Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, announced Feb. 5 that he’s no longer an atheist but a Christian.
In an exclusive interview with Baptist News Global, Sanger explained his five-year journey to discover whether God is real.
“The Great Commission says go and tell the world. I knew if I put my story out there it might make a difference for somebody. I had no idea at all how much my story was picked up and reported about. I still don’t quite understand it myself, to be honest. But I want to be used in whatever way the Lord wants to use me.”
He realizes his journey to faith was long but acknowledges that’s sometimes what is required. “People love to tell dramatic conversion stories and say my story is rare, although C.S. Lewis took years to come to faith.”
“I was sort of lukewarm on religion.”
Sanger grew up Lutheran as a child and wasn’t hostile toward Christianity and its teaching even when he considered himself an atheist. “I was sort of lukewarm on religion,” he explained.
His walking away from the faith of his childhood began as a middle schooler when he started asking questions. He attended church every Sunday until his parents went through a divorce.
“I asked a lot of questions when I was young, so much so that, probably more questions than my parents had patience for,” he said. “Some of the questions I had were just inherently difficult for anybody. I grew up in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which is a conservative branch of Lutheranism. I was confirmed at age 12. I talked to God when I was younger, but my parents got a divorce around that same time, and we stopped going to church soon thereafter. I don’t blame them for anything here, but basically, I stopped praying to God and stopped caring about the things of God.”
His questions and curiosity regarding religion never went away, though. He kept asking questions of the Bible and the people around him who had a spiritual relationship.
At Reed College, he majored in philosophy, and he continued to ask questions.
“Perhaps God’s purpose for me is to show people how you can be a very active question asker,” he said. “You can interrogate the Bible, so to speak, and it invites interrogation.” Now, he encourages friends who are on the faith journey to ask questions of the Bible and of people of faith who are open to answering questions.
“You can interrogate the Bible, so to speak, and it invites interrogation.”
His life has changed for the better since his conversion to Christianity, he said. “I lost 35 pounds and stopped watching pornography. It’s been a long time actually since I’ve seen any and that’s like really important. I especially tell young people that it just ruins your relationships. I also started praying seven times a day and studying the Bible.”
However, the most important change for him has been the relationship with his wife and sons that have gotten better.
On his website, Sanger recounts his coming to faith in detail in a 14,000-word essay. He followed that with another 5,000-word letter to answer questions readers posed after his initial post.
“Throughout my adult life, I have been a devotee of rationality, methodological skepticism, and a somewhat hard-nosed and no-nonsense (but always open-minded) rigor,” he writes. “I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, my training being in analytic philosophy, a field dominated by atheists and agnostics. Once, I slummed about the fringes of the Ayn Rand community, which is also heavily atheist. So, old friends and colleagues who lost touch might be surprised.”
Although he spent 35 years as a nonbeliever, he is not a converted “enemy of the faith,” he declares. “I was merely a skeptic. I especially hope to reach those who are as I once was: rational thinkers who are perhaps open to the idea, but simply not convinced.”
He currently works as president of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, with a mission to build a leaderless, centerless, old-fashioned encyclopedia network — “like the backbone of the Internet itself” — called the “Encyclosphere.”
He birthed the idea for a wiki encyclopedia that became Wikipedia, spearheaded the project, named it, led it in its first seminal year and formulated much of its original policy. Today, he’s an outspoken critic of Wikipedia, which he has accused of having a liberal bias.
As for the Christian faith, there’s a lot he’s still trying to figure out, he said.
“I’m still figuring things out about basic denominational questions like infant baptism versus believers’ baptism. I haven’t really made up my mind about that. I was baptized as a baby; I hope that’s good enough. I refuse to give up the ability to make up my own mind about things based on what I see in the Bible. I am sola scriptura and like it or not, that means, each person ultimately makes up his own mind as to what the Bible says. You’re guided by the Holy Spirit but there’s a range of conclusions that can be drawn.”