Wikipedia Co-Founder Converts To Christianity, Shares Epic Testimony

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Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announced in early February that his soul has come to Christ.

Sanger is one of many notable skeptics who has recently found salvation in the Lord, according to the Christian Post’s John Stonestreet. His conversion, like all, is a blessing to be celebrated. Sanger shared his full testimony, or what he calls his “conversion story.”

“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. 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,” he says.

35 Years As A Nonbeliever

Sanger says he was never an “enemy of the faith,” but was certainly a skeptic. He was born to Lutheran parents, spending his later childhood in Anchorage, Alaska, where he was accused of “asking ‘too many’ questions” to his father, a church elder. Sanger was confirmed at age 12, but his family stopped attending soon thereafter.

“As so many have, I lost my faith in my teen years. Dad started looking into New Age religions (he is now a more orthodox Christian again); this alone made the Bible less of a unique reference point for me,” he explains. “… Without realizing it, I probably stopped believing in God when I was 14 or 15: even today, I do seem to remember the belief slipping away, as I occasionally mused that I no longer prayed or went to church.”

“Apparently, it made no impression on me that many of the deepest thinkers in the history of Western civilization have been Bible believers.”

In 2001, Sanger was a year out of graduating from a largely liberal college, and started Wikipedia. He taught for a few years at Ohio State and other local schools. At this time, Sanger believed himself to be a confirmed agnostic.

“My attitude toward the Bible was also mixed at that time. Again, I knew that many brilliant minds had studied and loved it, finding it to be full of great wisdom. Still, based on the limited reading I had done, it struck me as being not much more than primitive Bronze Age myth and wisdom literature, with the miraculous bits probably based on rich imagination, misunderstood emotions, and other natural psychological experiences. It seemed to me that people who were most strongly committed to the search for truth, at least as sought through rational, methodological skepticism, could not take it seriously,” he writes.

Two events changed Sanger’s understanding of ethics: his marriage in 2001, and the birth of his first child in 2006. “After these events I certainly could no longer endorse Ayn Rand’s (in retrospect) ridiculous notion that we can somehow justify our moral obligations toward other people in terms of our own self-interest, no matter how ‘enlightened,’” he described. Still, Sanger found that his falling out with the ideologies of his youth did not direct him back to God. He left teaching in 2005 to focus on Internet projects.

Anti-Christian Sentiment

The growing obnoxious nature of what Sanger terms “New Atheism” turned him away even further. Within the growing anti-Christian sentiment online, he found Christians carried themselves with far more “maturity and grace, while their critics often acted like obnoxious trolls.”

Sanger found himself debating and challenging those hosting anti-Christian sentiments online, including on forums like Quora and his own personal blog. He turned away from reading deeply into texts written against faith, not because of the subject matter, but because the arguments were “just so transparently mediocre.”

“After enough years of dealing with these “adepts,” the thought slowly dawned on me: maybe, just maybe, I too had been indoctrinated, in a way. Perhaps I had misunderstood things I only thought I had understood. Perhaps I had not been exposed to the best representatives of the faith. In short, perhaps, I had not given Christianity a fair shake. And yes, I couched this in terms of “Christianity” to myself: I never found any interest in other religions. This thought sat uncomfortably in the back of my mind for many years,” Sanger continues.

Crashing Down of Society

Throughout his written works, Sanger seems to hold a theme on the macro-implications of social decline and destruction. He was particularly horrified by the revelations of Jeffrey Epstein’s extensive elite cabal of pedophiles in 2019. Through research and deep thought, Sanger came to the conclusion that “These people actually believe this weird stuff, obsessed with symbols, ritual, secrets, secret societies, and supposedly-ancient stories of gods. Yet it involves belief in actually-existent spiritual beings that can cause real-world effects … That might explain some of the organized pedophilia. Historically, some of the people who pursued such occult ideas were brilliant and powerful.”

Sanger further realized that reading about the occult, even those books that oppose it, introduces one to the “mysteries,” potentially opening a door to the spiritual realm. Occult ideas are simply just perversions of themes in the Bible, suggesting that reading the Bible first was the smartest thing to do. It is clearly the original text. Though he cautioned: “But one thing I told myself (and my friend) is that, if I started believing a spirit world actually existed, I would immediately believe in God, and I would certainly want to be on his side.”

Reading The Bible

Sanger still took months to finally start reading the Bible, but when he did, boy did he go for it. Throwing himself into an in-depth analysis of the entire text, he gave himself 90 days to get through it with the help of studies and commentaries. Fairly soon after, he started to talk to God. He saw it as experimental, a type of therapy at first.

Once again, this still didn’t quite do the trick. Sanger re-examined the arguments for the existence of God. He tried to explain Christianity. All the while, Sanger sat with a deep discomfort for his newly rediscovered faith. He read the Bible again, only with friends this time.

“I said I believed in God and that Jesus is the Son of God. But did I say that Jesus saved me from my sins? For a while, this made me nervous—but only for a while,” Sanger describes.

Where Is My Church

Like so many people who believe in God, his son Jesus Christ, and know they are saved, they struggle to find a church that speaks to their relationship in a way that moves them. “I am sorry to say that I have not yet adopted a church home,” Sanger says, but should he be sorry? He is part of a church, as we all are. We are all one church under Him.

“Speaking only for myself, I don’t want to join a church—basically, becoming part of a family—only to feel I must leave after a year or two because I have finally gotten around to thinking hard about some fairly basic issue, and now I see a different denomination is closer to my views. I might feel obligated to do that, and it would be my own fault. Not only that, I know that in my honest frankness I’d eventually raise questions, and my questions (and my very presence, given my background and habits) would be very disruptive unless I were already on board. I would never want to undermine the pastor in any way, shape, or form, on matters of doctrine, particularly if he’s simply following his confessional standards or doctrinal statements,” Sanger writes with a frank degree of self-awareness. He also intends to keep exploring his faith, and doesn’t want to publicly contradict his own denomination.

What Sanger Believes

For a full breakdown of Sanger’s beliefs, we encourage you to read his full testimony. Or you can go right to the source (hint: it’s the Bible).

Sanger hopes that by sharing his testimony, he can reach others like him: “rational thinkers who are perhaps open to the idea, but simply not convinced.” Why not share this article or Sanger’s full testimony with someone you think might need it today?

As he quotes in his own works, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15).

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