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A convert's honest account of showing up to Mass as the skeptic in the room — the social pressure, the intellectual path in, and what confession felt like when you treat it like therapy.
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The first thing I noticed was how everyone already knew what to do.
Not just the choreography — when to stand, when to kneel, when to say the responses. It was something underneath that. They were performing reverence and meaning it at the same time. Like watching my grand aunt pray to Chinese deities when I was a kid. She wasn't reciting. She was somewhere else entirely. These people had that. I didn't. I'm Taiwanese American, from a family where going to church was not something anyone did. Walking into that building, I could feel the gap between them and me — not about the room, but about the fact that they'd already decided something I hadn't.
I went to church for years before I converted. In college I'd been exposed to Christianity — not Catholic, the kind with a band and a fog machine and someone asking you to raise your hand if you accepted Jesus as your savior. There's something that happens in a room like that. The music is designed to drop your guard. A hundred people with their eyes closed and their hands up, and part of you just wants to let go — drop the fight, stop holding the line. Like a man who's been arguing for hours and starts to wonder why he's still fighting. I put my hand up. I wasn't sure if God was real, but I was sure it helped me belong.
The hard part walking into this parish was different. Just silence, and ritual, and my wife next to me who already knew exactly where she was.
I knelt with them. I did everything. I stood when they stood, said the responses, did the whole thing. I don't know when it stopped being for her and started being a habit. Somewhere along the way the questions just... froze. I wasn't convinced. I wasn't not convinced. I was truly agnostic — in the original sense, I just didn't know. And I kept showing up anyway.
If you're in the pew right now because someone you love is there, I wrote this for you.
The intellectual door opened at work. I was at a mental health startup with a psychiatrist. One afternoon the question came up: do apes have morals? Where did morality come from? Even the most secular person in the room got quiet. The fact that the question was genuinely open — that there was a frontier here — cracked something in me.
Then apologetics. William Lane Craig. The Kalam Cosmological Argument: everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause. The logic sat with me. I bought a book from a church bookstore in San Jose — the cosmological argument, the existence of God — and left it on the nightstand. I knew in the back of my mind how it looked. But hey. I was trying.
But it wasn't the books. It was the smart people I knew around me. When the person across the table from you, the one you respect intellectually, tells you they believe, it lands differently than any argument. That's more visceral. Far more convincing.
I found the intellectual framework alone, late, on the internet. The way engineers find things. But I didn't find the Church that way. I found it through my wife. Years in the pews before any of it landed. And in 2018, a medical emergency that changed the question from academic to personal. The short version: I know what it's like to stop fighting and hand it over. You don't choose it. You just run out. (That night is in Times New Roman.)
My RCIA was on Zoom during the pandemic. Led by a man. It felt like a business meeting. Camera squares and muted microphones and someone sharing their screen to show the Nicene Creed.
I remember one session, we went around and said how we were doing on a scale of 1 to 10. I said 6 out of 10 — not bad, but I'm still lonely. That shut the room up.
I was in full engineer mode — if the premise is true, follow it all the way down. I wanted to answer everything truthfully, ask the hard question, poke at the whole thing. What I forgot was that I was in a room full of people doing something vulnerable. I was good at asking good questions. Not kind ones. If you're the skeptic in the room right now, you might recognize this. The instinct to audit is real, and it isn't wrong — but there's a version of it that keeps you at arm's length from the very thing you came to examine.
What got through, even on Zoom, was the director talking about the visceral part. The smell of incense. The vestments. The weight of a building that has held the same rituals for centuries. He had something to say, and when he voiced up, you could feel the room shift even through a laptop speaker. Atheists and agnostics can feel it too — that pull toward something numinous. I felt it on those calls, even through bad Wi-Fi. You don't have to name it yet.
Confession was supposed to happen at St. Damiano in Danville during a retreat. I skipped it. Told them I wasn't ready. And I actually really wasn't ready. That part was true.
My psychiatrist, around this same time, said something that stuck. I told him I couldn't feel much — not the crying, not the feeling moved that's such a big part of worship for a lot of people. He said there's a rational way to God. He had his own faith and wasn't afraid to talk about it. So I asked genuinely, and he opened up. He had a lot to say. I'm telling you this because if you're someone who needs a rational on-ramp, that door exists. You don't have to fake the emotional response you haven't had yet.
When I finally went to confession, I sat down and started talking. Like I was coming clean — a memoir out loud. But something happened before I even got in. You sit in line with a sheet. You reflect. The exam of conscience. The longer I sat with it, the closer I felt to God. Not asking a therapist for normalization. Not running a blame game. Just what was in my heart.
I was drawn really close to God. I don't know how else to say it.
I'm not telling you that will happen to you. I'm telling you the structure of the thing was built for exactly the kind of person who has been carrying something and hasn't said it out loud. Whether or not you're there yet, it's worth knowing what it actually is — because it's not what it looks like from the pew.
A few data points worth knowing: yes, the longer you sit in that pew, the more likely something shifts. That's real. The research on proximity and ritual is consistent. But it doesn't mean you're being manipulated, and it doesn't mean you're wrong to stay skeptical. And if you keep showing up for years and never convert — that's not a failure. You loved your spouse enough to be there. That's already the right thing.
If you are the skeptic spouse, research consistently shows that a spouse's faith is one of the strongest predictors of religious change over time. It's not manipulation. It's proximity. You absorb the rhythms. Research on shared repeated ritual, even secular ritual, correlates with relationship satisfaction, stability, a sense of being in something together. The ritual itself does work on you whether or not you've signed off on the theology.
Religious engagement drops sharply in Catholic-unaffiliated pairings compared to two-Catholic households. Which means the skeptic spouse is often the deciding variable. Your presence matters more than you know, even when your arms are crossed. Even when they're not.
About 26% of married Americans have a spouse of a different religion. The most common form of interfaith marriage today is a Christian paired with a religious "none" -- it now accounts for 18% of post-2010 marriages. Roughly 9% of married Catholics have an unaffiliated spouse. I find the numbers useful not because they're comforting but because they make the situation legible. You are not in some weird corner case. This is the median American marriage trajectory right now.
Tony Blair attended Catholic Mass with his wife Cherie for approximately 25 years before converting in December 2007, weeks after leaving office as Prime Minister. The delay was political -- a Catholic PM advising the head of the Anglican Church was awkward -- but his reasons for waiting had nothing to do with uncertainty. He told the Catholic Herald he had always felt "closest to God" in the Catholic Church. His actual conversion happened at a private Mass with a friend. Quiet. No announcement. Twenty-five years of Sundays and then a Thursday morning. John Wayne's first wife Josephine was devout, got Wayne involved in parish events, sent their children to Catholic schools, and after their divorce never remarried. She prayed for his conversion for decades. He was received into the Church two days before he died. These are not conversion stories. They are proximity stories. The pew was doing its work the whole time.
T.M. Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist who has studied prayer across Catholic, evangelical, Jewish, and other traditions, found something neither believers nor skeptics predicted: the practices change the practitioner regardless of the prior belief state. Faith, she argues, is not primarily a set of propositions you hold. It is a set of habits that reshape how you attend to your own experience over time. Prayer functions like a metacognitive activity -- closer to therapy than to logic. You don't have to believe it for it to work on you. Pascal said the same thing 400 years ago, more bluntly: take the holy water, have the masses said, act as if. He was not being cynical. He had done the math.
Here is what you can actually do at Mass. You can stand, sit, kneel, sing, and say the responses. You can use the holy water. You can do everything in the building except receive Communion. Catholics believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ — not a symbol — which is why full participation requires that belief, and why the Church asks those who aren't there yet to receive a blessing instead. When that moment comes, you have two options: stay in the pew, or come forward with your arms crossed over your chest. The priest will give you a blessing. Both are normal. Nobody will look at you. You don't need to know the choreography in advance — follow the room and you'll be fine within a few minutes. The only thing that matters is that you're there.
I didn't come back to a faith I had drifted from. I was a convert whose path in ran through a medical crisis that changed the question from academic to personal. My path in was not clean or linear. It was an argument about apes. It was a Zoom call that felt like a sales meeting. It was a psychiatrist who had his own faith and wasn't afraid to talk about it. But the longer I stayed with it, the more I figured out how to be in that room — how to ask without treating it like a code review, how to be a respectful human in a space that deserved that.
If I could go back to the version of me sitting in that pew, hyperaware of the demographics and the social dynamics, running the mental calculations, I would say what my RCIA director essentially said to me:
Look. I know you got a bunch of questions. But stop being an a-hole. Just pay attention and live in this culture. The answer will come to you. You know that is true in your heart. So stop messing it up.
I can't tell you the answer came. I can tell you I stopped fighting the question. And the pew got more comfortable after that. Not because anything changed about the room. Same parish. Same liturgy. Same Sunday. But I was kneeling for real.
If this is where you are, the next step has a name: RCIA (now called OCIA). It's the Catholic Church's formal inquiry process — you don't have to commit to anything, you just show up and ask questions. Find Mass times at a parish near you at CatholicIndex.org.