Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: From hardcore atheist to hardcore Catholic, Leah's story is going to blow your mind today on the Chris Stefanik Show.
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[00:00:27] Speaker B: If you.
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Leah, it's so good to be here.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: It's so good to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: I was telling you when we got made up, and by the way, we get made up because otherwise the shine on my Slovak forehead would blind everyone that I just, I felt like I, like I saw you in the room, like, oh, I know her because I've been watching you, following you for so many years.
And I just love how God pursued you and your story and like, you have a really brilliant mind. I'm glad you're on our side.
Not that that implies you're against someone. This is the only team where, if you're on our side, you want everybody to win.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: That's what being on this side means.
But talk about your conversion today.
You know, most young people who are atheists, they fell there because they're watching too many YouTube videos of atheists influencers and their parents are upset about it, or they were raised with no faith and just kind of defaulted to atheism. You have a unique story in that you were intentionally raised in an atheist family. As an atheist, what's that look like?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, you know, for my family, it meant that, honestly, it was a big education in philosophy all the time. Right. Because my parents aren't religious. They're university professors and they're intensely concerned with what the good life can say.
And I think that was a real gift. Now, obviously, unfortunately, we haven't converged. I would love to see them in the church, but they gave me all the tools I needed to pursue the truth ardently and trustingly. That it's out there. They just had a very different idea of what that looked like. But they raised me to always ask questions, to not take answers other people give me for granted, and to be deeply concerned with how, you know what's the right thing to do. My dad was a historian of the civil rights movement.
So I think a lot of their atheism comes out of the sense of it's easy to make a big moral error and you can't rely on the world around you to steer you in the right direction. So what do you do to be really grounded in what's true? And how do you make sure you're following that no matter what it asks of you?
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Would that be how you define the good life?
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Yeah, you've got to be deeply cleaved into what is real, is what I would say. Because, you know, when I was an atheist, I would hear sometimes one of the least convincing pitches for Christianity is, oh, well, did you know that in survey results, Christians score happier and have more life satisfaction? I'm like, well, who cares if injecting heroin every day caused me to give happier results on a survey? I wouldn't start. Right. I want to know what's true. And if what's true was hard, that's okay. I mean, to be honest, especially as a teenager. And if what's true is hard, I'm like, sign me up. I want to be hardcore. I want to. And this is a big part of my personal atheism. Less of my parents. I was really into Immanuel Kant, like, so many.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Just like the average normal 15 year olds.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Right.
But I love the idea of what matters most in the world is duty. And that if duty asks a lot of you, then you're being called to something heroic. That you can kind of measure your moral strength by how hard what you're taking on is and how much you're overriding your instincts, your selfishness, et cetera, to do what's actually being asked.
Wow.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: That kind of. I took a trip to England not long ago and got to preach there, and it was really a blessing.
But there is the noble atheist, you know, that would say it's like the blitzkrieg spirit that they developed, like they're being bombed and like, we're gonna put our tie in and go to work. It's like, okay, the universe is a big show about nothing and I'm gonna get on with my day.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Well, neither I nor my parents ever thought that.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: No.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Make a big distinction there. Right. Like, I was a moral realist from day one is perhaps an exaggeration. Cause I only Learned to crawl and learned to walk after it. But I never remember a time where I didn't think of the world as fundamentally having truth in it. And part of this might be that I was a big math nerd. Right. And so when I went to college and started having more actual arguments about religion with real people, not books or figures in the media, some people would push back and say, well, as an atheist, how can you believe in good in this kind of moral realist way, as something external to ourselves, something we uncover like archeologists, not something we build like architects.
And I always found this so weird as a critique, as an atheist, like, well, no one gives me a hard time for believing in math. And math is obviously also something like this. It's transcendent. It's human independent. We get to explore it, but we don't build it. And for me, math and morality were really exactly parallel in that way.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: It was just a given.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Yes. In the same way this couch is a given. Right. You can get into weirder philosophical regions where people are like, I don't know, do you have a justified, true belief about this couch, or is it all illusion?
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: And to me, a lot of the atheist arguments where people kind of take a strong blow at moral realism, sound as foolish as that. CS Lewis had some bit where he's like, you can always try and find someone who says they're not a moral realist, and then just cut in front of them in line and see how quickly they say, like, that's wrong, not, you're violating social scripts we all share or evolutionary imperatives.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So growing up, I had my Catholic saints, who were the atheist saints.
Not that Kant was an atheist, but you had your philosophers. Who else did your family hold up as the people to follow?
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Well, so some of them were Christians. Right. Like, we were really deeply interested in people in the civil rights movement, people who put their bodies on the line for what was right, come what may, you know? And there were a number of secular Jews who marched alongside Martin Luther King, who I think were more people we could look up to and admire in that respect.
So I'd say those were some of the main ideas. We were promiscuous in people we admired. Right. Because you can find a lot of virtues kind of scattered through the world in different faiths and philosophies. And to us, what mattered were the virtues.
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Your family sounds kind of awesome.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: To be honest, they are kind of awesome, you know, and I kind of hope, and I hope you'll pray that, you know, they've been given a lot. Right. And the question is, what is that? What could that draw them to?
[00:08:22] Speaker A: I love what Justin Martyr, he said that the early philosophers were Christian prophets. Insofar as they follow the truth unreservedly, Jesus is the truth. So in some ways.
Well, you obviously know this. They're on the road now, just like you were already on the road, which is a beautiful thing.
How do you practice your faith? I mean, there's things I do, I say, practice your faith. Okay, I'll put parentheses around the faith. You know, there's things I do as a Catholic family in a predominantly secular culture to make sure that my kids keep what I'm giving them.
Okay, so even though it's a predominantly secular culture, it's also inherently religious. Most people believe you have Christian holidays, Jewish holidays, everything's like a holiday.
How does your family reinforce atheism in that environment? What kind of things were they practicing?
[00:09:13] Speaker B: You know, again, I think it's. It comes down to the fact that no one can live their life primarily around atheism. Right. Because that describes something you don't believe. The question is, what do you believe and build your life around? So we had a Christmas tree, but we didn't celebrate Christmas. We would Go out for a movie and Chinese food on Christmas day after doing presents. So to some extent we had this sense of, well, you can be in America and participate in parts of the holidays, but we don't believe them. And we were upfront about that.
But I think what it really comes down to is that we had a very Socratic life where I'm reading books, I'm talking to my parents about them. On Sunday mornings, my parents would get the Times, they'd split up the newspaper sections and they'd just be reading, reading bits aloud to each other. What do you think about this? Right.
And then that's kind of the open ended, curious. Ask questions of the world, seek out knowing things about the world. And then beyond that, I think this is the part that was more influenced by being an atheist, particularly, especially in the time I was really a teenager, right at the peak of new atheism, where you've got Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins in the news in a big way. So I did think part of my job, less than my parents told me, this is getting people out of religion. Right. If it's wrong, it's bad for you. You don't want to live inside a lie and looking for opportunities to kind of start fights, hopefully in a productive way. But I remember I did an article for my school newspaper on the toy drive that was being given out through a Christian charity where we were giving the toys and that we're going, but they were going to go with gospel messages. And so I did a piece for the school newspaper saying both that this was happening and that it should stop, because it also seemed bizarre. I was at a school that was 60% Jewish. It felt pretty odd that we'd partnered with something that was sending a message that almost none of the people collecting the toys believed in. And for me, the atheism was always about those two things together, both. I was against Christianity. I didn't want to promote it because I thought it was in particular false. But how could you be indifferent to that? Like, if you don't think this is true and aren't you miserving the people you're donating the gifts to by telling them something you yourself don't believe?
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Wow. So you felt kind of an angst about the Christians around you and a need to liberate them from what was bad for them?
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Yes. And I think part of that was that especially not knowing really almost any practicing Christians as such. In high school, most of my experience with Christianity was strongly mediated through what kind of Christians are on the News. Right. So something I remembered very strongly, aside from all debate about the religious right and politics growing up, was just Jerry Falwell saying after Hurricane Katrina that God had sent the hurricane to New Orleans to punish the homosexuals.
Right. And so that's a lot of the Christian witness I grew up with. What kinds of Christian evangelization gets on the news?
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the.001% of Christians that end up getting on the news with something like that.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Well. And it has to be newsworthy, which means controversial in a very specific way.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Yeah. What was your perception of the average Christian? Were you aware that wasn't the average Christian? Do you think that you see that headline and think, okay, they're all thinking this way?
[00:12:28] Speaker B: No, I thought there's a lot of animus out there, including for people like me. When I went and did one of my college visits, I went and went with the person who was taking me around, who I was staying with, to their gospel choir practice, which I really liked. I love music. But then they all wanted to pray over me. And I felt very awkward because I also had this sense of, if I tell them I'm an atheist right now, they'll be upset that I'm here, that we are to some extent, I think this is true, in conflict. But can we be in conflict philosophically without anger at each other?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: So when did you first encounter Christians where it didn't scare you?
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Well, I was scared. I was mostly like, I felt bad as a guest. Right. As a guest who's kind of breaking with whatever hospitality is for them. But when I met Christians, I wasn't scared that I wanted to fight them because I was in my college debate group.
So I went to Yale. I joined the Yale Political Union, which was a debating group that I would say it's philosophical debate rather than competitive debate. And I make the distinction this way. In competitive debate, you argue a side that's chosen for you at random to see how well you can construct an argument for anything. And you do it in front of judges who, if you do well, give you prizes.
We didn't do that.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: So we were only arguing things. We actually thought.
There are no judges, no prizes. So what are the stakes of having a debate? The stakes are that if I convince you that you're wrong and you'll live your whole life differently from this moment forward, or vice versa. So I loved that. It's truth seeking and the stakes are real.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: So you felt a bond with these Christians on that fundamental level that you were raised with, which is I'm all in for that, which is true. Yes, that's beautiful.
Did that kind of surprise you when you found Christians like that after being raised with headlines like the ones you saw?
[00:14:18] Speaker B: It surprised me that they were smart know, very, very candidly, right? So, you know, especially reading the New Atheists, a lot of their Christian debunkings are aimed at what I would call lowest common denomination evangelicalism, right? Where there's a lot of, well, people say you can just read the Bible and it will tell you everything, but then people interpret the Bible differently. So what's up with that? Right? And then I'm having these arguments with the mostly Catholic orthodox Christians of my debating group and if I raise that kind of question, they're like, oh yeah, we don't think you should just go read the Bible by yourself and try and figure out what's going on there totally in isolation. We have a magisterium, we have a history, we have advice for how to read the Bible. You're not on your own.
And I really appreciated that. Well, I didn't at the time. What I appreciated was I didn't have a rejoinder to it. So to me, who was falling in love with my friends, they were interesting, they were weird.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:15:17] Speaker B: That's a selling point for me, right? I'm like, okay, well I really care about these people and some of them are converts, which is nuts. Like, how could smart people become Christians? One of them's a math major, which I really respect.
So like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, like, they're not prepared for these people. I have to become the person who can deconvert them. So what am I going to do about it? Right.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: I love it.
Which of their arguments stuck the most that you know, what your strongest arguments as an atheist that you just didn't expect, like, whoa, how did you just untangle that for me?
[00:15:51] Speaker B: So I think if it's less that and more that the more I argued with them, the better. Lots of parts of their worldview fit together.
You know, GK Chesterton talks about finding Christianity to be a truth telling thing where there are a number of things where he's convinced of them one at a time individually, and he keeps noticing the Catholic Church is already there.
And for me, even before it came to that point where it actually changed my mind, especially actually around issues of sexual immorality, I could see that a worldview that both has no divorce, no contraception, no abortion, all fits together in this interlocking way in a way that lots of the worldviews that only have a piece of that do not.
And the part I was most sympathetic to of all that actually was no, no fault divorce.
I was really sympathetic to the argument that what marriage is, is the creation of a family. And that, you know, in your natural family you can have a lousy brother, right? You can even have an unsafe brother that you need to have physical distance from or even a restraining order. But nothing he does makes him not your brother. He's just your awful brother after a certain point. And that similarly, part of marriage is this person is my family. And I could be betrayed very badly by them in a way that made it unsafe to live with them, but they would be part of your family.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Wow. So it wasn't a particular argument, but a whole worldview. You're being sold on Jung comes to mind. Does it stand up to the acid test of reality? And it just stood up better than.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Well, no, not quite right. Because I didn't think it was true.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: I still didn't think it was true.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: So for me, it felt like as these arguments went on, that what Chris Shane was doing, especially as embodied by these friends, was it was clearing a test. You can kind of apply to fiction or science fantasy of does this world hold together? Because you can read a good fantasy novel where maybe you like the plot, but you feel like if you wander just a couple steps away from the main story, it's all painted sets, it doesn't hold up. You can't go anywhere in this world.
The plot works, but nothing else is real, vibrant, dense.
And I was coming to believe that the Christianity my friends believed in was both fairly internally coherent. Right. So it wasn't just a. With your own premises. I can prove this doesn't hold together. Which I think was the point of view of Dawkins and Hitchens and so forth a lot of the time.
And it felt like you could really wander around in it. So I kind of used the analogy even at the time of it felt like this enormous, complex and lovely, in some cases, clockwork mechanism where the gears all have somewhere to sit. But it's not on, right? There's no power source. It's not true.
You can make something. And the way I thought about it is the church has had 2000 years to make something, but it isn't true versus my atheism and my own philosophical ideas influenced by Kant and then eventually by MacIntyre.
It's like a sail that's patched and kind of has holes in it. It's not that great at doing the job you're asking it to do, but there's not a single fiber of it that I'm not confident in. And my job, I'm, like, 22 years old, is to finish it. Right. And I wouldn't want to throw over the thing I think is all real and grounded, that sail for something that's more beautiful but not true.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Wow.
This brings up the difference, too, between getting it and believing it.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: If they were the same thing, then Peterson would have no problem saying, I believe.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: And this was a big thing for me even after conversion. Right. Because when I changed my mind in sometimes I'd been thinking about God for, like, five years.
None of that was prayer. Right. That's not thinking with God as an actual person who loves me, who I'm in conversation with, versus a series of philosophical propositions that I'm weighing just for their truth value but can't befriend.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Getting it leads you to the threshold, and then there's, like, this personal thing going on. Like, come on over.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Come on over. And of course, it was personal on the other side the whole time.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: But, like, not as I knew it.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: Yeah. That leap.
Okay, what led you to that leap?
It's not just intellect. It's will. It's like it's a marriage.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: There was an intellectual preparation. Then there were a couple really startling moments.
And for me, a lot of the intellectual preparation was actually that shift from Immanuel Kant and that focus on duty and effort to Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue ethics, which I read as an atheist loved, showed to my Catholic boyfriend of the time. I'm like, all right, now I understand better how to live a good life and what I wish you would do instead of being Catholic. It's Alasdair MacIntyre's Virtue Ethics. It's so great. He's like, you know, Alasdair MacIntyre became Catholic. Right?
[00:20:39] Speaker A: No.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: Dang it. Yeah. All right, well, I've gotta pick up the work that Alasdair MacIntyre has abandoned along the way. Right. But what was really compelling to me about it is I had run into some trouble of just. Even though I'd come to Immanuel Kant and deontology and the sense of duty and trying to do the good no matter what, I'd come to it in a way that wasn't respectful enough of other persons, to some extent, I relished when other people behaved badly towards me because that was essentially setting kindness on a higher difficulty level. If you're nice to Me, and I'm nice to you.
What's that? Right. But if you're a jerk to me and I'm nice to you, there's a part of me that gets kind of excited because now being nice to you is heroic and I like it.
This is terrible, right? Like you can't actually root for a world where everyone is morally monstrous except me, because that gives you more opportunity to excel. Right. And what McIntyre gave me was a different way of thinking about this, that his virtue ethics is about virtue becoming easy, that it becomes so much a part of yourself that it's natural. It's taking away that sense I had of duty and effort being the way of judging moral mastery. And here's the physical analogy I'd use.
My way of thinking about living a good life, was that like the best possible life morally, was like someone walking straight into a snowstorm where you're bent like at a 45 degree angle to the wind. Every fiber of your body is straining to make progress, but you're doing it. Like, I'm like, that's what I want my life to look like. I want to find the hardest possible thing and I want to do it. And I'll be able to tell it's hard because it will almost hurt me to do it.
But McIntyre's virtue ethics is very different.
Their moral action looks more physically like the way a dancer just crosses a room not while she's dancing. Right. But that there's an integration of her whole body so that the act of crossing the room is beautiful.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: It's very Thomistic too.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
And this is surprising to me that you could aim for this instead. But it gave me room to root for other people, which was a big improvement.
But the problem with it intellectually is that with deontology, it's actually easier to say, how do I reason about morality? Kant himself talks about it in terms of you can only do that which you would will is a universal law for everyone. So why can't you lie? Because if I lie, then I want to live in a world where lying is common. And if lying is common, lying does me no good. Lying only works if most people tell the truth.
So you can tell. There's no consistency to this as a moral proposition. Again, this is very mathy. I like this. It's just this question of can I extend this or not as a baseline.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: I love thanks for this. I mean, I love watching your soul in a snapshot back then because as you're dancing with all these things, this structure of the Spiritual structure of the universe. It's screaming to you that there's an architect behind this architectural frame that is so beautiful. I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm just watching the fireworks, saying, whoa.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: But at that point, I still thought I didn't need an architect. Right. Because it's about logical consistency, and that feels like something I can do by myself.
But virtue ethics didn't work as well because virtue ethics doesn't say, can you will this as a universal maxim, though in many cases, you ought to be able to. It says, you should act as the good man would act. I'm like, what?
I can understand what it means, but the sense of you're aimed at something. You should act in the way that a good person in your situation would act. You can't do that the same way. You can't just say, okay, I've got a logical process. I don't need to refer to anything outside myself to figure it out.
This teleological aimed at thing raises the question of, who's doing the aiming? What am I aimed at?
And it was frustrating for me, but this was kind of a frustration. I was just sitting with like a rock in your shoe for quite some time. And what really got me moving was not the intellectual project. It was something that, you know, I wouldn't have named the Holy Spirit at the time, but I think was the Holy Spirit.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Doesn't it come back to where we started? Where you said, when Christians make an argument that how can you say something is good without a creator at face value? You thought, well, how do you say the couch is blue?
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Yes. How do you say the couch exists?
[00:24:40] Speaker A: When you get deeper and deeper and deeper, you start maybe thinking, yeah, there's gotta be. From somewhere. Pointed to an inherent intended design for there to be a good.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Though I think you can also kind of look at how hard I had to look at the question. Right.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: To see it's not obvious.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Which in some sense is encouraging. Right. Like the fact that people have access to the natural law, have reason to believe in the good even before they believe in God is part of how we live alongside each other. That we do have access to this through our consciences without understanding the origin of our conscience. And thank goodness for that.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: So let's go. Next step.
How did you keep going from here to belief in an actual personal God and what's going on inside your heart? I know when people leave Christianity, for instance, tragically. Right. One of the things in their heart is, I'm leaving that which I was raised with I'm gonna upset everybody around me. I have to have a new identity. It's like there's a whole letting go of all sorts of things that, as a Christian, I think are obviously positive things are letting go of. But there's a pain. Was there a similar pain on the other journey? And when did you realize, like, oh, my gosh, I'm one of those people now?
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Well, it's funny you frame it that way, because it was a lot like that.
I was back up for an alumni debate with some of my friends, which is a lot of fun. We were debating something that was not debate about religion. It was something like resolve nationalized the curriculum, which is prudential.
And I'm at the debate, and I have this sense that if you came in from Mars and you didn't know anything about religion and you were just trying to group people in the room according to what their philosophy was, who sounds like who here? Who's appealing to the same kind of reasoning about the human person that you'd cluster naturally a lot of the Catholics together, whether they were for nationalizing the curriculum or not. Because whatever their position on this question was, you could hear kind of the underlying logic about what kind of thing a person was and what education was for. And they disagreed about the implementation, but they had this unity connecting them. But I had the sense, like, if the Martian came in and was clustering people, they'd put me with the Catholics.
We were talking the same way about developing virtue, about being embedded in reality. And there's something weird about that. And it kept bothering me. And so after the debate, I said, we have these debates and then we stay up very late. And then, unsurprisingly for college students, there's some drinking involved, right?
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: But, like, not normal drinking because we're all weirdos. We have a giant toasting cup full of something very mysterious. It's getting passed around as people make dramatic toasts to ideas or persons or anti toast to someone else's toast. Drink, pass, sing, et cetera. And I'm at the toasting afterwards, and I just have this intrusive thought which is like, I should toast the Nicene Creed and become a Christian. I'm like, what?
[00:27:22] Speaker A: You gotta be kidding me.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: No, no. And I keep thinking it's very distracting, right? Like, so I'm like, no. And I have several reasons not to do this, right? Like, one, I don't think I know the whole Nicene Creed by heart. So, like, how could I even do that?
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Two, that's not how you become a Christian. Like, I would need to be baptized. This is more of a, like, weirdo debate thing, not a, like, Christian thing. If you're going to be a Christian, you should do it in a Christian way. And three, I don't believe in God. And also, what is this doing at number three? That should have been number one, right?
So it's just bothering me and bothering me. And so I give some terrible toasts. Like, I'm just sitting with this discomfort and here's the nuts part. I come back up for another alumni debate like two or three months later because we're crazy people. Like, alums are up that often.
And it happens again. Like the whole thing, different debate topic, same sense of what side I'm on in the debate. And I'm like, I don't even want to go to toasting. If I go to toasting, I might have this whole should I become a Christian thing again. And that's not what toasting is for. So I skipped toasting and I grab a friend of mine who at that time was a Lutheran, and now he's actually an ordained Anglican priest.
But I knew he wanted to be a priest. And so I'm like, okay, well, if Ben wants to be a priest and he doesn't want people to grab him and say, like, I have this problem, then he shouldn't be a priest. So I'm helping, right? Like, I'm going to grab Ben and say, like, let's both skip toasting and talk about God, which is what we did.
And I had some of the conversation with Ben for much, much longer than I've been having it with you about where I was, especially this idea of the clockwork mechanism that's dead inside and the sail that's patchy, right? Where for me, the overwhelming problem with my atheism at that point was how do I come to have knowledge of the good? I already know I have it, and that's very clear to me. I have knowledge of it. It's transcendent. And I'm not. How do I get from here to there?
There were tools that I'd explored but found lacking, right? So you can take a Platonist approach where you see something in the world and it helps you build up to these more abstract things. So I can say, there's two of us.
There's two water cups here, right? Like, people in water cups aren't alike in this, like, deep sense, but we're alike in this two ness. And so I can think about the number two you know, abstracted away from the world.
And hypothetically, you can go like, well, I look at someone kick a dog, and I look at someone do financial fraud on an old lady, and I go, well, what's the thing here? It's injustice, right? Like, it's cruelty. But I didn't ultimately believe that was how I came to know it. I think the way you can kind of work your way upwards about just the natural numbers is a lot clearer versus how exactly do I recognize those as injustice unless I already know what injustice is?
So I did this all for Ben at greater length and more examples. And Ben goes, okay, well, yeah, it sounds like that's not convincing to you. So what if instead of going over what you don't believe, you just try something new? Like, if not that, how do you have knowledge of the good? And I said, I don't know. I guess morality just loves me or something.
And he kind of made that case too, to be honest.
And I said, okay, I know what I just said. Let me think about whether I believe it.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: Oh, man.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: And I did.
So that was where I was stuck.
If I'm not transcendent and I have knowledge of something that's transcendent and I can't build a ladder up, but I have it, then the motion has to come from the other side. That instead of me working my way up intellectually, that somehow this thing that I can't reach for myself is being offered to me. And that once you say that about the good, specifically. Right. Then that offering has to itself be good.
And once you're talking about the good doing stuff. Right. I'm no longer talking about this abstract rule book like I am with math some of the time of. Just let me extend these rules. Let me see what these rules do. Rules don't act. So I'm not talking just about a rule book. I'm talking about a being. So now suddenly I'm talking about a transcendent being who is totally good, who condescends to me, offering himself in the form of slave. And I know who I'm talking about. I know that that's Jesus.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, man. Sorry. Choking me up a little.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:42] Speaker A: I mean, what you're tapping into is the metaphysical reality that is God. It led you to a place where you saw that in a way many devout Christians don't. I mean, there was a profound contemplative journey that was going on you didn't even know was happening.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: And I think that speaks so much to God's personal love for Each of us, right? Because you know, I've read a lot of conversion stories and some people God just talks to, right? Like, you know, some people, you know, have a moment of vision or a moment of encounter with Mary. Some people don't have this intense long inductive reasoning process. Like there's a moment just in front of a painting when they suddenly know and feel God's love. And what I take from my story is, you know, how much God loved me personally, that he came to me in the way that really drew on all the natural loves I had.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: That drew on the same things that made me excited to do my computer science homework.
And that's not too low for God. It doesn't have to be a great work of art. It doesn't have to be a place of great natural beauty. He looked at what I loved and said, all right, like I'll wait for her there.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: Incredible.
A lot of atheists will attack, you know, paper tiger of Christianity that no one actually believes. You know, you think of Dawkins, you know, flying spaghetti monster.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:32:57] Speaker A: Like no self respecting Christian actually believes that God is an actor on the stage of creation. That's more like what the Greeks believed about their gods. In fact, when people talk about how do you know which God is right? And they compare Christianity with the Greek gods, well, the Greek gods are more like our angels.
That's not even saying is it this God or that one? It's not even the same thing.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: And that was obvious to the Greeks also, right? Like if you go into the actual Socratic dialogues there you have a lot of questions about like, well, how can these gods be in charge of what's good when they fight each other constantly and don't agree about it and do things that are bad? Right? So that's not even a novel critique. The Greeks knew that critique. They're like, well, there's something pretty unsatisfying about these personages, right?
[00:33:37] Speaker A: But what you came in touch with is existence itself, which stands, transcends and then comes in. But it's like it personifies math, goodness, order. It's like this is the, the personhood.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: The ground of all being.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: How has that changed your dance with reality and truth and goodness? Like, how did life feel and look different on the other side of that for you?
[00:34:03] Speaker B: I think what's funny is one of the things that was clear I had to give up about my atheism was a down ranking of the physical world, right. It was easier for me to find God in math. And the things that Were most intellectual and abstract and, you know, have relevance. Right. There's not only applied math, but there's applied ethics.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: But the sense of you find the truest things by getting as far away from the material world was something I thought couldn't be true if God made and loved the material world.
So, you know, aside from needing to learn how to pray. Right. Which was part of becoming Christian, I thought I also wanted to do more cooking. I wanted to do more things that were just an appreciation of the physical world and of my physical body rather than saying, you know, okay, I'm a newly graduated college student. My job is like reasonable calories for the lowest price, no matter how boring or like terrible the meal is. That's fine.
Actually, if God made my body and not just as like a mech suit for my mind, I have to be nicer to it.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Wow. Wow. How did your family receive the news?
[00:35:06] Speaker B: They really disagreed with me. Right. You know, I had maybe a four hour conversation with them, them, and they still disagree with me.
I would say approve of my methods, but not my results. Right.
That this intense inquiry into the nature of the world good. This conclusion bad.
And I'll give them the compliment, they think it matters about being wrong. One of the things that's a disagreement between me and my family is the topic of abortion.
And I think the most frustrating thing I heard from everyone and did not hear this from my family when I converted was people who said, like, oh, yeah, well, whatever makes you happy. Like, if that's true for you, I'm so happy for you. Like, that's crazy, right? Like, that's not why I became Christian. And it's profoundly insulting to say that, you know, Christianity has no moral relevance such that someone could convert and it wouldn't alter their life whether it was true or not. You know, my family thinks that Christianity makes strong claims about the world and they think a number of those claims are false.
And so of course they think to some extent it's a worse life believing false things, inviting other people into things that are false than it would be if you believed things that were true. And I agree with them on that. We just disagree about which person is right.
[00:36:21] Speaker A: A lot of Christians are afraid to debate people who are atheists, or if they go at it, they go at it in a way that's combative. It's like, it's teams. Like I said when we started talking, this team wants everybody to win. Right. But some people think it's a zero sum game and that's it.
What Arguments with Christians were good and positive, moving in the right directions or encounters. I say arguments in a philosophical sense, not in a butting head sense. And which ones pushed you away as an atheist?
[00:36:48] Speaker B: You know, I think what was always most repellent was someone who kind of presumed they knew everything about my atheism already. Right? Someone's like, you know, it's okay if you're angry at God. Like, that's all right. I'm like, I'm not angry at God. Like, I don't believe in God. I'm not angry at God any more than I'm angry at the tooth fairy. Right? And it was really sincerely met because they'd met folks who had come to their atheism through the problem of evil and a real sense of rejecting a God. But that wasn't me. So I think you've got to start every argument about the specific individual in front of you, which means a lot more curiosity and questions. First.
[00:37:22] Speaker A: It's reverence for the person before.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: You're like, well, have you thought about this? Because maybe, no maybe that's irrelevant to them. Right?
And I think it's always good to start with kind of that question of, okay, well, if you're an atheist, like, I do want to know more about your philosophy. First of all, like, again, no one can live their life just as an atheist. That's not a positive philosophy. So how do you understand the good. What do you think about what marriage is? Right. Like, a lot of these questions about how do we construct our lives, what guides us in difficult moments.
I do find debates about marriage really fruitful because a lot of people think they'll enter into it in some form or another.
Because I have a debate background and I have debate friends. I don't recommend this for a friend. Like, when my friends get engaged, I often say, like, congratulations. And what do you think you're doing? Exactly. Don't do that. Don't do that for real with normal people because we're all weirdos. It's okay because people will give me honest answers. And it's fascinating because they'll say, like, oh, well, we think we do want to spend the next few years of our lives here. That obviously, if either of us thought we weren't good for the other, we would leave, you know, or, I don't think I'm doing anything at all, but our parents really want us to get married, you know. But, like, one of the most interesting claims I would hear is, like, we are married already. Like, it's just something that grows over time, like a plant. But now we're going to have a wedding because our parents want us to. And she's going to recognize something that happened at some undefined moment in the past. So having those open ended conversations, not just about marriage, but what are you doing and why are you doing it gives both of you room to notice. Okay, where do our views of the world diverge and what drives that diversion?
[00:38:57] Speaker A: Beautiful Christian community was a key part of your conversion and it's something you became passionate about after your conversion and wrote a book about it. Tell us about the book and about the role that played and how to be intentional about creating communities that foster conversion not just for the non believer, but for the. For us. I mean, I wanna keep converting and I can't do that alone.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: So when I converted, I think it was like someone had set off a flare, right? Where people are like, oh gosh, Leah's a Christian. We're all very excited, but we've gotta take care of her, right? She's like a little wobbly fawn that can't walk. Which was very helpful. You know, I even had one Dominican friar pick out my parish for rci. He's like, you should go there. They do two cycles a year so you won't have to wait as long. And I'm going to pick you a friend. And that he did at the parish.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:39:41] Speaker B: I was texting her yesterday, right? So like we've stayed friends forever.
That was really kind. And it makes sense because first of all, God wants us to know and love each other for his sake, right? He made you so he wants me to love you because he loves you.
And that my prayer life shouldn't be isolated or isolating. It should be receiving from God his love and letting that spill over to other people in my life.
But there's also just this intense anti catechesis if your prayer life is kind of wholly cordoned off. If you're praying at church but not talking to anyone and at home, maybe by your bed quietly. And the whole rest of the world is not prayer. And this is prayer, but only in the sense of being alone. You know, it's just anti catechetical because it's the sense that the world is not God's. Right? Like this is a small part of my life, not an expansive part.
So I wrote Building the Benedict Option because I was really interested in this problem of how do you make sure your life is grounded in community so that you're growing in love for God and love for others. And the book is really framed. What can you do on this front over the next two weeks to two months? I think there's a temptation to say, well, I want this to be part of my life, but I need to wait until I get married, until we move, until the kids are bigger, and then I'm allowed to have this, but I can't do it right now.
But your real life is right now. You could get hit by a bus, right? Like, there's no guarantee you're going to get to the part of your life where good things are allowed later. If it's essential to life, you have to have it in the hard parts, and you have to have it right now. When your house is messy, when you're very busy, there's room for what God wants for you now.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: Yeah. No, too busy for community is the biggest obstacle.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: Everyone's got their own thing going on, especially at a certain phase in your life. So you're saying just make sure you make time for it.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: And you've got to do it badly, right? You've got to do it worse than you think would be ideal so that you can do it at all. So my family doesn't feel bad about inviting another family over for dinner, but, oh, the kids have been sick. Like, we meant to give you dinner in a more expansive and hospitable sense, but we have ordered pizza and we're having it on paper plates. Or I just had friends over this weekend where my husband was traveling. They did all the dishes even though they were my guests. And that's sort of bad in some sense, right? Because the alternative was not having them over. And once we had them over, not only are our guests kids together and we're together, we talk about the things on our heart and we pray together. And that's, you know, another big thing I really emphasize is that I want, as often as possible not to part from another Christian without actively praying together.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: I love that.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: And it's amazing how much that changes my time with people, because I'll have spent two hours with someone, right? Having dinner, chatting. And then at the end, I say, and what should we pray for together? And I won't have heard till that moment that their mom is having heart surgery next week. That must have been so much on their mind and in their heart, but didn't come out, even in the context of our friendship, until we were saying, all right, well, what do we both want to ask of God together?
[00:42:36] Speaker A: That's beautiful. People make this stuff rocket science, and then they don't do it.
[00:42:39] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: It's such a high ideal. Like the platonic ideals. It's out there. No, no. You can just have friends over and pray.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: And I think something where Instagram is my enemy, where, like, if you think about friendship or time together or hosting purely visually and visually, for a third observer. Right. Like, what will this look like?
You're missing the point. Right. Like, it's fine if it looks ugly. You know, it's fine if the house is messy. It's fine if you're praying together and your hair is bad and you're crying together because now something has moved you. Because none of this is for an outside observer. Right. The only outside observer that matters here is God, and he already knows who you are. Yeah.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: You know, it's an unfortunate difficulty at our phase in life.
I'm a little. I'm in the grandpa phase. We're at the same phase. Yeah, I'm in the grandpa phase. You're, like, in it right now, right? My youngest is 13, so it's kind of. It's a fun phase, man.
But as you get into the building community, it's different than when you were at Yale. And it's easier to just say, hey, here's an atheist buddy. Let me invite him over to our debate team. You know, I'd love to think of ways to have Christian community that just more easily, hey, come on over.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: And you just. That's it, that's it, that's it.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: That's it.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: I think the only trouble is that people do this so little. I think there's even a big, documented decline of socializing in the wake of COVID that people lost certain habits or certain connections, and then they didn't build them back up. Right. So when you just say, like, hey, come on over, people may say no. Right. Or just, like, treat it casually because it feels odd, or they're not doing it all the time or the stakes feel too high. What? Why am I inviting this person over? Is it because I like them? Is that too much to say?
I see people, too.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: It's like dating in college. Yes. Or at Steubenville.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: At least people have an easier time getting together with a friend. Like, I'm going to meet up with this friend for coffee because we both like coffee. And therefore, this justifies getting together. And it cracks me up a little bit. Like, clearly people need some kind of crutch for, like, why am I getting together? Like, can I say, like, chris, come on over. I like you. I want to hang out with you.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Little strawberry Whoa, whoa, whoa.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: So I'm fine with people picking, like, little feints of, like, how am I going to invite someone over without showing them that I like them? Right? Like, that's okay. Work your way up to it. But one of the easiest ones is, like, you just look up the saint of the day and like, hey, do you want to go over for dinner on St. Lucy's Day?
There's always a saint, right? But like, when you do it that.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: Way, people are like, we'll serve a bowl of grapes. I don't know.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: Yes. You can pick something liturgical to do, and you can just pray the Divine Office for the day together then. But when you say, will you come over to my house for X? People go like, oh, I guess that only happens once a year. I'd better say yes. Right?
[00:45:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:45:08] Speaker B: It's a trick.
[00:45:09] Speaker A: There's a saint every day, but then it's the non believing neighbor or the non Catholic neighbor, I guess.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Just, I mean, you can say, you.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Can say, invite them for St. Lucy's Day. Yeah.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: You can just say like, hey, I'm having dinner for St. Lucy's Day. Do you want to come over? Like, you can say, like, you don't have to pray with us, but like, do you want to come over? That's what we do on St. Lucy's Day. It's what you do now, right? It's true, now that you've said it.
[00:45:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And that actually, more than arguing with atheists on X, actually might convert people.
[00:45:33] Speaker B: And one of the other things we do is I talk in the book about one. Good format for an event is kind of what I call a show and tell, where it's easy for people to just bring something casually and have a way of talking that isn't just about their work. Right. So my husband and I have hosted a number of liturgical season poetry parties where it's like, hey, it's that bit after Christmas where school hasn't started yet, but it's still technically Christmas.
Everyone, come on over. Bring a Christmas poem if you have one. And what I love about this is not only is that pretty easy, you don't have to bring a poem. You may, Right? You can Google one if you're kind of scrounging at the last minute. But when you get together, suddenly you have this room of at least some people who are mutual strangers. And what's their introduction to each other? It's not, what's your job? It's not like, are you married? It's here's something I love and find Beautiful. I'm going to read it to all of you.
I find it so much easier to like people in those circumstances. I always have an easier time liking people if I'm being shown something they love. And I think a lot of our default ways of getting together don't invite people to do that.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: Are you an introvert?
[00:46:36] Speaker B: No, I'm very extroverted. You are?
[00:46:38] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: I'm really impatient with small talk because I feel like I have no purchase on the person in front of me.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: Yeah, well said. I can't stand small talk.
My wife. I literally just almost said my mom.
I need some counseling. That was messed up.
I'm so used to referring to her to the kids as mom. She's like, there's dad.
She's a total introvert. So when you say I find it easier to like people, that's totally something that Natalie would say.
Yeah. Thanks for really just charting a course for how to be intentional about that. I mean, I'm sure we could talk about that for another hour, but we have another topic to get into shortly.
We'll link to it below in the show notes. It's so essential. This is not just for feeling better and for having small groups. I mean, this is literally life changing. This is the thing that changed your life.
[00:47:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: It's not just grasping some arguments, but finding yourself on the inside of a church where the stained glass looks different suddenly and these people are the stained glass. And there's a beauty here and I maybe want to be part of it.
[00:47:35] Speaker B: And you know it's true, right? You know, God made this person for love and loves them already. And the question is just how can I pull aside some of the veils that are hiding from me like the glory God wants to blaze out of them?
[00:47:45] Speaker A: Praise God. Thank you so much for making the time to come here. I know you're busy. You got a lot going on. You got kids. I mean, just having kids is enough to say thank you for coming here while you have kids.
Though maybe you got a good night's sleep last night in a hotel that's heavenly without. I mean, as much as you love.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: Your kids, actually the big perk was reading a paper book on an airplane with no one pulling it out of my hands.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: What?
[00:48:06] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:48:06] Speaker A: That's like a full on vacation.
That's incredible.
But really, I'm so grateful for the time. And I'm grateful more for just your unwavering commitment to truth and for your journey, because it shines a light down a path that invites other people.
So thanks for sharing that with us. And thank you guys for watching. Hopefully you felt the Lord tugging at your heart as you watch. Especially maybe if you're not a believer or you're struggling with it or you lost hope for one of your kids who's lost faith. I mean, the Lord's alive and he's well and he's calling people. If you have the courage to listen. Thank you for listening. Love you. We'll see you next time.
