Discovering, Abandoning, and Rediscovering God

The progress of my spiritual passions, recollected in Easter tranquility.

A sunrise service at Lighthouse Point in Scituate, Massachusetts, on Easter 1993. (Photo by Bill Brett/Boston Globe via Getty Images)

ON A COLD JANUARY NIGHT IN 2017, I went to the movies. I did not have any idea, as I walked to the cinema and pulled up my ticket, how consequential my evening would turn out to be.

Going out to catch a film wasn’t unusual for me then, although as a newly married graduate student at Yale Divinity School working part-time at the library, I didn’t get to make these trips as often as I wanted. The film I had come out for that night was one I’d been waiting months to see—a passion project that had haunted its director for decades and that was quickly turning into a box office disappointment, as such projects often are. My friend and I were the only ones in the theater. We were there to watch Martin Scorsese’s Silence.

Set in seventeenth-century Japan, Silence follows two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garupe (Adam Driver), who travel to the closed island nation in search of their missing mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). They hear rumors that he has renounced his faith. The fraught journey the two pious men undertake to find Ferreira becomes a harrowing exploration of spiritual doubt, theological tension, and the silence of God amid suffering.

As a devoted Scorsese fan, I was predisposed to love Silence. As a budding historian of Christianity, I found the film relevant to many of my intellectual interests. But as someone who had lost his faith, I also found the movie affecting me on a deeper level.

In the film’s climactic scene, Rodrigues is ordered to step on the fumi-e, an image of Christ; his captors explain that renouncing his faith in this way would immediately end the torture of several Japanese converts. He then hears Christ’s voice inviting him to trample His face, and to share in His suffering. Rodrigues steps—not in denial, but in love. Following this outward renunciation, he becomes acculturated and lives the rest of his life in Japan. But after his death, a secret is revealed—a small crucifix, which his wife hides in his hands just before his burial; it is a token of the secret endurance of his faith. And the fleeting glimpse of Christ suggests He was never absent, even in the silence.

I was overwhelmed by what I had witnessed. The movie is profound and capable of moving many people, but personal circumstances left me defenseless against its power, and I wept. My father, back in Australia, had just been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor that would take his life that October. I had visited him a few months earlier, and the signs of decline were already clear. He had only just retired after decades teaching Italian; the injustice of it scathed me. It was the kind of thing that had driven me from God in the first place.

I wasn’t raised in an overtly Christian family. I was baptized by a Roman Catholic priest a few weeks after I was born to satisfy the expectations of my Italian extended family, but we never went to church, and I hardly knew anyone who did.

My experience was far from unique. As Tom Frame has chronicled in Losing My Religion, the Australia I was born into in 1988 was already well into a pronounced religious decline. By the 1986 census, nearly 13 percent of Australians claimed “No Religion,” an increase by a factor of four since 1966, and the trend only accelerated in the decades that followed. Frame notes that what had once been assumed—a common Christian vision binding Australian culture together—had fragmented into something more diverse. In many circles, indifference reigned. The hush around religion I experienced growing up wasn’t unusual; it was the norm.

That hush was broken by the September 11 terrorist attacks.

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IN THE MONTHS AND YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I struggled to make sense of what happened that day. I wondered how people who claimed to be religious could commit such violence—how the mass murder of innocent people could have been one of their objectives. My questions led me back to reflecting on my own sense of morality. I began seeking answers to questions I hadn’t even known I carried. What started as a search grew into a deep fascination, and this fascination shaped my teenage years and eventually pushed me into my career as a scholar of religion. As I read more and discussed what I was learning with friends and family, I found myself drawn to the core of my subject matter, as I understood it—the person of Christ. Regular prayer and a weekly Bible study became part of my routine; I became a youth group regular and a frequent church volunteer. Before long, people began to ask if I had ever considered a life in ministry.

At that point, I hadn’t. My plan was to become an actor and filmmaker. But those voices grew louder in my ear. Could I be called? Was I meant to be a leader? Much to my parents’ surprise, I did decide to pursue Anglican ministry. But when I undertook theological training, I realized that my simple, literalist faith was about to face challenges I had not encountered before.

Professors and classmates held views I found bewildering. They questioned the virgin birth, the historicity of the Exodus, large portions of the New Testament’s authorship, and even original sin and the Trinity—and for all that, they still called themselves Christians. I began to wonder if there were other ways of being faithful than my callow, cramped paradigm had allowed. I started to gravitate toward more liberal voices like those of John Shelby Spong, Brian D. McLaren, and Rob Bell, and after a time, I patterned my beliefs after theirs.

I believed my newfound progressive faith was deeper, smarter, and more just than what it replaced. But at the end of my liberalizing arc, I was left with a God who never challenged me but who always affirmed me and my desires. In honest retrospect, I had not adopted a more mature and capacious framework so much as found a way to make religion into a vehicle for my very secular aspirations and insecurities.

Friends noticed the shift in my beliefs. A few confronted me, arguing that I’d been carried away into theological drift and moral compromise, but I brushed them off. I saw myself as a new believer for a new age—modern, and always modernizing.

I continued along the path to ordination, enrolling in seminary while the contradictions of my heart continued to heighten. My studies faltered, my spiritual life grew dry, and I stopped showing up to class. Personal tragedy compounded these problems: A close friend in ministry died by suicide. Grief sharpened my doubts: If prayer wasn’t real dialogue, why pray? If evangelism was colonialism, why witness? If the creeds had no stable center, what did Christianity confess? If the resurrection was only metaphor, what was left to believe? Eventually, the seminary asked me to leave. But spiritually, I had already walked away—not just from the program, but from God.

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WHAT I HAVE DESCRIBED FITS A TEMPLATE known generally as ‘deconstruction,’ a process of taking apart the framework of Christian belief, either to by the end become free of faith entirely or to recombine its parts into a cleaner-burning moral and spiritual engine for your life. The term has grown common in Christian spaces over the past few years as a number of prominent Christian leaders have publicly undertaken their own processes of deconstruction.

Among the most well known is Joshua Harris, author of the 1997 Christian publishing megahit I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He shocked many of his former readers when he not only retracted the teachings of his bestselling book but even, in 2019, stepped away from the faith entirely. Similarly, Marty Sampson, a former worship leader with Hillsong United, expressed deep doubts about his faith before eventually declaring that he was “losing” it.

But deconstruction does not always lead to departure. Some formerly conservative believers like the late Rachel Held Evans and Peter Enns have become emblematic of a deconstructive process aimed at reclaiming and reforming Christianity rather than cutting loose from it. Their work invites believers to challenge inherited assumptions, grapple with difficult passages of Scripture, and rebuild their faith in ways that are intellectually honest, morally serious, and spiritually life-giving.

Strikingly, Antitheist activists did not warm to these liberalizing trends within conservative churches, and they took aim at them just as Nietzsche did over a century before. Prominent New Atheist figure Sam Harris labeled this theological moderation dishonest, a means of providing cover. Christopher Hitchens saw liberal Christianity as a halfway house, a place where spiritual neurotics could cling to religion’s comforts while abandoning its claims to truth.

For a time, I was sympathetic to the arguments of Hitchens, Harris, and similar figures. Rather than keep following the example of Evans and others, I stopped believing in God—but I found that I could not quench my fascination with religion’s enduring power to shape the world. My goals evolved: I could not preach, but I could see a future delivering lectures to students interested in the same questions I was. I matriculated at Yale Divinity School and found that my frustration was only growing deeper.

In the classroom, I often found myself at odds with both students and faculty, many of whom treated religion as a kind of cultural performance similar in character to pop-culture fandom. I couldn’t accept that. Religion was categorically different, I still felt—it was stranger, weightier, more enigmatic than a Taylor Swift concert. Even as an atheist, I couldn’t rid myself of this sense of the unruly numinous, forever breaking out of the boxes scholars were attempting to place over it. I wanted it to keep it free—to maintain a sense for its awe, its mystery, its sacred strangeness. Its weirdness.

And so I found my way to the weird students at Yale. They formed a small, eclectic circle of Catholic, Episcopal, Orthodox, Methodist, Presbyterian, and even Mormon students who stood somewhat apart from the Divinity School’s prevailing ethos. They were often at odds even from the mainstream of their own denominations. I found them refreshingly authentic, intellectually rigorous, and remarkably kind.

My new friends genuinely believed in unfashionable dogmas like the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and they weren’t the least bit embarrassed to say so. They challenged me to reconsider ideas I had long ago dismissed; in doing so, they introduced me to a deeper intellectual world and a more thought-provoking spirituality than was available by dint of the austere atheist humanism I’d lately adopted. A flourishing life of both the mind and spirit I had never fully encountered, even as a former believer. And then it was all around me.

The friends I found at Yale reminded me, in short, of what faith at its most serious could still look like. When I was moved by Silence, I was experiencing the culmination of what these friends gave me. It got me back to God.

My reconversion was not immediate, although the initial emotions were intense and dramatic, a religious experience such as I had not felt in years. It was theophany. I comprehended my dying father and my life up to that point. The tears came freely; I felt dumbfounded. When Silence’s credits began to inch up the screen, I felt my spirit rising in tandem. I may not have been restored to the simplistic religion of my youth, but something new was happening. Or something very old.

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STANFORD’S PH.D. PROGRAM IN AMERICAN religious history welcomed me just around the time my father passed away. Grieving and isolated, I turned inward. I still did not fully accept my nascent faith, but I found myself reaching for Christian apologetics I hadn’t touched in years. In 2018, Stanford Magazine profiled me as “an Atheist in God’s country,” as the headline put it. I missed the church and envied Christians, I told my interviewer. Reading the piece later, I felt exposed and unsettled.

Former pastor Ryan Bell’s “Year Without God” was an experiment he undertook to see if his faith could survive a year without any spiritual practice or ritual. (It didn’t.) I decided to reverse the experiment by going to church for a year. My wife, Kate, was surprised and cautious. I chose to attend a 7 a.m. church service, the easier to slip in and out without being engaged. I told myself I was just trying it out. But if you tell yourself something like that, there’s a good chance it isn’t true. And it wasn’t. I was feeling something deeper, something stubbornly inchoate.

It was the closing prayer of Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God that finally gave shape to what I was feeling. Based on the experience of a member of his congregation, he advised seekers not to pray, “God, help me find you,” but instead, “God, come and find me.”

So that’s what I did.

It’s been a few years since then. I’m now a deacon in the Anglican Church in North America with hopes of being ordained a priest. I’ve led Bible studies, sponsored baptisms, and walked with others as they’ve been received into our church. Friends and family have asked me to officiate weddings and funerals, and prayer and Scripture are now woven into the rhythm of my daily life in a way they never were before. Embracing their mystery while sharing their hope, I confess once more the ancient creeds of the Church.

My journey today puts me in the company of a larger social movement. Some are calling it “the Quiet Revival”—a gentle but steady turn (or return) to Christian belief. Signs of it are emerging in unexpected places: rising Bible sales, a growth in liturgical worship, the unexpected global popularity of faith-informed media like The Chosen, the reach of devotional podcasts, and even Christian groups forming in Minecraft servers. The ranks of evangelists are growing to include former OnlyFans creators, student athletes, and gamers. My story is one of many recently about people finding God—or, in Keller’s revision, of God finding them.

But beneath the talk of revival, there are real ambiguities and causes for concern. Within Christian circles, high-profile conversions become occasions for careful discernment and for conversations about signs of true faith as opposed to its cultural trappings. It can be hard to avoid seeing some recent celebrity professions of new faith as attempts at rebranding, as stunts, or, at worst, as ways to seek cover for wrongdoing. And the reality of our hyperpolarized moment is that it is growing increasingly difficult to separate religious phenomena from their political entanglements. As a church worker, I find the signs of renewal encouraging, but I find it necessary to greet them with caution. Great collective passions stir headlines, but they are no guarantee of lasting change. They remain vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors and to the familiar criticisms that have long been leveled against faith. Our spiritual hungers endure, but we should be careful about what we eat.

In his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” the writer Wendell Berry counsels: “Practice resurrection.” It’s a very fitting sentiment for Easter, joining the core of Christian faith with a panoply of symbols. It comprehends the small crucifix enclosed in the hand of the dead priest, and the tear-streaked face of the man watching the scene in a darkened theater. Resurrection, it is important to remember, isn’t a simple return to a status quo ante. It is to reveal something that—though it remains recognizable—has been made new.