The SHOCKING Truth About Christianity Nobody Tells You

You've written this new book called Communion. >> Yeah. >> Which is about It's I mean the subtitle is Finding My Way Back to Faith. >> Back to Faith.

>> Yeah, that's right. >> So for your 30s, you you you became atheist in your early your late 20s. >> Yeah, I would say my 20s. Even Yeah, in my early 20s.

So I was raised in an evangelical household. Very conservative, you know, very evangelical Christianity. My grandmother was one of these people, you know, she read the Bible five, six times a day. She prayed five, six times a day was was a

woman, you know, mama was was devoutly religious, but we were what you you would call unchurched. So I would go to church with my dad. I would occasionally go to church with my mom, occasionally with my mama, but you know, our religion was very

much experienced at home. It was you would watch televangelists on TV. Uh you would watch Billy Graham revival um things on TV, but we didn't go to church that much. And so, you know, I got to a point in

my life where I I just felt like my faith wasn't speaking to me anymore. It didn't seem to have particular relevance to my life. There was a certain, you know, new atheist element to it where I assumed that I knew more than these,

you know, bumpkins that had raised me. And, you know, her faith is all superstition. I'm rational and I'm a college educated kid and I know things that other people don't. So, there's a certain intellectual arrogance that was built into

it. But sort of all these things kind of swam together. But fundamentally, I I think that the with all love and affection to my grandmother, I I think the thing about my faith that just never took root is that

I never saw why it actually mattered that much. It was just a thing. It was in the background. It was something we believed. I mean, I really did believe this stuff when I

was a teenager, but it didn't really matter. And so when that boy collided with reality and collided with a lot of things that were going on in the world, I just was not properly prepared to actually integrate my faith into this new world.

>> When did you realize that it mattered? >> Well, well, so so okay. So, so I become an atheist. I'm I'm sort of one of these like angry atheists, you know, where I'll like argue with people who say

that they're religious and I I pretend that I'm smarter than everybody else. And it was like very embarrassing in hindsight. But you know I I I go back and so just a flaw that I have all of us have

many flaws, many virtues but a flaw that I have is I just I wanted to rise above. Now where it came from a good place is I wanted stability. I wanted a decent income.

I wanted to provide my kids that stability that I didn't have. But where it was a very bad thing is I cared way too much about what credentials I had, where did I go to school, how much money that I

made. And so this sort of new atheism actually was like the perfect philosophy for the creed of a kid who just wanted to get ahead. I wanted to make as much money.

I wanted to have the most prestigious profession. I was super ambitious for ambition's sake. And you know, so I I I'd won every competition that life had put before me. You know, I'm I'm at this point in my late