How I Became a Christian

GPT image generation has gotten crazy good

I became a Christian this weekend.

Trust me, I’m just as surprised by this news as you are.

I want to share how I got here and where my conviction came from, not for the typical “share your testimony to convert more people” evangelical reasons, but rather to clarify my own thought process and perhaps explain how a self-styled rationalist can become a Christian.

I grew up in southern Mississippi with a southern Baptist preacher for a grandfather. Before my parents divorced when I was 12 years old, we were in church most Sundays. I went to vacation bible school, I went to Wednesday service, I joined the youth group and participated in the youth group activities. Hell, I even had one of those wildly emotional tear filled “confessions” and “conversion” experiences around 14 or 15 years of age.

To be honest, I never really took the faith seriously, in the slightest. I found the whole thing somewhere between baffling and silly; something I had to do to fit into American Deep South culture, to avoid becoming a social pariah, something to do so I could join all the fun youth group trips everybody was doing.

I always had deep questions about the faith and the theology that no one around me could provide an intellectually satisfying answer to. Why does evil exist if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent? In what reality does it make sense for the creator of all creation to appear in person once in the Bronze age then slide quietly into the background forever? Are we really sure the Bible is true and accurate?

Some of these questions seemed facially absurd to me; that there was no way a justified true belief could arise as an answer to them.

The responses I got to these questions invariably fell into one of two buckets: either these were not permissible questions a good Christian should be asking, or some milquetoast “The Lord works in mysterious ways, you’ll figure it out when you’re older.”

Considering that none of the spiritual leaders in my community took the faith intellectually seriously, I concluded that neither should I. That no one actually believed this stuff, that they were all just larping like me; that it was a kind fiction we all just kind of went along with because it was the dominant social convention of our tribe.

Then I went to college and began reading systematic works of philosophy. I read Rand and her systematic works of nonfiction, the Objectivist works on metaphysics and epistemology. I read Aristotle, read Nietzsche (really, I actually read him, not just read some summaries and claimed I read him, although it’s been so long I don’t remember much of it). Sartre, Camus, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Hume, even Foucault. I read Sam Harris, Dawkins, the horsemen of New Atheism.

I became a radical libertarian and radical, angry atheist. I learned two complementary conclusions: religion in general and Christianity in particular are stupid, irrational, and silly. And serious intellectuals, real Smart People, are not believers.

My mom, who has cystic fibrosis, almost died in 2016, further hardening my anti-Christian resolve.

I simply refused to believe a just God would inflict such suffering on such an innocent, beautiful soul as my wonderful mother.

I more or less stayed that way until two, maybe three years ago. I simply didn’t think about religion or Christianity much at all, really.

But slowly, I began to reconsider.

First, I noticed a pattern in my life: without fail, every single man I knew who was kind, dependable, high integrity, generous, gracious, understanding, disciplined, successful, and Good, in all the meanings of that word, was also a devout Christian.

My mentor, Joel Bomgar, a successful entrepreneur who pulled off what is to my knowledge the only successful nine figure tech exit in Mississippi history, is a devout Christian whose faith guides nearly every aspect of his life.

My father-in-law, who built a prosperous and successful life from nothing, is likewise guided daily by his faith.

One of my closest friends from college is one of the most finely trained warriors on Earth in the Naval Special Warfare Group, and his faith is utterly unshakable; in fact, he credits his faith with his utterly lack of fear and incredible bravery in the job he does protecting us day in and day out.

 These examples made me notice something: along my professional journey, I likewise met billionaires, titans of technology and industry, men who had created some of the most impactful companies in the world today. While they are all wildly financially successful, nearly every single one either has a preposterously dysfunctional personal life, or just are not good, high integrity people in other ways that matter. It was as small as being personally rude and unlikeable for some, multiple divorces and abandoned children for others. Of course, there were a few who were and are well adjusted stable people while also being wildly successful and not Christian, but it seemed to me that there was a clear correlation between the faithful and being a holistically Good person.

I began noticing this around the same time public intellectuals I (previously, to be clear) admired like Jordan Peterson (RIP to the artist formerly known as Jordan Peterson), or public intellectuals I still admire like Peter Theil. I began exploring the social sciences literature around the impacts of Christianity in particular on cultures and societies and saw the clear empirical correlation between high levels of Christian religiosity and the informal cultural and social institutions which beget a prosperous, successful, growing and flourishing people: high social trust, low rates of crime, high adherence to contracts and agreements, respect for property rights and the rule of law, etc. Joseph Heinrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World is a great systematic review of this literature. In effect, and to drastically oversimplify an enormous body of literature, Christianity seemed clearly good for societies at scale. The decline of the United States can be clearly causally linked to the decline of Christianity here.

I thus began to consider Christianity in a new light: perhaps the actual belief system is still silly, but it’s clearly meta-good for society writ large. I might not believe, but it would be good to live in a society where everyone else does. Call it Straussian Christianity: I don’t believe, but I think the rest of you people should.

This was a satisfying place to be, intellectually. I could retain my self-perception of intellectual superiority and pretention, while gaining all the benefits of living in a Christian culture and community. I could, in effect, have my cake and eat it too. I wasn’t one of those plebs that believed, those sweet summer children, but I could objectively recognize that it was good that they did believe; that I, and those around me, benefitted from their belief, silly though it may be.

This equilibrium was fragile, unstable. Evidence kept mounting that I was missing something critical.

First, some of my closest, dearest friends converted to hardcore traditional Catholicism, insofar as I understand what that means (I don’t). These are people I respect intellectually, so I found this genuinely incomprehensible. Further, as I worked my way deeper into political power centers on the right, I kept running into high impact, efficacious, erudite people who were and are also devout believers. Not just milquetoast Christians who attend a nondenominal “Jesus is my boyfriend” Pine Lake type evangelical Christianity, either. These people are hardcore Catholics or Reform theologians in their own right. I recognized that some of these people were clearly more intelligent, agentic, and effective in the world than I am.

That didn’t make any sense to me; it violated my mental model of the world. A model where truly intelligent people didn’t believe. Sure, we might all agree the plebs should believe, but smart people don’t do that.

Then those same dear friends who became devout Catholics experienced some of the worst personal tragedy I’ve ever seen. My dearest beloved friends Nate and Anja had a second child that suffered a severe, catastrophic birth injury as a result of unspeakable, borderline malicious negligence and medical malpractice. That child, who was genetically and biologically healthy before this heinous injury, is now severely disabled, unable to speak, walk, or even crawl. He cannot feed himself and is wheelchair bound for life, fed through a feeding tube forever. We will be blessed by the Lord if he lives to 20 years of age.

And through this tragedy, these friends graciously soldiered on. They handled a horrific event which would have emotionally and psychologically broken most normal people, including me, with grace and dignity. And they did it explicitly, expressly, and directly because of their Catholic faith.

This was utterly and completely incomprehensible to me. What was it about this belief system that gave them such fortitude? Such resolve? Such power?

At the same time, two other close, dear friends either became more devout in their faith, or I started noticing that faith for the first time; I’m not sure which. All of them, Catholic or Protestant, seemed more emotionally and psychologically complete and whole than me. And all of them kindly but firmly encouraged me to open up my closed mind, to explore the faith intellectually once more.

It seemed clear to me that I was missing something, that something wasn’t making sense. So I dove in once more.

I read CS Lewis, Tim Keller, Aquinas, the Bible. One of these friends, Cameron, was gracious enough to buy me an expensive and extremely well sourced study Bible. I watched sermons they would send me, lectures from Biblical scholars. My close friends Cameron, Nate, and JC humored me for hours and hours as I peppered and grilled them with questions about the faith. Again, I was shocked at the level of intellectual sophistication I was encountering. These were not and are not stupid people.

I read JD Vance’s explanation of his faith, multiple times. Here was a man I know for an ironclad fact is more intelligent, agentic, and successful than I am. And here he was, publicly explaining in detail how he came to and strengthened his faith into what it is today.

I learned that many of the most influential scientists, inventors, and thinkers from the 17^th to 20^th centuries were all devout Christians as well. Not all of them, of course, but far more than I imagined directly and explicitly contributed their insights, their discoveries, and their pathbreaking intellectual work to their faith. Again, my preconceived notions about the Christian faith were shattered. Intellectual titans were not supposed to be Christians; that’s against the rules. That’s not how this works.

Yet here they were.

Slowly, one by one, fitfully and painfully, my objections started to fall.

I learned that there is a deep intellectual, historical, and anthropological history of the Bible itself. The atheist objections around the Bible’s authorship, translation, collation, and publication fell, slowly, one by one. Wesley Huff, in particular, was quite helpful and impactful for me here.

The actual theology, when examined and considered carefully as one would consider any systematic philosophy, I found to my shock and surprise was internally logically consistent and whole. In fact, it contained deep and profound wisdom about how to live the Good life, how to achieve Aristotelian virtue, eudemonia, fulfillment, and all that is right and good in the world, to a truly baffling degree. A 2,000-year-old book I found time and again contained the answers to questions we have asked over and over again in modernity. I found the answers to seemingly intractable modern societal ills in every other page of the Bible. Those who claim the theology is contradictory or not internally logically consistent deliberately misunderstand and misconstrue what they read; they do not engage with Christian philosophers and theologians in good faith.

Then there is the evolutionary argument, the lindy argument. Christianity was directly causally responsible, either in part or in whole, for the development of modern society and the United States in particular. Much like English common law which I revere so much, Christianity is a few millennia old theological system which has developed, grown, and strengthened over a few thousand years. It worked to build the most prosperous societies the world has ever seen. We owe modernity in whole or in large part to Christianity.

What are the odds a few French, English, and Russian thinkers in the 20^th century suddenly came up with a better systematic philosophy than that which has passed the ultimate test: the test of long time?

Thus, after a few years of on and off concerted intellectual exploration on my part, I ended up in what felt like a cramped, tense, compressed position: it seems clear to me that my life would be better in almost every respect if I were a believer, and that there is clear intellectual support for doing so; that it is not this silly, dogmatic, irrational thing which I had previously imagined.

Yet I couldn’t do it. My rationalist brain simply utterly refused to accept the proposition that an omnipotent omniscient Creator of all creation would choose to act in the world in the manner Christianity claims He has. Why visit one time in the bronze age and then fade into the background, never to obviously display Himself or interact ever again?

I’m a big sci-fi fan, so I kept thinking back to the sophon in the Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem trilogy. Surely God could paint Himself onto the retina or visual cortex of all humans simultaneously as the sophon would do to people in that series? Surely He could very deliberately and irrefutably reveal Himself to us, to me, as He once did in the Old Testament and in the life of Christ?

Then I witnessed, for the first time in modern American history, the deliberate and brutal murder of a true Christian martyr, Charlie Kirk.

I saw a man who stood, publicly and proudly, on his Christian faith be killed for it.

I saw millions of people celebrate his death.

Something in the world is broken. Something that cannot be explained by rationalist conceptions I held.

The rationalist just-so story about critical theory and nihilism and alienation and detachment all cobbled together still could not satisfactorily explain what we are seeing.

These people are not animated by a consistent, coherent, well thought out alternative philosophical system to Christianity.

The average public-school teacher celebrating the death of this martyr have not read Marcuse, Gramsci, Foucault, Fanon. I have, and the things I have seen people saying and doing were not consonant with the consistent, sophisticated worldview I presumed them to have.

There is a throughline which undergirds this evil ideology. A throughline I hadn’t been able to see before, although friends (looking at you, Nate) tried to point it out.

The simplest, most logical explanation of the modern left is simple: it is a perfect inversion of Christianity and the moral, ethical, and social norms which flow from it.

They hate white people. They hate capitalism. They hate agency, efficacy, talent, merit. They hate beauty, celebrate the grotesque. They hate family, order, structure. They are not radical communist ideologues per se.

They simply hate every single mark, tenant, and indicator of Christianity.

And unbelievably to me, this is precisely as Christian theology has explained the dark forces of evil work in this world: through the direct and clear inversion of Christ.

I noticed, scrolling Reddit as they celebrated the brutal death of this martyr, that nearly every single time they described the enemy which they believed they had collectively vanquished, the icon of that which they seek to utterly destroy, the descriptors nearly invariably started with the same word. That word wasn’t conservative, it wasn’t male, it wasn’t white, it wasn’t Republican, it wasn’t right wing, it wasn’t fascist.

The first word they typically used to label and describe that which they hate is Christian.

Everything that I know as the Good in this world has Christ at its root.

Everything that I know as the Evil in this world has the inversion of Christ at its root.

In a weird way, our enemies recognized this before I did: everything they stand against is Christian. Everything we stand for has its roots in Christ and Christianity.

In some deep and profound way that I’m only now beginning to understand, Christianity is, in the deepest and most foundational and pervasive definition of the term, true.

Still, there was a part of me that resisted this conclusion, and for the silliest, most embarrassing of reasons: I am at my core an insecure human, fallen, just as we all are. I didn’t want to be like the chuds. Chuds believe in Christianity; enlightened intellectuals most assuredly do not.

But then I thought more deeply. I know a few people who are far, far more intelligent than me, who are also devout believers. Augustus Dornick, founder of Rainmaker Corp., a company that literally manipulates the weather, is younger than me, more agentic than me, more successful than me, and far more intelligent than me.

He is also a devout and public believer in Christ.

Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, has a beautiful family, wife, and children and has successfully built a working prototype of a nuclear reactor while being several years my younger. Not only is he my intellectual superior, he's succeeded at every aspect of life far more rapidly than I.

And he is explicitly, publicly motivated by his faith in Christ.

Not only was my intellectual insecurity silly, but it was also just empirically wrong.

I finally stopped resisting the conclusion I had been in the slow, painful process of coming to for several years.

Christianity is simply true.

The Bible is the living word of the God of Gods, the Creator of all Creation.

Christ died on the cross for the ultimate forgiveness of our sins (a radical social and ethical revolution which solved the problem of scapegoating and tribal warfare which had plagued humanity since early days of civilization in Sumer, and which only Christianity has successfully solved to this day). He rose from the dead, conquered death itself, and sent His apostles out into the world to spread this gospel far and wide.

This is a justified true belief I now hold, and one which undergirds the fight into which we as a civilization are now entering.

This doesn’t mean all of my questions have been answered, nor that I have the explanation for all the mysteries and questions surrounding the faith.

But it does mean I am now a Christian, and you should be too.