tactics in that book help give us the confidence that we need to go into a conversation. So the first thing is we have reality on our side. We don’t need to be scared of anything pressing in. Christian worldview best explains the way the world really is. Second thing is read and read often and widely. Read people you don’t believe or trust. Read people that you don’t agree with. Read old stuff. Especially church fathers and things like this. And read your Bibles. And then also read Koukl, I guess. Yes. Yes.  Yeah. And don’t be afraid to press in and don’t be afraid to not have the answers. Nobody has all the answers. That’s why we’re not God. Yeah. I think that’s really excellent advice, and if I could add one more Greg Koukl book to your advice to reading Tactics, I would say his recent book called The Story of Reality. If you’re a Christian or even not. That really, in a very accessible way, speaks to everything you’ve been talking about in terms of what we experience in our life and in the world and how the Christian worldview is the best explanation for reality.  Yeah. Having listened to you, I’m also equally… not only inspired by your story but also very challenged, as someone, as anyone should be listening to your story, to really not take whatever worldview you have for granted but actually be an open pursuer of truth and after truth. Whatever that is, because it will lead you where you need to go, and if you’re pursuing truth with an openness like you have, even if you began like you did, in an effort to disprove, you were still open enough to not shut down anything that conflicted with your own worldview. You were open to receive it and to question it and to challenge it. And it led to where you are. So I think we can all take, again, a kind of inspiration from all of that, from what we’ve heard today, and move from this conversation and be re-inspired towards seeking in a very intentional way what it is that we believe, why we believe it, and does it match with reality.  So thank you for bringing that to us today, Jon. I really, really appreciate it.  Well, thank you, Jana. And thank you again for all the work that you’re doing in putting this podcast out there. I’m such a supporter of what you’re trying to get done, and I think the work is incredible, so you’re leading the way. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you.  Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jon’s story today. You can find out more about where he works at the Stand to Reason ministry and the books that he recommended by Greg Koukl in the episode notes of this podcast. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe, rate, 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 seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.   

Like his father, Justo Amato was a resolved atheist well into middle age yet he unexpectedly came to believe in God. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. It’s often thought that religious people are religious just because they grew up that way. They don’t know any different, so they just believe, and it is thought that, once they discover the truth about religion, they will no longer believe.But what happens when someone grows up in an atheist household, resolutely identifies as an atheist until middle age, and then comes to believe that religion, particularly Christianity, is true? When someone has been an atheist for most of their lives, later into middle age, the odds of such a dramatic life shift from nonbelief to belief is often surprising, both to the person who’s making such a tremendous paradigm shift, as well as those around them. Those who are resolute in their own worldview often don’t seem to change, but sometimes they do, and we are generally curious as to how that happens. Today, we’ll be listening to Justo Amato’s long journey from atheism to Christianity. Following in the footsteps of his own atheistic father, it wasn’t until his late 50s that Justo reconsidered his own beliefs. I hope that you join in to hear his story, not only to understand why he was an atheist for so long, but what changed to allow him to reconsider what he once thought impossible to believe. This should be interesting. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Justo, it’s so great to have you. Thank you, Jana. It’s great to be here. Wonderful, wonderful! As we’re getting started, Justo, why don’t you give us an idea of a little bit about who you are? Okay. First thing, I was a little 4-month-old immigrant from Spain, so as a little boy, I don’t think I spoke any English until I went to kindergarten. Neither of my parents spoke English. My father spoke a little bit. My mother spoke none. And so my brother and I grew up speaking Spanish and English back and forth, always speaking English to one another but Spanish to my parents, and- Your family. That’s fascinating. Your family moved over from Spain, so you were immigrants to the US. What part of the US did you grow up in? Well, we settled in Bound Brook, New Jersey, and that’s where I lived up until I was 44. Okay, so you grew up in the Northeast. I did. Yes. So what was that like, growing up in the Northeast in terms of both your family and your community? Was there a sense of religiosity? Was there a community of faith? Catholicism, I believe, is probably fairly strong in the Northeast. What was your world like growing up? Was there God in it? No. My father was an atheist. As a young man in Spain, he saw the priests living very well while the community was struggling, and so he just became totally anti-church. So I never heard even the mention of God or Jesus, never saw a Bible. Most of my friends in my neighborhood were Catholic. One of my good friends was an altar boy. Why he was an altar boy, I’ll never figure out, because he was the wildest kid. But anyway, nobody that I knew really went to church on a regular basis. They went Christmas, New Year’s, for communion, but there were really no strong religious people in the neighborhood at all, and so I had no religious training, background, nothing, and it was that way until I was 28 years old. And then I went to the beach, and I met Annabel. During that period of time, those 28 years, that’s a long time to really consider who you are and your beliefs and what you believe and what you don’t believe. I guess you considered yourself an atheist during that time? And if so, what did you think of Christians and Christianity and belief in God. What was that to you? Was that just something people did on Christmas, Easter, but there wasn’t much more to it than that? How did you consider or what did you think of religion and religious beliefs during that time? To be honest with you, I didn’t give it much thought because my friends, they never brought up religion at all. I mean I had friends, six or seven friends. Nobody ever talked about religion. So I never even gave it much thought, Jana. And now I meet this young lady. She was 20. I was 28. And it turns out she teaches Sunday school, and she was at the beach with her friend, who was also a Sunday school teacher, so for the first time, I’m hearing about God and Jesus. I went to church with Annabel a few times before we got married, and I didn’t have a problem with going to church, but I didn’t really give myself to anything. I just went and was an observer. So you weren’t antagonistic towards religious faith. No. I was never antagonistic because when I asked Annabel to marry me, and she told me, “I’m going to bring up our children, if we’re lucky enough to have any, I’m going to bring them up as Christians.” I had no problem with that. But on the other hand — I had no problem with it, but I wasn’t ready to accept Jesus, either. Right. So you, as a good husband and father, went through the motions of church going in order to do something with your family, I guess? Is that correct? Right. Yeah. Initially, I wouldn’t go. Annabel would take the children, and then Christopher, when he was five years old, said to me, “Dad, how come you don’t go to church with us?” And I didn’t have a good answer, so I said, “Well, okay, fine. I’ll start going with you.” And I started to go with her. And that’s when I met the associate minister at this church that we were going to, and he was such a fine man. So I’m curious. As someone who had never gone to church, all of your life had really very little exposure to it, what were your first thoughts when you went to church? Not knowing exactly what that was. Well, the first thing that impacted me was this associate minister. He was such a fine man, and I thought to myself, “Wow! This is what a Christian is like, being like this man?” I was impressed. I thought the world of him. But I still wasn’t ready to accept Jesus. What was it about his lived Christian life that was impressive to you? Well, he was so kind and so gentle, and he would give Annabel such fine advice about — like she would say, “If you were confronted with a bull, would you wave a red flag in front of a bull? So when you’re dealing with your son, don’t antagonize him. Just be calm.” Anyway, he was very, very helpful to Annabel. So it sounds like he gave wise counsel. He did. Yeah. So as you were sitting there in those church services, and they were singing songs about God and Jesus or teachings from the Bible, what did you think about all that? In terms of did you think there was any truth to it at all? Or did you think that the Bible was just stories, and they were singing to a nonexistent God? I mean, as an atheist, how would you consider those things? Honestly, I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. I just thought, “This is what Annabel wants to do. The kids are benefiting from this, so I’m on board.” But I didn’t see it applying to me, if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah. So you didn’t see it applying to you because, as an atheist, there’s a sense of autonomy and independence and that you don’t need that kind of thing in your life. Is that how you were considering it? Yes. So in your mind, were Christians someone who were a bit more needy, I guess you could say, or weak, or needed that crutch, or something like that? But it just wasn’t for you? That’s about right. That’s about right. But you went through the motions of going to church. How long did you participate with this view? I guess you started going- I did. For about 13 years. We lived in New Jersey for the first 13 years we were married, and then I lost my job, and I was looking for a job, and it turned out that the job was in Florida, so, in 1978, I started the job in April of ’78. And Annabel and the kids stayed in New Jersey until August. We were having a house built, and the kids were finishing school. So you moved down to Florida, and you moved the family down to Florida, and I’m curious, too, all this time that you are participating or going through the motions of church for the sake of your family, was Annabel — I’m just thinking for the sake of those who are married to people who don’t believe in the same way. Did she ever talk with you about, “Why don’t you believe?” or put pressure on you, or was she just fairly quiet and just appreciative of you coming? How did that work out? She never put any pressure on me at all. I guess she felt that, in time — in fact, the associate minister had told her, “Don’t push him. He’ll come around to it when he’s ready. You’re not going to help anything by putting pressure on him,” and so she took his advice. And I’m sure you appreciated that. I did. Yeah, yeah. So now we’re in Florida, and we had a couple across the street that was attending a non-denominational church that they were very pleased with, and they invited us to go with them. And we did. And so now we started going to this church, and again, I was going every Sunday. I was going to different events. But I was just going through the motions. Right. I wasn’t really prepared to accept Jesus. I didn’t see a need for it. And then they had home fellowship groups, and this very good friend of ours, the wife, kept putting a little pressure on me. “Why don’t you come to these meetings? Come! You’re going to love it!” And so I did. I started going to those. Now, I started meeting men that I had a lot of respect for, and I started thinking, “Gee. These guys, they believe. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get over this resistance that I have that goes all the way back to when I was a child and never heard of Jesus, never heard of God, never read a Bible, never saw a Bible?” And so now I began studying in the Bible a little bit, and that went on for a few years, and then one day—we would go to church regularly. It was a Good Friday, and Elizabeth happened to be here. She was in grad school, but she was here, and so Annabel, Elizabeth, and I went to church on a Good Friday, and we met another couple that we were friends with, and they had communion. And I had never taken communion because I felt, “I’m not a Christian. I’m not a believer. I should not take communion,” but all of a sudden I just felt an urge. “I should take communion,” and I did. And Annabel almost fainted. Elizabeth put her hand on our friend who was sitting next to her, and she said, “I can’t believe what I just saw my dad do! I can’t believe it!” Yes. Well, yeah. I’m sure it was a bit surprising. That was the moment that I accepted Jesus. And I still can’t explain why then, why that particular night, but that’s when it happened, and then I began to really become a Christian, to participate in home Bible studies and to work in the children’s ministry and to do things, so that was the evening that I accepted Jesus. And I think it was 1992, I think it was. Let’s see. Yeah, I think it was about 1992. So it took me a long time. Right, right, yeah. But there was probably something in—I’m sure, years of consideration, sitting through a lot of church services and sermons and then meeting—it sounds like you met a lot of Christian men who embodied a life that you respected, which I think it sounded surprising, but- One of the biggest impacts on me was my son. My son, Chris. Now, as a young man, he was a little bit wild, and he got into drinking and I didn’t even know the extent that he was drinking at the age of 16 or 17, and his friends, they were not a good influence. My son would say to me, “You don’t like my friends, do you, Dad?” And my response was, “It’s not that I don’t like your friends. I don’t like the influence that they have on you and the things that you do when you’re together. You’ll do things that you would never do on your own. Now, he went to graduate school at Emory, and he met some really fine men, and without mentioning any names, he had a wonderful influence about him. He had an accountability partner, and all of a sudden, I saw this transition in my son, going from this kind of wild guy who drinks too much for his age, who might be in danger of becoming an alcoholic, to a really fine—you know, a Christian. And that had a big influence on me as well. That transition that I saw in Chris, that had a huge influence on me, in addition to the home study groups that I was involved in, but seeing that change in Chris had a huge impact on me. What was it that was so impactful? Was it the fact that you just watched his life being transformed into the Christian life and then it was attractive to you? Yes. All of a sudden I saw—you know, here’s a guy. He was drinking way more than I thought he should drink. He was doing things that I didn’t think he should be doing. And now, he’s surrounded by wonderful young men. His focus is different. I just saw a transition from a wild guy to a strong Christian, a strong believer. Wow. Yeah, it’s amazing to see a life transformed like that, especially when it’s your own child whom you love, and you know who they are. They’re not hiding anything from you. You just know them as a parent, and to see that kind of life transformation must have been amazing. Right. Yeah. I actually know your son, and he’s a wonderful man, so you and Annabel have done an amazing job with both of your children. Elizabeth and Chris both are just—I can’t say enough about them. They’re amazing, amazing people. When it comes to Good Friday and the message of Good Friday, I’m sure that there was something quite compelling. The gospel of Jesus, knowing that there’s acceptance and forgiveness no matter what you’ve done. I’m sure that that was something that you felt or—was there anything particular? Good Friday, for those who are listening who may not know what that is, Good Friday is actually the day designated when Christ was crucified on the cross, where Christians come together and remember that, and what He did on their behalf, that is, taking on the sin of the world. So that we don’t have to earn our acceptance with God. Right. Rather, God paid for our sin. And it’s a really amazing thing when you realize or take that in personally, and there must’ve been something about the message of that evening and understanding what communion is. Communion is really remembering what Christ did for you, basically, as a sacrament. Right. Yeah. So I’m sure there must’ve been something there for you that evening, kind of a culmination of many, many years of taking very small steps, but nevertheless, you were taking steps forward. It sounds like even though you were resistant for many years in your life, you continued to find yourself taking steps forward. And then the next thing you know, you find yourself actually believing this Person of Jesus. I guess it happened over, like you say, a long period of time. Right. No. It was a gradual, very gradual, process for me. And all this time, my father—my mother died in ’79, and my father started coming to visit us every January, February, March, roughly those two, three months. He was still an atheist, and as far as I know, he was an atheist the day he died. So he never—my father was a really kind man. He was very good to both my brother and I. He was a good husband. But he was never, never a believer. And yet he had a niece who was a nun. She became a nun at 15, and he loved this woman. After my mother died, he would go to Rome and spend two, three months with her. He went to Spain and spent time with her there. I got to know her really well. She loved Annabel, even though Annabel didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and she didn’t speak hardly any English at all. They really loved one another, and they had a connection, and the connection was Jesus. The nun, she believed in Jesus. That was their focal point that drew them together. Wow! That is interesting, considering your father had been really put off or rejected the church because of perhaps what he had seen as a child, the negative things that he saw, what the priests and what they were doing as compared to the people and all of that. It seems, though, that his niece, as a nun, gave him a different picture of, perhaps, who Jesus is through her life, and I’m glad to hear that. Sometimes people can get the wrong impression from an institution or a person who represents Christ or Christianity but not really understanding the real person of Christ himself, and I hope that your niece gave him that. Right. Yeah. So wow, what a story! So how old were you then, when you accepted Christ in your life? Let’s see. I came to Florida at 44. I was probably around 50, early 50s. Yeah. That’s quite a long time to go in your life, where you actually kind of change in midstream, to go from nonbelief to belief, but that’s a wonderful story. It’s a wonderful story, and so it sounds like your life—you’ve been convinced of it since, right? I have. You’ve held onto it. You took a long time to get there, but it’s something that you obviously have become convinced of and believe in. I have. Yeah. I presume, through continued Bible study and whatnot, you’ve really embraced it as your own, as true and real, and that Jesus is a Person worth knowing. Absolutely. Yeah. So as we’re just thinking further about this, knowing what you know, since you went for such a long time as a nonbeliever, I wonder—there were probably things that you appreciated or that you didn’t appreciate in terms of Christians approaching you or—like you say, Annabel was very patient and didn’t push Christianity upon you or anything, and you had those wonderful examples of men that you respected who were Christians. What would you advise Christians as to how they could best engage with those who don’t believe in Jesus? I would imagine having patience is one of those things. Yeah. I think the most important thing is not what you say but how you live your life. Because people are watching you. And in some cases, they’ll know you’re a Christian not because you said you were a Christian but because of the way you treat them, that you show kindness. I’ll give you an example. We had this security gate with guards, and this one day, I drove in, and I would always speak to the guard. Always. I’d always speak to him. I’d ask him how he was doing, how his family was, and he said to me, “You know, I think you’re a Christian.” And I said, “Really? Why?” And he said, “Because you take the time to talk to me. You don’t just drive through the gate and ignore me.” And he said, “I’ve noticed the same thing about your wife.” In fact, there was a lady guard that worked there, and Annabel befriended her. She would watch her daughters for her. And they became really good friends. And she said the same thing. “It’s how you treat me. It’s how you speak to me.” So I’m convinced that, if you want to bring somebody to Christ, then you need to show them, in your life, what Christianity means. And it’s not so much preaching as it is the way you live your life. And how you treat them. How you make them feel. Yes. Yes. Valued. You don’t just drive through the gate and ignore him because he’s a guard. He’s a human being, and he’s got a family, and he’s got interests, and so if you stop and talk to him and just be a friend, it’s going to impact him. Yeah. It’s amazing what an impact or difference just small things can do, just small gestures that are really huge sometimes to other people, valuing others. Yeah. That’s pretty wonderful. For those who might be quite skeptical of the Christian faith, of Christianity, of belief in God, have rejected it for whatever reason, but might be curious, just as you were, I guess, curious on some level. What would you say to someone like that? I think I would say, just observe Christians, and I think, for the most part, you’re going to find that they’re kind, they’re accepting, they’re loving. You might want to consider that this is something worth doing. I mean not only your soul, but I think it’s just a wonderful lifestyle. Aside from the fact that you’re saving your soul. Well, those are two very big things, having a life that—as Jesus says, a life that is truly life, a life that’s abundant in so many ways, knowing that you’re fully known and yet fully loved. Amazing things that you can find within Christianity. I can imagine some skeptics out saying, “Well, that’s not the Christians I know.” Right. Yeah. And that sometimes can be a really difficult issue. Just like your father encountered a priest who didn’t fit what he thought Jesus was about. And so I think sometimes—I think our witness can be good, in terms of when we do live the Christian life and allow Christ to live in and through us, but unfortunately sometimes we don’t always live as we should, and sometimes looking past the Christian life towards Jesus is the best way to really consider Christianity, because He was perfect. The only one, right? But yes, but Christians can make a difference, especially if they are truly embodied Christians and are living faithfully in the way that they should and loving, as you say, in the way that they should. It is a very attractive thing to do. So thank you so much, Justo, for telling your story. It sounds like it was a long walk, you know? One step at a time over a period of years, but I think what I appreciate most about you is that you were willing to, in a way, sacrifice and surrender your own purposes for the sake of your family just to go and that you respected and honored your family, even though you didn’t believe. And it’s amazing to me to see how even placing yourself with a willingness to place yourself in a situation that may have been uncomfortable, that you didn’t agree with, but over time, you became willing to actually see Christianity and to see Jesus for who He is and Christianity for what it was and that it was something worth believing. So in my research, I’ve seen—this sense of the will and whether or not someone is strongly resistant no matter what or whether or not they’re actually willing to give it a chance, and I think, in your story, you allowed the truth of Christ and the Person of Christ to come through on His own terms over time into your heart and mind. And I’m so thankful, because obviously you have left a legacy with your children and no doubt grandchildren at that point. So thank you again, Justo, for telling your story, and I really, really appreciate it. Thank you, Jana, for the opportunity. You’re so welcome. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Justo’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next podcast, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

Former skeptic Sue Warnke wanted nothing to do with religion. Although she achieved business and personal success, something was still missing from her life. Her quest for meaning led her to reconsider God. Episode Resources Sue Warnke’s blog – www.leanership.org Sue’s recommended article for skeptics – “Five Steps to God” (by Sue on her blog) Faithforce is the Interfaith employee resource group at Salesforce Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript 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 a skeptic but who unexpectedly became a Christian, to learn from their perspectives both as someone who resisted God and then as someone who not only found God but is also follower of Jesus.   Achievement and success often drive us.  Unmoored to God, skeptics are often believe they can take life by storm and find its fullness and fulfillment on their own.  There’s no need for God.  As poet William Ernest Henley penned, I am ‘the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” Sometimes after reaching the summit of personal or professional success, and the best of what the world has to offer, we’re often left with a sense of emptiness after the temporary glory recedes, wondering is this all there is? In my research with former atheists, While many reported a positive sense of satisfaction within atheism prior to conversion, slightly more than half (27/50; 54.0%) (Q15) ‘did not find Atheism to be generally satisfying but soberly accepted it as truth.’   This begs the question, are they willing to ask the deeper question – is this all that life has to offer?  It is in this moment of existential reflection, a decision is made to keep on or to search for something different, something more.  Someone may become open to that which was completely walled off before, or not. That is part of our story today.  Sue found the height of success in Silicon Valley and a wonderful family life, but somehow it didn’t ultimately satisfy her soul.  It set her on a journey of searching for something more. I hope you join in to hear her whole story – not only what informed her skepticism, but what allowed her to reconsider what he once thought so irrelevant.  This should be interesting! Welcome to the podcast, Sue. it’s so great to have you here today. Thank you. It’s great to be here. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell me a bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps what you do? Yeah, so I live here in northern California, a little town called Pacifica, on the beach. I have a wonderful husband who surfs, which is why we’re out here by the beach, and three teenagers. One is a sophomore in college, the other is a senior in high school, and then the other is a sophomore in high school. I work at Sales Force. I’m a senior director of content experience, so basically documentation and videos. And I kind of grew up in Utah and Colorado. Wonderful. So you grew up, in, you said Utah and Colorado. Let’s start back there. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. Also, not only where you grew up, but your family, your community, your friends. Was there any sense of God or religion in your growing up years? So I grew up in a town called Layton, Utah, which at the time was 95% LDS, Latter Day Saints, or also known as Mormon. And we were not that. My parents were Christian, and at the time, I have this vague memory of going to a children’s church meeting, but we kind of walked away from that. They had a falling out with that church pretty early on, so I have a vague memory, but then we were pretty much agnostic. Tried a few different churches throughout that time, but the key was that we were not LDS in this very LDS environment. So the impact of that is two things: One is that I was an outsider. I really couldn’t do all of the events with all the other kids. They would talk about things like their Ward, and I just wasn’t part of that. And then also my family and myself in particular was the target of evangelism. Pretty hard core evangelism. Pretty interesting attempts at evangelism. It felt at times like the whole town wanted to convert my family. So I developed this huge wall against religion of all types and just decided that was not for me. I wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the impact of it, of making me feel like an outsider and making me feel pressured, then I didn’t want anything to do with it, and I kind of developed this… I was pretty much anti religious, I would say. I mean I was that friend in college that was sending articles disproving this and that to my friends of faith and having deep, long discussions about how illogical it was and irrational it was, and I really felt like I didn’t need that in my life. So these walls that you built towards religion, that persisted, it sounds like, all through your childhood. Even when your parents were nominally Christian or whatever, there was no faith on your part. There was no real belief on your part. And then you just became averse to any sort of religion. I can’t imagine feeling like such an outsider in a such a religiously dominated world of which you were not a part and they were aggressively pursuing you. What that must have felt like. I mean if you resisted it to a point of antipathy. You wanted nothing to do with it. What would that feel that? I guess that informed your understanding of who God must be, right? Yeah. And I definitely don’t want to demonize that environment, because they were also incredibly loving. I mean one of the kindest environments you can ever imagine is just about anywhere in Utah. So I look back very fondly and have many friends who are LDS, back then and now. So definitely not in any way trying to paint it in too negative of a light. But there were a few moments. I know once I got invited to what I thought was just a snowmobiling weekend with some friends, and it turned out that it was that, but it was also a chance to sort of get me a little bit isolated, and both the kids and parents kind of surrounding me in an attempt to convert me. So it was quite odd and pretty traumatizing. I think I was maybe 10. So yeah, I built that wall, and then the repeated attempts of my mom to get me to go to church, and I found it so boring. My sister and I would just write notes about how horrible it was to each other. I really did think this was just irrational and quite unpleasant. So obviously it wasn’t worthy of belief and not logical, rational. So what did you think belief in God and Christianity was for? Whether it was protestant Christianity or LDS? What did you think religion was if it wasn’t true for you? I just thought it was a crutch. I thought, “Well, that’s nice for you, that you need that little pick-me-up to keep you going, and you can pretend that there’s something bigger than this world. And then I also thought it was just superstition. I had a friend who wasn’t really very Christian, but she would say things, “I just felt something. I felt a presence,” or, “Sometimes I feel like somebody’s here,” and I would just kind of internally laugh. I mean, there was a lot of arrogance in me all these years, like, “Okay, you can go on and think that.” I wouldn’t call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t say I said there’s no God. I just would simply say, “Nobody knows. Nobody knows. It doesn’t really impact my life terribly. I’m going to focus on driving my own future.” Just the captain of your own ship? Yeah. So it sounds like you did encounter some people who were Christians growing up. It just didn’t sound like something you wanted to be a part of. Yeah. In fact, my parents… Because the public school was so heavily LDS, they pulled me out, and they put me in a Catholic school for high school. Oh, okay. And that also was pretty negative experience. I remember we had to take religion class, and it was led by a priest, and we were supposed to journal about what we were learning about, and in my journal, I would ask questions, like, “I’m not so sure about this,” and, “I wonder about that,” and I’ll never forget, when he was returning our journals. It was kind of a U-shaped classroom, maybe about twenty students, and he threw mine across the tables, and he said, “See me after class.” And I was terrified. And I was very much a people pleaser, so that was really shocking. And embarrassing. And afterwards, he said, “Don’t ever question my authority.” So I was quite, in some ways, traumatized by Catholicism and by the more Christian angle of things as well. Had very few positive experiences related to that. So that makes sense to me, so that when you actually went to university, it was something that you wanted to fight against, or you said argue with or- Mm-hm. … or whatnot. That it was not something that was even an option for you. Oh, absolutely not an option, and I was quite angry about it and wanted to debate and sort of fight the whole notion of it. I’m curious. When you wanted to fight the whole notion of it and you ran into Christians in university, did anyone have any kind of rational, logical, evidential answer? Anything solid or substantive to come back against… Were you even open to listening what a Christian had to say? I don’t know that I was actually open, but I had wonderful examples of Christians in my life. I really did. I dated a man for three years who was devoutly Christian and tried so hard to get me to convert. Even had his father call me and try to convince me. And I worked with really amazing people as well. None of that really softened my heart. I mean, it just didn’t penetrate at all. I didn’t hate Christians, certainly, and I didn’t think that these people were illogical, but I just felt like, “Well, that’s fine that you need that.” I accepted that, but it in no way got me to change my mind. Really nothing that they said. So it was just a psychological crutch. Something for people to have a sense of belonging perhaps. Or maybe they were just raised that way, and so of course they would think that way. So a little bit of maybe even brainwashing. We’re all brainwashed in some way. We’re all products of our environment, so of course they would be, too. So that was what I thought. Okay. So that kind of perception of religion and Christianity and belief in God, how long did that persist? You said you went through college, and you started in the business world. I presume your agnosticism continued, and tell me about that part of your life, when you- I mean, my entire career, my entire life, I was perfectly fine without God and really did not pursue it in any way, met my husband. We have three wonderful kids. And for Christmas, we thought, “Yeah, it’d be good to teach them about Jesus,” just kind of informationally. This person existed and this is what people believe about him. Very lightly, you know? And then immediately taught them nobody really knows the truth, and so explore things as you wish. We didn’t want to create a pushy environment for them, where they couldn’t ask questions, and where there was only one right way, and that was really important to us. And I think we did raise kids that questioned and that hopefully don’t feel pressured by us, but I never personally pursued religion in any way during that period, other than just saying, “Yeah, maybe. Who knows?” Not making a big deal of it. Okay. And during that time, too, you were achieving quite a bit of success in your own personal or business career, weren’t you? Yeah. I have been very blessed. I put it that way now. As opposed to ‘I was doing so great.’ But I had wonderful parents that supported me, and I had the opportunity and privilege to get an education and a graduate education and have always worked hard, so that can get you pretty far. And I started a PhD program in English and then found there’s no real market for that field, but luckily, you could translate that into tech, so I got a job in tech writing, which was really satisfying and very marketable. I did that for two different companies for about 14 years and then, after that, landed at Sales Force as a technical writer and then moved on to management, and that’s kind of where I am. Now I lead multiple teams of writers and engineers documenting our products. So really satisfying, super exciting career journey. Very fulfilling. And on the side, wonderful husband and friends, so I wasn’t feeling this huge gap. I wasn’t hitting rock bottom. Things were pretty good. So if things were going so well without God or any of that, any crutch, and you were achieving all of these wonderful things, and you had a terrific life and family and career, what caused you to stop and think or wonder or change course? What was going on? Yeah. So I think I did have to hit rock bottom in some way, so while things were going well, at some point in my career, I started to just feel dissatisfied. I thought, “Okay, I have everything, and I mean literally in a tower.” In San Francisco, we have these enormous Sales Force towers, and I’d be looking out, thinking, “I’ve got a great team, great family, great job. Why am dissatisfied? What is wrong?” And so I had kind of a void in my life, and I could not put my finger on it, and so I figured, “Well, it must be my job. Maybe I’m supposed to do something more meaningful.” So what is it that changed for you? If you had the good life, what is it that made you perhaps stop and think that maybe God is worth thinking about? Well, I definitely never considered it. It really had to kind of push itself into my life pretty aggressively. So the way it all happened is I had this great life, but I was still starting to feel dissatisfied for some vague reason. I would look around and think, “I’ve got everything, so why am I feeling kind of dissatisfied?” And so I figured it must be my job. Maybe I’m supposed to something more meaningful than technical writing with my job. Maybe I’m supposed to make this big impact on the world or help people, you know? I had this desire for more meaning. And so I quit my job and pursued a new role that was kind of on the surface more meaningful. It was leadership development. Teaching managers across these Fortune 500 companies how to be ethical and humane and kind and follow best practices. And it was really exciting. I was traveling around the world making this impact. Managers would come up to me… One manager said, “This changed my life!” And I thought, “Wow! That’s got to fill that void,” you know? And I tried to push it in there, and it didn’t fill the void. And so that was really scary. Like, “This is not solving that need. Well, what is that need?” And then a couple of things happened that really made this kind of a high priority, this pursuit of meaning, and one is that this job was not what I thought it was. It wasn’t just teaching. It was also selling these classes, and it turns out I’m terrible at sales, so I was just falling flat on my face. I’d never failed before, in life really, you know? A straight-A student and career progression. And that was shocking. I think I sold $7,000 out of a $700,000 quota. Like one percent, you know? Everything kept failing. I’d get close to a huge deal, and it would fall apart. So that was really devastating to my identity. Because I was a business success, you know? And that evaporated. And then on the home front, so I have a son with special needs, and those needs were just starting to show themselves right about this time, and so health wise, all sorts of problems were happening with him, and we just were not able to find the help that we needed. Everything was like a shut door, so my identity as a businessperson and as a mother were collapsing. I was not a great mother, helping my ill child. I was not a great businessperson. So who was I? I was like nothing! And I was very depressed about that. I remember I was in a hotel room on one of these business trips, and I said, out loud—and I certainly did not think of it is a prayer, and I was not in any way intentionally talking to God, but I just said, “Wow! I give up. I don’t know what to do!” like, “I cannot fix this.” And I just had never said that before, had never said that out loud, and of course, now I see that as a prayer, as the white flag, and after is when God just came into my life in these really systematic ways. Wow! Wow! So that was a major turn of events. So you were praying even though you really didn’t know it was a prayer. It was that point of, I guess, laying whatever you held of yourself down and saying, “I can’t do this anymore.” Yeah. Some point of surrender, but you it wasn’t real clear at that point, I’m sure, what you were surrendering to or to whom. Yep. But things changed. So tell me about that. Yeah! So very weird set of things started to happen right after that. I mean just immediately. I woke up the next day, and I flew home, and I remember I had this huge desire to listen to Christian music, which I had never wanted to listen to before. In fact, I used to mock, and I used to say, “This is so cheesy,” and I didn’t even know how to find it, but I just went to Spotify. This urge was so great. And I typed God, and up came this really beautiful music. And I just found it enthralling. I mean I could not stop listening to this. It just was kind of filling me up in some strange way. I was kind of embarrassed. I didn’t want my family to know. I would listen on headphones and things. So that was one. And then shortly after that I was reading through some medical material for my son, and weirdly, in this medical article, there was a paragraph about God. And it didn’t fit. And it was talking about how belief in God can be as healing or more healing than any kind of medication. And it was saying we are surrounded by a world created by God, and that was weirdly appealing and filling me up as well. And what it made me do is picture somebody in my head from my past. Clear as day, I thought of my kids’ old karate teacher, who I knew.  He had invited me to church once. And I turned him down. But I remember I used to sit in the back of the karate studio and watch how he trained the kids. No matter how good or bad they were. No matter how old or young they were. Even the parents would take his class with him. He loved them. He loved them for who they were, and just was like this funnel of love in a way that I had never seen before, and he was who popped to mind, and I thought, “Oh, yeah! He invited me to church,” and I somehow got the courage to text him. I had his number. And I said, “Long time no chat,” and, “Can I go to church with you?” And he said no. No, I’m just kidding. Of course! And then that was a really kind of big moment for me. I bet he was shocked. Yeah. He was shocked. Out of the blue! Yeah. I didn’t even tell my husband that I was going through all of this. It was all just kind of keeping it inside at this point. So then you went to church with him. For the first time as an adult. Curious, I presume. Yeah. I had taken my middle daughter had expressed curiosity once, and I had taken her to a couple of churches, I think. Just trying to allow her to question and everything. But yeah. For the first time on my own volition, I went to church, and it was this tiny little church in my town of Pacifica, and I walked in, and it was a pretty transformative experience. And at the very end… And I remember crying. For some reason, I was in the back, crying, and at the very end, these two people went under this big cross, and they said, if anybody wants prayer, we’ll be right here, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” So something gave me the courage to go up to them. I’d never asked for prayer or been prayed over in my life, and I just said, “Can you pray for me?” And they put their arms around me and said this beautiful prayer, and I was crying, you know? And I just thought, “Wow! There is something real happening here.” And that made a really big impression. I was very confused, but I kind of drove home in tears and dried my tears and just thought, “I don’t really know what’s going on here,” but that was a big step. That would be a big step. From someone who was rather agnostic and really resistant to God for so long, and then you surrendered in some way and became open, and then somehow He shows up. You feel, in a sense, a palpable reality that there is something more than you had thought before. Yes. Absolutely. So I guess at that point you were very open to exploring whatever this was. Tell me about that. So I was kind of sitting with all of this, and I was going on a business trip, another business trip, so while I was there, I was unpacking my things, and I got a text from this karate teacher. And I was still in the wrong job and still unable to fix the situation with my son’s health, and this text said, “Sue, I pray that the Holy Spirit will reveal Himself to you today.” How did you feel about that? Did you understand that language? Did that seem kind of weird? I can’t imagine. You know, I did not understand it, but I felt it. I understood the feeling of it. I understood that this man took time out of his day to send me a prayer, to send me something quite bold. I mean it makes me almost want to tear up now. I sat on the bed just holding my phone, like holding this prayer, like this was just pure love in my hands, you know? Unsolicited love. And I will never forget that. How powerful that felt. Even though I didn’t understand it. And so I sat there and just kind of meditated on it, and it was only about 30 minutes later I get a phone call, and I’m thinking, “Okay, what’s this about?” And it’s my Aunt Jean in Texas, who, of course, would not have had any contact with this karate teacher, and she sounded really nervous, and she said, “Sue, this is going to sound weird, but I’m supposed to call you right now, and I’m supposed to tell you about God.” Wow. And of course I thought, “Oh, my gosh!” I just got this text from the karate teacher almost preparing me for this call. I feel to my soul that God heard the karate teacher’s prayer and really compelled my aunt to call me. Because we had never talked about religion before. I mean I knew she was a Christian, but I had no interest in it my whole life, so it was quite bold for her to call me, and I said, “What made you call me?” And she said, “Well, when Missy died…” Missy was her daughter who had died of an aneurysm long ago, and she said, “I felt the same urge to call her, this urge from God to call her, and I didn’t, and I always regretted it, because that night… Maybe I could’ve called her before the aneurysm. Maybe I could have told her I loved her.” And so she said, “I vowed that if I ever got that feeling again, I would obey it, and I had that feeling tonight. I’m supposed to call you. It’s very powerful.” And she didn’t preach and she didn’t lecture. She just told me what it meant to have God in her life and to be able to pray. And she told me stories. She told me two to three stories of God showing up in her life and lifting burdens and transforming things, and it was so beautiful. I was absolutely in the presence of something. And I had a decision at the end of it. What am I going to do with this? Is this the wildest coincidence, or is it real? So I was at that moment as the call was ending. Yeah, I would imagine you would… As she’s speaking about God showing up in her life, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t be thinking, “Is God showing up in my life right now?” Right. Yeah. It couldn’t be coincidence. Thirty minutes from the text. And it had been years since she had felt that urge, and then it’s all on you. Yeah. It would be hard not to think that, in C.S. Lewis’s terms, the hounds of heaven are kind of focused on you at that moment and that you felt that in some way. How did you respond to this focused personal attention from God? Well, I had to decide in my head, is this really God? Because that whole thirty minutes was really a decision point. Before, it was like, “Wow, this is weird.” Now it’s like, “Wow! I think God might very well be real,” you know? “Oh, my God!” And I’ll never forget that kind of decision, because it’s like a door opening to a universe. It’s like you realizing what you thought of as the universe was actually like a room, and opening the door and seeing there’s an entire world out there. There’s an entire existence. There’s an entire way of thinking and living and being. There’s a God. There is a God. There is God, the God! And all of that, I just couldn’t deny it anymore. I couldn’t deny what had happened, like physically. These things did happen. I have the text. I even snapshotted on my phone the time that Aunt Jean called. I wanted this evidence. These things happened. And I can’t deny that. And then I can’t deny how I feel, which is just what it felt like. My mom passed away a long time ago. We were best friend. She had cancer. And it felt like I was being held by her. That’s what it felt like, is being in the arms of someone that loves you more than anything else. That’s very profound, very powerful language you’re using. I decided I would verbalize that before we hung up, and I just said, “I believe you,” which was a big step, actually really saying I believe in God. I think it’s true. And we hung up. And real. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a major turn for you. I imagine that your husband was a bit surprised. Your children were surprised. Tell me about that. Yeah. Well, I’ll tell kind of the next phase first, which was still I had to process all of that. So I remember after we kind of hung up, I fell to the floor really and just sobbed for, like, three hours, really thinking back on a whole life of taking credit for the blessings that I had been given, taking credit and knowing, like, the whole time God was there. The whole time He was doing it for me. And how unappreciative I felt. And how just really sorry I felt. And I remember trying to pray, and words wouldn’t come out, and then finally, once I went through all of that, I realized what my prayer would be. My first real prayer to God was, “I’m sorry.” And I could verbalize that. And it was like instant forgiveness. Instant load off my shoulders, instant euphoria, almost. And I texted the karate teacher back, and I said, “You’re not going to be what just happened.” And he said, “Praise God. Get a Bible and read John.” So I found a Bible, and that kind of started this journey, and I went back home after that, and I stumbled back in this church, and I told the pastor and a couple of others, like, “How do you give your life to Jesus?” And he said, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s pray,” and we just said a really messy prayer, and I feel like I had already converted in a way in the hotel room, but that was nice to verbalize and to say, “I give my life to Jesus, to following Jesus.” And so yeah, then how do I integrate that back into my life? I’m really careful about not talking about my family in public, just to protect their privacy, but I can just share real vaguely that definitely it was shocking to have your mom come home as a born-again Christian. I say that proudly. I’m a born-again Christian. Even though I know that carries a lot of negative connotation, and I would’ve never thought I would ever say that. That’s pretty shocking to your family. But we had lots of really good conversations, and it turned out to be just a wonderful thing for all of us, and I now tell my story, like here, and they’re very, very proud of me for all of this growth and change. Yes, I would imagine so, and how wonderful to have that kind of support. Calling yourself a born-again Christian, that does carry with it a lot of preconceived notions and connotations. Yep. I imagine, working in northern California, Silicon Valley. How is that received as a successful businesswoman in northern California in the business place, in the workplace. How is being a born-again Christian taken? I would imagine that would have challenges of its own. Yeah. So that was an interesting part of all of this. I feel like it was only a few weeks after I converted, or maybe a few months, that I got an offer to come back to Sales Force, so I feel like that was a gift from God and that I was there and not just for myself, not just to make me happy, but to bring faith, to make it safe to have a faith in the workplace. And so I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I was really clear that that was part of the reason I was coming back there, is to be a leader of this movement within the workplace, and so I was very scared. I didn’t even want to wear my cross at first or tell people about it. I was really scared. I remember I started by wearing… it was like a flower cross, so it almost didn’t look like a cross, you know? And I would wear it to one meeting, and I’d think, “Okay. Well, nothing bad happened. Nobody mocked me. Nobody yelled at me. Maybe I can wear it to two meetings,” and then I’d eventually wear it all day, and then made it a real cross, and as I was testing the waters there, too, I also was searching for people that were professing anything related to faith, maybe like in their signature on their email. I noticed somebody had a Bible verse. And I noticed someone else had posted something about faith. And so I kind of found them, and we started a quick little Bible study, a prayer group, and it grew. It grew from two to five to now it’s hundreds of people all around the world. Very quickly. But then that wasn’t the whole story. That’s great, to have that and have a safe place to pray and talk about your faith in the workplace, and most companies are kind of growingly having things like that, but that wasn’t still a kind of top-down initiative. So that’s another thing I focused on is, “How do we have faith be recognized as a legitimate form of identity?” For some people, their faith is their number one identifier, over their gender or race or cultural background. And so what about those folks? When we say, “Can you bring your full, authentic self to work?” If that’s your number one identifier, you should be able to. In fact, that should be celebrated. As long as you’re not pushing it on others, you shouldn’t have to hide it. In fact, that will lead you to probably leave if you can’t express that side of you. So we worked with the leaders and formed Faith Force, which is an official employee resource group at Sales Force, and it’s hugely popular. That’s fantastic. Very bold and I think innovative and really courageous in this moment. I like the way that you say that, is that identity. The [number marker?] typically in Christianity is that that’s who you are and your primary identifier as a follower of Christ, and all of those other things are secondary to that. In thinking about your story, thinking way back, when you criticized belief in God and Christianity as irrational and illogical, as a crutch, I can imagine the skeptic listening to your story and saying, “Oh, she just kind of had a powerful experience of God. She’s now one of those who needs God as a crutch,” and you’re an intelligent woman and a thinker and very rational, so how did you fuse those two things together in terms of justification for the things that you believe? Yeah. Well, I started studying in great depth, found some really trusted mentors to kind of help me through that, and what I found was good data. What I found was… Almost nobody describe that Jesus existed. Very few people deny that. Or deny that He was crucified. Nobody denies that He had followers, that He had these apostles that kind of spread His message all around the world. There’s enough evidence of that that is historical, not necessarily written by other Christians. And we know that Christ got crucified, so obviously it was very risky to express this kind of belief in Jesus, and they did go into hiding after he was crucified. They went into hiding, were scared for their lives, and then something happened. When Christ resurrected. Something happened the size of a resurrection. Nothing else can explain it that would lead to the entire world changing, that would lead to these apostles not only not hiding but risking their lives and most of them dying to tell people what happened. To tell them, “He came back to life! I saw it! That means what He said is true. That means He’s the Son of God, the one and only Son of God. I saw it! I witnessed it. I experienced it. I experienced these miracles,” and enough people back then professed that to their death that it changed the entire course of history, and they wouldn’t have done that for a lie. They wouldn’t have all universally said this lie that He came back to life if it wasn’t true. There would be no benefit to them to do that. And so that, to me, is the sticking point here. Did He live? Yeah. Did He call himself God? Yeah. Did He come back to life after death? Well, it sure seems that that is true. And if that’s true, then what He said was true, what He said about being the Son of God is true. And that’s something we have to reconcile. That’s something that we should think about. Well, what does that mean? If it’s true, that changes everything. Yeah. It sounds like you did due diligence to really look at the rational evidence for your belief. You knew that God was real, and you wanted to substantiate the truth of what you felt and experienced with God, and I appreciate that about you. It is almost mind, heart, and obviously your life coming together all at once. Now you said there was a moment where you had, it sounded like, everything the world had to offer, but yet, you were dissatisfied, that somehow all of your achievements and your success didn’t fill up something in your soul. And I’m wondering, after belief, and you found God, has that sense of emptiness been filled? That sense of dissatisfaction moved to satisfaction or abundance. Did it make a difference? Yeah. I mean absolutely it has, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a miracle cure-all, in the sense that life is still super hard. My son’s medical concerns only got worse. They’re very severe. And so every day we deal with that. And there’s no clear solution. And it’ll be a battle for the rest of his life. And yet I don’t feel alone in that battle. So I take walks with my dog, and especially when there’s a lot of unknowns, and I just feel like, “Okay.” I pray every day, and I say, “Okay, I think this is what I own,” and I listen. Like, “Is that what I own? Okay, that’s what I own.” And it’s not God telling me, but it’s a clear feeling, like, “Okay, this is what I’m supposed to do today. Please help me with that thing.” Maybe it’s an appointment with a doctor. That’s what my focus is, and I do need to step forward into that. And then the reminder, “I’ve got the rest.” And I’m like, “Yeah. You’ve got it, God. You carry the entire weight of this thing. You carry the future of my son, of me, of my entire family. You own it. You own all of it. And I’m going to do this one baby step today.” And that’s so much more manageable than thinking, “What am I going to do next week?” “What am I going to do next year?” “What if this happens to him?” “What about when I die? Who’s going to take care of him?” I don’t worry about all of that anymore. I honestly don’t. Like, “God, what do I do today? That? Okay. I can do that.” And it changes everything. I mean it is just like having just your best friend, your best parent, your best coach, just telling you, “I’ve got it. You do this. I do that.” Teamwork, you know? Especially, I’m thinking, looking at the world today, there’s just so much fear. Yes! And so much, I guess, sensed need for power, among many, wherever you go. And so what I hear you saying is that you really have a peace that you didn’t have before and a sense of… really peace whether it’s in this life or what’s to come. And I would imagine that would inform everything about your life. Yeah. It’s very manageable. That’s what I would say. Sort of no matter what happens, and I really mean that. I think the worst tragedy ever… I feel like I could manage it because I don’t have to fix it. I don’t have to lead it. And I don’t have to carry it. I can carry my part. And it is a great sense of peace. And it takes work, too. I mean I have to carve out that time in the morning to look back, and I think God for what He’s done for me the day before and acknowledge Him, and I go through the Lord’s Prayer, and then I look at my day ahead, and I say, “What am I supposed to do today?” And it’s usually one thing. And then I ask Him to help several people in my life, and He does, and I go into my day. And it is every single day like that. And it is now quite… Just peaceful. Yeah, it sounds like it’s driven by both peace and purpose. Yeah. And purposes that are not only in your world but beyond yourself and purposes for the world, especially with what you’ve done with regard to prayer and bringing forth faith in the workplace in such a substantive way. You’re to be applauded for that. I think that takes immense boldness and courage, and you are obviously a woman who possesses those things. So as we are coming to a close, I wondered if… Picture your former self. Just angry, just resistant at God, no need for God. Perhaps somebody is just the least bit curious, though, and you could be somehow that karate teacher in someone’s life or just based upon your own journey, what would you tell a curious skeptic? I would totally empathize with them first, because I think a lot of Christians, when they’re trying to convert others or they’re trying to persuade others, go about it so poorly. And that was my experience on the other side of things, so that’s the last thing I would ever want to do is pressure somebody, so really just empathizing. At least my reasons, I get why to be skeptical. I think it’s perfect legitimate. I’m surrounded by people who are legitimately skeptical. They’re not crazy. You’re not a heathen. You’re not all these terrible words that I think you might be depicted as. It’s awesome that you question. It’s awesome that you push back. This is so great. That’s what God wants of all of us, you know? And if you’re ever interested, I’m here for you. That’s what I would say. The worst thing you can do is pressure somebody. Definitely from the perspective of the Christian who is trying to be the best follower of Jesus that you can be. Don’t be ashamed of your faith. Own it. Wear it proudly in the sense of never show shame for being a follower of Jesus. He’s a wonderful Person to follow and the Son of God and that’s one thing. And the other thing is just be loving and encouraging, and at the right time, people will ask you questions. Don’t be afraid to bring it up in the sense of, “What’s your faith background?” “How did you grow up?” “What are your thoughts about faith?” And really listen and care but don’t manipulate. Don’t pressure. That isn’t your role whatsoever, and it’s not reflective of Jesus. So I would just tell the skeptic, “I totally get it, and that’s awesome that you question.” Yeah. Because truth is not afraid of being questioned, right? Yeah. Jesus can take it. Yep, yep, absolutely. Is there anything else you want to add to your wonderful story before we end here, Sue? Any thoughts or anything you think that we’ve missed? I would end with Revelation. One of my favorite passages in there, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anybody opens the door, I will come in and dine with you, and you with me.” So I just want the whole world to know that scripture, that God is waiting. He’s been there the whole time. He’ll be there the whole time, and He will come in as soon as you open the door, as soon as you say, “Okay, I give up. I actually can’t solve this whole life thing on my own. I don’t know, but I guess I need God. I guess I’m open to God.” Then He will come in. He will come in, and he will be there with you forever. So that’s my wish. Well, you are certainly a living, embodied testimony of that verse coming to life. And I’m so grateful to you, Sue, for telling your story. It is a beautiful story, an amazing character arc, you know? Moving from complete disbelief to just an amazingly beautiful ambassador for belief in God and Jesus and Christianity and the life that it can bring you. And I also appreciate your honesty with all of that. It’s not all roses. It is a journey. It’s a daily struggle. But just like you said, there is someone who’s greater who’s in control who loves you, who is with you and for you and has purposes for you, and in Him you have peace. Yeah. So with that, again, thank you, Sue, so much for joining me today. Thank you. All right. Here we go. I’m going to- Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Sue’s story.  You can find out more about her, her blog, her work with Faith Force at her website: www.leanership.org.  I’ll include this along with some of her recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at theSideBPodcast@cslewisinstitute.org 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 see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Jeff Dockman wanted nothing to do with religion. Over time, his presumptions about the world, and his place in it, ceased to make sense and he began to consider the possibility of God.   The CS Lewis Institute: www.cslewisinstitute.org   Jeff’s recommended authors and books: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis, Miracles Alvin Plantinga   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 to see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone’s who’s been an atheist and became a Christian. Through listening to their story, we can appreciate both sides from someone who’s been there. If you believe in God, you can see how someone might dismiss the ideas of God, religion, and Christianity. If you don’t believe in God, perhaps you can see how someone who once resisted God moves towards belief. But as for all of us, what we believe in affects our understanding of who we are, our identity. In fact, our identity can be shaped by many things. How we see ourselves, how others see us, what we do, the group we’re a part of, who we want to be, or how we feel. Our identity can be shaped by our friends, our family, our life experiences, our desires. For atheists, there is a sense of freedom in creating your own identity without restraint. Free thinkers who form their own identity, their sense of self. Sometimes our identity can also be shaped by knowing who you don’t want to be, a soft anti-identity. We don’t want to be a part of a group of people that seems culturally irrelevant, judgmental, unscientific, hypocritical, uneducated, weak, narrow minded. Pick your adjective. These are terms often used for the religious. We want our identity to be as far from that as possible. That is where our story begins today but not where it ends. The sense of rejection of the religious identity. Jeff moved from an atheist identity to take on the identity of the group he once despised, Christians. How in the world did that dramatic shift happen? I hope you’ll listen in today to see how this story plays out. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeff. It’s wonderful to have you on today. Hi, Jana. It’s great to be here. You’re a familiar voice to me. We met several years ago. We both have a mutual affiliation with the C.S. Lewis Institute here in Atlanta, and so that’s where I got to know you a little bit and got to know a little bit about your story, so having you on the program today is truly exciting for me, because I know the dramatic changes that you have made in your life. In fact, you’re doing some pretty amazing things now in terms of even your current study of theology at the graduate level. Can you talk with me a little bit about just who you are now and what you do, so everyone gets a chance to know a little bit about who you are. Yeah, sure. So I work as a software manager at an engineering company here in the Atlanta area, I’m still in school, but I have switched my major from theology to Old Testament. I just had a lot of interest in looking deeper into the Old Testament, the history of the text transmission and things like that. So that’s my current focus in school, working on a Masters of Arts in Old Testament Studies right now. I know, in your story, you’ve come a long way from where you were, from your atheism. So why don’t we start at the beginning, in your childhood, and give me a sense of the home in which you grew up, your family, perhaps your friends and the culture. Was there God in that world at all before you had a sense of your atheism? Tell me about that. It’s a very interesting question because there was God in the sense that some members of my family would consider themselves Catholic from an upbringing perspective, but there was not God in the sense that we ever went to church or prayed or talked about God or anything like that. So we’d occasionally get together, and when my grandparents were in town, for example, my stepmother’s parents, they would pray, and they were pretty devout in their faith, so they would go to church. We would say grace for supper every night, even though that was about the only time we talked about God. Other than when my Dad would hit his hand with a hammer or something like that, and then I heard God’s name quite often. Okay, yeah. But growing up we didn’t really have much interaction with other Christian families. My friends, there were no Christians in my peer group, at least not that I knew of. If they were, they were closet Christians. Primarily I hung out with people that were pretty much humanists and a lot of interest in the occult and anti-Christian sentiment. So a lot of it was rooted in some of the punk rock culture and the New Wave/industrial music scene and things like that. So a lot of the people that I hung out with could consider themselves Wiccans or witches or humanists or even Satanists in many cases. Not a lot of Christians. So, Jeff, as you were growing up, you had some dots of religiosity with a dinner prayer, that kind of thing, but it’s obviously not something that your family took on with any serious nature. As a child, it sounds like it was just part of the routine but nothing more, but I would imagine that these humanist friends that you had, was that more towards like middle school, early teen? Or high school? Tell me about when you started hanging out with these friends. It was really late middle school and going into high school, I guess, is where that really started. And just one point from the earlier comment. I do remember one time clearly going to Mass with my stepmother’s parents, and my dad went with me, and I remember as we walked into the Mass, they had the holy water set to the side, so that you could genuflect, make the sign of the cross and all of that, and I remember watching my grandparents, step grandparents, go in and dip their fingers in the water and cross themselves, and as a young kid, I wanted to emulate that behavior, and I remember reaching over to touch the water and my dad pushing my hand away. So it was a very interesting dichotomy because, on the one hand, we’d do these supper prayers. On the other hand, when we are engaging these rituals in a Mass setting, it’s something he didn’t want me to participate in. And it’s funny because I’ve never talked to him about it. I never really thought much about it. But it’s just an interesting contrast. Yeah. It makes you wonder why he would almost endorse a ritual in one sense but not in another. Yeah. I’m sure that was a little bit confusing for you. It was. But as a nice young person I just put it aside and didn’t think about it for years. Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. So your impression of God or religion or Christianity at that time, growing up, particularly in your teenage years, as you were, it sounds like, part of a group that was rejecting all of that. Did you have any views towards religious people or institutions? Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think that actually gets at the root of what my religiosity was. Because it was really focused on people. And I’ve told a number of people over the years that, as an atheist, I actually wasn’t a very educated atheist. I was educated in my observation of people but not educated earlier on in the way atheists approached questions about who God is and the historicity of the Gospel accounts or things like that. So it was very much a focus on people, and even more so a focus on how I perceived Christian people to be, particularly with my peer group and my desires as a young man. It was primarily centered around hedonistic enjoyments, and so for me, Christians were those that were trying to take away any fun out of life, take away the joys of life. Yeah. And that’s interesting, especially related to even the… perhaps not only the activities that you were involved that were no doubt pleasurable on some level, but also you hinted that there was some kind of dark spirituality that you were even interested in. I’m curious about that aspect of your kind of pushing away from one form of spirituality but actually engaging in another. I think on some level there was a part of me that wanted to believe in something more, and I remember, at a younger age, maybe earlier middle school or sometime in middle school, reading The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, which was talking about King Arthur legends and Merlin and things like that, and I remember at one point—part of the story line centers around Mithraism and the idea that perhaps Merlin was this Mithraist and that’s where his power came from, and I don’t remember the story that well, but I do remember the aspects of Mithraism, and so I recall walking to the bus stop one morning and tying this little spruce branch around a tree and sort of doing this little offering idea, and I think I was always enchanted by the idea that there’s something greater, but I didn’t really believe in it, particularly as I got older. So while I had friends that were involved in Wiccan religion and some paganism, I didn’t really have the sense that there was this devil that would listen to you if you decided to become a Satanist or that you could influence nature as a witch or anything like that. But I wanted it to be true on some level. And, in fact, I embraced the humanistic aspects of Satanism, to the point that I had a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible and read through that and was really enamored with that sort of mindset. I know that the humanistic impetus in that movement is very strongly that you’re the captain of your own ship and a very strong sense of autonomy and control over your own destiny. Was that appealing to you? Oh, absolutely! A big part of that is, “If it feels good, do it,” and I think our modern culture even has quite a sense of that as well, which is, “If it feels good, it can’t be wrong unless it starts to encroach on somebody else’s boundaries.” And so, for me, that was a very appealing message, and again, as young man with a desire to have the sensual enjoyment in life, that was very compelling, to say, “Whatever feels good to you, go ahead and and do it.” So in a sense, then, you were involved with friends and your particular culture that was pushing away, I guess almost an anti-God sensibility, from religion and religious things, but at the same time, you said that you were focused on the people and that there was a negative hue or a negative perception of Christians and Christianity. What informed that? Was that informed by the actual experience with Christians? Or was it something that was informed more by what people were saying and what you perhaps wanted to hear? That’s a really good question. I think that some aspects of it were certainly informed by the media, and in particular, this was growing up as a teenager in the eighties and watching MTV and music videos. As an eighties kid, there was a lot of push back against the culture. I remember—I was speaking about it to somebody the other day—the Genesis video with Ronald Reagan and just this idea to push back against authority. And then Reagan and Nancy and the Moral Majority and all of those influences, where you’re looking at this media imagery of far right people wanting to put censorship labels on music. And you just sort of built this view of Christians as this vocal group of people that want to take away anything that you might enjoy. But again, I wasn’t really informed by a lot of direct personal experience with individuals. It was more of a collective thing. I see. Yeah. Because it sounds like there weren’t a lot of Christians, I suppose, in your world. No. Not at all. I would imagine, too, that it would be easy to develop a bit of an us/them kind of mentality and strengthen your understanding or perception of who you think someone is without direct engagement. That’s a very easy thing to do. Absolutely. So you were developing this sense of identity, this, I would imagine, anti-Christian identity, informed by your friends and the culture, your moral choices. Was there anything else involved in that? Perhaps education or your view of science or anything else that contributed to that push back against Christians and Christianity? As I said, I wasn’t a terribly educated atheist. In fact, I’m much more educated in atheist arguments at this point in life than I was at that age. But I did think that science was the answer to everything, so it was, in a sense, my religion. Although again—I was a smart kid. I had a good education. I understood basic scientific principles. But I did not really have a clear sense of all the different lines of argumentation that I’m aware of today. Nevertheless, I still felt like the earth began with the big bang and everything evolved, and where was the need for God in all of that? Science could explain all the questions that we have. And religion was just some holdover from a time where people didn’t have any understanding of the universe they lived in. So I absolutely held that prejudice, but again, it wasn’t a terribly well-informed prejudice. It was just something that I inherited by default. So Jeff, it sounds like, again, you were pretty well comfortable with your identity as an atheist. How old were you, by the way, when you really identified yourself with that label. I think the first time I applied that to myself was when I joined the Army. In fact, when I joined the Army and they were issuing my dog tags, they ask you for your religious preference. And I had never really thought much about it as a question, and so I put atheist on there as my religious preference, and it was, I think, the first time I had ever thought enough about it to say, “This is what I am.” Later, I remember having to get dog tags reissued, and they refused to put atheist on there for some reason. It was very strange. So I put agnostic, but I really still considered myself an atheist. And I think I did teeter back and forth a little bit, only because it seemed like atheist was such a firm position to take, and how much can we truly know? So while I was functionally an atheist, sometimes I would label myself as an agnostic. So then, Jeff, walk us along. Tell us what seemed to move you in a different direction. What seemed to cause you to perhaps question this identity or the way that you were thinking about God and Christians and Christianity? It’s a difficult question to answer on some levels because I don’t really know when the transformation of thinking began. When I look back at the influences that stuck with me, many of them were things that happened, but I didn’t recognize until later that they had some impact. So for example, as a 19-year-old person with an attitude, I had a Jehovah’s Witness come to my door, and he wanted to talk to me. And I was feeling particularly obstinate that day, so I invited him in, and he started talking to me about what he believed, and at some point in the discussion, he was talking about the Bible, and I said, “Well, what makes yours more valid than mine?” And he said, “Well, what do you mean?” And I walked back and I brought out LaVey’s Satanic Bible. And I fully expected this to have the guy kind of walk out on me, and he didn’t. He stayed and engaged. And I had asked a number of questions, and I remember, several days after he had visited, he came back, and he had a stack of papers that he had printed out that had answers to a number of the questions that I had asked. And I never even looked at them. I threw them away. And to this day, I’m not even completely sure he was Jehovah’s Witness because I don’t really remember, but he knocked on the door and wanted to talk about God. But looking back, I recognize the impact that that had on me, because this guy believed what he was selling enough to come back to an obstinate kid and want to give him the education, to give him the answers that the kid was asking for. So things like that, as I look back, I see that there were a number of occasions that were similar to that throughout my life. And I think, over time, those softened me a bit. And I was able to start to see that it’s not just a bunch of hypocrites but that there are people that really do put into practice what they say they believe, and they take it seriously. And so as I started working in a professional career, I was 29 when I finally accepted Christ, and over a few years prior to that moment—and it really wasn’t a moment. It was actually a process. But a few years prior to that, I had been befriended by a guy who I worked with named Greg, and Greg was a very devout Christian, and I had another friend named Kevin who was a very devout atheist, and it was that picture of the angel and the devil on your shoulder, each one whispering in your ear. But Greg and I would talk quite a bit, and I would ask questions, and he would have answers. And when he didn’t have answers, he would find answers. And as I started questioning what I believed about the origin of the universe and what existed prior to the big bang and how did it come to be, some of those questions really started to nag at me. And I thought, “I need to look into this a bit more.” And those were the kind of questions that Greg actually wasn’t very well educated in, but he had friends who were, and he would get resources and help me to start to explore some of those things. And so, over time, that exploration is what led me to change my views and come ultimately to believe that Christ is who He says He is. Who Christianity claims that He was. Wow! That’s interesting because… especially the way that you describe your being softened to the possibility of God, that it came through people who authentically believed. It wasn’t just a ritual that they performed or I guess a service that they showed up to and lived differently through the week. You engaged with people who actually took their faith seriously, and believed that there were answers to be found within religious faith, which I’m sure was a bit novel in a way, particularly not only with regard to answers spiritually, but also answers you’re describing even with regard to reality and the world and the cosmos. You’re talking about a bigger picture of reality and having answers to questions like that. I find it interesting, too, that you had these two friends, both kind of speaking into your ear and into your life. Was that a bit challenging at times? I’m also curious. Did your atheist friend find substantive answers for you when you were looking for them? Interestingly, no. And I think part of that is because there’s a certain degree of posturing that goes on as you’re coming to these questions about what you really fundamentally believe. And so I had a reputation as a loud person of atheistic persuasion, and so, with my friend at the time, my atheist friend, I probably was not very forthright with my questions and this process. Because you don’t want to be seen as somebody who might be going to the other side, although to be fair, I didn’t think that I was. I had no belief that I was actually changing what I ultimately thought or believed to be true, but I just had these questions. And I didn’t take the other questions back to this guy. The Christian friend was a compelling place to go and ask because of the authenticity. And because he really did live out what it looks like to be a Christian, with the humility and the kindness and the love and the gentleness. And so he was very approachable in that way. And I didn’t feel judged by going to him. And I would have felt judged going to my atheist friend and saying, “Hey, I’m looking at these questions, and there’s something compelling about this Christianity thing.” So I was not very comfortable going to my atheist friend, which is interesting. Yes, yes. So I would imagine, in this exploration, it was intellectual. There were answers that you were seeking. How long did this process take? I presume, over time, that as you were finding answers that you were able to see how those answers were making sense, not only of the world but of the way that you were living or perceiving life? Yeah. And it was a fairly lengthy process for me. And this is where our relationship with the C.S. Lewis Institute is interesting because I can very much appreciate Lewis’s journey from an atheist to a theist to a Christian and the time that that took. And I can also appreciate his story about his motorcycle ride where, when he departed he wasn’t a Christian, and when he arrived, he was, if I remember it correctly. I have that view, to some extent, of my personal journey as well. Because, as I started down that road, I started believing that there must be something more and particularly looking at the origin of the universe as one of the big questions. The scientific answers just ceased to make sense for me after a while, and they almost became a little bit reaching, particularly when you start looking into multiverse theories and things like that. It seemed to me that you’re exercising a different kind of faith to kind of go down that road, so as I became more of a theist and open to the idea, my wife, at the same time, who has grown up in a Christian home and was a very strong Christian as a young person, started returning to the church and found that she wanted to raise our kids with Christianity which, early on in particular, a very contentious desire for her. It was contentious within our relationship. I didn’t want my kids to be raised as Christians. I certainly didn’t want her giving money to the church, which, for some reason, bothered me more than the idea of her raising my kids as Christians, and so as she started returning to church, I started being more open, and it was during this time that, one morning I woke up, and she was getting the kids ready to go to church, and I said, “I think I’ll go to church with you today.” To this day, there was nothing besides God that I could say that informed that desire, because I was adamantly opposed to it up until that point. And so I went. And it was one of those stereotypical moments that you hear about where the pastor seemed to be speaking right to me. And that was not a conversion moment for me, but it was a moment that continued to open me to the possibility that maybe Christianity does hold some answers. And so that helped me to get past that obstacle of going more into almost a theism to being open to a greater possibility of theism to being open to the possibility of the truth of Christianity. One thing I think about when I hear your journeying is you continue, beginning at some point you became open to the possibility of God. And then you became open to another aspect. Something softened in you because of seeing authenticity or commitment to faith or perhaps you became more open because you started questioning. And you allowed yourself the possibility of another worldview being true. And that strikes me because oftentimes, if we’re not open, it’s hard to really see and weigh your current worldview versus potentially another worldview or the explanatory power of another worldview. And to me it sounds like you were making intentional choices to be open to another perspective. Oftentimes we hear there’s no evidence for God, and so if there’s no evidence then it’s not even worth engaging for some. How would you respond to someone who might make that declaration, “There’s no evidence for God,” in terms of perhaps even openness to consider another perspective. Yeah. It’s a great question. And one of the difficulties in talking about evidence for God is that there is no single one thing that you can point at and say definitively, “There you go. God exists.” By the same token, there’s no one thing you can point at definitively and say, “There you go. God does not exist.” And so for me it was ultimately a cumulative case, where there are a variety of evidences and things that we believe to be true, hold to be true, understand to be true. Things that we scientifically believe and things that we intuitively believe. And I spoke earlier about morality as an example of right and wrong and the idea that right and wrong is either grounded in something or it’s just grounded in our own preferences and group-think. And particularly in America today as we look at all of the division and the challenges that we face as a country, of people that have different views of what’s right and what’s wrong, we all believe instinctively that there’s something grounding that sense of right and wrong. And so being open to the possibility that that foundation is, in fact, God, that without God, there is no ultimate floor for morality. It really is a question of preference. And so as we start to wrestle with our own priorities, in life and in how we engage the world, I think this question keeps coming up. As I look at beauty, how do I understand beauty? Recognizing that different people view things differently. How do I understand morality, recognizing that people have different beliefs about different subjects. And being open to the possibility that God ultimately is and can be a foundation to those beliefs and thoughts and considering that. And looking then at the different evidences that are available, at the different ways of approaching the subject. So yeah, as you were saying, I think sometimes it really does require a little bit of openness to take a look at the evidence that’s there, but I’m glad that you really emphasize here that there’s not one sort of bulletproof argument for God, if you will. That Jesus is not the end of a philosophical argument, although of course there are other things like the resurrection that really historically, evidentially ground the reality of His resurrection and claim to be God. Some perhaps have a little bit more evidential value than others, but still, as you say, it’s not just one thing. It’s a combination of things. And I applaud you for really being open to taking a journey of exploration because, for most of us, I think we like to live in the comfort of our own worldview and not be challenged, but you were willing to go on a journey. And that’s not an easy thing to do. For your worldview and your world, really, to flip upside down. Yeah. I think you make a really great point, and I just wanted to weigh in on that and say that I think you’re absolutely right, and particularly with the resurrection. That was a significant factor for me. And particularly as you look at how the church spoke about Jesus and wrote about Jesus. It was all based on the resurrection. And you look at Paul’s writings, and he essentially says, “If Christ has not been raised, then your hope is in vain.” And, to me, that is an interesting confirmation of the fact that these Christian writers were making claims that they believed to be true because they’re flat-out saying, “If He didn’t come back from the dead, all of this is just a joke. It’s useless. So go on and do something else.” That aspect of Christianity has always been very important to me because it is making the claim that our faith is rooted in an actual event that took place at a particular point in time. For those who might be listening and are curious about perhaps what resources you might have looked at in investigating some of these big questions, do you have any recommendations? Great question. Of course we mentioned C.S. Lewis Institute, so I have to say that C.S. Lewis has a number of books on various topics. I think Mere Christianity is a great starting point to be open to exploring some of these questions of what is Christianity and what do Christians believe and why is it compelling. I think moving on, his book on miracles, for me, is a very interesting one and compelling because it’s essentially… To distill it down, it’s opening up to the possibility of miracles and understanding them in their context and whether or not they logically could exist. I think there are a number of great books written by different philosophers, Alvin Plantinga comes to mind, to just explore some of the questions. And there’s a number of books on Old Testament history, and I guess, as I think about it, maybe the answer is so difficult to come up with, particular set of resources, because I recognize that everyone’s challenges are in different areas, so some people might have challenges with the historicity, and some people might have challenges with some of the ethical claims or moral claims. And so it’s more difficult than to make a single recommendation or a couple of recommendations, because people are going to want to research in the area where they’re most passionate. Right. You mentioned, as part of your journeying, that you read the Bible, perhaps for the first time. Was your experience with that informative or enlightening or surprising or those kinds of things, in terms of your own journeying? Very much so. And as I mentioned, I had started going to church, and so there were a lot of things I was unfamiliar with. Growing up in the US as a kid, I remember going to the dentist, and they always had these big blue book of Bible stories and things like that, so I had that level of exposure as a very young child. As an older kid, I didn’t have any exposure whatsoever, so I wasn’t fluent with any of the Bible stories. When my wife started taking our kids back to church, she subsequently bought a lot of Veggie Tales videos, which is this animated cartoons about vegetables singing and talking about God, so my biblical knowledge was pretty well informed by Veggie Tales more than anything else. So on one level, as I would read through these stories, correlating the cucumber and an actual person from the Bible is fun and exciting. But the biggest thing was just, again, as I said earlier, seeing pictures of Jesus throughout the scripture. And when I came to the New Testament, that’s when it really all started to click into place. Reading through the Old Testament was challenging, and you see stories that, they’re hard to make sense of. And you have a lot of questions. But when you get into the New Testament and you start to see how Jesus can answer those questions and make sense of some of those stories that were difficult, I think that’s where things really began to click for me. And so, as I talked about the 34-week Bible study that I was in, it was the latter part of that when we had finally gotten into the New Testament which was when I became a Christian. And even then, going on from there, I think there was still a process. I can’t put a finger on an exact day. So everything kind of started to come together to make sense as a whole, as an understanding of the world, of yourself, of reality. As we’re wrapping up our conversation, I do want to, here at the end, give you an opportunity to talk with somebody who may be listening who is curious, not only about your journey but perhaps their own, and that they may have that sense of openness perhaps that you had at one point. What would you say to someone who is a curious skeptic and intrigued by the possibility of God and Jesus and Christianity and the Bible? I think the first thing I would say is that there’s a lot of noise on both sides. There are a lot of voices clamoring to be heard. And for me, it was important to take myself out of that a bit and to recognize that there are experts on both sides of this subject. There are experts scientifically. There are experts philosophically and theologically. There are people that are experts in the Bible and the transmission of texts, some of which believe and some of which don’t believe. And being open to the reality that there are people with the same inputs that reach different conclusions. So recognizing the impact that your worldview, what you believe about the world and the way things work, is going to have on your ability to receive some of the information you’re studying and being open to the possibility that your worldview is perhaps skewed. And allowing for the possibility that the other side might have something true to say. And spending time researching both sides diligently. And it’s easy sometimes to fall off to one side or the other and not look at both sides, so I think it’s important to look at both sides critically but openly. I think that’s great advice. No matter which direction you’re coming from. It’s always good to be thoughtful about not only your ideas and your worldview but others as well. And for those who are listening today who perhaps are believers in Christianity and in God, and they want to be able to engage with those who don’t see life and the reality and the world the same way, what would you say to them to help foster a greater example, like you mentioned in your story you had people cross your path who were a real embodied example of Christianity that, on some level, you found attractive. Can you speak to that? Yeah. I would say be slow to speak and quick to listen. People want to be heard, and they want to know that you’re listening to what they’re asking, that you care about what’s important to them, and no one wants to feel like you’re just there to put a notch in a belt or to get your word in, so listen carefully to what people have to say and hear their genuine concerns, and then seek to find the answers to those concerns. And don’t just go in with a program or an agenda. Take time. And don’t bucket people into one group. There’s many different beliefs across the spectrum of atheism, agnosticism, Buddhism, etc., as there are within Christianity. There are a lot of different things that people believe, so take the time to get to know someone, care about them genuinely, and answer their questions sincerely. I think that’s excellent, excellent advice, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming on today, telling your story, giving us advice, and just some tremendous insights, not only into your journey but challenging us all to really be more thoughtful about what it is that we believe and why we believe it, so it’s encouraging and exciting for me to hear such a dramatic change, really, from actually someone who has an Anton LaVey Satanic Bible on their coffee table to now having a Christian or Judeo-Christian Bible that you’re actually spending time studying at the graduate level. Wow! If someone doesn’t say that’s a transformation, I don’t know what is. So I’m just excited and encouraged really for people to listen to your story and to really be challenged in their own way of thinking and living, so thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s very exciting. Great. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jeff’s story today. You can find out more about the C.S. Lewis Institute, as well as some of his book resources that he recommended during his story in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it, and if so, subscribe and review 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 see again how someone else flips the record of their life.  

A Christian for 15 years, Jim rejected his faith and identified as an humanist-atheist for nine years.  Although he could not see a possible return to God, he found a more robust faith than he had once left. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we hear how someone flips the record of their life from atheism to Christianity. Each podcast, we typically listen to the story of someone who was an atheist and became a Christian. Today’s story is a little bit different. Jim was a Christian who became an atheist, who then found a more robust form of Christianity and reconverted. A commited Christian for 15 years, he left Christianity in his mid 30s and passionately identified as a humanist atheist for nine years. During that time, he genuinely could not see how he could possibly go back to believing in God again, and yet he did, with his faith even stronger for the experience. I hope you’ll come and listen and explore Jim’s extraordinary story with me. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jim. It’s so great to have you! It’s good to be talking with you. I love that English accent. Having gone to school there. I’m sure our listeners will really appreciate it, too. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, Jim? Well, as you know, my name is Jim and I’m from the UK. I live in Swindon currently, which is about 80 miles west of London, actually not that far from Oxford. But I was brought up in London, in the east side of London, a place called Rainham, and now I live in Swindon. I am an IT audit manager. I’ve worked in IT for about 15 to 20 years. I’m married to Liz, and I have two kids, one Hannah, who’s just recently gotten married despite the COVID-19 situation and the various lockdowns that we’ve had.   And I have a son who’s just finished secondary school, and he’s started college now. So that’s us. Family of four. And I’m in my late 40s, and yeah. So that’s a brief introduction to me. That’s terrific. It certainly gives us an idea of who you are and where you are in the world, really. And congratulations on your daughter’s wedding. Thank you. That’s really wonderful. So let’s go back to your childhood, it sounds like in East London, where you grew up, to get your story started. Was God any part of the picture at all among your family and your friends and even around your local culture? Well, I wasn’t brought up a Christian, but I was fairly ambivalent towards faith and religion, I’d say, generally. I would probably describe my upbringing as a very typical British upbringing where, when it comes to faith, and in particular Christianity, my views about Christianity were formed mostly through the lens of popular cultural influences and references, like Christmas and I can remember Nativity plays. I think my idea of Jesus was formed mostly through a film called Jesus of Nazareth that starred an actor called Robert Powell, who is a classic blue eyed, dark haired European-looking man who kind of wandered the hills of Palestine sort of listfully floating around, making short sentence statements about different parables and perhaps not easily understood who was just a nice man who was mistreated by Roman soldiers, and I think that’s pretty much all I knew about Jesus. And my idea of religion was that it was just something that was there. I neither was against faith and religion or for it. You probably know that, in the UK, we have a long history when it comes to Christianity and the church. We have the Church of England, and we have a lot of pageantry and a lot of traditions, so I just saw Christianity as something that was very much tied to the Church of England, old churches, old parishes, and effectively just Christianity was a way of being nice and being good but wrapped up in religious ritual, I think is probably how I kind of saw it. And my parents, they didn’t go to church. And again, I think they had a similar view, that Christianity was something that was nice but not something that we particularly were invested in, and religion was okay, as long as it was on balance and that you kept your feet firmly on the ground, and I think probably that there was a sense of right and wrong that I had as a young person, but I didn’t really think about where that morality came from. I just kind of had that sense that, “Well, if there is a God, I haven’t robbed a supermarket, so I’ll probably be okay.” So that was kind of my view of Christianity. Didn’t really give it much thought and was quite happy to, as a young person, explore life and all of life’s opportunities. So it sounds like you had a pretty good childhood and a nice family, a nice life. You did good things. You were a moral person, just along with the culture. So did you explore what you did believe? If you didn’t believe in religious institutions or in religious tenets, that they were nice stories or cultural rituals but not much more than that, did you consider what you did believe at that point? Or was it just kind of going with the flow? I think it was going with the flow more than anything, and I think that… I was brought up in the eighties in my teenage years, and I don’t know about [UNKNOWN 07:54], but I think, for me, the term atheist tended to have negative connotations of some sort. I don’t know why, but I tended to think that. So I wouldn’t have described myself as an atheist. I just didn’t really have any passionate views on faith or religion, and I didn’t know much about religion. A lot of that changed, though, when I went to university, and it was… When I went to Dundee University in Scotland that was a story of coming to terms with the future that I was stepping into. I was doing a degree, but I was struggling with whether that degree was actually the degree that I wanted to do, asking questions about where it would lead to, and I think I did have periods of reflection as a young man at university who embraced all of the social benefits, as I saw them, of being at a university, going out to pubs and drinking and socializing and all of that kind of thing And I found myself faced with the kind of life questions I think that a lot of people do ask themselves about life’s meaning and life’s purpose and where I was going. And the turning point for me was when I realized that I wasn’t really taking care of myself, and I was struggling with motivation, particularly to kind of think, “Well, what is the point? I could get this degree. I could aim for success. But I don’t know what success looks like. I could aim for something in life, but I don’t know what that purpose is,” and I was missing out on a lot of lectures and not doing very well. And I realized, “If I don’t get my act together, my life is just going to take a bit of a tumble, and I need to do something about this.” And so I decided that what I would do is I’d hang around with those friends that I knew who seemed to kind of do life pretty well and were disciplined when it came to study and seemed to be a good influence, and I didn’t really realize this at the time, but it turned out that the group of people that I hung out with were all Christians, and so I found myself in the company of Christians, and the strange thing is that I found out months later that, in the corridor in [UNKNOWN 10:36], where I was staying, I think there were about three or four Christian guys who were all in this corridor, half of whom had actually moved into that corridor in the first term through various reasons, and in fact, I myself had come to be in that corridor because there was a mix-up with the room allocation, so there were all these coincidences that I found out afterwards that led me to being surrounded by Christians. I was tripping over them. Yeah. I would imagine that would’ve been quite unusual, really, in Britain, actually, in the eighties, like you said. It was a nominally Christian culture but really not much more than that. So that is an interesting coincidence of sorts. Yeah. That’s right. And I often put it this way: I accidentally became a Christian. And what I mean by that is I was talking to a visiting friend of the guy opposite me, a chap called Ian, and I was in his room, and this girl, Maggie, was visiting, And she kept talking about this place called Menzieshill, and I thought this was a park or a woodland or something, and eventually, she said, “Would you like to come to Menzieshill, because we’re going this afternoon, and I said, “Sure. Why not?” It was a nice sunny afternoon on a Sunday, so we’re in the back of her car, and I was talking to Ian, and I said, “What kind of park is this Menzieshill? Is it a park with swings and playgrounds and things like that? Is it like open kind of fields?” And he just looked at me incredulously and said, “Menzieshill is a church.” And I remember kind of thinking… I kind of felt two things, really. One, I thought, “Oh, my gosh! What have I done?” And then the other thing I thought was, “Oh, actually it might be quite nice to go to church.” And so I sat in this Church of Scotland Church, and I don’t remember what the sermon was, but I do remember that I had a strong sense of being like a child and a sense that there was something here where there was a second chance, a second opportunity for me to do life differently. And the long story short, I went through this journey of discovering the Bible. I read a Gospel that somebody gave me. I was asking questions. And another Sunday we went to the church, and they had communion, and as they were passing around the bread and the wine, I said to Ian, “Should I take this?” And he said, “Well, you ought to be a Christian if you’re taking Communion,” and I said to him, “Well, my mom and dad never christened me when I was a child because they thought faith needs to be your own decision. We won’t baptize you as a young infant,” And this is almost embarrassing, I thought the word Christian came from christened. It didn’t dawn on me that the word Christian came from Christ. So I assumed in my head that a Christian was someone who’d been baptized as an infant and had been through some kind of ceremony and declared by a vicar or a priest as a Christian and perhaps given some kind of scroll or certificate or something like that. And so I said to Ian, “I wasn’t christened,” and he said, “No, no, no. It doesn’t matter. That’s not that, but you should be a Christian,” and then afterwards, when we had a conversation about this, I realized that we were getting our wires crossed, and I said to Ian, “I’m getting confused here. What is a Christian?” And when he told me that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus and has decided to follow Him and that this was a personal decision that you made, not something that you are granted by an official, I said him, “Well, I did that last Wednesday,” and he said, “Well, then you’re a Christian.” And this was news to me. And the reason why is because it suddenly dawned on me that faith and religion can be quite different things. It’s one thing to have faith in and to follow and be committed to the person of Jesus Christ. It’s another thing to just adopt a religious framework and all of the kind of things and trappings that come with that. And I was amazed by that. That was a real revelation to me because, again, having come from no Christian background at all, I was relieved and amazed and very grateful that actually I could call myself a Christian. Based not on meeting certain requirements of an institution. So that was how I first became a Christian. At the age of 19 at university in Scotland in Dundee. And remained a Christian for 15 years. So obviously something happened. But before we get to that, so your experience as a Christian for those… did you say 15 years? Yeah. How was your experience as a Christian? Before you decided that wasn’t for you? So I was very committed, and I was part of a very strong Christian union at the university, read my Bible, prayed, shared the gospel where I could on campus, and after university, I spent a year on mission in Kenya with an organization called Africa Inland Mission, teaching at a school and preaching in a church just southeast of Nairobi. And then I came back to Dundee, and by this stage, it was the mid nineties, and stayed in Scotland for a short while and then moved back to London and attended a church there, where I met my wife, Liz, and we had our daughter Hannah. And so my faith continued, and I was certainly very committed. If people ask, “Well, were you really a Christian? Did you really give your life to God? Were you really committed?” The answer to that is absolutely yes. I was a Christian. I understood the Gospel. I’d responded to it. And I had committed my life to Christ and chose to follow him. I think what happened, though, is you don’t just suddenly wake up one night and decide that you’re going to throw all that away. And it’s a long story. Lots of different things happened, but I think that probably the way I would summarize it, to begin with, is that I started, over years, to lose the simplicity of the Gospel. My faith, which was based on the Person I knew, became more about what I knew and whether I was right about things. And so the relationship with God kind of took the back stage, and what was front and center stage was more whether I was right about different things. It was the Gospel plus I have to have this doctrine right, and I have to be right on this nature of Christian walk and Christian living, and I think that, coupled with the kind of daily grind of life. Trying to cut out a career. Trying to cope with domestic life. And also I think when you go out into the outside world. I found that there were good people who were not Christians. I mean according them good in the sense of broadly speaking the way one might use that term. But they were people who were getting on with life who didn’t have faith, and I think that, if faith becomes ordinary and mundane, it just becomes less distinct. The Christian faith can become less distinct from any other religion or any other view, and I think that there are also areas of my life where perhaps there were compromises, not necessarily big compromises, but I think that what I found was that my life outside of church just looked very different from my life on a Sunday, and so I almost found myself living this dual life, really, where there was a kind of Christian side to me, and it was compartmentalized away from the rest of me, which was all about trying to get on with life, trying to achieve things, trying to do well in my job, trying to get on with the people who I worked with, all of those kind of things. And I think that’s what kind of happened over the years. And there was also this sense that your faith and Christianity becomes more complex in the sense of we all have to face into the fact that there are different denominations, there are different churches, that Christians don’t agree on everything, but I think that, for me, what I think happened was that truth mattered, certainly mattered to me, and continued to matter to me, but I found myself feeling that my Christian life was so far away from the lives of those who I worked with who weren’t Christians that it became very much an us and them kind of situation. And it felt like Christianity and church was just becoming a smaller and smaller island, if you like, of people who agree with you. And that was how I started to see it. From an emotional level I found myself struggling with trying to balance the kind of working life and the pressures of life with what faith meant to me on a daily basis. And I think intellectually I did have questions, but to begin with, I think those questions weren’t necessarily initially a challenge to my faith in the sense that they would necessarily lead me to reject my faith. I think what happened is a combination of all of these different things that kind of brought me to a point where, again, as I said, in some of the beginning, my faith just became like a philosophy, really. More about what I knew and not about personal relationship. And once God doesn’t mean that much to you in your daily life, the next logical step is, “Well, then why believe? Why carry on believing?” And so I started to investigate some questions. I was probably more challenged around questions of science, particularly around origins and evolution. I was asking myself questions about that. I was asking myself questions about salvation and what happens to people who haven’t heard the gospel. These kind of things that are challenges and we try to grapple with. But I did it very much in isolation. I didn’t really talk to people about it. It was more of an introverted journey that I went on. And I think that things just started to erode away. And eventually I remember I kind of raised some of these things with my wife one evening, because she could tell that I wasn’t myself. And I was a bit reluctant to kind of open up, and she said, “You’re not yourself. What’s going on?” And it kind of opened up this door where suddenly I just blurted out all these different memes, I think they’re called, aren’t they? All these different kind of thoughts that I’d dabbled together over a period of months and just blurted out all these questions and doubts that I was having, and I think poor Liz just didn’t have a clue where this came from, and she’s like, “Whoa! Where’s all this coming from?” And so that was quite a testing time. I think I was probably already, in my heart, on my journey away from God at this stage, but the one thing that I was concerned about was I was a member of the church in North Swindon. I had a church community around me. My wife was still a Christian. And I was obviously concerned about how this could affect my relationships, my relationship with my wife and with my family and those friends around me who were Christians. And that was obviously really important to me, and I didn’t want to… It wasn’t so much I didn’t want to disappoint them, but I didn’t want those relationships to break down so much. I certainly didn’t want my marriage to break down, and I was kind of faced with that, “Do I just keep this to myself and keep going to church and just put on kind of the right expression and turn up, don’t say anything, and then just live your life like that?” And I kind of did that for six months, and then it all came to a head when one of the elders in the church said, “Could you give a testimony in a couple of weeks?” And I think that was it, really. I thought, “I don’t think, in good conscience, that I could do that,” and so I phoned him up and said, “Look, I’m really sorry, but I won’t be coming to church anymore. I just don’t believe anymore,” and I stopped attending. And then that led to, obviously, a challenging period for me and my wife to kind of reconcile that and work through that. Obviously, it was quite a stunning surprise for your wife. But as you were going through this process and you came to this culmination point, and the church, you were forthright with them and truthful. Did they try to approach your doubts or skepticism with any kind of intention at all? Did they engage you on why you had left? Or did they just let you go? They did reach out to me. They were very gracious, actually, and I think, looking back, they were really good. They were very gentle. The elder of the church who I called up to say I didn’t believe anymore… the pastor of the church was on sabbatical back in the US for a few months, and so it was one of the elders who was running things, and he met with me in a Starbucks coffee shop, and he just wanted to understand what’s happened, and I talked to him about things like: Is the Bible really the word of God? How do we know it’s true? Isn’t it just that there was a council that made the decision that this is what is scripture, what is canonical, and therefore isn’t it all just manmade? Doesn’t the science suggest that we’ve just evolved and that we are just physical, material beings? What about rational thinking and reason? Shouldn’t we be prepared to question why we believe things? And all sorts of things that came up. And I remember he responded and said, and this is a bit embarrassing, really. He said, “I’m not very intellectual, and obviously you are, and you’ve got these questions, and I don’t really have the answers to all of those. Or I can’t answer them sufficiently.” He said, “But I’m happy to keep a dialogue with you.” And I’m a bit embarrassed by that in the sense that I don’t see myself as very intellectual. Because I thought, “Well, actually, I don’t know whether, hand on heart, I could say that I’d fully investigated these things or fully done my homework or had given opportunity for engagement with somebody, to say, ‘Look, I’m having these questions, and I want to explore them.'” And I remember, when the pastor returned from sabbatical in the US, and he’d found, anyway, because they called him on the phone and said, “Look, Jim’s not attending church anymore,” and he got in touch and said, “Hey, I’d love to meet you for a coffee,” and by this point, my attitude at the time was very defensive. I think I kind of saw myself as, “Look, I’ve been a born-again Christian. I’m familiar with the inner workings of evangelical Christianity. You can’t fool me. I know your tricks. I know you’re just trying to bring me back in.” And so I had this very defensive, nonengaging position that I’d adopted. And thought, “I will do the honor of meeting with you and have a coffee,” and he asked a few questions, and we had a bit of a discussion. And he certainly struck me as someone, from his answers, who had a lot more to say and said, “There are really good answers to these questions, and a lot of what you said, I think, isn’t strictly true.” And he said, “I’ve been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and do you want to go through that?” And I’d read The God Delusion, but I remember I just turned him down. I said, “No, I’d rather just carry on with my life,” and I remember he was really disappointed. I remember walking away from that meeting and the look of disappointment on his face because I wasn’t prepared to engage, and I think, again, this is because—I know everyone’s experience is different, and some people would say that they don’t feel the same way, but even in my atheism and my skepticism, while I was convinced that it was purely on intellectual grounds, there was definitely a heart decision to it as well, and I don’t think I was fully honest with myself at the time, but I was already determined not to believe, and the kind of intellectual questions that I had and I guess the arguments that I felt that I’d formulated and that I’d heard, particularly online from the New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, they were really just a means to substantiate the decision that I’d made to leave church and to give me good grounds for it and to feel that it was okay what I’d done and that I’d done the right thing and it was rational and reasonable and so on. But my wife carried on going to church and I did attend the occasional lunch with some friends from church who were very careful not to bring up the topic of faith, and in some ways it was frustrating, because I remember I was kind of thinking, “Just you wait. The first time that someone brings this up, then I can let them have it.” And tell them all the reasons why… “Don’t you realize these things that you haven’t thought of? You’re just blindly following this faith, and I’ve seen the light, and I’ve now decided to use my head and reason and logic and all those kind of faculties that I have to make a decision on this, and you’re just blindly following faith and carrying on.” And of course, it didn’t come up. They just shared meals, and that was it. It was nine years I was an atheist. But when I left church, I’d made the decision that I didn’t believe in God anymore, but I wanted to land somewhere. I wasn’t satisfied with saying what I didn’t believe. I certainly felt, “Well, what do I think, then? I don’t want to be a non-person. I don’t want to be somebody who just doesn’t believe. I do want there to be some kind of foundation for my life. What is that?” So I kind of did the usual thing that a lot of people do in this day and age that we live in. I used Google and looked on the Internet, and I came across some different organizations. Then I came across humanism. And of course I’ve heard of the term humanism but didn’t know much about it, and I thought, “Oh, humanist sounds good, because at least this is something where we’re saying, ‘Look, we’re all in it together. We’re human beings. Our morality and our reason and our purpose come from within. It comes from a shared human collective view of things.'” And so that seemed more attractive, and it seemed a bit more positive than the atheists, so I thought, “Ah, okay, humanist sounds good.” So I very strongly identified, certainly in those early years, as an atheist humanist. So I didn’t just backslide. I didn’t just kind of slip away or just stop going to church. There was no particular hurt, actually. When I left church, I did it 100 miles an hour. And actually I would say that I did go as far as saying, “I’m not just an atheist. I’m an atheist naturalist.” Okay. You’re probably aware that Richard Dawkins is famous for that quote. He said something like, “We are just dancing to the tune of our DNA and to the sound of the universe, and this universe is not personal. It’s just a cold universe and- Right. It’s a very sobered perspective. And at the time I appreciated that. I just thought, “This is honest atheism. This is where atheism should logically lead you to. It should lead you to naturalism because anything other than that is just a compromise. There can’t be anything other than just the natural. At the time I certainly felt, “At least he’s honest about his atheism,” that there is no hope. And there is no purpose. And that is how I felt. That’s a little bit interesting or a little bit ironic, even, for someone who, early on, was really searching for meaning, purpose, and looking at their future and desiring a worldview that actually provided substance towards that, as compared to the naturalist who, as you said, in Dawkins’ quote, “There is no real meaning or purpose. You’re just dancing to the music of your DNA,” right? Everything’s determined. There’s no free will. There’s no real purpose, no good and evil. If you are that honest atheist naturalist, did that not disturb you on any level? How did I feel? I guess I kind of satisfied myself that, “Well, if this is it, then this is it. And there were very intelligent people who believe this and accept it and yet still get on with their lives, so maybe the biggest challenge I’ve got is to find a way of continuing with life, carrying on with a purpose, as if there is a purpose,” even though philosophically, I was in a position where I didn’t feel that there was objective purpose or objective meaning. If we look at the world around us, we don’t look at people who are constantly, on a day-to-day basis, struggling with existential philosophical problems about who they are and what their meaning in life is. Not to say that people don’t think about these things. They do. But by and large, when you look at the world around you, you see people getting on with their lives, and I think I was kind of envious of those who’d never thought about God and never thought about theism or atheism before. They just ate and drank, had family time, and enjoyed life as much as they could. Yes, they had their struggles and tried to cope with them. And I kind of envied that, because I thought, “Well, the toothpaste is out of the tube now. I can’t go back to a position of just, ‘It doesn’t matter.'” Because I knew that it did matter, and I can’t just switch my mind off to it. So it was a bit of a struggle, but I think what I did was I just pushed certain things down beneath the surface and kind of wrapped myself up in this view that the most important thing for me is to be true to myself, which is true of anyone, to be honest about how I feel about things, and find a way to keep going with my marriage, find a way to keep living a fulfilling life and be the best dad that I can be, be the best husband I can be. I certainly didn’t want my marriage to suffer as a result or fail as a result, and so there’s something to work on, and keep going with my career. And find purpose in that, even if that is just an illusion, if you like, of the mind that says that there is a purpose, and it’s just something that’s just synaptic gaps firing away in your brain and that’s actually why you think that there is purpose and meaning to life. Even if that’s true, just kind of carry on regardless. It’s interesting you bring this up, because I think there was this transition from a very passionate, “I’ve stepped away from God, and I’m really affirming myself as a skeptic, atheist, humanist,” and I was very defensive about that. hearing someone like Christopher Hitchens, who was just so florid in his language, so fluid in the way that he could present his ideas, he was just really good to listen to, and I’d listen to Richard Dawkins. I met Richard Dawkins. I went to a book signing after a debate between Richard Dawkins and Professor Robert Winston, and I remember queueing up, and I got to the desk, and there’s Richard Dawkins in front of me, my hero. At the time. And I said to him, I used to be a Christian and I’m not anymore,” and I remember he just looked at me, and there was this awkward silence for about 5 seconds, and then I thought, “Well, I’ve got to say something,” so I said, “Oh, it’s Jim. Could you just put ‘to Jim’ and sign your name, please?” And he did that and handed me the book, and I walked away. He had no words. Nothing. No words at all. And it was just… it was bizarre. It was just a really strange encounter. Right! … got a convert away from Christianity to atheism. He just didn’t say a word. It was really odd. Awkward, yes. This is kind of that first phase of skepticism for me, where I’d wrap myself up in these warmly affirming, “You’re right to be an atheist. Here’s some really clever words and some clever arguments to keep you in that position, and whenever your wife gets home from church with the kids, you just remember that you just got the latest newsletter from the British Humanist Association through the post and read that,” and I would just do all these things. I wasn’t very adversarial or combative because, again, I knew that my wife was going to church still. I didn’t actually meet with humanists personally and join the group personally. I did all of this very much at a distance, just within myself. Probably because I felt that actually that might be too much. It might just cause there to be too much conflict. And then, of course, rather selfishly, I thought, “Well, if at all things go wrong, it’ll be me that gets the blame, you see?” So I was a bit selfish, I’m sorry to say. So a lot of this was kind of private thoughts and private readings. But then things changed a little bit, because again as we said before, I started to move into this stage of, “I just want to get on with life,” and, “I just want to move forward.” And so fast-forward a few years. I found myself becoming… It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t convinced by the arguments anymore, but my experience was that it felt like a lot of the humanist narrative that I was exposed to in social media, in the different literature that I’d received and so on, seems to be, “Whatever the church is saying, we’re opposed to it.” “Whatever religion says, we’re opposed to it,” and I kind of found myself becoming a bit tired of it. And particularly when there’s that kind of famous message that Richard Dawkins gave. He said, “We just shouldn’t debate people of faith. They’re not worthy of debate. We should mock them. We should ridicule them.” Oh, at the Reason Rally, I believe he said that. Yes. Yeah. And I just thought, “Hang on a minute. These friends of mine who I met at university who were Christians, they were intelligent people.” I knew of some who were far brighter than I was. Far more academic. And they were Christians. And I know friends and family who are Christians, and I thought, “I don’t feel that way towards them,” and I have to say, it’s absolutely right to say, not every atheist or skeptic feels that way, and we certainly shouldn’t assume that that is a typical view that they have. I know a lot of atheists have come out and said that they don’t think that Richard Dawkins was right to say that kind of thing. Because it’s not helpful. We don’t want to tar everybody with the same brush. But I think what happened during that time was I just softened. I think the defensiveness that I had had, the opposition to any attempt to engage had just softened, and I kind of found myself thinking, “Do you know what? I won’t renew my membership of the British Humanist Association.” I was only a member for a year, so I didn’t contribute much. And, “I’ll just kind of settle down a bit and not be so defensive,” I guess. And so life kind of carried on for a few years. But I joined a band, and I was doing well with work. I did creative things. And sort of carried on in that kind of vein. And then I hit this period where it was really funny. There was one friend. I can’t remember who it was, but I do remember the conversation, and I did share with people who’d never been Christians before that I was an ex-Christian, and I always found it really difficult to try and explain to them how important that was. From their experience, having not been a Christian, they just kind of saw it as, “Oh, right. Okay. So you don’t believe anymore. That’s all right, isn’t it?” They want to just get on with their lives. And I was like, “No! You don’t understand! This is a really huge thing. I’m not a Christian anymore, and don’t you realize that Christians think that this is really important and that your life depends on this decision and how important it is that we use our minds,” and all this kind of thing. But I remember having a conversation like that, and the response I got back was, “Well, you don’t know. One day you might come back to faith. You might change your mind,” and I said to them, “I can’t honestly see how that would be possible, given that now I’ve…” as far as I was concerned, I’d dismantled Christianity. I pulled back the curtain, like in the Wizard of Oz, and revealed what the real truth was, and that was how I saw it. So I saw a return to faith as really impossible because of where I’d arrived at. And yet it happened. And yet. So how did you make that turn? What happened that caused you to reconsider? A number of different things. I think first of all, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and we were talking about our lives, and I just said, “You know what? I’ve got a great job. I’m really appreciative of my life. My job’s going well, and it’s fulfilling. Ish. I mean obviously there’s always something else that one would like to do differently perhaps. My family’s great. I live in a comfortable house. I can take the dog for a walk with a view over Swindon, and it’s lovely in the mornings. I’m in a band, playing bass in a band.” And I remember saying, “If I could go back to my 18-year-old self, I know that if I said this is what your life would end up, my 18-year-old self would say, ‘Hey, I’ve made it. I’ve done all right.'” And I remember having this conversation, and then a couple of days later, I was thinking about this, and I had probably a similar question to what I had right back when I was 19. I just went, “Yeah but so what? So what? What do I do next? What is the rest of my life going to be like? And where is meaning and purpose in life?” And that question came up again, the big kind of, “So what?” question. “What is the purpose of life?” And, “What meaning is there?” And, “Is it just manufactured? Is it just a way of kind of coping to get through your existence?” And I kind of had this little alarm bell, going, “Uh oh. Hang on in a minute. Let’s not go there. That’s going to lead me to God again,” so I kind of brushed that under the carpet. But then other things happened. I remember there was a time when I was sitting outside, on a bench outside my house one summer evening, and I was thinking about my career and my job. And again, I enjoyed it and I liked it, but I was also kind of thinking, “I feel that I want to do something different,” and I was kind of going through this little struggle. And this thought came to mind, that, “Hey, one day I would have prayed about this, but I don’t have that opportunity now. That’s not available to me anymore.” And there was a kind of sense of personal reflection, sort of an intellectual exercise. It was just simply asking, I guess, the beginnings of the question, “Why did I walk away? Why did I choose to actually abandon my faith, given that there are other believers who must have gone through similar things, who must have had similar struggles, and probably some who’ve gone through far worse situations than I’ve gone through, and yet have kept their faith?” And I thought of people like Corrie ten Boom and others like that, who I just thought their lives weren’t anywhere near as comfortable as mine is. I was so grateful for the life that I’ve got relative to others, and yet others have stayed the course. I think because I was already in a place where I’d softened a bit and I’d become less defensive and just more open generally, I kind of went through this period of reflection. And I remember lying in bed one night and thinking back through my life, and it was really strange actually. It’s an interesting time because I was kind of looking back at all the different years, every year of my life, from the age of 19, and all the different events that happened, and it was almost like my life was kind of being played out. And I just couldn’t sleep. And I kind of woke up the next morning with that question of, “Had I made the right decision? Was it all about the intellectual doubts or was there something else?” And so I thought, “I need to kind of address this again. What’s my biggest obstacle?” And I thought, “Okay, let’s look at science. Let’s see if there’s anyone who’s said something about this in response to the kind of New Atheist monologue that’s come out,” people like Dawkins and Hitchens and so on. And I don’t remember how I found it. I did a search on my Kindle to look for a good book to read, I just thought, “I want to read something that’s by somebody who’s at a university that is a reputable university and not a Christian institute.” So I kind of did this search. I came across this book. I think it’s called Gunning for God by a man called John Lennox, who is a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and I thought, “Oh, Oxford. That’ll do.” I think the subtext to that was something like “why the New Atheists are missing the mark,” or something like that. And so I read that, and I started to read the writings and hear some of the counter arguments to those typical arguments that I’d seen from the New Atheists, talking about whether religion was the root of all evil, whether it was a poison, as Christopher Hitchens called it, whether Jesus really did rise from the dead and what the evidence of that is. And I also kind of read other books by John Lennox as well. In a short period of time, and I did all this secretly, without my wife knowing, because again I think just being that introverted thinker, I just thought, “Well, this is my little journey. I’ll just think about these things.” And then I think what challenged me was I was confronted with the realization that I’d probably put obstacles in the way of faith that weren’t really legitimate obstacles that were kind of false obstacles and barriers to continuing believing. The big thing for me was about evolution and what our origins are, and my view when I was a Christian was that, if you believed that the Bible is inerrant and is inspired, then you are committed to a six-day creation event and a 6,000-year-old earth, and if you can’t commit to that, then you’re not somebody who takes scripture seriously. And I found that when I read what John Lennox had to say on that, he just said, “Actually, that’s not the case,” that actually that view on the age of the earth and on the six days of creation has been debated for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s not a new thing. And just kind of challenged my thinking on that. And so I started to unpick this view that reason and rationality and logic are tools that are exclusively for use by atheists and nontheists and skeptics and that faith is something that is purely a blind faith. And lots of other things as well. But I found John Lennox, the way he wrote and the way he expressed himself was really clear, really articulate, and also very fair. And I also listened to, or watched online, a couple of sermons by a friend of mine called Gavin who was at university that he gave at his church in Perth about the kingdom and the convent. And it was almost like just being reintroduced to the Gospel again, but hearing the Gospel in the context of the entire Old Testament and New Testament, and I went for a walk with the dog to a little parkland that overlooks Swindon. And I remember I sat down, and I was thinking about all this, and I just thought, “Do you know what? I could investigate everything and keep investigating and then look at the counter claim or counter argument and then look at the counter counter argument and keep going. How much knowledge do I have to amass before I can be satisfied on this question of whether God exists or not and whether he wants to relate to me or not?” And I realized that, if I’m not careful, my project that I’d embarked on would just be this never-ending constant series of questions. And it’s good to question. I’m not saying at all that that shouldn’t happen. It’s absolutely right that we ask questions. But at some point we have to get to a stage where we stop and make a decision. And so I found myself saying the first prayer of nine years, which was, “Okay, God. If You’re there and You’re real, I’m prepared to think about You again,” and that was as far as I was prepared to go. You know, it wasn’t really a prayer. It was more just kind of a statement, and then I walked away and kind of went home. And it was actually just a couple of weeks later that I found myself in the same spot, and I just thought, “Do you know what? It all starts to make sense,” and I don’t know if you recall. There were these pictures that were really popular about twenty years. I think they were computer images. They used to call them Magic Eye, and you’d get a book of them. And they just looked like these really complex patterns, but if you were to kind of look at them carefully, you should see a 3D kind of image by staring at them. Yes. And I can only liken it to this, that what I realized that I needed to do was not focus on the individual patterns, not focus on every single individual question, but to kind of just step back, take time, reflect, and look at the big picture. And when I did that, it just felt to me like there was a coherent message behind all of these questions that I had and all of the answers that I felt were there. What I mean by that is that the thing that made most sense of what I observed in the world around me and what my experience of life was, the thing that made the most sense about that, was that there was a God, that He does exist, that we are created beings, that we are immaterial minds and not just physical brains, that the universe hasn’t existed for eternity and didn’t just pop into existence by magic but had a beginning, and that there is a meaning to life that has been given to us externally by a God who has given life meaning in the first place and given us meaning. And so I then found myself thinking about Psalm 139, which came to mind. I think there’s a part where it says, “You perceive my thoughts from afar,” and I was just reflecting on how that Psalm talks about God knowing our minds and knowing our thoughts, and I thought, “God knows the questions that I’ve got, and He understands them. He knows why I made the decisions that I made,” in that process of reflection, I just prayed the prayer and just said, “God, I’m yours again. I’m back,” and recommitted my life to Him. Wow! That’s an amazing story. And you speak of the process, the journey in such eloquent terms, and I’m very struck by your self-awareness of the different aspects of your journey, whether it be intellectual or existential, your awareness of your openness or resistance. Perhaps the way that you describe yourself as an intellectual—or an introverted thinker, I think you said. You are very thoughtful, and we are the grateful recipients of that thought process, because you’ve made it so clear. Some of your story reminds me a little bit of the way Esther Meek describes what she calls knowing God in her book, called Longing to Know. She describes that same thing as the 3D picture. It is there to see, but you have to have the intention and the willingness to reflect to see it. So in the same way in which you sat back, you thought, you studied, you listened, you reflected, and then the picture came into being. It made sense. You were able to see all of these things coming together, like you say, the world around you and the experience of your own life, that the Christian worldview is, like you say, coherent. It’s comprehensive. It seems to connect with what we experience in reality. What a beautiful story you have! I do have a question, a couple of things with regard to your wife. One is that you resisted the mocking, the ridicule of the Christian, and I wonder if some of that had to do with the fact that you knew Christians personally easy to have an us/them mentality. It’s easy to dehumanize or degrade the other, but when you’re actually married to someone who calls themself a Christian, when you have friends, like you say, that are intellectual, that are loving, that actually belong to you, I think that that’s not an easy determination, in terms of, “I’ll just ridicule and mock and dismiss.” You can’t just do that because you experientially know differently. And so I wondered if you could speak to that. And I also wondered, with regard to your wife, because I know that people listening have a spouse or someone they love who does not believe, who sees things quite differently, I wondered how your wife’s response to your disbelief affected, not only your perspective about Christianity but your willingness to come back to it. Yeah. It wasn’t easy. I think when it first became clear that I was having doubts about my Christian faith and particularly through the period where I made clear my intentions to leave church and not believe anymore, I think the initial response from my wife was… She was shocked, and she was concerned. And rightly so, because faith is really important, and we met as believers, and we had shared a common love for God and each other. We’d got married under covenant before God. And so all these things were important. And I wasn’t naive to the impact that this would have on Liz, and so it was absolutely right that she responded initially with that shock and that concern, and you know, “What does this mean for us? What does this mean for our marriage?” And I tried to assure her that, “Look, we’ll find a way to carry on, and we’ll just have to kind of get through things. I think probably the biggest challenge for Liz and the thing that she struggled with most was just kind of knowing how to respond around me. Knowing how to not push too hard. She certainly didn’t want to stop going to church herself, and she didn’t want to stop taking the children to church, and we agreed fairly early on. I think actually she was quite firm on that. She said, “This is your journey, but I don’t want this to result in the kids not going to church,” and I said, “That’s fine.” And I think probably, if I’m honest, I said, “That’s fine,” and then behind the scenes, whispered, “Don’t worry. I’ll get them somehow. They will hear what I have to say on this by some other gratuitous route.” So I think that was the initial response to that, and it was difficult. We had to kind of work things out. And there were difficult conversations. There were awkward moments. I think I probably said some things that were just a bit insensitive, really, that was just me blurting out kind of different, new feelings and thoughts that I’d had about the Christian faith. So we had to wrestle with that and work it out, but I think, underneath that, what mattered was… She was definitely determined to keep her marriage intact, and so was I, and I had no doubt that Liz wanted me to believe again, of course, and that the people in the church would want me to believe again, but after a couple of years, things just kind of settled down. I think from Liz’s point of view, I know she was praying for me, and I know that she prayed, “Lord, may it only go so far and no more,” because part of the—and I guess this is something that perhaps Christians do wrestle with, is, if you don’t have an objective morality, then where’s that going to lead you? Where does the buck stop? Where do you get your boundaries from? And thankfully I was really keen to make sure that there could be no accusations made against me that I’d suddenly gone from this life of being a Christian to a life of doing all the wrong kind of things and a life of depravity and so on, so I was really keen to make sure that, just because I don’t believe anymore doesn’t mean I’m going to go away and get drunk every night and do drugs or whatever. I still feel that there are boundaries in life, and I want to honor those. And I think, once we’d kind of had that period of time where we both got that assurance that our marriage could keep going and that we could still relate to each other, albeit with this change in belief that I’d had, we just kind of got settled into normal life. But I think—it has to be said. I know Liz would say to someone who has a spouse who doesn’t believe, is to be gentle, to not push too hard, and to keep praying. I remember Liz actually—this is the year leading me up to me coming back to faith, Liz invited me. She’d gone to a new church by this stage that I wasn’t familiar with, and she said, “Oh, we’re having a picnic on a Sunday afternoon. Would you like to come? You don’t have to. It’d just be really nice if you could be there because it’s a nice sunny day.” And I said yes. And I said yes because I was not in that stage of being really defensive, so I thought, “Okay, why not?” And it was just a picnic. There was another Sunday afternoon where there was a barbecue at someone’s house, and I came along, and if I heard a conversation where people got onto the God stuff, I’d walk away and mingle somewhere else, but I remember having a conversation with somebody about music for quite a long time, and it was a really lovely conversation. And so I think that epitomizes where I was at. I’m prepared to just meet with people. And that really helped, I think. Just being able to connect with people. And I think that helped Liz as well, to kind of see that I was willing to do that. So yeah. I think that’ll be very helpful. Jim, as we’re winding up here, can you speak to the curious skeptic who might be reflecting a bit, perhaps? Or curious. Just about their own beliefs. Perhaps thinking about the meaning and purpose in their own life or wherever it is they are or perhaps thinking that there is no intellectual substance to Christianity. There’s a lot of things that you can speak to. What would you tell someone like that, who might be listening? The one thing that I do feel passionately about is this view that reason and rationality and logic are devices that are solely for the use of atheists and skeptics and nontheists, and that belief in the God of Christianity, is a belief that you can reach that is completely consistent with your ability to reason and to think. I think the idea that reason and rationality is not available to the Christian, or that the Christian faith and belief in God cannot be supported rationally, I think that’s the one thing that I would say I really would like to challenge people on. There are people of all backgrounds, people of all levels of education, from Nobel prize winning physicists to sports personalities to former terrorists, in every different country, all forms of culture, all different types of culture, throughout history, in different times in the timeline of human history, who have found a reason to believe. And I think, for me, the encouragement that I would give is to make a distinction between teasing apart the arguments and trying to understand difficulties and finding answers to these questions and try and see that as something that is important, but it’s not the whole picture. There’s a really interesting introduction in a book called Basic Christianity by John Stott, and he talks about how a young man in his congregation was having questions and met with him and said, “You know, I just don’t think I believe anymore. I’m going to be leaving church,” and John Stott said to him, “If I was to answer all of your questions to your intellectual satisfaction, would you change the way you lived?” And the look on the young man’s face said that he wouldn’t. And so it kind of begs the question, so is it just about intellectual thinking or is it something else? John Stott said that this man’s problem wasn’t intellectual. It was moral. if it’s with your heart that you believed, is it not also the case it’s with your heart that you don’t believe? And I think that’s the thing that I would put out there. Take yourself away from all of the noise of the debates for a moment. Go and sit on a hillside. Go and take yourself away to a quiet place. And give yourself that room to examine yourself and to think about, “What is that point that I would get to where I say, ‘Okay, I’ve answered enough. I’ve searched enough. I’ve discovered enough. And now is a time to make a decision.'” Because if you do that and you find that actually the answer is, “Well, there never will be,” then you have to ask yourself the question, “Is it really an intellectual reason why I don’t believe in God? Is that really the barrier that’s preventing me from making that decision?” I think that’s really excellent. Very challenging. Like you say, challenging and encouraging, I think, for all of us, in terms of why we believe, what we believe, and what we tell ourselves about why we believe what we believe. Sometimes those can be two very different things. Yeah. If you were to speak to the Christian who really has a heart for those who don’t see Christianity as true or good or real, what would you say to them? I would say don’t put up artificial barriers to someone coming to meet and be a disciple of Christ. the advice would be be gentle, be respectful, always give a reason for the hope that we have but do it with gentleness and respect, and all of those things. And that’s probably the advice a lot of people would give. But I think my biggest thing would be that, if we make coming to God really difficult for people, we shouldn’t be surprised when people find it really hard to come to faith, and again, as I mentioned earlier, if we insist that the only interpretation of Genesis, for example, is a six-day creation and the 6,000-year-old earth—and I’m not getting into that debate—I’m just saying that if we make that a condition, or any other doctrinal point a condition, other than the core doctrines of the Christian faith, if we make that a condition of belief, then we’re just making it really, really hard for people to see the invitation of God. And so I’d say just reflect on that. And pray for people. A lot of people were praying for me all the way through, but I mentioned that I spent a year in Kenya after university, and I spent a year there with a chap called Philip, who was from a similar place in London where I lived, and we got to know each other throughout that year and became really good friends. He went on to do mission work in Tanzania, and after I had left faith, I had just lost touch with him, so I’d not spoken to him for about 10 years at the point that I came back to faith. I didn’t know that he knew that I’d fallen away. So I kind of reconnected with him on Facebook, got his email address, and I sent him an email and I told him my story. And I said, “I hope you’re sitting down, but nine years ago, I abandoned my faith and became an atheist, but recently I came back to faith.” And he was studying in the US. He got his doctorate in New Testament Studies, and he was supervised by someone called Craig Keener. I don’t know if you know of him. Yes. Oh, yes. And so Philip was studying for his PhD, and he’s a really great guy, very faithful, very British. He described himself as so British that even British people think he’s British. And not one to exaggerated, but he emailed me back, and he said, “Jim, I was really thrilled to hear from you. By the way, I actually knew that you’d fallen away because word had got around the grapevine, and I was really shocked back then, especially given your experience of being a Christian and all the reasons why you were a Christian, and I prayed for you, but over the years, apathy set in and I forgot and time moved on.” And then he said, “Until recently, a few months ago, you were in a dream, and after I had this dream, and it wasn’t a very specific dream, but you were in it, and I woke up with a strong sense to pray for you every day, which I did, at least every day, if not every week, from that time on,” and he said, “So I was thrilled when you reached out to me soon after and even more thrilled to find out that you’d actually come back to faith when I was hoping that you would just be reconsidering God again.” And this just knocked me for six, because I just thought that moment that he’d had that dream, the moment that he’d had that conviction to pray for me, thousands of miles away, with ten years of silence, that very moment that he decided to pray for me was the moment that I started to consider God again. And so the message is just don’t forget that this isn’t just a physical kind of thing that’s happening here. This is spiritual, and prayer is important. Keep praying for people. And don’t give up hope. Again, that’s not to suggest that it was only Philip’s prayer of course. Because I know a lot of people were praying for me, and I really appreciate that, but I just found it remarkable that I really felt that prompting to pray at that time was specifically the right thing for that time as I was going through that journey of rediscovering God. That’s extraordinary! And it is truly a word for all of us, how, I think as you spoke of earlier in your story, there’s a sense in which Christianity can become too ordinary for us as Christians, and it can become less and lesser and less related to our daily lives. But you are a vivid reminder that that—it’s really not a good thing for many different reasons. First of all, just the fact that those who really appreciate that the Christian life is extraordinary and it is supernatural and that there is a God who oversees and superintends and engages in, as you said at the very beginning, in your journeying to God for the first time, He’s a Person. A Person who we can know. A Person who knows us and loves us infinitely. And so much so that He listens to the prayers of His people and that lives are changed. What a beautiful portrait that you have painted of your life, both towards God, away from God, and then even more robustly toward this beautiful and full relationship with God that is not only intellectual but existential and makes sense of your life and makes sense of all of reality, even. So thank you for spending the time. I think it was well worth spending this time to hear your entire story. So thank you, Jim, so much for coming on board. You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to speak with you, and just thanks for the opportunity to share my story. You’re so welcome, Jim. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jim’s story. You can find out more about the resources he mentioned in the episode notes listed on the podcast page. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at the thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.  

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Former skeptic Jeremy Evans comfortably presumed his atheism was true until a sobering event caused him to ask life’s biggest questions. Dream Center Non-Profit: www.dreamcenterevansville.org Unbelievable Podcast Link 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. 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 Reason for God by Tim Keller Episode Transcript 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 thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. 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.

We presume we are right and correct in our beliefs. But, sometimes we are challenged to consider why we believe what we do. In today’s podcast, former atheist Robert Kunda takes a closer look at his atheistic presumptions, opening him to new possibilities. Robert mentioned the influence of these Christian thinkers: Hugh Ross (on science): https://reasons.org/about/hugh-ross C.S. Lewis (argument from desire): Mere Christianity William Lane Craig (debates): www.reasonablefaith.org James White (debates): https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/bio/jwhite.html 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 thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. 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.