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A Muslim Catechesis

As I grew older, my training was supplemented with other catechetical materials. Those presented a far more juridical view of religion that contrasted sharply with what I had been exposed to before. Some of these teachings were unproblematic. Even though my family may not have prayed five times daily (the Musim standard), I could see regular prayer as a good thing that brought us closer to God. Others, however, seemed arbitrary. Why were women allowed to wear silk, but not men? What did that have to do with faith?

My parents viewed religion as important, but largely private, so there was little interaction with the broader Muslim community. I would typically accompany my father to the two annual Eid prayers (on the major feast days of the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting, and the commemoration of Abraham’s sacrifice), but that was the extent of our participation in public worship. Although the religious education I received at home was relatively free of legalism, it bordered on indifferentism. (This is what we believe, so we follow these rules. Christians have their own religion; they follow different rules. Hindus, too, have their religion, etc.) Even from an early age, I could tell that this was at variance with the fundamental teachings of the Quran. Why would God insist that we follow his guidance if different groups of people faced different expectations? And if expectations were different, then how could the Quran — to use its own words — be a message “for all people”?

My early religious education emphasized the Quran as the word of God, but subordinated it to the Hadith and Sunnah (sayings and practices of Mohammed). As I grew older and began to read the Quran in translation, I conceived of God as a benevolent monarch who deeply desired that every person be reconciled to him through an act of faith. Most of all, God was close and intimately involved in our lives. He was rational in a sense that far transcended, but in no way contradicted, our own rationality. There was no trace of the voluntarism characteristic of so much Islamic thought. Although my understanding lacked depth, I can see in hindsight how God was at work in those days, laying the foundations for the faith I hold today.

A Christian Catechesis

At home, I was not taught much about Christianity. I was told that Christians claimed to follow Jesus Christ, but made the grave mistake of worshipping him as God, instead of simply acknowledging him as a prophet. Christians believed some of the same things we believed, but had also invented priests, religious orders, saints, and other elements that distracted from the pure worship of the one true God. As “People of the Book,” Christians and Jews were not as far removed as pagans — our men were allowed to marry their women (but not vice versa) — and yet their rejection of the Quran put them definitively outside the fold.

When I started fourth grade, my parents sent me to a private school, which I attended until college. Although not affiliated with any denomination, the school was modeled on an English prototype, and so bore the marks of Anglicanism. Those were expressed primarily in prayers at morning assembly, grace at meals, and chapel services on Friday. Although there was no official promulgation of Christian doctrine, some came through in the hymns we sang. Some, like “Come, ye thankful people, come,” were in complete consonance with my faith and made perfect sense. Without exposure to Christian teaching, though, I was unable to make theological sense of “There is a green hill far away.” And I wondered why Islam had no tradition of liturgical music. Why did so many Muslims consider music sinful? Was music not a beautiful vehicle for offering God praise? In my teen years, I happened to attend a handful of Christian services. Each time, I was moved by the sincerity of the worshipers, regardless of whether or not there was music. The people there clearly wanted to serve God, even if (as I then believed) their doctrine was faulty. I noted the charity of their communities and wondered, with a tinge of envy, why I was not allowed to be part of something like that.

Life Away From Home

While at Harvard for college, I attended Muslim Friday prayers on campus, although mostly out of obligation. I was struck by the disjunction between the Islam preached there and what I had learned from the Quran. I quickly became convinced that Islamic tradition was unreliable and compromised beyond redemption. I also sang in the choir of the nondenominational university church for two years. Musically, it was an excellent experience, but spiritually it was a desert.

During my senior year, a Protestant friend and I began to visit various churches in the area. Each had its own character, but the Catholic Church was the one that stood out to me as the most reverent. That same friend invited me to meetings of a Bible study, sponsored by the undergraduate Christian Fellowship. There, I heard God speaking directly through the words of Scripture, and I became convinced of its authenticity — at least that of the Gospels. But what to make of the irreconcilable dogmatic differences between the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, as against the strict monotheism asserted by the Quran? I had been taught the predominant Muslim view that the Bible was a direct revelation from God that became corrupt over time. Searching the Quran, I found no evidence for this view; instead, I found multiple passages encouraging Jews and Christians to believe its message on account of its similarity to that of the Bible. If, I reasoned, God was using the Bible as motivation for the truth of the Quran, then surely the Bible must be trustworthy, although perhaps misinterpreted. The more I read of the Bible, the more I became convinced that both scriptures were true expressions of revelation, and I sought to understand how this could be so. In 1993, I took a year-long Arabic course and learned enough to make sense of much of the original Quranic text. In 1997, I took a course in biblical Hebrew, hoping to discover linguistic and stylistic indications that the Old Testament and the Quran came from a common source. I hardly found any, and this discomfited me greatly.

Catholic Catechesis in Stops and Starts

When I started graduate school at Brown in 1995, I knew I wanted to worship at a Catholic church, so I sought out the university Catholic community. I joined its choir and eventually slid into the role of pianist and organist. It was there that I met my wife, Mary. We were married in 2001, a year after I received my PhD and just prior to her graduation from medical school. However, the next few years, in which I began my career as a mathematics professor, were marked by great spiritual frustration. I felt drawn to the Catholic faith of my wife but unable to participate in it, on account of the teachings in which I had been raised. While I found some elements in the Quran troubling, I also recognized a great deal of truth in its teachings about God and the moral life, and those teachings made it difficult to justify rejecting the text outright. The tension I felt was compounded by a sense that I had “maxed out” in my understanding of the Quran. Unfortunately, I succumbed to vicious emotions: envy of Christians (including my wife) for being able to participate in something my conscience told me was off limits, and bitterness against God himself for ostensibly fencing me into a faith community to which I felt little social or theological connection. My spiritual and moral life began to suffer as I became increasingly resentful. I stopped identifying as a Muslim, but still smarted from a feeling of not belonging anywhere.

In spite of having lived in Cincinnati, Ohio for five years, my wife and I still had not settled into a parish. We attended some for stretches of months, but ultimately moved on, not because we experienced anything negative (except maybe lukewarm liturgy), but because I never felt any connection to the parish. My mistake, I eventually realized, lay in looking for fulfillment in human community rather than in God himself. Once I became aware of my error, things began to fall into place.

In 2006, we joined a Maronite Catholic parish, that became our spiritual home for nine years. Around the same time, I read an article that reflected on the Quran’s description of Jesus as God’s Word (4:171). That was a key moment: it turned my perspective from the conventional Muslim understanding of Jesus as “just another prophet” to that of the logos.

I began to read the Bible in a new light and came to understand Jesus as the pre-existent Word. At that time, the Bible seemed to me largely compatible with my non-trinitarian theology. Certainly, there were problems. For instance, I could not reconcile the language of the Bible with the Quran’s absolute proscription of even using the phrase “Son of God.” I could not explain how “the Word was God” (John 1:1) or why the Apostle Thomas should proclaim “My Lord and My God!” (John 20:28) upon meeting the resurrected Christ. In spite of these inconsistencies, I welcomed the reinvigoration of my spiritual life and convinced myself that I could be happy as a “church of one,” worshiping God according to all that He had revealed. It was also in this period that Mary and I were called to our vocation as parents: our daughters were born in 2009 and 2013, respectively.

A Temporary Anglican Catechesis

By 2014, I had reached something of an impasse. While I still harbored reservations about extrascriptural religious tradition, it was equally clear that key elements of the Christian tradition — the celebration of the Eucharist, for example — were confirmed, rather than contradicted, by Scripture, and as such, were surely authentic. I also felt a deep longing to partake of the sacraments. Because I had always believed that God was close and intimately involved in our lives, I had no problem accepting that He could (and indeed did) communicate grace through these earthly channels. The distance between my beliefs about Jesus Christ and those of the Church had narrowed to the point that it no longer made sense not to be part of it.

That year, my wife and I enrolled our older daughter at a nearby Episcopal school. The practices observed there — hymns, chapel services, lessons and carols — brought back memories of my vaguely Anglican primary school and made me wonder if I could, in good conscience, seek baptism in the Episcopal Church. The Catholic Church still appeared too authoritarian and theologically rigid, but the Episcopal Church seemed to forge a middle course, valuing holy orders and sacraments, but not insisting too strongly on its own authority. However, I discovered very quickly that the Episcopal Church had evolved to embrace moral positions that I found entirely inadmissible. Bringing to mind stories about separated Anglican congregations I had heard from an Episcopalian friend, I found St. John the Evangelist, a parish of the Anglican Catholic Church (ACC), a “Continuing Anglican Church” that had separated from the Episcopal Church in 1978.

On paper (or on the Web), the ACC presented itself as a church in apostolic succession, preaching not Protestantism, but rather the doctrine of the universal (i.e., Catholic) church as preserved in the English tradition. At the time, it seemed exactly what I was looking for: conciliar, pope-less Catholicism. After some vacillation, I made an appointment to speak with Father Timothy Butler, then Priest-in-Charge at St. John’s. I went into that meeting with no prior expectations, aware of the possibility that any hope of welcome might be dashed. Instead, I found an extraordinarily humble man, deeply devoted to Christ, who had traveled miles to get where he was, both literally and spiritually. (Fr. Tim had driven nearly sixty miles from his home to meet with me, and did so every weekend for years, until his parish finally acquired a rectory.) That day saw the beginning of a highly treasured friendship. I told Fr. Tim about my situation and asked point blank whether my theological leanings would constitute an impediment to baptism. After reflecting a bit, he answered in the negative, explaining that my Christology was unlikely to remain the same over time. Over the next few weeks, I realized that I was actually on the brink of Trinitarianism. The sense that God was calling me to the Church, and that there was no way I could grow further on my own, was so intense that I made the leap. The next few months saw a flurry of activity as my family transferred its parish membership to St. John’s, and I began preparation for baptism.

I was baptized on January 10, 2016, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. It had been more than 25 years since I had first heard the call of Christ. My last theological qualms about doctrine had been set to rest in the preceding months. As the beautiful words of the Anglican baptismal liturgy went by, I could not help but feel confused. True, I was entering into a solemn covenant with the Lord, but had I not already done that, in some way, years ago? The next few years would teach me about the nature and power of sacramental grace. What had begun earlier as a trickle became a flood on that day.

The next year and a half saw much spiritual growth and happiness for my family. Since St. John’s was a small parish, we became established in it rather quickly. Mary developed catechetical materials and taught Sunday school for children after Mass, and I served first as cantor and later as organist. I received confirmation from the Anglican bishop in August 2016, and our older daughter first received Holy Communion in April 2017. The size of the parish also had its drawbacks: fewer people meant fewer resources, but it did not bother us as we continued on, blissfully unaware of church politics. Suddenly, in August of that year, a group of disgruntled parishioners — including some we thought of as friends — launched an attack that ended in their storming out of the parish in protest. Although personally upsetting to us, their exodus also meant that there were no longer any young children in the parish other than our own. We tried to soldier on, but it became increasingly difficult, and the episode had rattled our confidence in the integrity of the ACC. Some people left because I had begun chanting the proper texts of the Mass, which they felt had no place in the service. Others thought we were “too serious” about ministry or “too Catholic.” The response of the clergy, while sincere, was disheartening. Complainers and liturgical terrorists were informed of their errors, but then we were instructed not to rock the boat. Chant had to be rolled back, because other people might get upset and leave. No Latin, because that could be perceived as “too Roman.” The reality of the situation within the ACC became clearer to me: the clergy were well-catechized and preached the Catholic faith, but many lay members still identified as Protestants who liked ceremony but thought that they — not the clergy — were in charge of the parish. I had sought baptism in the ACC because I thought it was faithful to Catholic Tradition, but many others seemed to be there because they wanted either the 1928 Book of Common Prayer or some form of diet-catholicism. After several months of discernment, we made the difficult decision to leave St. John’s.

Swimming the Tiber

Before resolving to leave St. John’s, I had to wrestle with the implications of doing so. My wife was a cradle Catholic, and I had already dragged her to enough places on account of my theological foibles. What was preventing me from becoming Catholic? By that point, I had accepted virtually all the tenets of the faith; it only remained for me to submit to the authority of the Roman Pontiff. The last question I had to answer was: does he have the authority he claims? After reading the Catechism from cover to cover, I became convinced that Jesus really did give Peter a particular mission and that the foundations of papal authority were there, even if I didn’t understand them completely.

In June 2018, we registered at St. Gertrude, a parish of the Dominican friars, where we remain parishioners to this day. Instead of going through RCIA, I was asked to read the fourth book of Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, along with several Church documents. After three meetings, the friars determined that I was ready to be received into the Church. Thus, I was confirmed and received into the communion of the Catholic Church on the night of All Souls’ Day in 2018. The clergy were vested in black and only nine people were present: two priests, my confirmation sponsor Brian Zappia (a former student), my wife, my daughters, myself, and a couple who happened to be praying in the church that evening. I arrived at the church about fifteen minutes before Mass and stopped briefly in the parish’s adoration chapel. I saw Jesus looking at me from the monstrance, and knew I had made the right decision.

Before becoming Catholic, I was preoccupied with my quest for spiritual rest. However, entering into that rest (to the extent that one can in this life) has forced me to face the question of vocation. What is my place in the world? As a student, I had studied what interested me most, and I was later privileged to land a position in academia that allowed me to continue doing that. More recently, I have been drawn to the Catholic intellectual tradition and have taken some courses to fortify my understanding of it. The flip side of this experience is that I have come to realize how far the educational system, at all levels, has departed from the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. I sense that I am being called to use my intellectual gifts to address this deficit, although I am not yet sure how.

It is a blessing that God brought me to his Church while there was stability in other spheres of my life. Watching my parents age over the past few years has been difficult, but the virtues of faith, hope, and charity have helped to sustain me. The snowballing problem of moral confusion — and of those who deny it — have eroded any sense I had of belonging in the wider society, but the grace I have received through the sacraments has kept me grounded in these trying times.

Looking Back

After my baptism, I told the priest who had officiated at my wedding about it. His response was: “Do not think me ungracious if I say that it’s about time!” To this day, I am still perplexed by how long it took. It was all very gradual; there was no “Damascus moment.” Even more strangely, I never had to grapple with the common theological issues faced by those considering Catholicism. My early understanding of the operation of grace was very similar to the Catholic one. I had always prayed for the dead, and the sacramental system presented no difficulty. I also had no trouble accepting that the saints in heaven prayed for us, although it took some time to become comfortable with the idea of invoking saints for intercession.

Instead, what I struggled with most was Christianity’s insistence on detail. The Quran also teaches that humans are fallen creatures in need of God’s saving grace, but it says little about how He saves us. I used to wonder why Christians made such an issue about the mode of salvation. It took me a long time to understand that the reason for this is rooted in the Christian understanding of revelation, which (unbeknownst to me at the time) is quite different from the Islamic one. Islam takes the view that God sent the same message of monotheism over and over again through various messengers, prophets, and books. Christianity, in contrast, views revelation as progressive, finding its fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ. I had to understand that the teachings about the incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ were not ends in themselves but rather key pieces in the greater story of God’s self-revelation. Once I understood the “full picture” of revelation — how many witnesses were involved and how the testimony of one supported that of every other — I saw that it could not possibly have been a human fabrication. The details of Christian revelation, far from being incidental, provide material for endless reflection on God, humanity, and the relationship between the two.

Perhaps it took such a long time for me to seek baptism because I was in possession of a partial truth that vigorously asserted itself as the whole truth. Although strongly attracted to Christianity from the beginning, I thought that any pull I felt towards it was merely emotional, and therefore untrustworthy, that it would somehow be a betrayal of God himself to “jump ship” on the basis of a vague feeling. Ultimately, it was by understanding that God reveals Himself to us, not only in words, but also through personal experience and the witness of others that I was able to recognize this pull, not as an emotion, but as a genuine impulse of the Spirit. Lack of confidence in the religious tradition in which I was raised did not help. For many years, I was in perpetual “evaluation mode” with respect to doctrine, and my mind could not rest. With baptism came the grace of greater trust and — at long last — a sense of peace.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that my conversion was all about growth and happiness. In the early years of our marriage, my wife endured plenty of defensiveness and irritability on account of my insecurity. The various changes we made in parish affiliation were almost all driven by my dissatisfaction with the status quo. After converting, it was impossible to keep the matter secret from my family forever, and when it came out, strong feelings of betrayal and failure emerged. Yet in all this, I count myself blessed to have had the support of those around me. My wife supported me even when I chose to be baptized in a communion other than her own. In spite of our theological differences and misunderstandings, my family has neither abandoned me nor treated me as an outsider. Our friends at St. John’s remained friends after we left. And God has walked with me through every stage of the journey.

Conclusion

Of all the titles of the Blessed Mother, one that speaks particularly strongly to me is “Star of the Sea.” The vicissitudes of life are the like the waves of the ocean and make it difficult to see the way. Yet, it is a great comfort to know that, through them, we all have a beacon to help maintain our focus on the Lord. Our Lady, Star of the Sea, pray for us.

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I entered the public school system in fifth grade, and the following year my family moved to Tennessee, the “buckle of the Bible Belt.” Two unfortunate and, these days, increasingly common things happened to me during middle school: I developed an addiction to pornography, and my parents got divorced. After that, my family stopped going to church, and I was very upset: I remember crying and wondering why we no longer went.

Toward the end of middle school, I made friends with some of my atheist peers (probably all three of them — there weren’t very many in small town Tennessee). In my zeal, I attempted to evangelize them, but the discussions we had ultimately caused me to question my beliefs — not my theological beliefs so much as my scientific ones. I had been raised to believe in Young Earth Creationism, and my friends presented me with many compelling arguments against my fundamentalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative. It seemed there was a mountain of evidence that the earth was much more than a few thousand years old, and apparently this lent a great deal of credibility to the theory of evolution. I decided that I would dedicate the summer before I entered high school to researching the matter.

It didn’t take long for my Young Earth Creationist views to fall apart. I felt as though I had been duped. If I was wrong about this, what about Christianity as a whole? I decided to dig deeper. It was 2010, and the New Atheist movement was at its peak. I soon came across names like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens and spent the rest of the summer devouring their books and watching their debates and lectures online. By the time I entered high school, I had apostatized. More than that, I had become an “evangelical” atheist, dedicated to helping others realize that they, too, had been hoodwinked. The New Atheists had convinced me that Christianity was not only naive and unscientific, it was outright dangerous and delusional. I felt it my duty to proclaim the “good news” that religion was bogus and that we in the modern era needn’t be bound by its fetters any longer.

Shortly after that, I also adopted a sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll type mentality. My increasingly degenerate lifestyle only served to set me even more at odds with Christianity and its seemingly prudish and restrictive morality, from which I felt I had been liberated.

However, these carnal distractions didn’t put an end to my intellectual pursuits. I continued my studies, always looking for more ammunition to use in debates with my Christian peers. During high school, I often sought out and participated in such debates. I found the argument from the Problem of Evil to be quite successful and was able to convince a number of my peers to abandon their faith. Thus emboldened, I steadily ramped up my proselytization, which soon devolved into outright mockery of the Christian Faith.

When my school announced that we would have a fictional character costume day as part of our “spirit week,” leading up to  the prom my sophomore year, I couldn’t resist. I had to go dressed as Jesus Christ. I arrived at school clad in bedsheet robes, crowned with a paper halo and bearing sharpie marker stigmata. I was promptly confronted by the Head Principal, Assistant Principal, and School Resource Officer and instructed to remove my costume. After some resistance, I relented. However, that evening I contacted the Freedom From Religion Foundation, recounting the day’s events and informing them that I felt my First Amendment rights had been violated.

The FFRF responded by awarding me a one thousand dollar scholarship for my activism, publishing my story in their newsletter and sending a strongly worded letter to my school district with threats of legal action. Shortly thereafter, the local Channel Four News offered to interview me, and I gladly accepted. Numerous online media publications began sharing my story. I was experiencing my fifteen minutes of fame, which would ultimately be the peak of my militant anti-theism.

But I began to feel the need for more. I started to feel that my whole worldview was based on a simple rejection of Christianity and wanted something more fulfilling, more holistic.

At first, I tried to cobble together my own system of spirituality, drawing from existentialist philosophy, particularly the writings of Albert Camus, and pagan mythology. I was strongly attracted to the Egyptian crocodile god of the Nile, Sobek, a hedonistic deity known as “he who eats while he also mates.” I went so far as to take Sobek as a sort of patron anti-saint during an occultic ceremony I celebrated alone by the creek near our house.

However, this little charade didn’t do much to resolve the interior emptiness I was feeling with ever greater frequency. I tried to distract myself with more drugs and entertainment, but these only exacerbated my depression. The next year, I dropped out of high school, leaving me with even more time to spend in “vanity and a striving after wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). My emotional state reached its lowest point after my mom was evicted from our townhouse, forcing us to move back to Florida and away from all of my friends.

Now a lonely, depressed, unemployed high school dropout, porn addict, and pothead, I remember telling my younger brother that if my situation didn’t drastically improve soon, I would most likely kill myself.

This was when I started second guessing my beliefs. I kept having this nagging feeling: “maybe you’re wrong about Christianity,” which was strange, because I was entirely sure that I was not, in fact, wrong about Christianity. However, the feeling persisted, so I ran with it. I decided to challenge God: “I’m pretty sure you don’t exist,” I prayed, “but if You do, now would be the time to show me. If You don’t, You will never get another chance. If You don’t answer me now, I’ll never second guess myself again, and I’ll probably be dead soon, anyway.” I resolved to pray a similar prayer every day, to re-read the New Testament, and see what happened.

I’m pretty sure you don’t exist, I prayed, but if You do, now would be the time to show me. If You don’t, You will never get another chance. If You don’t answer me now, I’ll never second guess myself again, and I’ll probably be dead…
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Over the next few months, I experienced a long series of “God-incidences.” I would say my “challenge prayer” and read a bit of the New Testament. Then, immediately after I put the Bible down, something would happen that was directly related to the passage I’d just finished reading — all of this despite the fact that I had told no one what I was doing. This went on for weeks on end, so I can’t tell the story of every such God-incidence here, but I will share one memorable occasion.

It was the Fourth of July, and I had just finished reading Matthew 7:6 (“Do not give dogs what is holy…”). The second my Bible hit the desk, there was a knock at the door. It was my next-door neighbor, inviting me to his family’s cookout. As soon as I entered their yard, his father addressed me: “Jeff, I hope you’re hungry. Otherwise, we’ll have to throw this food to the dogs.”

After a few months of experiencing such situations, I decided it might be worth the effort to “give Christianity a try.” In a worst-case scenario, I would quickly realize it was a silly thing to do, and nobody would have to know I’d had a momentary lapse in judgment.

On the night of October 15, 2014, I prayed to God again, this time in a much different tone: “God, I’m still not quite sure how or why it’s true, but I’m open to believing that it’s true that You exist. Please accept me back as Your son and forgive my sins.”

Immediately, I felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

I decided that I would have to renounce any affiliation with my patron “anti-saint,” Sobek, and I thought it would be appropriate to replace him with an actual patron saint. I did a bit of research online and came across the story of St. Genesius of Rome, a pagan who wrote and performed plays mocking Christianity, only to have a miraculous conversion during one of his satirical baptism scenes. He was martyred at the order of Emperor Diocletian after he began preaching from the stage (this time, for real). I figured he was a fitting choice. Perhaps he, too, had dressed like Jesus during his plays, as I had for that fictional character day.

Still somewhat unsure of my new path, I turned in for the night. That night I had the most intense, vivid dream ever in my life. To this day, it’s the only one that I’ve been able to remember in its entirety: I was walking along the sandy shoreline of a vast river, when suddenly, a massive crocodile emerged from the water at speed. Snapping at me, he pursued me as I fled. Panicked, I tripped and fell face first. I started to rise up, looking over my shoulder and expecting to see the beast at my heels. Instead, he was cowering, retreating back frantically into the water, tail between his legs. When I got to my feet, I noticed a shining angelic figure at my side, and it was clear that his presence was repelling the monster.

I awoke, astonished by how clear the symbolism of my dream was: God, through His angel, was protecting me from Sobek, who represented my former life of sin. Actually, I was shocked I had dreamt anything at all. Years of drug abuse had rendered virtually all of my nights dreamless. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a dream, let alone such an intense and meaningful one. I interpreted it as a profound confirmation of my conversion. I was now certain that I had indeed been wrong about Christianity.

But I still wasn’t quite sure how Christianity made sense, or which kind of Christianity I should believe. I knew I didn’t want to return to the form of faith I had rejected years earlier. The question was, where should I go?

My friends back home were incredulous when I told them I’d converted. Most thought I was joking, although some had questions. And I didn’t have answers — yet.

I embarked on a deep dive into Christian theology and history, researching all of the different traditions and denominations. I looked online for book recommendations. The first two I read were Søren Kierkegaard’s Training in Christianity and the Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo. These two texts radically altered my perception of Christianity. It became clear to me that the Christianity I had rejected wasn’t the true Christianity. Next, I devoured anything I could find by G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Christianity was making more sense by the day, but I still had one question: where should I go to church?

While I had been reading, I had been visiting different non-denominational churches that weren’t much different from the ones in which I had been raised. One night, at a Bible study, I asked the small group leaders if they had any sort of material they could recommend to help me understand what their church taught, some sort of catechism. They looked at me like I had three eyes. Why would I want anything besides the Bible to study? This was quite a disenchanting response. I knew I needed to look elsewhere.

Through my reading and the many conversations I was having in online Christian forums, I had developed an interest in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. I found their historical pedigrees and their rich theological traditions appealing. I even started praying the Rosary and the Jesus Prayer. However, as a recovering anti-theist, I still wasn’t quite ready to jump into “organized religion.” I had many lingering, more liberal beliefs about things, like gay marriage, that I wasn’t prepared to relinquish quite yet. I expressed these sentiments in my online communities and was directed to the Church of England. I resolved to visit the local Episcopal parish that Sunday.

It turned out to be a very high church, Anglo-Catholic type parish — smells, bells, and altar rails. I was blown away by my first experience of liturgical worship. Afterwards, the congregation greeted me enthusiastically. (It probably didn’t hurt that I was at least thirty years younger than anyone else in attendance.) One of the parishioners gave me a tour of the building and told me all about the history of Anglicanism, how it was a “middle way” between Catholicism and Protestantism. The vicar took me out to lunch, where we discussed my conversion from atheism. By the end of the day, I was feeling quite at home.

However, in the coming weeks I would repeatedly be told that the members of this parish weren’t “like those Episcopalians,” and that, in fact, they were “more Catholic than the Roman parish down the street.” I was taken back to my time as an atheist, when I began feeling the desire for a worldview that had more substance than a mere rejection of Christianity. It seemed that these Episcopalians defined themselves not only by their rejection of Rome, but also by their rejection of Episcopalianism. I wasn’t a Christian because it wasn’t atheism or wasn’t Islam, and I didn’t think I wanted to join a church that was based on not being like this or that church.

I was taken back to my time as an atheist, when I began feeling the desire for a worldview that had more substance than a mere rejection of Christianity. I wasn’t a Christian because it wasn’t atheism or wasn’t Islam, and I didn’t think…
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As I continued my studies and my online discussions, I noticed that really the only Christian group who didn’t largely define themselves in opposition to another Christian group, were the Catholics. Everyone else was always explaining why they weren’t Catholics. Orthodox didn’t like the filioque or the papacy, Protestants didn’t like … well, it depended which Protestants you asked. Catholics, on the other hand, were always just explaining why they were Catholic. And the more Catholic explanations I heard, the more sense they made.

In fact, I didn’t really have the experience many Protestants have when considering conversion to Catholicism. I never struggled with accepting any of the uniquely Catholic doctrines, because I wasn’t looking at Catholicism through a Protestant lens. I was looking at it as a former atheist. I didn’t have any particular attachment to ideas like Sola Scriptura. I had no reservations about Mary — quite the opposite. I found the Catholic teachings about Mary, the sacraments, the papacy, apostolic succession, etc., not only easy to accept, I was excited at the prospect that they might be true — and even more thrilled when I came to believe that they probably were true.

My main problem was that Catholicism would leave me no wiggle room in other areas. By now I had become a convinced universalist, and I felt that the Catholic teaching on gay marriage and sexual morality were oppressive. But everything else the Church taught made too much sense to ignore: the scriptural and historical case for the authority claimed by the Catholic Church seemed to be solid, and if the Church actually had the authority she claimed, it meant that wherever there might be a disagreement, she was right and I was wrong.

Around this time, I started a new job, one which allowed me to listen to podcasts for the first five hours of my shift every morning. I spent all five hours, five days a week, listening to podcasts like Catholic Answers, Pints with Aquinas, The Art of Catholic, etc. It didn’t take long for my remaining qualms about Catholicism to be resolved. I then realized that I needed to start going to Mass and begin the RCIA process. So I did.

When I told one of my Protestant friends back in Tennessee that I had joined RCIA, he asked his youth pastor to try to convince me not to “swim the Tiber.” Over the coming months, this friend and I would become close, spending hours every day debating theology. He threw my way every objection to Catholicism that he could find. Thanks to his efforts, I ended up delving much deeper into Catholic apologetics than I would have done otherwise, and as a result, my desire to join the Church only grew.

He threw my way every objection to Catholicism that he could find. Thanks to his efforts, I ended up delving much deeper into Catholic apologetics than I would have done otherwise, and as a result, my desire to join the Church only grew.
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This was also the period when I met the woman who would become my wife, Britany. She was also raised Baptist but went to a Catholic university. In our first conversation, I told her everything I’d been learning about typology, particularly concerning Mary as the New Eve, the Ark of the New Covenant, and Queen of Heaven. Once we started dating, she agreed that if we got married and had children, we would raise them Catholic. She also started coming to my RCIA classes and attending Sunday Mass with me. We got engaged the month before I was to be received into the Church.

As I prepared to enter the Church at the upcoming Easter Vigil, it was time to make my first confession. I entered the confessional with a long list of sins, many of them grave, and left with a clean conscience. My first experience of the Catholic sacraments was honestly miraculous. The addiction to pornography that I had been struggling with since middle school literally vanished in an instant. I no longer felt any desire to consume pornography, and thanks be to God, I still don’t.

My first experience of the Catholic sacraments was honestly miraculous. The addiction to pornography that I had been struggling with since middle school literally vanished in an instant.
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I made my profession of faith, was received into the Catholic Church, and made my first Holy Communion on April 15, 2017. Easter Vigil was one of the most beautiful and moving nights of my life. Fifty days later, I was confirmed on Pentecost Sunday in the Cathedral of the Diocese of Venice, FL. I took as my confirmation Saints Genesius of Rome and Louis de Montfort, the latter being known as the Apostle of Mary.

On Christmas Eve that year, the sixteenth anniversary of my baptism, my then fiancée gave me the best gift I could have asked for. She told me she too wanted to become Catholic. She was received into the Church the following Easter Vigil, confirmed on Pentecost, and less than a week later we were married.

Having gone from being an evangelical Baptist to an “evangelical” atheist, I am now an evangelical Catholic, dedicated to sharing my story and the beauty of the Catholic Faith with anyone who’s willing to listen. As a result, in the last two years, I have had the honor of being the confirmation sponsor for three of my Tennessee friends.

I also received the tremendous honor of becoming a father, when my wife and I were blessed with a daughter, Hannah, who was born and baptized in the summer of 2020.

A year later, her younger brother, Benjamin, was born prematurely, baptized, and died on June 11th, 2021, the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. In our loss, my wife and I received great consolation from the Church and from our Catholic faith, which assures us that our son is now a saint in Heaven, interceding for us and for his older sister.

So, that is my story. By the grace of God, I was able to go from wayward son to father of a saint — from mocking Jesus to worshiping Him.

The post From Mocking Jesus to Worshipping Him appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Find out more about Dr. McDermott’s studies in the Christian intellectual tradition at beatriceinstitute.org.

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I wasn’t raised in church, but both sets of grandparents went often. When I was little, one set of grandparents took me to a Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) congregation, where I learned God loved me. I knew that much and I had heard of Jesus dying on the cross. I once asked my grandmother to explain it to me and she told me I wouldn’t understand. That was as much discipling as I would get.

After being rebuffed at age 13, I made arrangements to stay the weekend with my other grandparents. I told my grandmother I wanted to go to church, so she had my grandfather take me. I ended up in a big room with small rooms on the sides. Some guy got up and instructed the kids to go to their classes. He pointed me to a room where there were just two kids with some guy and his wife. He gave a Bible lesson of some sort and at the end asked the three of us if we knew where we would go if we died that day. I hadn’t thought much about death and certainly had no idea what would happen afterward. I said I didn’t know and he asked me if I would like to. Well, yeah. Sign me up! So, he led me in a sinner’s prayer, told me to tell someone, and to read the Bible. This was an Independent Fundamental Baptist church and they were “King James Only.” I told my grandparents I had said the prayer and my grandmother sent me with my grandfather to the bookstore to get me a Bible. It was the King James Version and I knew nothing of the book, so I did what you do when reading a book: I started at the beginning. I got as far as a pair of sisters getting their dad drunk to have sex with him in hopes of giving him a son and I gave up. That was as much discipling as I would get.

Evangelical Love for the Bible

Earlier, when I was 10 years old, I met a kid on the playground who became my best friend. We’re still friends today, but I had moved to a different school district at age 12 and we lost contact for a few years. One summer day, when I was 15, I gave him a call and he asked me if I had ever considered becoming a Christian. I told him I already was and went to spend a Saturday night at his place. We went to his church the next morning, where I was given a brochure for a church camp in Kansas. My dad would later say that was the worst money he ever spent.

At camp, a preacher said you have to make a commitment to following Christ. Well, I had never heard that before. So, I got up and went forward to the steps where he told kids to kneel and pray. The kid next to me was bawling and I thought I was supposed to cry. I tried, but the emotions weren’t there. They sent us to the back to talk to camp counselors and the guy asked me what was going on. I said, “I just needed to make a commitment” and that was it.

After we got home, someone in the church connected me with a lady who lived down the street from me and I started walking down there and going to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night to youth group. This was a Christian and Missionary Alliance church and it was the first time I received any religious training.

Sunday services were unconvincing and were definitely not for me. It was no different than your typical Southern Baptist church, but I didn’t know that at the time. After a couple of years, I got bored and stopped going. The youth leader had started a parachurch organization that organized youth groups in several school districts and I got involved. The organization held regular lock-ins at the YMCA and I attended one after being away from church for a couple of months. I felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit and told myself that if I was going to start going to church again, I was going somewhere more exciting.

Lifting Holy Hands

I knew kids from around town through that parachurch organization and a girl who lived near me recommended visiting her church. Her dad was gracious enough to come pick me up on Sunday morning as he was taking his family to church. It was an environment I had never been exposed to. They used drums and guitars; they sang lively songs and lifted their hands. They prayed loudly and it wasn’t in English. The whole thing lit my fire and piqued my interest. I wanted all that God had for me. I didn’t understand what was going on in that worship service, but the pastor of this small Independent Charismatic church gave me some literature on the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and I wanted it. I went forward and the elders gathered around me; they laid hands on me and started praying in tongues. The pastor told me to just open my mouth and let it flow. I received the gift of tongues and began attending that church. Then I found one like it which was much closer to home. I could catch a ride to it down the street from my house, so I started going there.

I got carried away. I had encounters with the living God in those early years and really dug into the Bible. I was in love with this charismatic experience — it was what I was looking for at the time. I hadn’t received any religious belief system from my parents, so I considered it my responsibility to discover what I believed by finding out what the Bible teaches. I didn’t understand there were different religious traditions with all of these different ideas and even different paradigms. I thought church was church and that churches represent God. I had always thought that and it wouldn’t be until much later that I would see problems with the idea.

When I started looking at colleges, I wanted to attend a “spirit-filled” Christian college because I had some pride about charismatics being “more spiritual” than Christians who weren’t “spirit-filled,” and I wanted to be taught by those who shared my doctrinal slant. I ended up at a classical Pentecostal liberal arts college in Missouri.

During my sophomore year, I started getting bored again; bored with the Christianity I had known. I spent a lot of time in the library’s reference section satisfying my curiosity. If I had any questions at all about any denomination or religious movement, I would go look it up. The college subscribed to a variety of magazines, one of them being New Covenant, from Charismatic Renewal Ministries, which is Catholic. It is now named Renewal Ministries. I was enamored — I mean absolutely enthralled — with the images of thuribles and incense smoke, monstrances and other sacramentals. I was drawn to these things; I didn’t know why, but I needed to explore it.

High-Church Liturgy and the Eucharist

This was the first time the Catholic Church came on to my radar. I had been taught that Catholics aren’t Christians; they aren’t born again and the mainline Protestant churches were also “dead.” However, I had a pair of friends down the street from my home who were the ninth and tenth children of a devout Catholic couple. I wasn’t sure my friends’ dad was “saved,” but I knew their mom was. It was clear that she had a relationship with God, but I believed her to be the minority among Catholics.

I desired to explore what I now know to be contemplative Christianity. I had anti-Catholic prejudice that made me uncomfortable with going to contemplative Christianity’s Western source, but I knew the Episcopal Church was similar. I went to the phone book and called the nearest Episcopal church. It turned out to be a high-church Anglo-Catholic parish and it was exactly what I was looking for. I was in love!

The charismatic experience had been a milestone, but so was this smells-and-bells liturgical experience. The traditional church architecture, the sacred music, the sung Mass, and the belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist captivated me like nothing ever had. I threw myself into it and embraced as authoritative and authentic everything I was taught. I prided myself on being “Catholic,” though not Roman Catholic.

I was taught that Catholicism is broader than just the Church at Rome; that authentic Catholic religion is based on four pillars: Scripture, Tradition, the Sacraments, and Apostolic Succession. I was taught that the Anglican Communion was legitimately both Catholic and Protestant and that we were on the Catholic side of the issue. As an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, I identified as Catholic and to call me Protestant would have been fighting words. I knew other Episcopalians and most of the Episcopal Church didn’t share my faith and this was very disappointing. I wanted church unity and the denomination couldn’t provide it. It also wouldn’t provide fidelity to 2,000 years of orthodoxy and I ended up leaving the denomination over that. I was perfectly happy with my parish and I didn’t want to leave, but I was concerned for my future. I didn’t want to invest time in a denomination that I would later feel compelled to leave, so I left sooner rather than later. That was in the late 1990’s.

Convergence

I went immediately to the Charismatic Episcopal Church, a small denomination built by leaders from the independent charismatic movement, who had been reading the Church Fathers and were incorporating Anglican liturgy into what they called the “convergence movement.” Basically, this was a group of charismatic and evangelical sacramentalists who were trying to build a new denomination under the orders of a religious group in Brazil that was not in communion with the Pope. A large percentage of the CEC’s clergy, including the bishop who received me into the denomination, would later become Catholic.

I was still in Missouri at that time, but soon moved back to Ohio, where neither the CEC or the Episcopal Church was available to me. In that small town, I had two choices: Rome or Luther. I chose Luther, but it was a poor fit. It was too low-church for me. I had been with low-church Anglicans in the CEC, but they were still liturgical and believed in the Real Presence in the same way I was taught as an Anglo-Catholic. The way the Real Presence was assented to was sort of like transubstantiation with a consubstantial description. However, the Lutherans understood consubstantiality very differently. As an Anglican, I had been taught from the objective side of the matter, but the Lutherans I encountered in the Evangelical Lutheran denomination approached it with a great deal of subjectivity and emphasis on the faith of the recipient as a determining factor concerning the nature of the Eucharistic species. I was turned off by this, so unless I were to become Catholic, I was staring at a Protestant vacuum.

Because of my persistent aversion to the Catholic Church and Evangelical de-emphasis of denominationalism, I felt I needed to be flexible and allow my interior leanings to coincide with whatever the worship style would be of whatever church I would most grow in. I ended up in a Vineyard Fellowship, under a former United Methodist pastor. Had his background been Calvinist, I wouldn’t have gone there because of Calvin’s “total depravity” doctrine. As it was, I moved back to Kansas City after a few years and went straight to the CEC cathedral I was connected with when I lived in Missouri the first time. I grew impatient with the distance I had to drive to attend church, despite this being the only CEC church in the KC metro. So, I again became flexible and chose a United Methodist church near where I lived. I wish I hadn’t.

Liberal Mainline Protestantism

I had never encountered people in church who identified as Christian but believed in abortion and gay “marriage.” I rejected such ideas, even as I grew to love these people, whom I discovered held these social and political opinions as time went on. I was open-minded enough to wrestle with these ideas and that was one of the devil’s tools. The other would be a crisis of faith which began with a personal tragedy.

Through no fault of my own, I lost my job and spiraled downward. I got evicted from my apartment and my car was repossessed. I knew a retired minister from my Sunday School class who got me into a halfway house setting connected with a homeless ministry and I got a job I could walk to. In five months, I was back on my feet, but the experience rattled me.

Heterodoxy, Syncretism, and a Half Lotus

I moved home to Ohio and back into my parents’ home. I found my dream job as a newspaper reporter and copy editor, but my spiritual life was in pieces. Because of the Word of Faith movement and the consumeristic emphasis on worldly success that Evangelicals capitalize on when marketing their approach to Christian faith, I believed God would not allow life to be so hard on me. There was also some Calvinist influence going on, though I had never been in a Calvinist church of any kind. Calvin taught a doctrine of “election” and that must have influenced me. I thought I was of a special group — those who are born again. Therefore, I expected to go through trials, but I didn’t expect this level of hardship and it shook my faith. I went back to the Lutheran church I had been in before, but I only went once in a while. I read liberal theologians from mainline Protestantism and that led to my understanding Christianity metaphorically. I never stopped believing in Jesus as the Son of God and I never stopped believing in His bodily resurrection, but everything else was up for grabs. How He was the Son of God and what that meant shifted around over the next seven to ten years as I fell outside of orthodox theology and explored Eastern spirituality. I also explored the Unitarian–Universalists and experimented with different forms of meditation.

I felt let down by organized religion and was deeply disappointed — not with God, but with the church as I had known it. However, my interest in the Catholic Church never completely went away. I had embraced the Social Gospel and that led me to social Liberalism. I found the Catholic Church to be too conservative for me, but along the way I discovered the teaching of a liberal-leaning contemplative Catholic priest and author who I became enamored with. This priest was instrumental in bringing my faith full circle. Also during that time, Pope Francis was elected and I became very fond of him. I eventually got to a place where I didn’t want a church to look like me by reflecting my opinions and that was the beginning of the end.

Coming into the Catholic Church was difficult, though. While working my dream job and exploring meditation, I met a priest and considered becoming Catholic for the first time. We only met a couple times before I backed off. Later, I made friends with another priest and met with him; this was the second time my interest in the Church was piqued. I was still liberal and he was uncomfortable with that. He said nothing about my views, but politely steered me away from the Church, telling me to go wherever I could get fed.

After relocating to another part of the country, interest in the Church came up a third time and I met with a catechist who scheduled a follow-up meeting, but stood me up and I backed off again. Becoming Catholic came up a fourth time and I looked up RCIA programs near me, found one, attended for a while, but didn’t follow through. The catechist didn’t understand where I was coming from, as a former practicing Anglo-Catholic. Despite all of the doubts I had wrestled with, in my heart I still believed in the Eucharist and I still believed in the legitimacy of what catholicity had been instilled in me years earlier. My position was not validated by that catechist, as it shouldn’t have, but I didn’t understand that at the time. So I got cold feet yet again.

Finally Learning to Swim

I wanted the issue settled, so I decided to not become Catholic. I consented to attending a local Episcopal church, determined to make it work, but it didn’t. I attended fairly regularly, but I wasn’t into it because it wasn’t high-church. It was a typical mainline Protestant style of worship, which to me, was bland and flavorless like chewing gum you kept in your mouth too long.

I was working at another newspaper and my editor received an e-mail from a Catholic parish that had done a beautification of the church’s interior. I was assigned to write a story on it, so I called the priest without any intention of getting personal in the conversation. After the interview, we kept talking and I told him about all of the times I had considered becoming Catholic, but lost heart. He asked me to meet with him and I obliged him out of courtesy. But this time, the Holy Spirit went to work on me and by the time we met, I was once again actively considering entering the Catholic Church. This time, it would be the right time and the right priest.

We met over a couple of months as we both carefully prayed and discerned the issue. This church-hopper ended up joining the Tiber River Swimming Team, entering the Catholic Church on the Solemnity of All Saints in 2015.

 I became Catholic for many reasons. Aside from knowing there was no home for me anywhere in Protestantism, I had set aside a felt-centrality concerning my own opinions. I had accepted the authority of the catholicity I had embraced in traditional Anglicanism and surrendered my excuses. I could no longer justify remaining in schism. I wanted the truth and I wanted the full version of the “Catholic Lite” I had fallen in love with. I also wanted full union with the religious body endowed with the authority to live out the authentic and historic Christian faith — not an opinion about it. Because someone has to have the final say, I came to embrace the Pope as that person and I embraced the supremacy of the Catholic Church. I had an opportunity to enter the Church by finding a priest who understood me and was willing to give me individual attention, so I embraced it.

In hindsight, I can say with firm resolve that becoming Catholic was the best decision I’ve ever made and one of the greatest gifts God has ever given me — second only to my (earthly) mother. Taking that plunge has brought me home for good.

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