¶1A Princeton philosophy PhD student who spent years publicly attacking Christianity just announced in a single video God exists. Christ is Lord. That's Joe Schmid, the YouTuber behind Majesty of Reason. And his conversion video hit over 100,000 views in just 2 days. What actually changed his mind is more specific and more interesting than you'd expect.
¶2Let's start where Schmid himself started. He grew up in a devout Catholic household, but his doubts began early in seventh or eighth grade when his private Catholic school taught him the theory of evolution. He couldn't reconcile an all loving God with a brutal evolutionary process where in his words animals were ripping each other to shreds and just suffering and languishing for hundreds of millions of years. That tension pulled him toward new atheist figures like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. And eventually he lost his faith entirely and became an atheist.
¶3But then heading into his senior year of high school Schmid discovered a YouTube channel called Worldview Design run by Christian philosopher Dr. Joshua Rasmussen. Rasmussen's arguments for God's existence were strong enough to move Schmid from atheism to agnosticism. He could no longer rule God out entirely. So what finally pushed him from agnostic to Catholic?
¶4Schmid says it was evidence for specific miracles and he's a philosopher so he approached them like evidence not sentiment. He pointed to Our Lady of Zeitoun a Marian apparition witnessed by hundreds of thousands atop a Coptic church in Egypt tied to documented healing miracles. But then he went further into Eucharistic miracles including cases with blinded laboratory analysis. Why did that matter so much to him? Because as he put it the universe was conspiring to make it look like God exists and not just any God but one confirming distinctive Catholic doctrine specifically through Fatima, Lourdes, and Zeitoun.
¶5In February of this year, Schmidt spent 4 hours with Catholic apologist Ethan Muse examining the evidence behind Saint Padre Pio's mystical charisms. That conversation was the turning point. He said he couldn't imagine standing before Christ after death and explaining, as a non-Catholic, why he'd bet his soul against what he called a conspiracy of conspiracies all pointing toward Catholicism being true. The day after that call with Muse Schmidt made a full examination of conscience covering a decade away from the faith. The next day, he made his general confession, but Schmidt was clear that intellectual conviction wasn't the whole story.
¶6Conversion, he said, requires a change of heart, too. That came through the witness of Saint Maria Goretti, the 11-year-old virgin martyr who forgave her killer even as she was dying and who later appeared to him in a dream leading to his own conversion and eventual life as a Capuchin monk. Schmidt's reaction was simple. Whatever she's on, I want some of that. A trained philosopher who spent years arguing against Christianity ended up convinced not by abstract debate alone, but by evidence and by the witness of the saints.
¶7What part of Schmidt's story stands out most to you? The miracles or Maria Goretti's forgiveness? Let me know in the comments and subscribe for more conversion stories like this one.