Commentary: “Unbelievable: A French atheist-turned-theologian discusses his conversion” Part 1: On the account itself

(This commentary will roughly follow the course of the show that Guillaume Bignon and I were invited to have a conversation on by Justin Brierley.)

In June of this year while planning a trip to London with a friend I’d taken it in my head to contact Justin Brierley, a broadcaster with Premier Christian Radio and host of the popular broadcast and podcast, Unbelievable? In order that we might get together and simply say “hello.” I’d written to Justin on just a few occasions with regard to a variety of philosophical and apologetic topics and he’d always treated my comments with interest and fairness. In short, he seemed like a nice guy that I might like to get to know a little better.

The day after setting up what I assumed would be a short meeting, Justin emailed me and asked if I might like to be on the show discussing conversion with French theologian, Guillaume Bignon. Of course, I agreed.

Justin and I had some time to chat both in the outer office and in the small studio we would eventually contact Guillaume via Skype and record in. Justin is a lovely man and I’d happily follow his masterful lead again if given the opportunity. He did a marvelous job of smoothly channeling my innate “thoroughness” (Put less flatteringly, my tendency to explain to death each point I’m asked to address.). In more contentious or adversarial conversation, this tendency has been referred to by friends as “Wade’s death by a thousand nuances.” I can tend to talk a lot. It would seem that I’m still talking…

After spending some time setting up, we eventually had Guillaume on the line and had an additional opportunity to chat. Guillaume is a very earnest man and I was impressed with what seemed his sincere desire to connect his personal experience to a broader truth. That will be the subject of this blog post. So, I think that I’ll start with simply running down Guillaume’s account of his conversion in brief. Please note, this is meant to simply start as an outline, not a comprehensive examination of Guillaume’s conversion – that comes later; so keep reading…

• Guillaume grew up “nominally Roman Catholic” and went to Mass on a regular basis.
• Guillaume suggests that atheism may be – more or less – a kind of cultural norm in France… with religion, perhaps, to be taken more as “superstition” than true religiosity.
• He notes that he “went through the motions for years” and at a time (I assume seeing this in retrospect) he came to a point in his life in which he could cross a tipping point and, as he told his parents, “I don’t believe any of this” and stopped going to Mass. Guillaume notes that, “My life as an atheist was really not different at all than it had been before. It’s just that there had been no pretense anymore and I was essentially pursuing my own pleasure and happiness in life so, I, on various grounds… because of that favorable environment at home and my mom’s devotion to our education, I did very well in school…” Guillaume went on to study in mathematics and the hard sciences. He additionally exercised what is now starting to sound like a prodigious personal drive by joining a band and national league volleyball.
• At a comment from Justin, Guillaume notes that he was “pursuing that happiness pretty ferociously.” He goes on to note the pursuit of “French atheistic ideals” in the form of “feminine conquest.” This bears examination later as to whether this is merely an atheistic ideal or something more deeply adjoined to his conversion. One begins to receive the idea from Guillaume that what he is calling atheism is another way of saying “hedonism.” This will not be the first time that he will have suggested a particular self-serving “atheistic ideal.”
• As Justin notes, part of Guillaume’s journey lay in continuing to pursue female interests. This would be the point at which Guillaume begins to look into Christianity more systematically – at least in as much as creating an evidential framework is concerned. This is also the point that Guillaume begins to make oblique references to the improbability of what follows.
• A brief follow-up point to Guillaume’s comment: ““My life as an atheist was really not different at all than it had been before. It’s just that there had been no pretense anymore and I was essentially pursuing my own pleasure and happiness in life…”

In quasi-biblical fashion, we could surmise that this might be so because Guillaume was never really an atheist. I’m going to surmise that it’s possible that Guillaume never maturely considered atheism. It’s worth setting on a peg the idea that he was pursuing “my own fame and pleasure” and perhaps taking a look later at whether or not that is essentially different now.

As was summed up in the show, here is my perspective on the upshot:
Guillaume’s going “through the motions for years” is a very familiar story. That he saw little to no difference in his “life as an atheist” before and after is indicative of what many of us go through as children. However, the way Guillaume seems to frame the issue might be paraphrased as, “In much of the time that I spent growing up as a Roman Catholic, I was an atheist. One day, I was simply ‘old enough’ to make this declaration to my parents.” Guillaume did not give an account of his parents’ reactions and one is given the impression of a conscientious, rather well-educated French couple shrugging in unison – except that there was something suggested simply in the need to tell them that he was an atheist that implies that their belief (if not their Catholicism) was something other than nominal. My guess would be that by “old enough” (about four minutes into the show) Guillaume was specifying around the time of puberty.

Though Guillaume reports that he was an atheist, it is not at all clear that he was an atheist in the sense that many of us – as atheists – tend to understand the term now. This would include the often jarring disconnection that we experience as a result of our exposure to a disapproving Christian community. Indeed, it can even be said that younger atheists don’t understand their own dispositions as atheists particularly well – hence the extremely frequent references to theistic hypocrisy, “your God,” and the apparent conflation of the hypothetical with the real. Can most adolescents be reasonably expected to bear very deep insight into such things? In most cases, I’d say the answer to that question is “No.”

On the surface, Guillaume gives every appearance of having pursued a woman that he was attracted to toward, if not into, Christianity. I didn’t get the impression that this was a shared endeavor in which she guided his exploration. In fact, she starts to take on an almost incidental aspect – at least in the context of the show.

But with regard to the probabilistic aspect of his conversion that the woman played no small part in…

“I was in this very secular culture. The chances of me ever hearing the Gospel, let alone believing it, were extremely slim and it happened in a funny way…”

Given time and experience, many of us of a “certain age” would say that speculating on the slimness of chances in most circumstances would be unwise – particularly with regard to something as fundamental as how we see the world. Many of us would say, “Be surprised and delighted when you can be, but expect anything and everything.” Guillaume goes on to describe in probabilistic terms what I’ve heard referred to as “the implausible.” His language takes on a tone and content highly suggestive of this (i.e., “We decided out of the blue, one day…,” as though spontaneity on holiday at St. Martin were highly suspect). In this sense, doing something one time and only one time is indicative of a “random” occurrence as opposed to an infrequent intention. Life is simply happening to Guillaume now and he is no longer pursuing; rather like when someone falls in love. Perception of life shifts from intentional to serendipitous and everything just “falls together,” so to speak. We will most often project this perception backward into the past as well as forward with regard to our expectations. Human beings are notoriously unreliable at sifting context (particularly emotional) out of what we think we are recollecting objectively and, thereby, “prime” our own memories in some very particular ways. (There is no doubt in my mind that the impression that has filtered down from out of an “information processing model of cognition” and the nearly continuous comparison of the brain to a computer bears much of the blame for a misplaced confidence in our own memories.) I won’t go into the deeper descriptions of the circumstances that Guillaume finds improbable (on an island with an area of 87 square kilometers – 53 square kilometers of which are sovereign French territory and visited by millions of tourists each year). For these purposes, we might assume that for reasons not made entirely clear on the show, Guillaume began to think and feel in a way that was fundamentally different to what he’d been accustomed to – at least as he remembers it.

Having been raised in part Roman Catholic myself, what I’d found highly improbable was that Guillaume was unaware of what Christianity “claims” (hence, his ongoing deeper study). What I find more probable is that one would set out on a confirmatory course in order to – as has already been noted – pursue one’s pleasure. As crass as that sounds, I don’t want to undersell Guillaume’s intentions. If I’m speculating correctly, while he and others may not see the intention and direction that I describe as ennobling, it is normal and quite human. This, in and of itself, makes it special.

Born of religious consideration or not, one of the important things that comes out of this is Guillaume’s examination of what – in his terms – was simply taken for granted culturally. This simple exercise in and of itself is worthwhile and if it places Guillaume in the world as a Christian his Christianity may, as previously noted, be perfectly reasonable, if not representative of an objective actuality. (And when I say, “objective” I mean a constrained objectivity – one taken from the only perspective we actually have – subjective and intersubjective – as true objectivity, like conceptions of infinity, nothingness, God and even other peoples’ minds are hypothetical constructs. This does not mean that any one or all are objectively false, simply that there is no one referent and that none can be contained in any single description. They also all share the characteristic of not being directly observable, but must be inferred.)

Christian rationalists will complain with a question: “How then can we know anything?” The short response – whether you are a Christian or not – is that you operate in the world as though you do, no matter how you choose to describe the term “know.” This makes the question academic and, from a practical point of view, often not even worth considering. Where I find it most stridently and deeply considered is in the form of a rhetorical justification of faith. Indeed, as Guillaume goes on to describe his burgeoning relationship with Jesus – if not the woman he was pursuing (she seems to become more or less incidental; this may be a deliberate omission as she may have been part of the very serious transgression that Guillaume described to various levels here, in his own written account of conversion and the one that he gave to CBN verbally.) – as underscored by how impressed he was with Jesus’ rhetorical competence and authority (or at least the accounts given by Paul and the Gospel writers).

There are, of course, more accounts of serendipity – now described in terms of constraints that conspired against Guillaume’s investigation (i.e., restrictions on his time that prevented him from going to a church “even if I wanted to”). Suffice it to say, Guillaume happened to find the time to visit a church. In the context of a petitionary prayer made for revelation, Guillaume noted that what “couldn’t happen” (going to a church) did, in fact happen. (Again, note the “happen” here, as opposed to the intentional, I  “wanted” or “didn’t want” to visit a church, observe a congregation “in action,” so to speak, and speak seriously to a vicar with regard to belief. Guillaume was no longer describing his life in terms of intention, he was describing it in terms of constraint and serendipity, setting up the “improbable” to “impossible;” in essence, setting up a miracle of belief.

This brings us to another usage of the term “[completely] out of the blue” [emphasis mine]; the failure of Guillaume’s shoulder and his being sidelined. It is largely unnecessary to go into great statistical detail here. I’ll simply link to one of many indications of the utter commonness of shoulder injury in higher level volleyball players (I’ll additionally speculate that the injured shoulder was the one connected to his spiking arm.):

“Muscular imbalance and shoulder pain in volleyball attackers.”

Life happens to Guillaume. A young man begins to discover that what he intends is inadequate to explain or direct the course of his life. We may quibble over the details of the article and how they apply specifically to Guillaume. However, given the description that he applies to his life, thus far, “attacker” is likely an appropriate term here.

It takes almost no effort at all for someone un-invested in a broader meaning (and I’m not suggesting that there isn’t one with regard to Guillaume’s life) to place his injury, his love, his passion, etc. in a context that does not indicate anything more special than what any of us experience.

Of course, Guillaume’s injury afforded him the opportunity to visit a church in Paris. His account, for all intents and purposes, describes a stressful, embarrassing, furtive enterprise. It is worth noting at this point that being taken out of a life – even if only temporarily – is occasion for a deeper, perhaps religious, examination of our lives. I see this in no way as mysteriously coincidental.

Guillaume goes on to describe his “escape” from this church following the sermon – avoiding “eye contact… with any of these weirdoes” in order to not be pressed into conversation. He describes “jumping” to his feet and “running” to the door in order to make good this escape. On the threshold, Guillaume describes a “strong blast of chills that I got in my stomach and all the way in my chest and grabbing me by the throat and stopping me on the doorstep…” Interestingly, Guillaume does not describe the resolution of these symptoms upon returning to the church and introducing himself to the pastor.

“I don’t remember a thing the preacher said that day, but I was very, very uncomfortable.”

Guillaume had an anxiety attack. (There may be a very good neuro-cognitive reason that Guillaume either failed to encode or is failing to recall the memory of that day’s sermon as he relates this story.)

When I was doing agency work and in private practice I dealt with many people in many contexts who experienced these symptoms. One of the ways that I would help my (very familiar and better established) clients was to literally induce anxiety attacks. The onset, progression and resolution of such attacks are very well-studied phenomenon with neurological correlates. Inducing such attacks helps clients obtain a more objective perspective on them and realize the malleability of the experience of suffering and how it might be sorted out from more strictly recognizable physical symptoms (i.e., the very common impression during panic attack that one is dying of a heart attack). This can be done with chronic pain, as well (though, in such cases, we do not induce or exacerbate pain, but examine it when our immediate instinct is to withdraw from it). The effect in each context can be profound and induce deep insight. Like most people, Guillaume seemed more accustomed to simply reacting to his discomfort as opposed to examining it. Likewise, such experiences must have a deeper meaning when they lie outside of our immediate control.

Sometimes, though, we just hurt and do a very good job – as Guillaume has, perhaps without realizing it – at pinpointing why.

Guillaume describes the pastor that he spoke to “for hours” as someone “clearly not emotionally driven by some weird sense of having to compensate for something.” This might describe any number of pastors. If Guillaume is suggesting that he found just the right, intellectually unique pastor to guide him in his exploration – indeed, at this point, I’d say his confirmation – he would be mistaken. I’d venture to say that most pastors are intelligent, well-spoken, emotionally stable individuals. This extremely rational – to say nothing of conventional – appraisal of credibility is quite common and, unfortunately, cognitively under-informed. We are always – our preferences to the contrary notwithstanding – emotionally/affectively driven. The trick is incorporating discretion into that driven-ness, not eliminating emotional considerations, as analytic philosophy/Christian apologetics does so effectively.

While there simply may be parts of this story that Guillaume hadn’t had the time to share, there is nothing clear about how the head pastor that he referred to was motivated. While he may have adjusted his demeanor and language to Guillaume’s quite rational surface (perhaps not aware of the anxiety that Guillaume had only moments before been experiencing – was maybe still experiencing), the pastor’s very entry into his vocation may have been emotionally driven, born of an emotional insight into his own guilt, his own relationships, his own sense of meaninglessness or lack of connection with something larger… None of us can know for sure.

In any case, it would appear that Guillaume developed a relationship with this pastor – a friendship, perhaps, as he’d seen him for “a number of months” following this initial meeting in which Guillaume “bombarded” the pastor with questions.

I would venture a guess that – depending on his intellectual disposition – Guillaume might have gone to nearly anyone – a Buddhist monk, a Muslim intellectual, a well-spoken psychic – and given much the same kind of appraisal. Guillaume was ready to believe something. Not so coincidentally, I feel that he found something that was already rather familiar to him; familiar by virtue of his recent experience and his upbringing.

Guilt

It’s important to talk about something that I think may carry far more weight than any of Guillaume’s accounts conveyed; a crushing sense of guilt.

My first exposure to his guilt lay in the account of his conversion that Guillaume had written for himself (referenced below). Frankly, given the shadowy reference to this guilt, I’d imagined something far more dreadful than the still very vague explanation that I’d gotten from Guillaume later through a CBN commentary Justin had linked me to and a subsequent personal correspondence. Given his pursuit of pleasure, his suggestion of consciencelessness, culturally and personally driven womanizing and the cultural and political nature of modern Evangelical Christianity, I’d imagined that Guillaume had impregnated a woman and heartlessly compelled her to obtain an abortion.  As it was, there were varying levels to explanations of his guilt; either infidelity on his part or the encouragement of infidelity on the part of a sexual partner – something that I’d gotten from Guillaume personally that had grown deeply and tediously hurtful to everyone involved.

Let’s talk for a moment about conscience.

Guillaume, in response to Justin’s probing for a tipping point, makes note of having had some very high standards for “what sorts of reasons I would need to believe that God exists or that Jesus was raised from the dead.” His expectations were predicated on the expectation for “argumentation” or “evidence” and these expectations would go on to circumscribe Guillaume’s eventual justification for a belief that – I suspect – was already strongly rooted in his life. Guillaume’s standards may very well have been high, in the sense of demanding rigor, but they seem relatively un-nuanced – caught within the framework of how he believed he already “knew” how to obtain knowledge. Guillaume did, however, begin to reinvent his access to the particulars within this framework; namely, what he would accept as evidence for something that I’d assert he’d already begun to believe by the time he’d made this realization. Guillaume’s rather – to my mind – simplistic approach to “knowing” something includes the idea that we cannot “know” it if it isn’t true. So, indeed, we are often left with a choice: How do we retain meaning when there is already a very real sense of knowing that is at odds with this standard? For many, simply asserting to ourselves that we don’t actually know something isn’t enough. We make a choice to refine our evidential standards.

I’ve seen this done on a number of other occasions with other theologians. The circumstance that comes to mind most readily is in a discussion group I’d participated in a couple of years ago with Peter Williams and Dirk Jonkind of Tyndale House. (Interestingly, it is Dr. Jonkind’s views with regard to the “implausible” – as in “Everything in our lives is implausible,” that stick with me. If everything is implausible, the miraculous is quite easy to accept.) Dr. Williams, a noted authority in biblical textual criticism also made a revision to how he would view Biblical evidence. He would no longer harass the truth out of the Bible as he might a spouse whose behavior is suspect (or a questionable historical event), meaning he would no longer hold the Bible up to the same standards that he would other historical texts (for instance, seeking corroboration through a variety of historical sources). He would treat it “as a friend.”

Guillaume takes the Bible at its word because he had decided that someone reliable told him that what it postulates is true. To extend his metaphor of how he knows what his birthdate is, I’ll use my own birthdate and my own “reliable” source. Very simply, I have long outlived what I think is a source of that knowledge. In truth, my knowledge of my birthdate comes from a variety of sources and I cannot name them all at this time. However, such as they are, they are all I have. I have not decided that they are reliable. I don’t really know this. Indeed, my mother was mentally ill and possibly not so reliable as a source. Does this mean that I don’t know what my birthdate is? Of course not. However, I find myself in a “state of knowing” not because my birthdate really is July 11, 1962, but because I have no other recourse than to either believe the information that has matriculated in me over a long span of time and confirmed by a great many people who also believe that’s my birthdate, or simply come to the conclusion that the date itself is irrelevant except for certain practical reasons. (I tend toward the later.) I rather doubt that Guillaume’s birthdate was subject to the same revision of approach that his belief in God was; moving from asking for reasons to believe that it occurred at a particular time, as opposed to asking for reasons to doubt that it occurred at a particular time.

Where any such questions lack nuance lay in what appears to be Guillaume’s failure to ask himself not whether any of this was true, but whether or not he wanted or needed to believe it was true and why.

There is a principle in cognitive psychology known generally as the “mere-exposure effect.” Briefly – and insomuch as it is brief, a bit of an injustice to the concept – the mere-exposure effect describes our tendency to “prefer” or “like” something more as we are exposed to it. This is only one dimension of a complex web of factors in motivation and, hence, the injustice to the concept and how it fits here. Suffice it to say, spending months with a Christian pastor absorbed in what, for me, in any case, would have been the pleasurable intellectual pursuit of meaning yields – again – unsurprising results; a great liking of and preference for the underlying principles of Christianity. Guillaume’s inner narrative is, of course, inaccessible to us, so we’ll have to assume that he is summarizing his own experience of it accurately or meaningfully here. Even shortened and constrained to the limits of the show, his personal narrative leads me here.

Much of this kind of experience will come to us in the form of a personal revelation. Whether we call it an “ah-ha” moment, a “light bulb” experience, satori or anything else that suggests a sudden tipping point, it is likely that such a tipping point is merely the circumstantial tip of a very large iceberg, so to speak. It is nothing less than the culmination of our experience, our relationships and the acquisition of knowledge and feelings that go along with these over time. Put rather dramatically, Guillaume’s entire life led him here. This is quite special, but how all of our lives work. However, we are more likely to see the resulting realization as something that stands alone – a “key-in-lock” acquisition of knowledge, if you like. This realization is not unlike the special-ness of our desire to marry – immune from the statistical reality that it really isn’t so special; it is very common and fails frequently.

Guillaume describes his conscience as something that had been “seared.” If we are to take the culinary meaning of this word, we will assume something that has been heated suddenly and its exterior caramelized into a hardened, crisp surface that retains the flavor locked inside. Presumably – slipping ourselves more toward the reality of what a conscience is – this would also mean something that doesn’t take so well to a marinade; more or less impervious to influence from the outside. It is “locked,” or has become more significantly impermeable, in this sense. Unaffected.

To say that something has been “seared” is to suggest that something has happened to it to cause it to exist in that condition. Whether Guillaume was referring to a specific event or set of circumstances (like his culture) or our innate sinful nature is hard to determine based on what he had given. Whatever he meant, however, I don’t want to give it short shrift before saying this:

A conscience is not something that is simply “activated.” To imagine that a conscience existed dormant and waiting for the right circumstances to simply start working is to ignore developmental psychology altogether. Yes, there are those who simply don’t have them. We call them “psychopaths.” Guillaume presents as someone who is classically disposed to the hard sciences – concrete, black and white, linear. My wish is not to be unkind, but realistic. We frame the world and our experience in ways that we are both culturally and genetically disposed to. Somewhere between these two we direct ourselves in this disposition and its methods.

About guilt; I’m getting there. Guillaume said, suggesting that this was a response to a prayer for proof that he could accept and not make a fool of himself: “God reactivated my conscience that had been seared for years. It so happens that just about at the same time this investigation began I had myself engaged in very atrocious immoral sin against that person… it was pretty extreme, even by my own atheistic moral standards.”

Guillaume, in a sense, describes God causing his (moral) life to flash before his eyes.

“I was struck with guilt... intense physical guilt… physical pain out of the guilt of having done those things. And it’s from that place that all of a sudden [“out of the blue”] the things that I’d been reading and talking about  with this pastor made perfect sense. Now I understood the Gospel. Jesus died on the cross so that he could pay the price for my sins, and so I received that Gospel or the good news that I didn’t gain my salvation by my good works, but by simply placing my faith in Jesus… I received forgiveness that he purchased on the cross. So, that was a very strong ‘light bulb’ experience where I understood the Gospel… and from that place where God reactivated my conscience it turned on the light and I figured ‘I’m all in… I get it.’ And so, embraced the Gospel. I told God, ‘I’m giving you my life;’ I received the sacrifice of Jesus by faith alone and from there the guilt just evaporated…”

I’d never – as a Christian or non-Christian – taken the impression that personal guilt was something that a confession of faith was meant to free me of. Nonetheless, Guillaume’s account is quite familiar. It is, indeed, in any meaningful sense of the word a “religious” experience. That experience produced a result that – from either a secular or religious perspective – provided a resolution that Guillaume was unable to build a bridge to consciously… in a linear way. He needed to be forgiven and could not find a way to do it for himself. Now that forgiveness serves a double-duty. It frees Guillaume in much the way he’s described, though I’d describe this as a sort of religious “bliss” or “ecstasy” that, like being in love, will play itself out leaving Guillaume, if it hasn’t already, back in “the world,” so to speak. Personally, I’d question the integrity and reliability of someone who, through whatever process, could find themselves regularly freed of guilt if this wasn’t just a one-time occurrence. An interesting juxtaposition to Guillaume’s earlier, “de-activated” conscience.

This “light bulb” experience now also serves as affective “evidence” of the rightness of Guillaume’s knowledge (its correspondence with a factual reality). Again, another interesting juxtaposition to noting a pastor who was not in some sense “emotionally driven.”

The second part of this commentary will address Guillaume’s more explicitly philosophical justification for his claims to knowledge and belief.
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References

“How God turns a French atheist into a Christian theologian - My conversion story:” http://gracenyc.onthecity.org/plaza/topics/7becdc2df794f161230567bbbd6db1dd41ccf2cd

“Mission to Disprove God Reveals Need for Him:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM9_vxvN4Hg

“Unbelievable: A French atheist-turned-theologian discusses his conversion:” http://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-A-French-atheist-turned-theologian-discusses-his-conversion

“Unbelievable: The Flying Spaghetti Monster & New Atheism - Graham Veale & Rory Fenton:”http://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-The-Flying-Spaghetti-Monster-New-Atheism-Graham-Veale-Rory-Fenton [Note feedback in the last ten minutes for the previous week’s show.]