The Reconversion of a Secularized Radical

Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

I once stood on a Kansas City sidewalk shouting obscenities through a megaphone at total strangers just because they were attending a politically conservative conference. You may be wondering how a United Methodist pastor winds up shouting amplified curse words along a busy city street. I’ll explain.

It was 2009, and America was under new management. Hope and change were in the air as our first black president took office. The Bush-Cheney years were over, and for an outspoken, young liberal like me, that felt like a win. In those days, white conservative Christians were the bane of my existence. I was an anti-war, pro-choice, LGBT ally who said witty things like, “Obama isn’t a brown-skinned liberal who gives away free healthcare; you’re thinking of Jesus,” and “Jesus was a socialist; Christians should be, too!” 

Where did those ideas come from? Was I radicalized on the secular streets of Seattle? Nope--I was raised in Red Lick, Texas, and my family’s local United Methodist church was our home away from home. I preached my first Sunday morning sermon at the age of twelve, and as a teenager, I was heavily involved in conference- and jurisdictional-level youth events. I was the president of my high school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a diehard Promise Keeper, and a reluctant virgin for the Lord. 

By the time I went off to college, I’d checked all the “good Christian” boxes which meant, of course, that I was prepared to face the challenges and hostilities that await overtly Christian underclassmen in secular, academic environments, right? Not quite. By the spring of my third year, my worldview of choice was agnostic humanism, and my lifelong faith in God was all but gone. 

Did I mention that, when I de-converted, I was a Religious Studies major at a United Methodist college? This may not surprise you if you’ve heard the whispers about the rapid secularization of our institutions of higher learning. The rumors are true: critical theory, intersectionality, and the coronation of victimhood as the summit of virtue have been steeping for decades in academia’s illiberal teapot of counterfeit tolerance. In the name of liberation, powerful professors have leveraged their considerable privilege to compel entire generations of young students to abandon critical thinking and surrender unconditionally to their totalitarian narrative of white, Western villainy. 

My senior thesis paper on Ecclesiology reads like a Marxist manifesto: “Even if Jesus didn’t physically rise from the dead, all that matters is whether the Church bearing his name will rise up to conquer present-day demons like systemic injustice, racism, and income inequality.” In the twelve years that followed, I attended a left-leaning United Methodist seminary, became an ordained Elder in the Missouri Annual Conference, led three local churches, and oversaw various social justice initiatives serving refugees, immigrants, at-risk youth, and homeless people. 

Although I was proud of the work I was doing, my inner life was consumed by the flames of rage and depression, and a sinister addiction to online pornography covertly added fuel to those fires. My sermons often amounted to angry and vulgar diatribes against all the ways conservative Christians were pushing people farther away from God. I never stopped to consider what gave me the right to speak about a God in whom I had no vested interest.

I was stuck living a lie until late 2012, when an activist friend asked me if I had ever been to the Holy Land. When I said no, she said, “I’m going to find a way to get you there. You need to see how the Zionists are destroying Palestine.” Nine months later, I was exploring the land that gave rise to the Bible.

I died in Capernaum, or at least the old Eric did. My wretched, divided life passed away the day I stood near the first-Century house where first-generation Christians gathered to worship in the years following Jesus’ death. My tour guide was an archaeology enthusiast named Bert, and he told me all about the graffiti on the walls inside that ancient house-church - engravings that read: “Lord Jesus Christ” and “Christ have mercy,” among other things. That part didn’t surprise me; I knew Christians had been calling Jesus their “God” ever since the days of Constantine’s Edict of Milan. 

But then Bert said, “Archaeologists have dated those etchings to the first half of the first century AD,” and I felt my ontological foundations trembling beneath my feet. One of my favorite weapons to use against evangelicals had always been the argument that Jesus’ divinity was a later amendment to the original biblical narrative. What did it mean, then, that this Capernaum graffiti was scratched onto those walls at least two-hundred sixty-three years before Constantine’s edict and several decades prior to the first gospel being written? It meant that the people who knew Jesus best--his friends, followers, and family--worshiped him as their God. 

I knew enough about Jewish Scripture and beliefs to be certain that, for any self-respecting Jew, worshiping a mere man was off-limits. The rule against worshiping anyone but God sits atop the Ten Commandments. Not even Abraham, Moses, or Elijah was worthy of worship. But the faithful Jews who walked with Jesus, including some who watched him die, worshiped him, postmortem.

That day in Capernaum, I was faced with history’s most consequential question: Was Jesus just a man, or is he truly God? After a considerable amount of reflection, I came to the uncomfortable and shocking conclusion that Jesus is who he and his followers said he was: Emmanuel, God with us.

Reaching that monumental decision was the easy part; the harder work awaited me back home. I knew I owed my faithful, patient, Jesus-loving wife an apology for making her life a living hell for the better part of thirteen years. I also knew it was my responsibility to go back to the pulpits where I’d preached heresy and hate, and to tell the truth about my sin, my shame, and most of all, my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. 

As I look back on this journey so far, my heart overflows with gratitude because it made me who I am today. Ironically, my newfound, evangelical faith has sparked a greater, more authentic yearning to seek, here and now, the economic and racial justice of God’s heavenly Kingdom. Prior to my Capernaum experience, I spoke non-stop about diversity and inclusion, but my churches and staff were almost exclusively white and liberal. In 2015, my family and I moved to Houston, where God has blessed us with the opportunity to plant one of the most diverse United Methodist congregations in the Texas Conference. We’ve still got a long way to go before we become the church God wants us to be, but we are trusting the Holy Spirit to guide our steps. 

By His mercy, God plucked me as a brand from the fire, and His Spirit has prompted me to offer gentle warnings to my fellow, well-intentioned Wesleyans because, in times like these, when emotions run hot and culture wars rage all around us, it can be tempting to push the Gospel of Jesus aside as we search for some “real solutions” elsewhere.

How can you tell when you, your church or denomination is drifting toward secular solutions to our society’s spiritual issues? From my personal experience, I’ll offer three telltale signs of one who may be inching toward veiled agnostic humanism:

1. Laughing When Christians Fall

When I was an angry Leftist, criticizing well-known evangelicals was my favorite pastime. When preachers and politicians like Mark Driscoll and Mark Sanford fell from grace, I didn’t grieve for their families or the people who looked up to them as leaders. I laughed. I tweeted. It felt like we won. Why? Because one of the lies I believed back then was that tribe mattered more than truth, and even though I called myself a Christian, my true tribe was the political Left. Today, whenever I hear of a prominent Christian getting into trouble, my heart breaks for them and those they’ve been leading, and I pray for the Holy Spirit to restore them. That’s the power of Jesus; in the shadow of the cross, I’m certain that I’m in no position to judge my brothers and sisters, especially in the hour of their greatest need.

2. Explaining Away the Bible

After my conversion in 2013, I looked back at the sermons I’d written while walking in darkness. It was shocking to see how deeply ashamed of the Bible I had become. In almost every instance, I went out of my way to apologize for what I believed were textual inaccuracies and immoral, outdated teachings. I mocked Leviticus and Revelation as though they do not represent the inspired Word of God. I apologized profusely for Paul who, according to the old me, was clearly a misogynist. I argued against the idea of Hell as a place of eternal torment. I believed in Adam Hamilton’s “three bucket” fallacy before it was cool, thereby creating a kind of Stepford bible that revealed the only god I was willing to follow back then - one made in my image.

When you love Jesus, you love the Word. Shame about the Bible is incompatible with Christian teaching. Every word of Scripture is inspired and purposeful; God told precisely the story He intended to tell. Even the dark and dirty parts are meant to reveal the world as it truly is, a world deeply in need of Jesus. As John Wesley once wrote, “If there be any mistakes in the Bible there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth.”

If any writings were ever deserving of the unholy third bucket, my old sermons were, and if anyone was ever deserving of eternal hellfire, it was me. In my arrogance, I misled so many people for so long, but our God is gracious and kind. And now, each time I have the privilege of opening the scriptures, I tremble at the thought of God affording such grace to a sinner like me. Even now, seven years after coming to Jesus, I still sometimes wonder why I am allowed anywhere near the Word I once took for granted.

3. Deconstructing Evangelicals > Discipling Unbelievers

Upon reflecting on my own leadership during those thirteen years of darkness, and upon observing other Christian leaders who now walk the wide road from which Jesus saved me, I’ve noticed that the overwhelming majority of “converts” to biblically-lukewarm churches appear to be coming from other churches with higher views of Scripture. There could be many reasons for this phenomenon; for example, some churches are so rigid about the rules of Scripture that they wield their Bibles like weapons of war. In these cases, people have good reasons to leave their churches. 

In other instances, however, I’ve seen Christians who leave Bible-believing churches simply because they don’t want to be confronted with their sin. Either it’s too painful for them, or they’re just not ready to stop sinning yet. These folks often find a soft landing spot in left-leaning communities because, in my experience, the only iniquities deemed worthy of condemnation in such churches are the systemic sins of white America.

These are just a few of the warning signs to watch out for when striving to remain faithful to Jesus, especially during stressful, anxious times like these. Other signs may include a devaluation of human life, a disdain for wholesome innocence, and an increasingly subjective moral compass. 

To be sure, these are trying times. Our hearts are broken and our minds are blown by the depths of human depravity we’ve seen on display in recent months, and people want answers. Take heart, friends. We may not have all the answers, but we’ll always have the Answer. 

What can we do to achieve racial reconciliation?
Trust that Jesus already reconciled us to God and one another, and live accordingly. (Col. 1:19-20)

How should we behave toward those with whom we disagree?
The same way Jesus behaved toward us when we disagreed with him. (Rom. 5:8)

What do you do when some angry stranger curses at you through a megaphone?
Be patient with him. He’ll come around one day, by the grace of God.

Eric Huffman is the lead pastor of The Story Houston, host of the “Maybe God Podcast,” and author of 40 Days of Doubt: Devotions for the Skeptic. His forthcoming book is Scripture and the Skeptic: Miracles, Myths, and Doubts of Biblical Proportion.