For my first post here at Classic Christians, I wanted to share my testimony—a common task for those religiously speaking in the public domain. While I hope this post can be generally inspiring to you, I also have an additional thesis to share, one that cuts through the unique vicissitudes and influences of my life: We, as human beings, are dead in our trespasses, as Paul articulates in Ephesians 2:1. We are products of sinful people and a broken world, and everything we think or do is nested in a framework of meaning, ideas, and predispositions to which we have been subjected. In this state of apparent hopelessness and nihilism, Christ reaches out to us and presents us with a simple offer. Jesus reaches out to us and gives us the opportunity to crucify ourselves to this world; instead of attempting to flail about in this materialistic domain, Christ prods us to humbly acknowledge our own predicament and grab His hand, at which time He will make us truly alive and open us up to the transcendent—the Kingdom of God. I say these things because I have lived them, as I will express throughout this testimony. Your story may sound quite different from mine, but I suspect that, under the surface, many of you can relate to these themes. May God bless you as you read and contemplate these things.
The Beginning
As is the case with all of you, I was born into a particular set of social, cultural, and economic circumstances, through which I was continually shaped according to the fallen nature of man, which I had inherited (Romans 3:10-18). In particular, we are all inheritors of specific religious contexts; therefore, we often absorb many of our initial conceptualizations of religion from man-made sources—our parents, community, and culture. Unfortunately, I was not effectively exposed to many transcendent sources of religious inspiration, such as the Bible and Sacraments, since those things were not at the forefront of my life, nor was I particularly interested in them.
As a young child, I was fortunate to attend church regularly: my maternal family were members of the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), a small, moderately liberal Christian denomination rooted in Wesleyan-Arminianism, the Holiness movement, and the restorationist tradition. I cannot speak to the overall merits of the Church of God, only my experiences growing up somewhat affiliated with it.
Growing up in this environment, I perceived Christianity as mostly a cultural, familial, and social phenomenon. I attended church to meet family and make friends, and I took the vaguely Christian values around me for granted. As someone in a somewhat rural, conservative American milieu, the surrounding ‘Christian’ values were more reflective of rural Midwestern American culture than they were of traditional Christianity: cursing, sexuality of any kind, tattoos, drinking, and smoking were highly taboo, for ostensibly Christian reasons, but rarely did people explicitly connect these moral values to articulated biblical foundations, at least as far as I was aware as a child. Given these factors and my youthful immaturity, I was simply disinterested in religious institutions, practices, values, and information.
Those around me presented God as a given—an unquestionable and, hence, somewhat mundane axiom; therefore, I thought little about Him. Like so many cultural Christians, God was a sort of genie in my life, to whom I directed my requests and from whom I desperately hoped for good fortune. However, as I grew older, I developed a sense of existential insecurity and anxiety, which eventually descends upon most developing individuals. Perhaps due to some fire-and-brimstone influences I had taken in, I began to be deathly afraid of hell, and I had little assurance in how to avoid it for me and my loved ones. I came to blame God for evil and my fear of hell since I saw evil and hell as God’s creation. Of course, I did not realize that evil is not a created thing since it is, in reality, a lack of something—a lack of God and His goodness. God did not create evil; instead, we brought upon it through the act of our wills in rebelling and distancing ourselves from God.
Simultaneously to the development of these sentiments, I was still trying to treat God and Jesus as my wish-granters. God was then both a source of anxiety and an authority to which I desperately appealed in an attempt to alleviate this anxiety. I would pray every day, begging God to spare me from hell and prevent tragedy from befalling in my life. I was not developing substantive faith; I was adopting misconceptions and emotional dependence.
Eventually, my tenuous belief in God began unraveling. I was a deeply insecure and reserved individual, and I yearned to be and appear as being intelligent. As an edgy and somewhat depressed adolescent, I quickly fell into the post-Enlightenment rationalism that “New Atheists” were extensively promoting online in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I wanted my mind to contain the whole universe. I wanted to be in control. Being unendingly skeptical and questioning made me feel better than those who made truth claims, which helped me cope with my insecurity. I began to associate all of Christianity with the culturally constructed phenomena around which I had grown up; therefore, God became, to me, a silly cultural construction and a conceptual and intellectual source of great suffering in my formative years.
I was also disenchanted with the fruits of Christianity, identifying many problems with the Christians and Christian communities around me, and the videos I was watching online were further pointing me to these flaws. Then, I attributed these instances of human brokenness to inherent flaws in the notion of God and the contents of Scripture, and I ignorantly criticized theology and the Bible alongside the New Atheist influencers. All these forces culminated in my eventual disavowal of all things religious, a position I retained until early adulthood.
Emergent Adolescence and Teen Years
During my early teenage years, my family stopped attending church, and I continued to descend into secularism; however, God also placed some positive religious influences into my life. I was a member of a Christian athletic team in which I was one of the few people to be non-religious. In this environment, I witnessed many more positive fruits of Christianity. The parents in the team were generous, the families were largely stable, and I knew so many kind religious people. Within this new milieu, I became self-conscious of my shortcomings, even if I did not interpret these through a spiritual lens. I realized that I had few concrete moral values, I was struggling with sins, and I did not appear to possess the same level of generosity as others. Instead of developing virtues, I became consumed by radical deconstruction, and I was mostly preoccupied with picking myself apart and dwelling within myself, wallowing in self-pity. I had no positive vision for my purpose in existing, nor did I have any answer to my sins or the worldly evils I observed.
At this time, my family also began falling apart. My father had been wrestling with religion all his life, oscillating between periods of apparent religious devotion and radical sinfulness and brokenness. He was dysfunctional and made my family life chaotic and even abusive at times. I had no worldview through which to comprehend what was happening, and I once more had no answer to it; therefore, I sunk further into a sort of nihilism, in which I was simultaneously grasping for intellectual power through which I could confront the world and provide for myself some sense of security and control.
Toward the end of high school, I began dabbling in rudimentary philosophy and developed a fledgling moral understanding. I became a robotic consequentialist, pragmatist, and libertarian, seeking to maximize my value to society, promote human pleasure, and further liberty through detached calculations and a distant sense of philanthropy. To say the least, my values were half-baked, but I hung onto them, once more grasping for any source of meaning and consistency within my life. It was with this mentality that I first entered university, finally distancing myself from my family and attempting to formulate my own independent identity and purpose.
College Conversion
In college, I first felt a real draw toward Christianity, after years of overconfident skepticism and fervent Agnosticism. I knew several believers, attended occasional Bible studies and had hours-long conversations and debates regarding religion with my friends. Despite this newfound curiosity, I still wanted to demand that Christianity fit within my narrow perspective: I wanted to contain faith within the constructs of rationalism and materialism. Insofar as Christianity transcended materialistic confines, I still looked down upon it. I surveyed rational arguments for God but always seemed to find cracks in them sufficient to plant doubt, and that doubt fueled my skepticism, which then justified my unbelief.
At the same time, however, I started to envy Christians. I respected the moral guidance they possessed, the insights they could affirm within the universe, and their explanations for the problems of evil. Meanwhile, my secular philosophies were crumbling before me. My insecurity and feelings of meaninglessness grew, and the world began feeling smaller and smaller—less and less worth experiencing or existing within. I held firmly to my skepticism but got nothing from it, and the rational conclusions I came to failed to produce good fruit in me or the secular institutions I observed worldwide. It was at this time I began taking Christianity more seriously.
As I studied Christianity with a more open mind, I began dispelling some of my prior misconceptions. I also gained the ability to differentiate between what was Christian and what was, indeed, culturally constructed. I realized that many of my concerns regarding the faith were instead with the cultural baggage that surrounded it, and I started to try to view Christianity apostolically and scripturally, instead of blindly accepting the presumptions of Christianity furthered by either American culture or recent liberal reinventions. I fell in love, not with the Christianity of my youth, but with a newfound yet age-old faith—a living faith—that I began to see in the Bible and learn about from pastors, theologians, and historians.
As my understanding of Christianity deepened, I began craving the transcendent—the aspects of the religion that transcended the materialistic framework in which I had once imprisoned myself. I developed an affinity for the sacred, as communicated through beautiful music, architecture, and Sacrament. These pure instantiations of Christianity became a window through which I could see the Kingdom of God, and through which I could see far beyond the evils of this world.
For once in my life, I became internally motivated to develop virtue, and my self-worth was no longer based on my abstract societal value or the degree of external validation I could receive. My insecurities faded as I focused on the person of Christ, seeing in Him my value, worth, and meaning.
My connection with Christianity was still confined to intellectual assertions and emotional sentimentality, however: I struggled to obtain genuine and firm belief and conviction. I wanted to be Christian and even began identifying as such, but my materialism still held me back. I fell into heresies, grew perpetually discontent with any denomination with which I identified, and plateaued in my attempt to further myself in virtue. I still wanted to control my religion and faith: I wished to use Christianity as a tool to improve my life and offer me a supernatural means of understanding and controlling the scary world around me. I had yet to recognize the essence of the faith and entrust my life to God.
One day, I spontaneously snapped. I was in my car after just having gotten home, and I randomly began weeping and crying out to God. I told Him that I was failing, that I needed Him, and that I was willing to give up control. While this event did not instantaneously resolve my problems, it did mark the beginning of my journey of learning to trust God and relinquish control to Him. In some sense, I had finally fully realized that I was dead in my trespasses. A few months after this impassioned prayer, I finally got baptized and became a part of the body of Christ.
I still struggle with the desire for control and anxieties over the future, and I am certainly not morally perfect or replete with virtue. I am still learning to lean upon Christ and humbly receive His sanctifying grace. However, I have also come a long way, by the glory of God, and I am excited for every opportunity to open myself up to Christ’s further work in my life. The more I learn about the early history and theological essence of Christianity, the more I decidedly revere it and the less I care for the contemporary innovations, cultural baggage, and other social constructions that are associated with the faith. One of my main goals in this blog is to promote and advocate for the historical essence of Christianity I love—the sacredness, reverential sacramentality, and Good News that underlies the eternal and universal Church. I am disinterested in excessive sectarianism and, instead, have grown to appreciate the insights and perspective that each historically grounded branch and denomination of Christianity introduces, insofar as they are hearkening to the essence of Scripture and the apostolic deposit of the faith.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading my testimony. I hope it was interesting and perhaps even inspiring for you. I will continue to develop many of the themes in this testimony throughout my future blog posts, and I hope I have rendered them coherently within the context of my faith narrative. I would be happy to talk to anyone who has questions, is struggling with their faith, or is feeling called to Christianity from a position of secularism or another religious background.