How I Became Christian (Part 1)

My journey from materialist atheism to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

I was born in 1967 in the American South, in the small town where my father had grown up and my paternal grandparents still lived. I think I came into the world knowing the truth—I think we all do—but by the time I started forming memories, the cultural Petri dish feeding my young life had supplanted it. I don’t remember a time when I ever believed in God. My grandmother attended church, and I sometimes went with her, when I’d spent Saturday night at her house. It was from her that I learned the Lord’s Prayer, and I knew the words by heart my entire life, in the older Anglican / Episcopalian version, with ‘who art’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses’. I was an inquisitive child and I’m certain I badgered my grandmother about what I’d heard in Sunday School, but none of that turned into anything like a conviction. At home, where I of course spent most of my time, we were not believers, and I’d have asked my parents the same things I asked my grandmother. They’d have given different answers, and apparently those carried more weight. So I grew up believing God was just a myth that made some people feel better about life.

So at home we weren’t believers, but we weren’t militant atheists, either; I don’t recall ever talking about it. We had no dog in that race; we swam in agnostic water. I grew up not so much an atheist as a materialist (though I didn’t know that word then). The world was all around us, it was what it was, and that was the deal. I remember asking my father once what he thought happened when we died. He said he didn’t know. He didn’t know if there was some kind of afterlife, or it was just all over once you died. All he knew was he was alive here, now, in this world.

I grew up interested in everything, but especially math and science. I went to a STEM-focused high school, then off to college where I majored in physics and math. By the time I got my degree I’d been swimming for nearly a decade in the elitist water of academic materialist atheism. To wit: only stupid people believe in God, simpletons who can’t understand the science that has disproven him, and who need a sky daddy to remind them to be nice to other people. Even then lots of them are total jerks. Talk about dumb!

Then I went to grad school, where I met Frederick Phillips Brooks. This was the first data point that made me rethink my stance.

Fred Brooks was a brilliant computer scientist. And a famous one: his 2022 obituary appeared in the New York Times. His work earned him a Turing Award in 1999. The Turing Award is like the Fields Medal for math, the Nobel Prize for physics. Fred Brooks was a whip-smart, accomplished champion of science and technology. He was also a committed Christian.

I had a lot of occasion to interact with Dr. Brooks. He was my advisor, and he led the research project I worked on for three years. I also served as his teaching assistant for a semester. If he’d been the kind of Christian who gets all judgy and evangelical up in your face, he wouldn’t have been that first data point I mentioned. But he wasn’t like that at all. Everyone knew he was a devout Christian, but it never came up once in his and my interactions. He was always gracious and kind to me. He held me to high standards, which I admired, but it was how he responded to my failures that amazed me. He was somehow generous without waving them away. He clearly loved his work, loved his life, and had this deep peace about him that fascinated me. I wanted what he had. At the time I didn’t realize that ‘what he had’ was Christ; I thought it was age, experience, fame, the usual suspects.

At that time I was a divorced mother with a young child, recently married to my second husband, another grad student in the department. Not six weeks into our marriage, I started an affair with an international exchange student. The story of that is long and messy and I’ll say more about it later, but the point here is that I was decidedly not someone living a life Fred Brooks approved of. The second marriage and the affair played out during the time I worked for Dr. Brooks; he knew the state of my life. Yet he was, as I said, always gracious and kind to me.

This—the lack of evangelizing, the lack of censure, and the love for science and technology—were the data point. If this man believes the Christian story, it can’t be what it looks like from the outside. There must be something I don’t understand.

Nothing changed for me then. That data point got filed away somewhere in the back of my mind as I went on with my life. I divorced the second husband and married the international exchange student. We moved to a new house and had our first child together, our second in total. While I was pregnant with our third, new neighbors moved in next door. She was a leading voice in education; he was a physics professor. Both were devoted Christians. That gave us a little pause at the beginning, but they turned out to be great neighbors and friends: fun, funny, smart, kind, gracious, generous, and peaceful. Where had I seen this before?

If these two people are Christian, it can’t be what I think it is. I am missing something key.

It was a second data point, but again, it didn’t change things for me. I filed it away beside data point number one and life went on as before. We eventually moved overseas, to my husband’s home country. By this time I was in my late thirties, and starting to suspect I didn’t actually have life figured out. The crippling depression that had plagued me since childhood still paid me regular visits. The lack of deep social connection I’d felt my whole life was still there, but I’d exhausted all possible explanations: I wasn’t autistic, morbidly shy, obnoxious, or socially clumsy. I had a family I loved and work I enjoyed, but they weren’t scratching my fulfillment itch. There wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong; life was sometimes frustrating but fundamentally good. And yet I was fundamentally unsatisfied.

Around this time, two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door. Now JWs and Mormons had knocked on my door many times before; I’d always been gracious while explaining I wasn’t interested. When this married couple in their sixties knocked on my door, I responded as I always had. But Joab and Martha surprised me. Joab in particular knew his science. So I invited them in. I’d always said the Bible was bollocks, but I’d never read it. Fred Brooks and my old neighbors had, and they believed it. Here was a chance to find out what it said, from people who—like Dr. Brooks and my old neighbors—believed the book was true and also believed in science.

(For the record, I did not go on to become a Jehovah’s Witness. Like all denominations, they have their own special sauce of beliefs and traditions, and it isn’t a sauce I feel compelled to ladle onto my walk with Christ. But I am deeply grateful to them for the door-to-door work that they do. They gave me my first way in, in the safety of my own home, with thoughtful, gracious teachers.)

I spent about a year learning from Martha and Joab. No question was out of bounds, and they responded to my doubts and aversions with thoughtful answers. They remained gently firm on their beliefs even when I didn’t like them, which was critical—if they’d hemmed and hawed and tried to serve me more palatable half-truths, they’d have been useless to me. I already knew what I believed; I wanted to know what the Bible said.

Our sessions ended when my daughter got cancer. Joab and Martha rang the doorbell every couple of months to ask how she was doing, and when at last I had to say she’d died, they mourned with me. No platitudes about her being in a better place now or God needing another angel or yadda yadda vomit upchuck ralph. Here, too, was a data point that didn’t match what I thought Christianity was. (It would be years before I realized their sharing in my grief was the true response of Christ.)

We moved away that spring, and I never saw Joab and Martha again. My Bible study with them had been fruitful, in that I’d met two more Christians whose rationality and depth of character told me there was some real substance in that faith. I also knew more about what was in the Bible than I had before, but frankly, none of that had budged my worldview. I was disturbed by all the violence in the Jewish scriptures, and when we got to Sodom and Gomorrah I asked point blank if the Bible really did condemn homosexuality. Joab and Martha had explained that the sin of those cities had been their aggressively self-centered inhospitality, which included a demand to hand over two male visitors for the townsmen to gang rape. My question led us into other places in both testaments where same-sex activity is explicitly forbidden. Well, I said, I can’t pledge allegiance to a God who goes around killing people for that. In every presidential election in the US, I said, I’ve voted for the candidate who supports marriage equality. If God will send people to eternal fiery torment because of who they love, I said, then I’m out. (It would be years before I knew how flawed my understanding of the Christian viewpoint still was.) And then my daughter got sick, and we stopped our biweekly study, and then I moved away, and life went on. It would be nine years before I sought to know more about God.

Read part two here.