Accidental Pilgrim

I am a Christian, a practicing member of the Roman Catholic Church, a conservative Catholic by the world’s standards, a bit more uncertain about my conservative Catholicism than some of my co-religionists, a bit weirder in some of my ideas about the cosmos compared to most of my secular friends and some of my religious ones as well. I was born to upper-middle-class Protestant parents and baptized Episcopalian in Connecticut in the 1980s, which means that according to sociological generalization I should have grown up as a Christmas-and-Easter Christian, drifted from religion as an adult, and raised thoroughly secularized children who then went on to explore some form of exotic hallucinogen-mediated spirituality in college.

Instead, my family was diverted by illness and unexpected religious awakening into charismatic Christianity. That’s the bland way of saying that I grew up watching crowds of otherwise normal Connecticut Yankees, a population not known for its revivalism these days, experience a range of spiritual experiences, from tongues-speaking to supernatural healings to intense, flat-on-the-floor mystical blasts. The openness to the numinous and supernatural that I have urged on secular readers is, in one sense, organic to my childhood. I couldn’t not be open to strange spiritual possibilities because they were being made manifest around me.

But at the same time, they weren’t my own spiritual encounters. I was an observer, an accidental pilgrim, a passenger carried along by forces I didn’t experience myself. The secular adult friends that my parents invited to charismatic services might pitch over and shake mysteriously and rise befuddled by the experience, but under all forms of charismatic prayer I remained unravished and unmoved. I suppose my impassibility could have set me up for a life of skepticism. But instead I came away quite confident in the reality of what had been happening around me. Confident, that is, that it was emphatically not just a trick of mentalist persuasion, a madness of crowds, or whatever other reductive explanation you might seek—that it was much more real and much more flagrantly supernatural than dry references to “religious experience” in secular publications would lead one to expect.

But because I wasn’t personally caught up in it, I had no choice but to approach it analytically rather than mystically, to stand a bit outside it, to play the professor of religious studies even as a twelve-year-old. The direct experience, for my parents and many others, created a relational religious attitude, a sense of God as a person with Whom you could commune. The indirect experience inspired a desire for a system, a theory of the case, a world-picture that made sense of all these strange encounters—which the frame of Official Knowledge offered by my secular education emphatically did not.

All of this made it somewhat predictable that I would end up Roman Catholic, joining the part of Christianity known for systematizing everything, for being dedicated to the proposition that faith and reason are friends rather than rivals and that it’s possible to reason about the supernatural and come to plausible conclusions. But if Catholicism answered my desire for systemization, it also fit my personality in other ways. After standing unmoved so often under charismatic prayer, I especially appreciated Catholicism’s sacramental promises, in which the Holy Spirit is assumed to be operational in baptism and confirmation and confession even if you aren’t overcome with ecstasy in the moment itself.

The Catholic Church accepts, in other words, that some people have mystical temperaments and some people don’t, and it promises that God loves even the non-mystical personality, the impermeable-seeming soul. But it makes this promise without seeming to exclude or limit the mystical. In Catholicism the sheer weirdness of what I saw growing up in charismatic Christianity isn’t denied or anathematized. Rather, it’s matched, exceeded, and enfolded into orthodoxy in the stories of the Church’s wilder miracles, its stranger saints.

Then, too, I found in Catholicism coherent answers that seemed sensible, balanced, intuitively plausible. The Church is a liturgical institution that leaves room for both ethical and radically mystical approaches to religion. It’s monotheistic rather than polytheistic but with an understanding of divinity that builds in crucial bridges between the Absolute and the timebound world. Its vision of Purgatory as a possible destination for a great many human souls seems like a reasonable balance in the debate over eternal damnation versus reincarnation and universal salvation. And its pluralist cosmology, in which angels and demons and saints exist as spiritual powers in their own right and even the singular Godhead has a mysterious triune relationship within Itself, likewise leavens the philosophical case for a single transcendent Creator with a recognition of the way that spiritual exploration seems to bring people into contact with a range of supernatural beings.

Meanwhile, the capaciousness of Catholicism, its antiquity and resilience and global sprawl, makes an obvious fit with my baseline assumption that God isn’t just hiding from us, that the big and important religions are big and important for a reason, and that even if they aren’t in possession of every iota of the truth they are the safest harbors for the honest seeker. This is especially so since the big and important religions also tend to harbor real diversity, which has its own advantages to the religious searcher—offering a sense that one can join a faith without settling every spiritual question immediately and that one can change important views without departing. All of this can help sustain both belief and practice across a lifetime—as you change politically, as your circumstances and relationships are altered, as your experience of liturgy or community evolves, as God sends graces or tribulations (or both of them at once).

Of course with global sprawl and influence and intense internal factionalism come a lot of worldliness, a taste for power, and an authoritarian temptation. So I can understand why the entanglements that Catholicism has accumulated, the long history of corruptions, make it hard for many people to believe in the Church as a divinely founded institution. Certainly twenty-five years of sex-abuse revelations have given me a much clearer sense of the Church’s institutional failings than I had when I converted.

But, perhaps foolishly, my own impulse still runs in the opposite direction. The sins of Catholicism seem inseparable from its sheer significance in history, its in-the-arena influence on civilizations past and yet unborn, its shaping role today on how millions or even billions of people encounter God. Come what may, the Catholic Church seems like an instrument of Providence; come what may, it does not seem like it can ever be a bad place for a believer to be planted.

But isn’t all this talking around an essential question, which is whether I think the tradition I’ve ended up practicing is actually true? Not just true enough, not just pointing toward God, not just generally accurate in its description of the nature of God or the cosmos, but also true in its most important claims about reality? After all, Catholics don’t just stand up on Sundays and proclaim their belief in monotheism, a diversity of supernatural beings, sacramental grace, and the goodness of creation. We profess belief in “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages,” who came to earth and “by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,” who died on the cross in Roman Palestine and “rose again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,” who will eventually “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” And that is just the creedal condensation of a long list of specific claims about the way to salvation, the requirements of the moral law, the authority of the bishops and the pope—enough to fill a thick bound catechism, at the very least.

When I say the Nicene Creed, I mean it. I am open to hidden complexities and unexpected syntheses, but in the end I think that God has acted in history through Jesus of Nazareth in a way that differs from every other tradition and experience and revelation, and the Gospels should therefore exert a kind of general interpretative control over how we read all the other religious data. I think the New Testament is just clearly different from other religious texts in a way that stands out and demands attention, that the figure of Jesus likewise stands out among religious founders, that together the sources and the story and the Nazarene Himself all seem God-touched to a degree unmatched by any of their rivals. So where there is uncertainty, tension, a wager to be made, I make my bet on Jesus.

Christopher Hitchens once asked me in the kitchen of a house in D.C.: “If Jesus did rise from the dead, what would that really prove?” The easy answer is that it should at least make someone like Hitchens a lot more interested in the truth claims of religion. But really I think one can go much further than this, for reasons connected to the assumption that God is not trying to trick us, that if the universe offers us clues to its purpose we should follow them with confidence, that the path to truth may be extremely hard, but it shouldn’t be deceptive or impossible.

This implies that if you find within human history (not just human myth and legend) a singular and well-attested happening, an especially dramatic and compelling story set in an especially earthy and human context, through which the order of the world was forever altered, a religious event that seems to stand out starkly from the historical record; if this event looks stranger and more credibly miraculous than other religious foundings; if the specific nature of its miracle seems to stand out from the wider range of stories about saints and sages and holy men and women; if its sheer strangeness still echoes down the centuries despite all the attempts at reinterpretation and domestication—well, then the simplest interpretation of that discovery is also the literal-minded one: that the resurrection really happened, that here God intervened in human affairs decisively, that this is the defining revelation of His purposes, in whose light the larger run of mystical and spiritual experiences across cultures and civilizations should be read. The reasonable thing to do is not just to pay attention but to believe. 

This essay is adapted from Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025).