It’s really incredible the extent to which this tracks my own trajectory, including the Catholic wife, the return to church after having children, the desire to fill the indoctrination chasm, the emotions I was surprised to feel upon my return to worship — it’s all there, and would be detail for detail, but for my much more middling career in tech that does not include employment at elite firms.
Mine is quite similar. I was specifically scared of my children not knowing the Gospel, and of me being responsible for that. The question, “Why am I scared of this?” had a surprising answer of belief.
Now we go to church. My children are baptized. They are learning scripture.
Lutheran doctrine is that faith is a gift from God, and that’s been my experience.
Like wayne, I also see many parallels between your journey and mine, including being raised in a mainline Protestant church (United Methodist), falling into a materialism that felt brave and smart as a teenager that led to agnosticism and then atheism, and then finding my way to the Catholic Church through life circumstances, and then finding that I really, truly do believe.
About the True Presence: yeah, I didn’t get that, either. But now I do. I went to Adoration recently, and it was an eerily moving experience.
Because it is something that I think jibes with what you are talking about and that you would appreciate, I wrote about Christianity, vaccines, and the belief infrastructure we take for granted here:
Thanks for the kind words. I'll give those essays a read when I have a minute, very curious to hear other people's experiences with returning to faith. It's an under-discussed phenomenon, partly because I think smart people find it embarrassing.
As an offering to your curiosity, here is some of my experience.
I was raised a cradle Catholic. My recollections of childhood belief mirror your own. Then my mom told me that Santa Claus wasn't real when I was 9, and I got my first taste of existential vertigo. However, my parents were both still committed to the church, and for the next 10 years, I went with them to Mass every weekend (even the weekends where I had to drive my dad to the Sunday evening service at the parish across town because he was hammered after an afternoon of tailgating at the Chiefs game).
During my adolescence, I'd had a few awkward conversations with my dad asking him if he really believed that all the Hindus in India were going to hell, but he basically refused to debate it and I didn't push. Then, before I went off to college, my dad took me aside and gave me a condom to put in my wallet. The world started spinning again. Turned out all that talk about the importance of abstinence and the mortal sin of pre-marital sex were more like later verses from some outdated Christmas carol than hard and fast rules of life. Duly noted.
In 2005, I saw Sam Harris talking his book "The End of Faith" on C-SPAN. I read it. I was hooked. I went full Reddit-atheist. Argued with my friends. Chastised my sisters. Broke my parents' hearts. I look back on it now and wonder why I didn't wonder why they didn't cut ties. I might have learned something then if I'd been wise enough (or humble enough) to ask.
The decades passed. My wife and I married, worked, brought beautiful children into the world. Everything went great. I was on the escalator to the good life, and it was a smooth ride. And then my mom got sick. And then she died. And that was not ok. And I was not ok. And neither was my dad.
When my mom died, my dad immediately went through me and my sisters asking each of us to move in with him. I said I couldn't, but he was sick, too, and without my mom, he wasn't getting better, so after a year, I agreed and we bought the house I grew up in, and for the next year, we lived with my dad. My kids got to truly know their grandfather. My wife gave birth to our youngest, and my dad got to meet his last grandchild. And then his lungs lost against the onslaught of the chemo, and year after we had moved in with him, my dad followed my mom.
While we were living with him, my dad had made it a point to offer to take my kids with him to Mass every weekend. He would usually take them out for a treat afterwards, so when they would go, I figured it was mostly the lure of donuts or brunch, but they didn't always go. Except for my oldest son. He loved my dad. He looked up to him the way I looked up to him when I was kid. My dad made an impression on a lot of people, and it turned out my son was one of them. He was always happy to go to church when Big Papa invited him. During the last conversation I had with him while he was in hospice, my dad asked me if it would be ok if some friend of his could take my son to church with him since he wasn't there. I told him not to worry about asking his friends. I told him I would do it. That was as close as we ever got to a reconciliation over religion while he was alive. A few weeks later we were attending his funeral.
I kept my word. I took my son to church after my dad had died. In fact, I took the whole family. A few months later, I had the kids baptized. A year after that, my wife completed OCIA. And now, here we are, going to church every week. Saying prayers before meals. Adorning our home with religious iconography. Reading the Bible. How did that happen? I mean, in a sense, I guess I just told you. The story is right there above, but the thing that is funny to me is that, when I look back on it, the journey out of religion was all about what I believed and what I didn't, while the journey back in had little to do with either the beliefs or the "me" that I once regarded as the final word on everything that mattered.
Thanks for sharing. I find a lot here to relate to.
I do find it very striking how differently I conceptualize faith and religious practice now relative to when I was a child or a young man. It's interesting to me how the process of growing up has these stages, where first you shed the illusions of childhood, and then later on you shed the illusions of adolescence and early adulthood and learn which childhood truths were actually real.
My recollection of my relationship to "truth" during childhood is dominated by "telling the truth" as opposed to "telling lies." I'm not sure I ever really thought about whether something was "false," and if I did, it was long, long after I'd considered whether or not it was a lie.
Eventually I encountered the concept of falsity and it became an enormous preoccupation for close to 30 years. Accuracy displaced honesty as the highest of virtues. Error displaced duplicity as the gravest of sins. Or at least, I lost track of the hierarchy.
Today I find myself much more interested in what someone (including myself) does with the model he has. Those who are factual but not truthful are best treated cautiously and kept at a distance. Those who are honest but ignorant are often worthy companions. And then there are the souls who are curious, considerate and courageous: however rare they may be, I cherish every encounter I have with them and hope that I may eventually find myself counted among their ranks.
Can I interest you in the data analytics of Ryan Burge? One of his major themes is that, while secularism may have a certain cultural cache, and secularists are pretty loud in bragging about how smart they are, in the United States there is in fact a positive relationship between church attendance and educational level. (The reverse is true in Europe, but only barely since mainly Europeans don’t go to church at all, regardless of education; the American pattern holds where I live.) Here’s Ryan’s most-cited piece on this topic, but his Substack has a lot more:
I like Ryan, I've linked to his graphs on twitter a bunch of times before. I know just the one you're talking about, I was surprised when I learned of it.
Certainly our own church is full of educated and high-achieving people. One of the images I have about the Catholics in the states is that they're the "urban christians", not sure how accurate that is but that's the vibe.
It’s really incredible the extent to which this tracks my own trajectory, including the Catholic wife, the return to church after having children, the desire to fill the indoctrination chasm, the emotions I was surprised to feel upon my return to worship — it’s all there, and would be detail for detail, but for my much more middling career in tech that does not include employment at elite firms.
I often wonder how many of us followed this path
Mine is quite similar. I was specifically scared of my children not knowing the Gospel, and of me being responsible for that. The question, “Why am I scared of this?” had a surprising answer of belief.
Now we go to church. My children are baptized. They are learning scripture.
Lutheran doctrine is that faith is a gift from God, and that’s been my experience.
That's beautiful
Like wayne, I also see many parallels between your journey and mine, including being raised in a mainline Protestant church (United Methodist), falling into a materialism that felt brave and smart as a teenager that led to agnosticism and then atheism, and then finding my way to the Catholic Church through life circumstances, and then finding that I really, truly do believe.
About the True Presence: yeah, I didn’t get that, either. But now I do. I went to Adoration recently, and it was an eerily moving experience.
Because it is something that I think jibes with what you are talking about and that you would appreciate, I wrote about Christianity, vaccines, and the belief infrastructure we take for granted here:
https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/inoculated
And I wrote about religious demographics where I live and a bit about my own conversion here:
https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/the-smart-set
Thanks again for this essay, and I’m very happy for you.
Thanks for the kind words. I'll give those essays a read when I have a minute, very curious to hear other people's experiences with returning to faith. It's an under-discussed phenomenon, partly because I think smart people find it embarrassing.
As an offering to your curiosity, here is some of my experience.
I was raised a cradle Catholic. My recollections of childhood belief mirror your own. Then my mom told me that Santa Claus wasn't real when I was 9, and I got my first taste of existential vertigo. However, my parents were both still committed to the church, and for the next 10 years, I went with them to Mass every weekend (even the weekends where I had to drive my dad to the Sunday evening service at the parish across town because he was hammered after an afternoon of tailgating at the Chiefs game).
During my adolescence, I'd had a few awkward conversations with my dad asking him if he really believed that all the Hindus in India were going to hell, but he basically refused to debate it and I didn't push. Then, before I went off to college, my dad took me aside and gave me a condom to put in my wallet. The world started spinning again. Turned out all that talk about the importance of abstinence and the mortal sin of pre-marital sex were more like later verses from some outdated Christmas carol than hard and fast rules of life. Duly noted.
In 2005, I saw Sam Harris talking his book "The End of Faith" on C-SPAN. I read it. I was hooked. I went full Reddit-atheist. Argued with my friends. Chastised my sisters. Broke my parents' hearts. I look back on it now and wonder why I didn't wonder why they didn't cut ties. I might have learned something then if I'd been wise enough (or humble enough) to ask.
The decades passed. My wife and I married, worked, brought beautiful children into the world. Everything went great. I was on the escalator to the good life, and it was a smooth ride. And then my mom got sick. And then she died. And that was not ok. And I was not ok. And neither was my dad.
When my mom died, my dad immediately went through me and my sisters asking each of us to move in with him. I said I couldn't, but he was sick, too, and without my mom, he wasn't getting better, so after a year, I agreed and we bought the house I grew up in, and for the next year, we lived with my dad. My kids got to truly know their grandfather. My wife gave birth to our youngest, and my dad got to meet his last grandchild. And then his lungs lost against the onslaught of the chemo, and year after we had moved in with him, my dad followed my mom.
While we were living with him, my dad had made it a point to offer to take my kids with him to Mass every weekend. He would usually take them out for a treat afterwards, so when they would go, I figured it was mostly the lure of donuts or brunch, but they didn't always go. Except for my oldest son. He loved my dad. He looked up to him the way I looked up to him when I was kid. My dad made an impression on a lot of people, and it turned out my son was one of them. He was always happy to go to church when Big Papa invited him. During the last conversation I had with him while he was in hospice, my dad asked me if it would be ok if some friend of his could take my son to church with him since he wasn't there. I told him not to worry about asking his friends. I told him I would do it. That was as close as we ever got to a reconciliation over religion while he was alive. A few weeks later we were attending his funeral.
I kept my word. I took my son to church after my dad had died. In fact, I took the whole family. A few months later, I had the kids baptized. A year after that, my wife completed OCIA. And now, here we are, going to church every week. Saying prayers before meals. Adorning our home with religious iconography. Reading the Bible. How did that happen? I mean, in a sense, I guess I just told you. The story is right there above, but the thing that is funny to me is that, when I look back on it, the journey out of religion was all about what I believed and what I didn't, while the journey back in had little to do with either the beliefs or the "me" that I once regarded as the final word on everything that mattered.
Thanks for sharing. I find a lot here to relate to.
I do find it very striking how differently I conceptualize faith and religious practice now relative to when I was a child or a young man. It's interesting to me how the process of growing up has these stages, where first you shed the illusions of childhood, and then later on you shed the illusions of adolescence and early adulthood and learn which childhood truths were actually real.
My recollection of my relationship to "truth" during childhood is dominated by "telling the truth" as opposed to "telling lies." I'm not sure I ever really thought about whether something was "false," and if I did, it was long, long after I'd considered whether or not it was a lie.
Eventually I encountered the concept of falsity and it became an enormous preoccupation for close to 30 years. Accuracy displaced honesty as the highest of virtues. Error displaced duplicity as the gravest of sins. Or at least, I lost track of the hierarchy.
Today I find myself much more interested in what someone (including myself) does with the model he has. Those who are factual but not truthful are best treated cautiously and kept at a distance. Those who are honest but ignorant are often worthy companions. And then there are the souls who are curious, considerate and courageous: however rare they may be, I cherish every encounter I have with them and hope that I may eventually find myself counted among their ranks.
Can I interest you in the data analytics of Ryan Burge? One of his major themes is that, while secularism may have a certain cultural cache, and secularists are pretty loud in bragging about how smart they are, in the United States there is in fact a positive relationship between church attendance and educational level. (The reverse is true in Europe, but only barely since mainly Europeans don’t go to church at all, regardless of education; the American pattern holds where I live.) Here’s Ryan’s most-cited piece on this topic, but his Substack has a lot more:
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/lets-have-a-talk-about-education
So, be not afraid. I think that people may be silenced on this topic as they are on so many things, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not out there.
I like Ryan, I've linked to his graphs on twitter a bunch of times before. I know just the one you're talking about, I was surprised when I learned of it.
Certainly our own church is full of educated and high-achieving people. One of the images I have about the Catholics in the states is that they're the "urban christians", not sure how accurate that is but that's the vibe.
I'm a sucker for brainy conversion/reversion stories and this one is a banger.
https://www.taylorforeman.com/p/why-i-am-christian-again
Thank you for the recommendation, I'll check it out. It's been very encouraging to hear so many stories that are similar to mine.