Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s agnostic cofounder, is converting to Traditional Anglicanism. The analytic philosopher, who previously identified as a “devotee of rationality” and “methodological skepticism,” said he will be joining the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA).
Dr. Sanger, testified to his conversion in February in an autobiographical essay titled “How a Skeptical Philosopher becomes a Christian.” On August 26, he published a 37-page blog explaining why he had chosen to be confirmed in the ACNA in early September.
The former unbeliever has begun attending St. Augustine’s Anglican Church in Westerville, Ohio, where he “sang old hymns, heard excellent Bible-based sermons, and received the Lord’s Supper.”
“I attended a local ACNA church last Sunday, and I absolutely loved the liturgy, which I found deeply spiritual, as well as the fellowship,” he wrote on X. “I am fairly sure they’ll let me in,” he joked.
Sanger clarified that St. Augustine’s is in ACNA’s Living Word diocese, which does not ordain women to the priesthood.
“I was not drawn to sacramentalism, paedobaptism, or Anglo-Catholicism, but instead to the positive aspects of liturgy, tradition, and an intellectual seriousness about Christian doctrine,” he explained.
“I do regret taking so long to join myself to the local, visible Church,” Sanger confessed, linking several articles he had written in his months-long search for a denomination.
Ruling Out Catholicism and Orthodoxy
But Sanger firmly rejected Catholicism.
“I believe that we are to adopt only those doctrines that can be adequately supported by Scripture,” he wrote. “While I respect and love Catholics as my Christian brothers and sisters, I disagree with them on many other points, and sola scriptura is the fundamental one that ultimately explains the rest.
Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy “added many doctrines and practices after the Apostolic Age” and elevated “Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium to an authority reserved to God alone,” he asserted.
In defense of Anglicanism, he elaborated:
Anglicanism manages to preserve truly ancient traditions in continuous succession from the earliest Church, but only those clearly licensed by Scripture alone or by nearly universal Christian practice, avoiding both the later syncretistic accretions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy and the historical amnesia of many Protestant denominations.
On the current state of Catholicism, he lamented that “most Catholic priests and a large portion of the laity are left-wing at this point, explicitly ignoring doctrine all over the place.” In contrast, he found “much about Orthodoxy to be quite attractive.”
Believing in the Branch Theory of the Church
Brought up as a Lutheran who stopped believing in God when he was about 15, Sanger said that he believed in the “branch theory” of the Church, with different denominations functioning as branches of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
“Unlike traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I reject the idea that salvation can only be found within one particular human institution,” he said. “We are saved by the grace of God through faith in Christ alone.”
Saving faith “must be an active faith, not dead; but it is by this faith, not by good deeds, sacraments, or the approval of a human institution, by which we are saved.”
Concerns About Contemporary Worship Styles
He also explained why he had ruled out joining Lutheran, Calvinist, Presbyterian, or Pentecostal denominations, as well as the Churches of Christ, even though he “generally found something to like and admire” in these families of churches.
In a section devoted to “contemporary worship” churches, Sanger noted that “at its worst, such ‘worship-tainment’ is driven by questionable purposes, being emotionally manipulative, deliberately engineered to pull in an ‘audience’ of spectators — not participants.”
He explained:
The result resembles a rock concert more than corporate worship. True worship, to my mind, is not ‘feel-good entertainment’ but a sacrifice of praise and contrition. It pricks our conscience and sharpens our judgment. It does not make us passive consumers as entertainment does; it focuses us on God and what we owe him, and we serve him deliberately as members of the body of Christ, hearing and uttering words of praise.
However, “some megachurches do preach the Gospel in a godly way, and they often are filled with my devout Christian brothers and sisters,” he affirmed. “My complaint is that the ‘sermons’ of many megachurches are more like self-help seminars or TED talks, showing and inculcating little to no actual Bible knowledge.”
Repulsed by the New Atheists
Before his conversion, Sanger had already begun to grow disillusioned with the irrationalism and nihilism he saw in the field of analytic philosophy. He went on to read the works of “fellow unbeliever” Ayn Rand and “ended up hanging out” with Ayn Rand devotees, “but never quite fit in, mostly because they were dogmatists about many derivative matters, and I, with my methodological skepticism, was not.”
Sanger took pains to emphasize that he had never aligned himself with the “New Atheists of the Dawkins and Dennett stripe” as he found them to be clownish, often “crass and obnoxious.”
Moved by the Fine-Tuning Argument
Sanger’s agnostic worldview suffered a major fracture in 1994 when a graduate student engaged him on the Fine-Tuning argument, which posits that the universe’s physical constants and initial conditions are so finely calibrated to allow for life as we know it that their existence points to an intelligent designer.
“This made an impression on me” and “there were tears in my eyes, to my consternation,” he wrote. Even as a nonbeliever, he said he believed that the Fine Tuning Argument was perhaps the theist’s strongest argument.
He also found himself informed by leading philosophers, who were also committed Christians, like William Alston, Richard Swinburne, and Alvin Plantinga. Moreover, he “observed Christians on social media often (though not always) behaving with maturity and grace, while their critics often acted like obnoxious trolls.”
While he has exposed his two sons to the Bible since 2010, Sanger noted, he only did so with a view to appreciating the biblical texts as the foundational document for Western civilization. However, in December 2020, he began to read the Bible cover-to-cover, “obsessively and carefully” using the ESV Study Bible as well as and other study bibles and commentaries.
Fairly soon, he started “talking to God,” he said. “I had already begun to believe in God, but I was not ready to admit it to myself, nor could I easily reconcile it with my own philosophical commitments — especially not with my methodological skepticism.”
Believing in Jesus’s Atonement for Salvation
After studying the Bible, he concluded that he “believed in God and that Jesus is the Son of God.” However, the concept that “Jesus saved me from my sins … made me nervous — but only for a while.”
Eventually, his understanding of “my own sinfulness and why one of our deepest obligations is to be thankful to God for adopting me into his family and forgiving my many sins” was what brought him into “something like an orthodox Christian faith.”
Sanger concludes his testimony by explaining how the atoning work of Christ is sufficient for our salvation and that Christ’s resurrection is God’s vindication of Jesus’s sacrifice.
“Everybody should read the Bible daily, anyway,” he urges in conclusion.
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
