Ivy league Atheist Finds Christ – Rachel Gilson’s Story

Former skeptic Rachel embraced atheism until her intellectual curiosity regarding God’s existence led her to Jesus.

Learn more about Rachel and her book at www.rachelgilson.com

Recommended Resources:

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin

Reason for God by Tim Keller Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Rachel. It’s so great to have you with me today.

It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me, and tell the listeners, a little bit about yourself before we get into your story?

Yeah. Well, I’m a California sojourner in New England. I currently work for Cru, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, on the national theological development and culture team. I write a little bit. I speak a little bit. I parent a 7-year-old a little bit, so that’s a little bit of where I am right now in life.

And you’re pursuing a PhD at the moment as well?

Yes. I’m working on my PhD in public theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Okay. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, maybe we’ll hear a little bit more about those bits and pieces as we go. As we’re starting with your story, as you know, this podcast is talking with former atheists who found their way from atheism to Christianity, and sometimes that’s quite a long journey, from one ideology to the other and one life to another, but it all starts somewhere, and I’d like to start with your childhood and your culture, your family, your community, just kind of how you grew up. Shape that for us. Tell us how your journey or your story started. Was God in that story at all as a child?

Yeah. I love context. I was a history major in college, so these are my favorite.

Yes, context means a lot.

Context is a big one.

Yeah.

So the bigger context is my mother had grown up in a practicing Catholic household but not really serious. She ditched it at a young age, so by the time she was raising me, nothing of that was in her life. She had really gone far away from Catholic doctrinal teaching, moral teaching, all of that. My dad similarly didn’t have religion in his life when he was raising me. He had grown up not church going at all, like poor in the hills of Appalachia. He had met some Jesus people along the way, he says, but there was just no faith in his life, even as a young boy, so by the time my parents were bringing up my brother and I, we were just never in the church, not even Christmas or Easter. It just wasn’t a thing that was talked about. It wasn’t a part of our fabric. Now, the community I grew up in is north of Santa Barbara, California, and sometimes people here California and think really, really liberal, and obviously that’s true, but actually where I grew up was very rural, in a lot of ways conservative. My high school had a working farm on it and a place where you could tie up your horse, like that kind of rural. The town it was in literally had one stop light. And so I knew that a lot of people around me were churchgoers, but as a child, I didn’t really know what that meant. It was just sort of a fact in people’s lives, and I never really thought about it as a kid.

So there was no childhood belief in God, no prayer, I mean-

Nothing.

… there was nothing in there to give you a context for that kind of belief at all.

No. I did have some babysitters when I was a young girl who were Mormons, and I have a distinct memory of… they had a picture on their wall, you know, of that feather-haired 1970s white Jesus who’s staring softly into the middle distance?

Yes, yes.

And I remember sort of making fun of that picture and getting a timeout for making fun of Jesus. So that was my first real encounter with Jesus as a concept.

Wow. All right. So that was your childhood, and so, as you were getting older and going to school, still no cultural or contextual references, even for Christmas or things like that?

Well, Christmas I loved, but it was definitely that weird porridge of Santa and Rudolph and Baby Jesus and Frosty the Snowman. It’s a little unclear what Baby Jesus had to do with any of it.

Right!

It was just the full-on tree, presents, commercialism type of thing. And Easter, like I got an Easter basket, but to me, Easter was entirely a rabbit who laid eggs or a rabbit who carried eggs. It’s entirely unclear what exactly is going on there. Chocolate is heavily involved. The resurrection? Not even mentio