Sudden Religious Conversion: Genuine Transformation or Incipient Psychosis?

Why sudden conversion is seen with secular suspicion

The Conversion of Saint Paul, Giordano

I recently wrote about my conversion to Catholicism and shared how I came to experience a sudden shock to the conscience while in the middle of a ritualistic sissy kink masturbation session, fueled by cannabis addiction and my underlying predisposition for autogynephilia, a paraphilia defined as a male’s propensity to be aroused at the thought or image of himself as a woman, an affliction that drove me to identify as transgender and take cross-sex hormones for eight years starting at the age of 28.

Technically, I haven’t “converted to Catholicism yet” because, while baptized in the Southern Baptist tradition as a young child, I still need to finish the adult education process and become officially confirmed in the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, the shock to my conscience was the impetus that led me straight into the arms of a local Catholic parish, a beautiful Cathedral Basilica that takes the breath away upon entrance and silently but effectively evangelizes the transcendental Beauty and Truth at the heart of Catholicism.

Moreover, and crucial to the story, it was this struggle with my disordered sexual desires that led me to overcome my intellectual and moral objections to the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual ethics, which was the number one stumbling block preventing me from assenting to the full truth of Catholic orthodoxy.

Why orthodoxy? Because from an intellectual and philosophical perspective, I saw anything less than orthodoxy to be a slippery slope to the same relativistic ethics of individual conscience and theological liberalism that made it easy to self-rationalize the idea that it’s “impossible” to fully repress my autogynephilia, giving me an easy excuse for why I might as well just indulge in my paraphilia because it’s “harmless,” where harm is cashed out entirely in whether it satisfies my own individual subjective desires and/or whether it causes frustration of the desires of others, a reductionist ethical system that ultimately fails to transcend to the finite limitations of our modern, culturally bound human sentiments.

But a metaethical framework that ultimately reduces down to the subjectivity of human desire and has no room for the concept of objectively binding moral facts is indistinguishable from nihilism.

Indeed, atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie said of moral facts that,

"If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else."

The modern secular skeptic about normative absolutism claims the objective bindingness of moral norms derives its “force” merely from biological and cultural values, but there is no ultimate fact about which values are “better” than any other because, from the secular, atheist, naturalistic, physicalist point of view, the universe is cold, uncaring, and ultimately valueless.

Nietzsche’s characterization of normative nihilism is definitive: “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time.”

Nietzsche offers a “physiological” explanation of the source of normativity by tracing the concrete human origins of the concept of categoricity, explaining away the phenomenology of “binding” normative authority as a figment of the human imagination

And yet, here I was, with a sudden religious experience of normativity being not only objective and absolute but binding on my soul, stopping me dead in my tracks to do a moral 180 and turn towards Christ.

In a newfound evangelist zeal, I could not help but share news of this sudden conversion experience on my social media platforms.

A large portion of my audience are agnostics, atheists, nonbelievers, skeptics with a special disdain for Christianity, a religion they deem to be morally bankrupt and entirely a product of superstition and deficiencies in reason, a morally outdated vestige of our prehistorical past and something that we’ve outgrown post-Enlightenment now that we’ve come into the Age of Reason and realized all religion was but a primitive stepping stone into a more enlightened stage of human evolution (20th-century death count and moral horrors notwithstanding.)

As such, a lot of my audience saw my sudden conversion to the Catholic faith to be merely a manifestation of my emotional and mental weakness characterized by flightiness and a tendency to jump from one extreme ideology to another.

I can’t particularly blame my detractors for arriving at this conclusion given my life history, where I do have a track record of jumping head-first into various ideologies with great fervor only to eventually get bored until the next ideology captures my attention.

Common comments I’ve received include that I have “gone off the deep end,” “gone from one cult to another,” that I’m “fully delusional,” “unstable,” “coping,” “using religion as a crutch,” “driven by emotion,” “going through a binge/purge cycle,” “will inevitably relapse,” “at risk of suicide,” “driven by self-hate,” etc. etc.

This is not surprising. A nonbeliever is metaphysically committed to devising naturalistic and psychological explanations for sudden religious conversion because the idea that someone could suddenly and rapidly change their life in response to a transcendental reality breaking through into their consciousness is not possible within the naturalistic metaphysics of the post-Enlightement secular age.

Indeed, this is the same explanation they’d give to St. Paul's sudden religious conversion, who was knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus by an encounter with the Risen Christ. A nonbeliever has no other recourse but to postulate that this experience is entirely explainable by a disturbance in the brain's physical organ.

Conversion on the Way to Damascus, Carravagio

Indeed, the only people who have accepted the metaphysical reality of my conversion to Catholicism are other Catholics (and many Protestants), who have welcomed me home with open arms and recounted stories from a long line of Catholic converts who also came to see, one way or another, the Truth of Christianity.

Nevertheless, I must remain humble enough to admit that, given my history, my newfound religious zeal is but a temporary phantasm of guilt and shame from my AGP and that once the honeymoon phase is over, I’ll backpedal on my moral convictions, self-rationalize, and inevitably go back to trying to “integrate” my autogynephilia into my life because on secular, humanistic grounds I’m not “hurting one” so long as I’m not impinging on anyone’s liberal freedoms.

But God willing, through the power of Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit working in me, in this moment, here and now, I will maintain my zeal and like St. Paul and many other converts, use my conversion story as testimony to evangelize about the evils of gender ideology and counsel other gender confused, autogynephilic men to give up their sexual hedonism and find lasting peace in the absolute transcendental reality of the Lord Jesus Christ and His saving Grace.