Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who spent decades as a skeptic uncertain of where he stood on God and faith, is now an outspoken Christian.
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“It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian,” he wrote in a Feb. 5 blog post, noting it was time for him to unveil his testimony.
And it’s a journey turning many heads considering the philosopher and web developer has had such a profound cultural impact.
Sanger told CBN News the skepticism he held for most of his life went back to his childhood and his unsure perspective on all religions. Despite that reticence, he did dabble in attempts to communicate with a Higher Power.
“I wasn’t necessarily praying to God, per se, but I had a sort of internal dialogue,” he said. “And sometimes, I even wrote it out …. with some supremely wise being, and, sometimes, I would even call that being ‘God,’ not that I believed that that was God, but in order to just sort of clarify my thought.”
Today, though, he’s now definitively directing his thoughts to the Lord, embracing the entirety of the Christian Gospel. The reaction has been swift, which he didn’t expect.
“I just assumed … to be honest, a lot of people have more or less forgotten about me,” Sanger said. “I’m not in the news that much anymore.”
But people have responded in droves, with Sanger calling the reaction “overwhelmingly positive.” Surprisingly, he said, high-profile atheists have been silent on his conversion — a long process that he said came about after he extensively explored the evidence.
“I had a lot of roadblocks in the way to coming to believe that God exists and … that the Christian God exists, and being a Christian,” he said, noting he had to shed presuppositions and ideologies that conflicted with these worldviews, including notions about being driven by self-interest. “When I had children and when I got married, I’d reflected that, ‘Well, I would die for these people.’ So, of course, I put their interest ahead of mine.”
This challenged any sort of ideology about putting the self first. Then, he began to become “very disillusioned” by fellow unbelievers — especially the “mocking skeptics.”
“They were so obnoxious [it] made me reflect about myself and think, ‘Maybe, actually I have been influenced in a way that I didn’t realize,'” he said.
Sanger was forced to ponder whether he had been impacted by the secular culture in which he was enmeshed — a dynamic that made nonbelief more palatable.
All of this led Sanger to begin thinking deeper, reading the Bible, and starting to piece together evidence. Much of the process began in 2020, just before COVID-19 shut everything down. But there wasn’t necessarily a moment in time where it all came together; instead, it was a process.
“There was a period of time in which I knew things were changing, but I can’t pin it down to a particular moment when I just decided I now believe that God exists,” he said. “There is a moment when I said, ‘OK, I have to admit that what I’m doing now is praying to God,’ and there also was a moment when I prayed something like the Sinner’s Prayer after, I guess, two months or so into reading the Bible.”
It was a unique process that took time, as Sanger wasn’t enmeshed in theological conversations or intensive preaching at his heart.
“I wasn’t convicted of my sin, for example. I didn’t have anyone preaching at me at all,” he said. “I was just reading the Bible. It just takes time … because it involves an entire shift of a worldview.”
Like many, Sanger had a litany of questions as he read Scripture and he relied on commentaries and biblical resources to help him navigate and learn. As he studied, he ultimately came to the conclusion that Scripture is true, validated, and provable.
“The answers are out there,” Sanger said. “The Bible withstands scrutiny, which was a great surprise to me. I thought it couldn’t. I was wrong.”
Sanger said his life has changed as a result of becoming a Christian, noting us was once a “little more hard-edged” than he is today.
“I’ve changed a lot,” he said.
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