Why are Youth Leaving Church? #apologetics #church #youth #theology

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today I have with me Keith Foskey, who I'm going to introduce in more detail in just a few moments. I'm sure those who have been following this channel have recognized that I went from a gap of not having shows to like bombarding YouTube with a bunch of interviews these recent days, and next week I have a couple of great interviews coming as well.

So I wanna make sure that folks know that next Tuesday, I will be interviewing Anthony Rogers and Jeremiah Nortier on the discussion of the doctrine of original sin. What is the biblical basis for that doctrine?

Apparently this doctrine has been coming under attack in recent times, and so I thought that would be a great topic to cover. On Wednesday, I will be rejoined by both Dr. Jason Lyle and Dr. James White, and myself will be doing a live Q &A.

So make sure you get your questions and you can bombard us with all the questions you'd like for that Wednesday live stream. So Tuesday's live stream is at 9 p .m. with Anthony Rogers and Jeremiah, and then on Wednesday, it's 6 p .m., and that's Eastern time.

Also, just to give folks a heads up, and I've been saying this at the beginning of my other programs, that I've started a second YouTube channel called Revealed Apologetics Plus. There are only two videos up there right now, but the goal there is to do these somewhat short videos, five to 10 minutes answering theology questions, apologetics questions, and just general Bible questions.

And so show me a little bit of love if you can go over there and subscribe. If you've subscribed to this channel, you can do me a solid and subscribe to that one as well. And hopefully those brief responses can be shareable.

You can point people to those videos as I cover kind of general topics that I think are related to questions that a lot of people are asking in those areas of theology, apologetics, and the Bible. Lastly, if you're looking to support Revealed Apologetics, my new course is now available for purchase on revealedapologetics .com.

It is called PreSupp Applied, and basically it is a five-lecture presentation on how to apply presuppositional apologetics in different contexts. And so I cover how to navigate apologetic conversations, how do you apply presuppositional apologetics to atheism, Roman Catholicism, and presuppositional Eastern Orthodoxy, that's an interesting one, and the cults.

So all of the information there is in the description of this video and my past videos as well. If you're interested in supporting Revealed Apologetics in that way, it would be greatly appreciated. Well, without further ado, I'd like to formally introduce my guest, who is the host of the Your Calvinist podcast.

And I'll give Keith an opportunity to kind of tell you guys a little bit about himself, and then we'll jump into this very important discussion. Keith, why don't you say hi to folks and kind of tell everyone who you are and how they can find you?

Keith Foskey on Pastoral Ministry, Humor, and Teaching

Well, thank you for having me on the show today. Again, my name is Keith Foskey, and I am the pastor of Sovereign Grace Family Church, where I have served for 18 years now as the pastor and have been at the same church since I was seven.

So it's interesting that I pastor the same church that I grew up in, and I am full-time as the lead pastor of the church. And I serve with two other pastor elders that the three of us lead the church, and we're thankful to God that he brought us together to do that work.

And I am also the host of Your Calvinist podcast, as you mentioned, as well as being a, basically a, what I call a humorist. Some people might use the word comedian. I do stand-up comedy, but very, very irregularly.

So I'm a little hesitant to call myself an actual comedian.

Not when you're preaching, of course, right?

No, no, no, don't do that.

You're gonna open up this terminal.

So a rabbi and a priest going to walk into a bar, okay.

No, but I do enjoy stand-up, and so, but I consider myself more of a humorist. A lot of my videos have humor in them. I've just begun writing articles for a new media outlet that's actually starting in July, and it's gonna be, my contributions are going to be more satirical.

Truthful articles, but articles that have a little bit of a satirical bent to them, and so that's kind of my contribution to the conversation is trying to use humor to point toward truth, and using humor as a tool to point people to truth.

And it's a very powerful tool. I think it's a lost art. A lot of people kind of see me, and I kind of talk about serious topics and stuff, but I actually have a background in theater and physical comedy, so I'm a really goofy person in real life.

Trying to mix humor with conveying truth can be tricky, but if you're able to do it, it's a very effective way to communicate what you want to communicate, especially, I'm a teacher, so I teach middle school, seventh grade Old Testament Bible, and eighth grade logic and debate, and I have to talk about these topics and somehow incorporate ways that help it stick with the students, and so humor is a very powerful tool to that end, so I think what you're doing is something that's very needed and can be done very effectively, which I think you do very well.

Well, I appreciate that. I always like to remind people of a quote by G .K. Chesterton and I like him for one reason. We share the same name. The K in G .K. is Keith, so people often don't think about that.

So Mr. Chesterton said that funny is not the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and so I hold onto that pretty tightly because I tell people just because I'm being funny doesn't mean what I'm saying isn't serious.

That's right.

And so, yeah, I think it's, like you said, it's one of the lost tools in our belt of truth.

Okay, awesome. Well, you and I have something in common. We both grew up in the church, so you said you're a pastor of a church that you have been going to since you were seven. Is that what you said?

Yeah, my dad's mom got a divorce when I was six. My dad met my stepmom and got married when I was about seven, about a year later, and she brought me to church, really, for the first time consistently in my life when I was seven years old.

And the church was much different then than it is now. The church I grew up in was actually part of the Old Disciples of Christ Church, which is a very liberal denomination.

Okay.

But we left that denomination in the 90s, and we became more and more conservative in our theology, and now we are actually confirmed and confessional as a Baptist church. We hold to the First London Baptist Confession, and that's the direction that God took us.

So he took us from liberal theologically all the way to conservative, Calvinistic Baptist theologically, which is a major shift, but it just shows how God can bring revival over time as his word is preached.

That's right.

I grew up in a Spanish Pentecostal church, very, well, yeah, it was pretty strict. We had, I always tell people, we had wooden benches. That was like how we, kind of old school, constructed purposefully to not be comfortable so that you don't fall asleep.

It didn't work. Sometimes I fell asleep, and we were in church Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and two services on Sundays, so we were in church a lot. So I'm very much familiar with kind of that experience of growing up in a church and things like that.

Youth Ministry, Church Culture, and Why Young People Leave

Now, did your church have a youth group or any youth ministry that you participated in or were involved in in any way?

Yeah, I grew up going to a youth Sunday school, and then also we would have youth events. We didn't really have a strong youth, like Wednesday night youth group like a lot of churches did in the 90s, but I would visit friends' churches who had those types of things.

So I was very, very aware of the youth group culture and watching it grow, but I didn't know anything about it. I just was watching it sort of from a distance, but our church didn't really, it was a small church, so it didn't have a lot of youth.

So what I experienced was mostly by going with other friends like to First Baptist Church of Callahan, which is the little town I was in, and that kind of thing.

Yeah, same for me. I went to an Assemblies of God church, and we were part of what was called the Spanish Eastern District, and our youth group was really small, but we were very, very close. And so thankfully, by God's grace, the context in which I grew up in, we were very close.

We often spoke about the things of God outside the context of the church, so it wasn't just something we did when we went to church. So I had a very strong base socially and spiritually, but you made mention of the youth group culture, and so it's very different in the different churches that you visit and things like that.

Especially in the 90s, youth group was a big deal. I'm not sure how it is now, these days, and I know Sunday school is kind of an old school thing that you don't find in a lot of churches, too. I mean, I'm sure you had Sunday school classes.

I had Sunday school classes. So the scene is very different. Now we have some trends of people, young people leaving the church, which is really the topic of our discussion today. So I wanna open up by asking you this question, and it's kind of the general question and the obvious question.

Why do you think significant numbers of young people are leaving the church today? What are your thoughts on that?

Well, a few years ago, I was invited to speak at a homeschool convention, and I was asked that question as the topic of my speech. Why do young people leave the church? And I think that my answer was considered by some people to be somewhat offensive.

So I do wanna sort of preface this by saying my answer is not an answer that most people like. Because the answer that a lot of people give is lack of discipleship, lack of apologetics, lack of training in theology, the introduction of university professors, the introduction of foreign thought, as far as like thoughts that they haven't gotten.

When they go to college, they get all these thoughts that are different and outside of what their normal things are. And a lot of people think that's the reason. And I say all those things are part of that, but they're not the cause, they're outliers.

The root cause is most of our kids don't really get converted. And so the reason why they leave the church is because they're not really in Christ. And so that's my answer, is the reason why so many young people leave the church when they become adults is because when they become adults, they realize they really don't have a relationship with Christ.

They really don't have a relationship with the God of the scriptures. And so they tend to simply jettison that part of their life because that part of their life, which was integral in their youth is no longer integral in their young adult life.

And they see it as something that's unnecessary because it hasn't changed their life. That's what conversion is. Conversion is a life change. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation, Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter five.

And many people have not been made a new creation in Christ, even though they were confirmed in that conversion in some kind of experience. And that's the thing, whether it was confirmed in that conversion through an actual confirmation class, or they were confirmed in that conversion through some type of baptismal exercise, or they were confirmed in that conversion by some type of going forward, or praying a prayer, or going down during a revival meeting and having an emotional experience.

And they say, this was my conversion. And yet Christ didn't change their life, didn't change their heart. And so that's what I think is the big problem is we have created, especially in the 90s. And I wanna go back to this because you said something earlier about the difference.

The youth group of the 90s is the church of today because all those people who were enjoying the youth group in the 90s wanted to maintain that same atmosphere. And so a lot of the churches today are grown up youth groups.

They're 40 year old adolescents. They're midlife crisis Christians who are trying to get back to something they enjoyed in their youth. So they model their churches around that youth group model. And that's why when you go into churches, you see people doing youth group games during worship and things like that.

Things that you were like, well, this isn't worship. This is goofiness. Yeah, it's goofiness because that's what they had in the 90s. That's what they had in the early 2000s. And they wanted to keep that going.

And youth pastors are now senior pastors. Youth pastors are now taking the youth that were their youth and now they've made them into churches. And the churches have no tie to history. They have no tie to any foundational theological truth.

And so many people are leaving those types of churches and actually going back to churches like the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Church and the more high church of the Protestant denominations because they're hungry for some type of grounding in history because Pastor Spike, who's been a pastor who's got his Mohawk and his loud, crazy t-shirts and all that, Pastor Spike appeals to a certain demographic and the younger people today aren't interested.

And so I just answered a lot of questions at one time and I know I kind of sporadically went out.

And I hope No, that was excellent. And one of the things I love about your answer is that you didn't provide a superficial answer. You gave kind of the divine commentary on why people leave the church.

This channel is predominantly focused on apologetics and apologetic method and things like that. And I made mention in a past video when a famous Christian apologist was asked, why are you a Christian?

And they gave this answer. They said, I'm a Christian because of the evidence. And I thought to myself, well, that's not what the Bible says as to why you're a Christian, right? His spirit bears witness to our spirit that we're children of God, right?

So he did an answer in a way that was consistent with the theological divinely inspired commentary as to why he became converted. And what I appreciate about your answer is that why are young people leaving?

The same reason why anyone leaves is because they were never converted to begin with. And I just, that's such a Calvinist answer, isn't it?

Very first John to, you know, they went out from us. I mean, that's our answer, right? And it upsets people. When I said that at the homeschool convention, I mean, it was almost like, oh, hold little Johnny's ears.

He doesn't need to hear this. He doesn't need to hear that he might not be a believer because we've confirmed him in his faith. And we don't want anybody to make him question that. I've actually seen pastors who would say, if you ever think you weren't saved, go back to the day you wrote in your Bible, the day you got saved, and you'll know, you'll go back to that time and you'll be reminded that, hey, I actually got saved on June 2nd of 2000, you know, whatever, 2004, and that's your spiritual birthday.

And don't let anybody ever make you question that, even though the Bible says to actually seek and know if that is actually the case, that you make your calling and election certain. But they'll say, don't do that.

Don't actually question whether or not you've actually come to faith.

Sure, and I love the way that their answer is an answer that is consistent with our broader worldview, which is based in scripture. So we focus a lot on this in this channel is that anything we say about anything, whether it's science, history, the all, everything needs to be rooted in the scripture.

And that fact impacts how we answer these questions. And so I really very much appreciate the fact that you answer that. Now, it is true that the reason why people leave is because they haven't been converted, that there's a certain level of that that's true.

However, that doesn't mean, oh, well, there's nothing we can do about it. Well, they were never really converted. So there's nothing we can do because conversion is kind of on God's side of the ledger.

So how do we respond to that line of thinking and maybe explore other aspects that contribute to that fundamental biblical answer that you provided? For example, what role do cultural influences and social media and entertainment play in compounding that fact and catering to someone's non-converted state, if that makes sense?

Apologetics, Conversion, and Confirming the Unconverted

Well, this is where, going back to the first things I was saying about, well, we didn't do apologetics or we didn't do theology or we didn't study doctrine. That's why I say those things still matter, but they're not the root.

They're the outliers that need to be considered. And that's why in that talk that I gave, and it's been several years now, I started with the problem. We have young people that aren't converted. So the second question is, are we confirming them in an unconverted state?

That was my first question. Are we telling people they're saved without actually giving them any type of examination? And I'll give you an example. There's a big church in our town and it's a big church.

It's one of those ones that I say really, literally was a youth group that became a church. And the guy who was the pastor used to be a youth pastor and it has blown up. I mean, it's got like nine campuses and each one, he gets beamed in via video every week.

And in that church, they have beach baptisms every couple months. And in these beach baptisms, they'll post on Facebook, hey man, we had 300 people be baptized today. We had 400 people be baptized today.

And everybody's like, oh, praise the Lord, amen. But when you ask the question, okay, how many of those people actually went through any form of question with the pastor or any type of discipleship to see if whether or not they were truly converted or whether or not they're just responding to the call of baptism?

And the answer is they didn't. Because, and we know this to be true, because they literally have on their website, if you wanna be baptized on so-and-so day, go sign up on our website and we'll see you there.

There's no like we're gonna, before you get baptized or before you become a Christian by your confession and receiving the sign of the covenant, you're actually going to demonstrate your faith by actually showing that you understand what the gospel is.

So my first question to families, when somebody says, hey, little Johnny wants to be baptized, my question is, can little Johnny articulate the gospel? You would be surprised how many Christians today, adults who've been in church for 20 years, if you ask the question, do you understand the gospel?

They'll say, yes. Okay, can you explain it to me? Pretend I'm a non-believer and explain the gospel to me. And they'll fall all over themselves. They'll explain all kinds, they'll either show legalism or licentiousness.

They come with all kinds of bad examples. I remember one time, because we do a booth at our church. We go out to fairs and other things and we set up this booth and hand out gospel tracts, offer to pray with people.

We have this, it's like our evangelism booth. We call it the fishing hole. Like we're fishing for men, right? Like this is our fishing hole. And I have a sign that I made, I do woodwork. So I carved this sign, it's about four foot wide.

And across the sign, it says, do you understand the gospel? And we hang it above the booth. I remember one time a guy walked by, he looked up, he read the sign and he looked at me and he said, that's a hard question.

I said, okay. And he said, and I said, well, what do you do? He said, I'm a pastor. I said, it shouldn't be hard for you. Like, and even he was like, well, I don't know how I would answer that. Do you understand the gospel?

I was like, dude, this is your job. Like you, ostensibly you should be the one who has no trouble answering that question. But because we have a problem defining what the gospel is, because we have a problem asking people, hey, can you actually define this thing that you say saved you and is the most important thing in your life?

Sure.

We're afraid to ask people that question. We're afraid to actually realize that they may not even know the answer.

Right.

Now, just to clarify, I know this is not what you're saying. You're not saying that there's a way to determine who's the elect, who's saved. What you're asking for is evidence of the fact that they understand what they claim they want to do.

Hey, I wanna be baptized. Okay, well, what is the evidence that A, you understand the gospel and B, that this isn't just kind of like you're just going with the crowd, so to speak, because it's popular to kind of say, hey, I wanna be baptized, especially if there's a thing on the website, people are promoting it, you get the claps and the feels when you do it, especially within a big context, a big church context.

So that's not what you're,.

You're not saying we need to identify the elect first before we baptize, anything along those lines.

Yeah, no, I'm not a hyper-Calvinist. I'm not a hardshell Baptist, as you know, those who would say we should only preach to the elect or anything like that. No, I'm saying that if a person says they believe they are saved, they ought to at least be able to say what they were saved from.

They ought to be able to say how they were saved and what, and by whom they were saved. You know, that can be a seven-year-old child who says, I recognize that I'm a sinner. I recognize that Christ is the only savior that can save me.

And I realize that if I do not repent of my sin and trust in him, then I will not be saved. I mean, just those three things. If I heard a young people, if I heard a young person say that, that would be a big, a big indication that, hey, this kid understands what we're actually saying.

And just because somebody can articulate it doesn't mean that they're necessarily saved. And just because someone has a struggle articulating it doesn't mean they're not saved. But if they can, then that's helpful.

That's something that I think if a person can't articulate those things, that's a place to start. And I think that's where we have to start. Now, then we move into the area of apologetics and stuff.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

No worries. What do you say to someone who says, well, listen, in the New Testament, people didn't have to take these long classes before baptism. They believed, they repented, they were baptized right there on the spot.

And so that's the biblical model. We just wanna see people, we just wanna obey the command by proclaiming the gospel and baptizing people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It's more of you kind of legalistic kind of tooth tooth tooth.

Hello?

Yeah, unplugged myself.

I can hear you now.

Okay, cool, sorry about that. I have to not move my hands because then I disconnect myself. But yeah, so the Bible's, the biblical model is that believe and you're baptized on the spot. And so it's these kind of stuffy, Calvinist Christians who think, well, they need to go through this long theological test before they could even get baptized.

How would you respond to something like that?

I think that's a legitimate question. I do think we have to be careful not to become, as there's a term, fruit inspectors, right? Like we're ensuring that the fruit is good before we're willing to baptize someone.

I'm not endorsing that. But I'll say, since we are talking about children, I think this is something we have to consider that the Bible doesn't really have a model for. And that is, we don't see a biblical model of the second generation church.

Everybody that's being saved in Acts is first generation believers, right? And so either we take the Presbyterian view that their children were baptized on the faith of their parents, which is the family covenant view, right?

That if dad gets saved and is baptized, then his wife and children are also baptized because they're brought into the covenant through the faith of the parent. So I don't accept that because I'm a Baptist, but that's one model, right?

But the other model is, we have the first generation believers who are hearing, believing, and being baptized, and there's no indication of how they handled the conversion of children in Acts. So we don't see that.

So we have to make some assumptions. One thing we do know is this. Children, by nature, have a desire to please their parents on a certain level when it comes to this issue. So children will affirm what their parents believe so as to be accepted within the family.

And parents will affirm that their children are believers because they want their children to be saved. So we have two sides of this coin where the children are affirming something that the parents believe, and the parents are affirming the child's belief because both of them want something.

One wants acceptance and the other wants salvation, right? So that is not something that Acts addresses specifically. And so this is where, as a pastor, we have to have wisdom. I actually wrote an article years ago, and maybe I should republish it, but it was called, When Should Little Johnny Be Baptized?

When should little Johnny be affirmed in his faith? And I have been in this situation, and I remember who it was. Lady walked up to me and she said, my granddaughter's ready to be baptized. I said, okay, well, I'd like to sit and talk with her about her faith.

And she goes, you don't need to. I talked to her, we're good. And I said, well, I appreciate that you talked to her, but I'm the pastor who's gonna be confirming her before the church and baptizing her before the church.

I still need to talk to her, even though you feel confident that you talked to her, because I'm the one that's standing up and baptizing her in the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit. And so I want to at least understand, or know that she understands the gospel.

And one thing I think would have been true, even though it's not clearly articulated in scripture, I think it would have been understood that the people who were baptized at least understood what Peter preached on Pentecost.

They understood what he said. We know that in the case of Philip with the eunuch, that the eunuch at least understood what he said. We don't know how much he said. We don't have the full-orbed conversation between the two of them.

What we do know is that he's reading a scripture he didn't understand. Philip comes up and gives him an understanding of it. And based upon that understanding, he says, well, there's water. What preventeth me from being baptized?

And then, of course, there's a textual variant in the very next part where he says, well, if you believe, you can be baptized. And I like to think that's actually part of the text, because it lends credence to the baptist's view.

But there is a textual variant there. You know what I'm talking about, right? There are in Acts where he says, if you believe, because that's what the King James says, right? If you believe, you can. And that's left out of like the ESV and other translations.

But either way, whether he said that or not, whether Peter said, or Philip said, you need to believe, we do know that the eunuch understood enough to request it. He understood enough that I need this.

I don't have something, I need it. And if I had a 45-year-old man come to me after service, and he said, listen, I heard your sermon today. I understood the gospel, and I recognize I'm a sinner, and I need to be saved.

Well, I'm not putting that guy through a six-month class on salvation. I am gonna take him to my office, and I'm gonna talk to him and find out what is the desire of his heart, and why has he desired this?

Is it because he really heard the gospel and is saved, or is it because his wife's been giving him a hard time because he hasn't been coming to church lately, and he's trying to do something to satisfy her?

And that may create a conversation that lasts longer, because I wanna know that this is genuine, and he's not just trying to satisfy men, but is actually trying to do something that he believes is right for his soul.

So there will be a conversation there.

But, and I'll give you a good example.

I know I'm talking a lot here, but a good example of this is, a year ago about, we had a couple come to our church. This couple had never been a part of a church, never been saved, never had anything in their life to do with God or the Bible or Scripture.

Both of them got saved about the same time, and both of them came to our church and said, listen, we've, Christ has changed our life. This is something that we, we didn't ask for this, but we are now desiring to pursue Christ, and we want to do that here.

And what it was was they had a neighbor who had shared Christ with them. They heard the gospel, they got saved, and the neighbor pointed them to our church. He said, hey, if you wanna go to a good church, it's this church, because he lived on the other side of town, and Jacksonville's this huge city, so he knew they weren't gonna go to our, they weren't gonna go with him.

So he's like, here's a church that's a block away. Go to this church, because it's a good church. They show up on our doorstep, and so immediately, I begin asking them questions, make sure they understand the gospel.

The lady is pouring tears, because she's confirming everything that I'm saying, that Christ died for her sins, that Christ's blood makes an atonement. Do you understand this? I don't really fully grasp it, but I believe it, and the tears running out of her eyes.

We baptized her within a couple of weeks, because that was the, we were satisfied that this woman truly understood, even though she was a babe in her understanding, she truly understood that God had changed her life.

And so, no, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a, well, I don't think that there's, again, fruit inspection that has to happen. I do like the idea of a catechism class for kids, again, because there is some time to catechize the children, so that they do understand the faith.

There's more time involved, but like I said, it's a different context when you're dealing with someone who's a child being brought up in the faith.

Sure, so the Alcoon Project asks, should people be catechized for at least six months and examined by the elders before they're baptized? When they say at least six months, three months, two weeks, as a pastor, as a rule of thumb, how long do you think, or is it just on a case-by-case basis?

How would you speak to that?

I would answer just like you just said, I can't give an absolute on one or the other. I think churches that make that a standard is fine, that if that's what the elders have decided and come to that conclusion.

We don't do that for adults. We do have a catechism class for kids, and we do encourage any child who believes, or parent who believes their child has been saved to go through that. Adults, again, it's a little different, and so it would be on a case-by-case basis.

All right, someone is putting a link in there for someone there. Okay, all right, so you did mention that the reason why young people are leaving is because they've never been converted, and that was not inconsistent with the claim that there's a lack of biblical teaching, theology, apologetics, and things like that.

So you're not ignoring that, but let's kind of shift focus on the issue of apologetics. What are, in your experience, some of the common things that young people are struggling with in the church that are apologetics-related, or being equipped with apologetics would help in terms of responding to?

Existential Doubt, Atheism, and the Need for Apologetics

I think one of the areas that is often not discussed is the issue of the existential dread which accompanies reaching adulthood, and this is something that I can look back at my life, and I can point to very specific times in my life of early adulthood.

And I got married very early. I got married at the age of 19, and so I met my wife when I was 17. We got married at 19, and we've been together, this year will be our 25th anniversary.

Congratulations.

Well, thank you.

So that, in 1999 to 2000, I went through this very real experience of not knowing whether God was even real. I met my first real atheist when I was working, I was working for America Online. You remember that company?

Yeah, AOL.

You laugh, because it was the first real internet company. They gave you 1 ,000 hours on the internet for free on these little CDs. Well, I worked for America Online, and I sat next to a guy named Scott, and Scott was an atheist.

He was a former science teacher, now worked for America Online, and one day I was just talking about God because I'd been brought up in church. And Scott said, I don't believe in that. I'm too smart to believe in that.

I know science, and I know the history of the Bible, and I'm just not, I'm too smart to believe in all that. And I, for the first time, felt like asking myself the question, is believing in all that stupid?

Is that an intellectual deficiency that causes people to say God is real? And I went home and opened my Bible, and the only Bible I had at the time, this shows you my maturity level, the only Bible I had at that time was a comic book Bible.

You've seen them lately, the Action Bible. But it was helpful, because when I opened it up, the first story I looked at was the story of Adam and Eve, and it literally just had a picture of Adam and Eve.

Then you turn a few pages, and there's no one in the ark. You turn a few pages, and I get to the burning, I remember I got to the burning bush. I closed the Bible, and I threw it across the room. I remember, I literally remember throwing it, because that was like me throwing away the idea of faith.