From Atheism to Catechism [View all]

[rug]

By Leah LeMoine
September 27, 2012 at 12:00 am

Imagine society’s collective shock if Hillary Clinton were to join the National Rifle Association, if members of the Westboro Baptist Church were discovered frolicking at a gay bar or if Quentin Tarantino were to announce plans to make a Justin Bieber documentary.

Josh Horn’s friends were hit with a shock wave of that magnitude when Horn, then an ardent atheist, announced his resignation as president of the Secular Free Thought Society, an ASU club known for its skepticism of religion. Horn had committed the ultimate taboo and sealed his self-imposed excommunication with one act: he decided to become a Catholic.

Sowing the seeds of devotion and revolt

This wasn’t the first time Horn had radically changed his worldview. Horn, a history junior, was raised in Tempe by Southern Baptist parents so strict that as a child he had to have a “multi-hour” conversation with them pleading for permission to watch Pokémon (it was forbidden “because they evolved,” Horn says). From the ages of 3-13, he attended a private Christian school that Horn describes as fundamentalist, “denial of evolution…‘Left Behind’ series stuff,” and attended church up to three times a week. He was a model child who impressed teachers and clergy with his preternatural intelligence, his disarming command of logic and his fervent religious devotion.

Horn’s zeal began to dim when he started public high school. For the first time, he was exposed not only to non-Baptists, but to the broad spectrum of the secular world. His curiosity and desire for knowledge were piqued and he began consuming academic texts — religious, philosophical, mathematic, scientific — like a starving man at a buffet.

http://www.statepress.com/2012/09/27/from-atheism-to-catechism/

Here is an earlier interview he had given.

http://www.statepress.com/archive/node/10456