Finding Faith
My spiritual journey hasn't been a straight line. I've gone from childhood faith to convinced atheism and back to a faith that looks very different from where I started. Understanding where I am now requires understanding where I've been.
Early Faith: Vanilla Midwestern Protestantism
I was raised in what I'd call stereotypically Midwestern, middle-class Protestant Christianity. We were Methodist and Baptist, attending churches like Aldersgate Methodist when I was very young, then Asbury Methodist after we moved.
My first salvation experience happened at Metro Christian Academy during a school assembly. These kids came dressed like cool '90s youth: baggy pants, chains, flannel shirts. It was a stark contrast to our Christian school uniforms. They gave an altar call, and I went forward. A young kid prayed with me for salvation and the Holy Spirit. It was meaningful at the time.
I was involved in youth group at Faith United Methodist, active in the church community. After my parents' divorce, my dad moved in a more charismatic direction with his new wife, while my mom stayed Methodist. I also spent time with my girlfriend Rachel at a Reformed LDS church, where her grandmother Kay was especially kind to me.
This was all good, normal, middle-American Christianity. I believed it. But I didn't understand it deeply, and when it was challenged, it fell apart pretty easily.
The Atheist Years: Thinking I Had It Figured Out
In my early twenties, dating Kathryn, we watched a documentary called Zeitgeist that was making the rounds in the mid-2000s. It presented a revisionist history of Christianity, arguing that it was all borrowed mythology and a control mechanism. I watched it and thought: everything I learned was a lie.
This dovetailed with my growing interest in libertarianism and Austrian economics. I was reading Murray Rothbard, who was an atheist and had some choice things to say about the "throne and altar," the unholy alliance between church and state. I came to see organized religion as fundamentally a control grid, a way for powerful people to manipulate the masses.
For seven or eight years, I was an atheist or at least agnostic. I thought I'd seen through the lies. I was smarter than all those religious people who needed fairy tales to make sense of the world. I had economics, I had reason, I had libertarian philosophy. I didn't need God.
When my mom died and the pastor at her funeral service said it was her dying wish that we would come to know Christ like she did, I remember thinking: "Well, this is fake." It didn't move me at all. I was beyond that now.
Or so I thought.
The Return: A Dangerous Delusion
The atheist worldview worked fine when life was working. It gave me no resources when life fell apart.
After my mom died, in the midst of my self-destructive spiral, there was a morning when I was hungover, in withdrawal, feeling absolutely terrible. I prayed: "Lord, can you save me again? I can't keep doing this."
That prayer didn't immediately change everything. But it was the beginning. I started saying yes to the Holy Spirit more often than no. I was still living a lifestyle that was incompatible with faith, but something was shifting.
Around this time, I started listening to Jordan Peterson. Love him or hate him, Peterson was talking about the Bible and myth and meaning in ways that made sense to my analytically-minded, logic-driven brain. He was treating Scripture seriously as a source of wisdom without requiring me to check my intellect at the door.
But here's where things went wrong: I became arrogant. Dangerously arrogant. I convinced myself that I was going to be a prophet of the Lord Jesus and correct all the errors of the church. This was before I'd done any serious reading, before I'd read through the whole Bible, before I'd engaged with the Church Fathers. I was absorbing Peterson's ideas and thinking I'd figured it all out.
I was insufferable. I remember being out to lunch with my friends Harry and David, fresh off Harry's failed road trip to Missouri to meet a girl who had a boyfriend. We'd all told him not to go, that nothing would happen. I was being a complete jerk about it, and to drive the point home, I asked our waitress to weigh in on whether he ever had a chance. It was cruel and humiliating.
We went back to my house. I was playing guitar and going on about how I was going to fix the church with all this stuff I'd figured out from Peterson. Then Harry snapped. This guy is six-seven, six-eight, maybe 350 pounds. He jumped up, crossed the room in two strides, lifted me by my throat, slammed me to the ground, and started choking me to death.
I took it. I didn't fight back. I didn't resist. At the time, I wasn't that enamored with my life, so I accepted that this was how it was going to end. David had to physically pull Harry off me. I was legitimately on the verge of death.
Looking back, that moment showed me two things: how little I valued my own life at that time, and how delusional I'd become about my supposed prophetic calling. I wasn't a prophet. I was an arrogant jerk who'd read some Jordan Peterson and thought he had all the answers.
That was a wake-up call. I needed to actually do the work.
Doing the Work: Reading and Discovery
After that incident, I got serious about actually understanding what I was talking about. I committed to reading the entire Bible in one year using a daily reading plan. Not skimming, not cherry-picking favorite passages, but working through the whole thing systematically.
That year of reading was transformative. I started seeing patterns I'd never noticed before. Questions emerged that I'd never thought to ask. The text wasn't what I'd been taught it was. Something deeper was there, something I was just beginning to glimpse.
After finishing the Bible, I discovered
It was Pageau's endorsement of Orthodoxy that prompted me to actually start attending church again. I found an Orthodox parish and loved it immediately. The liturgy, the tradition, the theological depth. Everything resonated with what I'd been reading and discovering.
I also began working through the Church Fathers systematically. Then I discovered René Girard, whose work gave me language for patterns I'd already been seeing.
What matters about this sequence is that I was developing my own understanding before I had the theological frameworks to articulate it. The reading didn't give me someone else's ideas to adopt. It gave me the tools to understand what I was already discovering.
The Church Journey: Finding and Losing Community
The Orthodox church became a spiritual home. Then the pandemic hit. They closed down, and in my hurt over that closure, I stopped going. I'm actually embarrassed about that now because I feel like Orthodoxy might be the best Christian tradition, but I let my disappointment stop me from pursuing it further.
I started attending my parents' church, New Covenant Bible Church, and got deeply involved. I led a psalm chanting ministry called "Plainsong Revival" for about a year and a half. We used the St. Dunstan's Psalter and chanted the psalms in traditional plainsong style. I taught from Matthieu Pageau's book The Language of Creation. We went through the entire Psalter twice during that period.
After Plainsong Revival ended, I led a Bible study and lecture series on Wednesday mornings for another nine months. I was pouring myself into teaching and building community there.
Then I experienced some significant church hurt. Without going into details that might be unfair to well-meaning people, I'll say it involved unmet expectations, miscommunications, and ultimately a breakdown of trust. That, combined with the church's inability to provide consistent children's programming for my kids, led me to leave.
Where I Am Now
I'm now at Church on the Move. It's not Orthodox, and it's not a place where my particular theological views are particularly understood or welcomed. But it's where I've found genuine community and am able to serve. I'm part of Bible study groups and small group ministries where I can share insights with believers at different stages of their faith journey.
I continue using daily Bible reading plans, though not always consistently. I keep working through Girard and theological texts. I'm still learning, still growing, still trying to figure out what it means to walk in love.
My faith now is intellectually rigorous in ways it never was as a kid, but it's also more practical. It's not about having all the right doctrines or saying the right prayers. It's about walking in love. It's about the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
I struggle with all of those, especially patience and self-control. I'm working on it.
Faith and Doubt
I want to be honest: I still struggle with doubt. There are days when the whole thing seems like elaborate mythology I've convinced myself to believe because I need it to cope with existence.
But here's what I keep coming back to: this framework works. It explains human behavior better than any other model I've encountered. It provides resources for transformation that secular philosophy doesn't. It gives meaning and purpose to suffering in ways that "life is meaningless, then you die" never could.
And more than that, I've experienced it. The transformation in my life from the wilderness period to now isn't something I accomplished through willpower. It's grace. It's the Holy Spirit working in ways I can't fully explain but can't deny.
So I keep showing up. I keep reading. I keep praying. I keep trying to walk in love. And when I fail (which is often), I keep trusting that God's grace is sufficient, that my weakness is where His strength is made perfect.
The intellectual framework that emerged from all this reading (the theological understanding that makes sense of Scripture and human nature) is what I want to share in the next section. But it's important to understand that it came from a journey, not from adopting someone else's system wholesale.