The Deconversion Of A Deep Thinker
What can you do when you feel like you're not God's type?
Christianity in America over the centuries has frequently been dismissive or hostile towards the informed, the educated and the intellectually gifted. The thesis of an earlier Monadnock Review article, “The Evangelical Mind And Its Discontents”, was that Low-Church Protestantism was not simply trying to weed out perceived untruths infecting the church and promote doctrinal correctness, but was also a revolution driven by the envy and resentment that less intellectual people felt towards the bookish and contemplative. It was a revolution which declared Christianity to be a religion “by the average and simple, for the average and simple”, and said society wouldn't really suffer that much if it ignored and neglected the needs and spiritual development of the High I.Q. Religious historian Nathan Hatch wrote a prize-winning book, The Democratization Of American Christianity (1989) exploring aspects of this thesis as they appeared during the Second Great Awakening (roughly 1780 to 1830).
Yet, even Christians who tolerate the Anti-Intellectual style, Christians tainted by this envy and resentment, are still Christians. They're people who should theoretically care about the salvation of all who feel called by Christ. In times of stronger faith, as America presumably was during its Colonial and Early Republic eras, some robust piety and conviction could still be reached fairly easily I'd guess, despite the rejection of intellect. Today, in 2025, this no longer seems possible. Over the last few decades, the percentage of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation has grown sharply; less sharp but still noticeable is the increasing percentage of self-identified atheists and agnostics. Few people are inclined to take the claims of Christians at face value.
How would Christian Anti-Intellectuals react if they were given an example of how their style is preventing people outside the church from developing an interest in Christianity?
Dr. Holly Ordway is a scholar of J.R.R. Tolkien's literature and teaches English at Houston Christian University. She's also a convert to Christianity after having gone through a childhood starved of religion, followed by an era as an anti-religious atheist. Her conversion story, originally published in 2010, is titled Not God's Type, which is also a three-word indictment of what the Second Great Awakening has wrought.
Dr. Ordway's describes her own Melancholic personality temperament more than once in this book: “I am very introverted, with an abundant share of native New England reserve, and as a child I was shy and anxious about new people...in books I explored a vast, dynamic, endlessly interesting world, and I responded to that world creatively by writing, drawing.”1 “I wanted a role to play [in life] that would let me fit in, in ways that I felt I couldn’t as the bookish, overachieving, socially awkward young woman that I was.”2
Unsurprisingly, she couldn't identify with the Choleric and Sanguine manifestations of Christianity that usually prevail in America. She recalls experiencing both of them while at graduate school in the South: loud fire-and-brimstone preaching that interrupted lunchtime3, and an invitation to a fun volleyball game where the woman who invited her quickly turned to sharing the Good News of Jesus with her, which Ordway rightly describes as a manipulative bait-and-switch.4
Instead, the impetus for her Christian conversion arrives when she embarks on a college athletic career as a fencer. Her fencing coach, named Josh, is a Christian, but Ordway didn’t learn this about him for an entire year. Her friendship and tutelage with Josh served as an introduction to the concept of a Faith whose strength lay in quiet authenticity: “I had a lot of negative stereotypes about Christians, and Josh didn’t fit any of them...[he] never tried to foist religious pamphlets on me or have an ‘important conversation’ to tell me how to be saved. Wasn’t that what Christians did?”5
Dr. Ordway was an Episcopalian upon conversion. Six years later, she was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, which certainly isn't dominated by the Anti-Intellectual Style. Her story has a pretty happy ending, but it's regrettable that she spent her earliest years in some level of spiritual poverty, because a good religion is, and I speak from the glimpses of good religion I received during this often magical age, the ultimate furnishment of a happy childhood.
Something equally regrettable which deserves our attention and care, is how “Christian populism” has taken children raised in Christianity and contributed significantly to the destruction of their faith in God.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it seemed like the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris was everywhere. These thinkers told us that religion is irrational and dangerous, that the Twin Towers would still be standing in Lower Manhattan in a world without religion, and so on. The atheists they influenced, many of whom were formerly Christian, had a firmness and boldness to them that could intimidate, and many of them weren't afraid to use hostility and mockery to get their points across. From what I remember among people I knew personally back then, it seemed like an even larger number of my generation succumbed in a gentler, more confused way to apostasy and impiety.
Atheism had a big presence on YouTube in those days. During this time, one of the most fascinating, thorough and detailed stories of a religious deconversion was the one told in a video series created by a user calling himself “Evid3nc3”, who was raised Pentecostal and lost his faith when he was a college undergraduate. I find his story very captivating, partially because Melancholics in Low-Church Protestantism, including those of us who kept our Faith, can see the struggles for the validation of our own identities reflected in his story.
From the very start of the video series, it diverges from atheistic stereotypes by placing patience, empathy and understanding at the center of its narrative. “I empathize a lot with Christians and I know how it feels to be one, and what kind of values are important to you.”6, Evid3nc3 tells us, adding: “you'll never cause someone to see your perspective unless you show them that you understand their perspective.”7 Even more refreshing is that his atheism doesn't seem to be a permanent stance. He seems fully open to arguments for contrary positions. “If I find the truth, I take it. Bitter or not. I seek the truth above all else, and if the truth is something other than what I believe, then I’ll accept it, given that it really is the truth.”8 This doesn't make several of his erroneous critiques of religion any more correct, but humans are vastly more than the sum of their beliefs and we should always admire the positive qualities we see in others.
The storytelling in the series is superb: articulately and poetically narrated, as he rummages through cherished childhood memories and the trials of growing up. I love some of the musical selections too. Evid3nc3 (who mentions in these videos that his real name is “Chris”) went to college as a computer science major and apparently works for a Silicon Valley company these days, but he easily could've forged a career as a novelist or screenwriter if he'd chosen to.
The series discusses many of the subjects one would expect to find in a story like this: “How does evolutionary theory fit into the Christian worldview?” “Where did the Bible come from?” “What does it mean if a prayer seems to go unanswered?” etc. But there’s an aspect which, in my opinion, possesses a significance unparalleled by anything else in the story: where Evid3nc3 talks about his relationships with other Christians, and his relationships with unbelievers.
In one video, “The God Concept”, we're given a summary of various reasons people believe there’s a God. One of these reasons is the relationship bonds Christians have with people of the same faith. “Other Christians bolster our belief, both by providing an example for us and by providing numbers.”9
Now, I have a deeply nonconformist personality temperament. Standing with defiance against mobs when they’re in the wrong just comes easily to me. My immunity to peer pressure is incredible. But this personality trait has liabilities along with assets, and when I was younger, I wasn't mature enough to appreciate what Evid3nc3 is talking about here.
A younger me would've said that if God exists, it’d be sheepish to rely on others for our belief in Him. But what I learned in time is, we actually do see God, or a lack of God, in the people around us. This is how the Holy Spirit is often described. I've read too many conversion and deconversion stories in which the behaviour of people the storyteller encountered was the most influential and important factor in their decisions. In numerous entries of the Lives Of The Saints, we read about how positive relationships and behaviours converted countless heathens to Jesus Christ.
Here’s the story of Evid3nc3 and his fellow Christians, as he tells it:
“I grew up immersed in a church environment, and the older I got, the more I associated everything that happened to me with serving God and carrying out His plan for my life. I grew older in the church, I grew spiritually in the church.”10 Given his strong piety, he mentions that he considered becoming a pastor as a child, but felt discouraged because “I was a very quiet person, and I wasn't sure this matched my personal life.”11 Pentecostalism, with its frequent shouting, chaos and emotionally overwrought worship, has obviously waged personality war very strongly on behalf of what Susan Cain calls America's “Extrovert Ideal”. By contrast, the Orthodox Church has a liturgy that not only appeals to both Extroverts and Introverts, but the Church's monastics have, in all ages, spread to the world the concept of Holy Silence, which affirms Introversion as an advantage.
Instead of pastoring, he feels called to: “the pursuit of technology, science and thinking. I felt that these creations of God had been neglected by the church community at large.”12 Reverend Roger E. Olson, professor of theology at Baylor University, was raised Pentecostal before becoming a Baptist. In 2006, he wrote frankly about problems in his childhood church: “endemic to Pentecostalism is a profoundly anti-intellectual ethos. It is manifested in a deep suspicion of scholars and educators. Not all Pentecostals are anti-intellectual or revel in incoherence. But a deep antipathy to critical rationality applied to theology is a hallmark of the movement. Pentecostal scholars too often have to work outside Pentecostal institutions and live in the shadows and on the margins of the movement. This is without doubt the main reason I drifted away from the movement and eventually broke from it.” At this point in the deconversion story, we can see the stage being set for great hardship.
When Evid3nc3 arrives at university, he takes a “Professional Ethics” class where he's very impressed by his Professor's open-mindedness towards ideas, and his use of slow, careful reasoning “to help good people make good decisions in a world where the best decision isn't always clear.” But this Ethics Professor was agnostic rather than Christian, dimming Evid3nc3's ability to assume that people he admired would be strongly on God’s side.13
Far greater was the dimming that would occur later, when he met another non-believing professor, the “Linguistics Professor”. Apparently this Linguistics Professor had made some comments on the internet denouncing the Bible, and Evid3nc3/Chris decided to begin an e-mail correspondence with him, hoping to turn him into a Christian. During this correspondence, he vents to the Linguistics Professor his frustrations with Other Christians at his church: “I could not deny there was a difference between the way they thought, and the way I thought. I couldn't help but feel they were on a different [lower] rational level than me. They fear science and shun its ideas. I feel they've turned their backs on truth that is right in front of them. I feel they're more fueled by their emotions than by a search for truth.”14 The Linguistics Professor tells him: “the fact that you see them on a different rational level than you is a very wise observation. Religions are not meant primarily to serve people like you and me. They best serve those whom you are describing.”15 If someone's experiences of being Christian are formed fully by growing up in a Pentecostal church, it can be difficult to build up a resistance to this idea because they see it confirmed all around them, week after week, year after year.
Despite this devastating remark, the Linguistics Professor was actually hesitant to discuss at length his own specific objections to Christianity with an impressionable college kid, writing: “There is little to be gained by jumping from the frying pan of religious questioning, into the 'oh, so that's how it works' fire. If you're comfortable in your faith, and especially if you enjoy the company of your fellow believers more than the company of non-believers, then it's probably very important for you to continue in your faith and not sweat the details.”16 Well clearly, Evid3nc3 was experiencing enough alienation and discomfort with the company of believers (among other factors) to push him over the edge, because his participation in this correspondence is what causes him, within just a short while, to lose altogether his belief in the existence of a Theistic God.
After his deconversion, a time he describes as “my life becoming a living hell”17, the Linguistics Professor recommends he read the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull. A bestseller in the 1970s, it's the story of a talented, interesting, unusual seagull with a passion for flying. He feels dissatisfied with the ordinary, mundane seagull life, can't fit in with the other seagulls and is eventually banished by them. Recognizing this as a good allegory for how he felt about other Christians he'd known, he remarks: “I had never read a story that felt so deeply relevant to my identity.”18
I think it's appropriate to wonder at this point if Evid3nc3 had ever met, at any point in his Pentecostal life, another Christian with a personality, interests, thought processes, etc. he could really relate to. Like Holly Ordway before her conversion, all he'd experienced informed him that he was not God's type.
The Monadnock Review here introduces a neologism: the Psychological-Emotional Environment. When we're in a situation where we obtain positive experiences like love, friendship, success, fulfillment and peace, etc., the psychological-emotional environment inside of us is strengthened, so we're then compelled to use our reason to defend what we've discerned is good, beautiful and true. Situations that produce negative experiences within us, however, weaken our psychological-emotional environment, so our reason is trained to dismiss or refute the situations that have given us these negative experiences.
In the series’ later videos, Evid3nc3 goes on to describe reading books like Robert Ingersoll's Some Mistakes Of Moses, John Shelby Spong's Why Christianity Must Change Or Die and Karen Armstrong's A History Of God, accepting the Anti-Christian theses of each. This shouldn't surprise us at all. My opinion is that the experiences of being raised Pentecostal caused damage to his internal environment, and his ability to see God in the people he needed to see Him in most, and that any embarkments on a future Christian life for people in his situation are dependent upon having a Church where the truth, beauty, goodness and reason of God can be seen obviously in its people.
In addition to the Anti-Intellectual, overly emotional nature of Pentecostal spirituality, there's a much more severe third problem: how much of Pentecostalism is actually Christian? Fr. Seraphim Rose, in Orthodoxy And The Religion Of The Future (1975), devotes two chapters to Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement, in which he shows that the movement's spirituality bears little-to-no resemblance to Christian worship as the Ancient Church had understood it for two millennia, while bearing great resemblance to mediumship and seances. In other parts of the video series, which we’ll discuss in future articles, the maddening nature of this sort of spirituality (referred to by the Orthodox as “prelest”) becomes glaringly obvious. I'm not going to go as far as to say that Evid3nc3/Chris would absolutely still be Christian today if he'd been raised Eastern Orthodox, or perhaps Roman Catholic. But do I think the probability of him still being Christian increases? Yes, I definitely do.
Evid3nc3 and Holly Ordway’s encounters with Low-Church Protestanism are both tragic; they should provoke sympathy, mourning, grief. Yet even within churches like this, there are many shining, sterling people with adamantine souls. If any are reading this now, I’d ask them to consider: have the chickens come home to roost? Have the populists grown arrogant? Would the Non-Denominationals, Southern Baptists and Pentecostals be willing to surrender with humility to the instructions of a learned, traditional clergy if such leadership could strengthen the Christian Faith in America and around the world, helping the nonbelievers to change their minds, and the fallen to come home?
As for Evid3nc3 himself, his last major video was posted 13 years ago, with his narrative reaching a satisfying natural conclusion, vowing that he'll go wherever the evidence takes him, even if it's somewhere really strange, or back into Christianity. As he explains it, the busyness of life has thwarted his attempts to continue making videos. Meanwhile, the world has changed vastly in those 13 years. It’s now more sickly, more deranged, more war-torn, more economically stagnant. Atheism itself has lost considerable steam, and has undergone serious scandals in the last decade, with some of its former personalities rarely mentioning religion anymore (Sam Harris), allying with Christians against things deemed much worse than Christianity (Peter Boghossian) or in some cases even becoming Christian (Ridvan Aydemir).
I hope Evid3nc3 is doing as well as anyone can do in this twisted, confusing, decaying world, and that at some point, he and I will be able to discuss deep things in a deep manner.
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Ordway, Holly. (2010/2014). Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms. San Francisco, California. Ignatius Press. Page 23.
Ibid, Page 35.
Ibid, Page 36.
Ibid, Page 48.
Ibid, Pages 47 to 48.
Evid3nc3. (May 3, 2009). 0 Overview. [Video] YouTube.
Evid3nc3. (June 19, 2009). 1.1 Deconversion: The God Concept. [Video] YouTube.
Evid3nc3. (September 20, 2009). 1.4 Deconversion: Other Christians (B) [Video] YouTube.
1.1 Deconversion: The God Concept.
Evid3nc3. (May 19, 2009). 1 My Christian Life. [Video] YouTube.
Evid3nc3. (December 29, 2009). 1.6 Deconversion: Personal Relationship (A). [Video] YouTube.
Ibid.
Evid3nc3. (August 13, 2009). 1.3 Deconversion: Morality. [Video] YouTube.
1.4 Deconversion: Other Christians (B)
Ibid.
Ibid.
Evid3nc3. (March 16, 2010). 1.8 Deconversion: Losing God. [Video] YouTube.
Evid3nc3. (July 27, 2010). 2.2 Atheism: Nontheistic Gods. [Video] YouTube.