[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Ben thornton didn’t believe[.small-caps] in anything. He didn’t have anything against people who did. It was just that none of it made sense.[.article__paragraph--cap]

A child of divorce, he grew up attending church only sporadically. He had devout extended family on both sides, but his stepfather resisted religion, and his mother let it go. By the time he reached his mid-teens, he considered himself an atheist. At twenty-one, he lost his grandfather, and the family gathered around the hospital bed to pray and comfort each other. Ben didn’t want to be comforted.

Born in Clarkston, Washington, he moved all around the Northwest of the United States at the behest of his employer, a grocery store chain: work which evolved from a part-time job in high school to a full-fledged career. Further widening the rift with his family, he married a woman who was also nonreligious, and they had a daughter. Then one day, after fifteen years, the job was gone. Not much later, so was his marriage, to his confusion and regret. But he settled into new work in Bend, Oregon, where he would eventually remarry and gain two stepdaughters.

I’m talking to Ben because one of his church’s pastors thought it would be a good idea.

It started when I went looking for stories about the effects of the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, the often provocative commentator who built a campus movement that became a major force in American politics. Some conservative evangelicals talked about a “revival moment,” but months on, religious statistician Ryan Burge reported no significant uptick in church attendance since the murder. Still, I sensed there were stories to be told, stories of lives affected by this event. That was when Pastor Dan Price responded to one of my X posts, describing how his church in Bend, Oregon, had been growing over the past half-year – growing so dramatically that they’re expanding their building. They’ve gone from about 1,600 weekly congregants last fall to about 2,300 on average as of this spring.

Ben had never been a politically involved person, but he’d grown more conservative as his daughters grew older. He saw Kirk as “a voice of reason,” in an environment where “strange ideas” about gender and sexuality were being forced on “sane, normal people.” When Kirk was murdered, it brought good and evil into shocking relief for him. The memorial service stirred up “big feelings” that he struggled to articulate to his wife, Katie. Meanwhile, she was already making a list of local churches. That led her to Pastor Price’s church, Eastmont.

Another pastor preaching that day, Blaine Braden, immediately impressed her. Ben summed up her assessment: “He was just so real.” He “didn’t beat around the bush,” and he described the moment as “a spiritual battle.” When Katie came home, she said, “You need to look up more of his sermons, and you need to come with me next Sunday.” Nervously, he agreed.

Next Sunday, she gave him the grand tour “like she’d been there for ten years.” As they found seats, Ben braced for side glances at “the new guy” that never came. And he was moved to hear Pastor Blaine pray “for the congregation, for you specifically, for the world, for Bend, Oregon.” “Nobody even waves at a stranger nowadays,” Ben says, “let alone tells them they love them and they want the best for them.”

Soon afterward, Ben reached out to the church and met with Pastor Price. “I got more than I bargained for,” he says. Price is close to Ben’s age and shared honestly with him about his own life – how he’d worked through his own childhood church-related pain, how he’d lost his father before high school. His stepfather left the first “imprint of real-life ministry” on him as a teenager when they did musical prison outreach together. He initially came to Eastmont to serve as its worship pastor, a significant step down in pay from an executive role at a much larger Michigan church. But at the time, it was where he felt God had placed him. Now, things had come full circle, and he once again found himself overseeing rapid growth in an administrative role.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Ben was not the only newcomer with urgent questions. One young man knocked on the office door asking how he could “give his life to Christ” and now prays for his family to join him. While Price doesn’t necessarily attribute all of the church’s recent growth to Kirk, he can point to dozens of people who quickly filled up two “new believers” classes they started, designed to walk people through several weeks of basic theology. A handful of participants have stuck around for months. “I’ve never seen, in all the years of my ministry, this level of hunger to be fed,” Price says, including “people who are either new believers or unbelievers who are coming around asking questions.”

[.pull-quote]“Following God and following what is true and right gives me more of a voice to say what I know to be true.” —Ben Thornton[.pull-quote]

“But at the end of the day,” he says, “we don’t care about the numbers. We just care about the individuals who are coming.” Meanwhile, Price is also overseeing leadership training for a select cohort of men from the congregation, concerned that the church’s growth does not outstrip the staff’s ability to steward it well. It’s easy for a “revival moment” to be “a flash in the pan,” he reflects, “if you don’t disciple people.” He continues, “People are hungry, and so our job is to feed them.”

Ben’s fellow congregants have nourished him as well. The church feels like a “natural family” to him, and “good for my soul.” He and his wife have been overwhelmed by “complete, out-of-the-blue kindness” from older couples who are still “madly in love” with each other. He’s also recognized some of the community members he respects most among the congregation.

While not all his children are equally excited about church, he says his oldest daughter is all in. She was curious about church years ago, and Ben kicks himself in hindsight because he wasn’t prepared to nurture it. Now he and Katie take her with them every Sunday they can. She loves fantasy stories, but she talks about Christianity differently. When I mention C. S. Lewis’s idea of the “true myth” as distinct from fictional myths, Ben immediately sees a parallel to his daughter. She’s emphatic “that it is true, and that it’s not a story, and it’s not made up,” he says. “She talks about it so bluntly and so purely.”

Ben can’t pinpoint one single dramatic moment when he became a Christian. When I ask him how it has changed him, he thinks for a moment, then says he tries to be “less scared.” “I think following God and following what is true and right gives me more of a voice to say what I know to be true.”

He’s also more intentional now about finding ways to mentor people. At work, he tells me, he nudged a junior colleague towards marriage, and the young man walked out resolved to buy his girlfriend a wedding ring.

I suspect nothing would have pleased Charlie Kirk more.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Charlie Kirk began[.small-caps] growing his conservative youth movement at eighteen years old. In his early years as the founder of Turning Point USA, he shot to fame as a polarizing figure. Over time, faith became more central in his public profile, as he and his wife Erika worked energetically to bring young people into the Christian fold. In his last few years, increasingly more of his campus videos included explicit gospel presentations. Journalist Warren Cole Smith, who’d been put off by his political rhetoric, wrote a tribute article lamenting that people would never get to know this softening, maturing Kirk. “We have the opportunity to imagine the man Charlie Kirk was becoming, and to follow in those footsteps.” [.article__paragraph--cap]

Pastor Lucas Miles, head of the affiliated TPUSA Faith group, recalled to me how Kirk worked to apply his core belief that “we were all created by God, we all have the same opportunity to … respond to the Lord.” From those who cheered on his project to those who stepped up to the tent to argue with him, regardless of their social status, “Charlie saw value in everybody.”

In her memorial speech Erika Kirk said, “Charlie passionately wanted to reach and save the lost boys of the West. The young men who feel like they have no direction, no purpose, no faith, and no reason to live. The men wasting their lives on distractions, and the men consumed with resentment, anger, and hate. … He wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life.”

Tyler Robinson, who was turned in for the murder by his own heartbroken parents, had been drawn into various sexualized internet subcultures, including esoteric forms of pornography. He was living with a roommate who identified as transgender. In material recovered after the crime, he described Kirk as “spreading hate,” presumably including Kirk’s Christian views on sexuality.

Yet while Robinson was captivated by ideologies of the left, equally harmful trends are shaping the right, as anti-Semitic, racist streamers such as Nick Fuentes aim to capture Kirk’s target audience. Kirk banned Fuentes from TPUSA events and spoke out against his influence. But in the wake of Kirk’s death, disaffected young men are drifting.

At the same time, Miles told me about encouraging signs of spiritual revival, both across TPUSA’s broader network of churches and in the Indiana church he pastors. Still, he’s not sanguine about the particular challenges of reaching young men who have been captured by one toxic narrative or another. He worries that many pastors are unsure how, citing the statistic that the average American pastor is fifty-seven years old.

At sixty-two, Paul VanderKlay is an unlikely candidate for “internet pastor.” But he’s earned the title over about ten years spent growing a niche online following around his religious and cultural commentary. His journey began with the rise of Jordan Peterson, the popular Canadian psychologist and podcaster. Observing the spell Peterson seemed to cast over unchurched young men, VanderKlay dedicated himself to understanding Peterson’s appeal. He drew from decades of ministry experience in the Christian Reformed Church, producing YouTube commentary while continuing to shepherd his very small, very offline congregation in Sacramento.

While there are a few women, VanderKlay’s little corner of the internet is mostly populated by nerdy men. He thinks there’s truth in an old skit joking that science fiction nerds are the same as religion nerds. They share a fascination with elaborate structure, world-building, and systematically fitting together pieces of a narrative. They are drawn, like Ben’s daughter, to story. VanderKlay is constantly considering ways to present the gospel afresh to them as a story that is compelling, with the patterns of myth, while being, nevertheless, true.

Many former “lost boys” cite Peterson as their “gateway drug” to Christianity – an authoritative yet vulnerable masculine figure who commanded respect. In contrast to figures like Fuentes, he presented a morally serious vision of male responsibility. But the eccentric, tortured professor has lost his audience after years of overwork and illness.

VanderKlay and I talk about the “What now?” question that looms whenever an internet influencer like Kirk or Peterson builds an audience, then leaves a void. Craving masculine leadership but lacking strong real-life role models, young men are drawn to charismatic digital substitutes, some helpful, some toxic. But there is no substitute for incarnate mentorship and community. “You can have this revelatory moment,” VanderKlay reflects, “but then you need a track and a community, and you need somewhere to go.”

Each church denomination will, of course, have its particular approach and appeal. Some men, like Ben, will make their homes in evangelical churches. Some men try “shallow-slope” mainline options before moving on to a “steep-slope” tradition like Orthodoxy. If they’re hard-core nerds, they might be excited by a theological challenge.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]That was true[.small-caps] for my friend Thomas, who began his journey to God as “a very lost boy indeed.”[.article__paragraph--cap]

Before we talk, Thomas sends me ten densely packed, meticulously organized pages outlining his life in bullet points. Sometimes he reads from them verbatim, sometimes we go on a tangent and circle back. He is at once painstakingly thorough and a bit impish, amusing himself with the occasional corny joke. We’re both young millennials, almost exactly the same age, and he’s delighted whenever it turns out we share a nostalgic touchstone, like VeggieTales. Because of the darker elements of his past, we have agreed that I’ll be referring to him by his middle name.

Thomas realized from a young age that he was different from his peers, a realization that was reinforced by constant bullying. To escape, he immersed himself in his favorite media, memorizing whole movies and getting thrillingly lost in the world of Pokémon. His favorite character was Lucario, a dashing jackal who abided by a knightly code and performed feats of derring-do. By contrast, he found his Methodist church bland and stultifying. The female minister, though warm and kind, never made a strong impression. He was always curious to know more about the nature of God, but that curiosity was never satisfied. At the end of each VeggieTales episode, when Bob the Tomato said “God made you special, and he loves you very much,” Thomas would wonder, “But how? But why?”

By eighth grade, he had no interest in being confirmed in the church. What he did want, more than anything in the world, was to be a hero. And Lucario seemed much more tangibly relevant to that pursuit than Jesus, who felt about as real as Santa Claus.

At first, his obsession with internet culture was relatively innocuous, filling his days with fan fiction, fan art, and shared gamer nerdery. But then, at thirteen, he discovered pornography, wandering into some of the same virtual subcultures as Tyler Robinson. By his mid-teens, he was forming dysfunctional entanglements with other teenagers he met online. Realizing he was suicidally depressed, his parents tried to set him on courses of meds and therapy. In college, he tried to absorb the wisdom of the Stoics and organize his own self-improvement regimen, aiming all his effort at the heroic ideal of Lucario. That was when he began identifying with an alter ego, a perfect embodiment of the virtues he wanted to practice. Meanwhile, he cycled through a succession of emotionally abusive relationships with older men.

[.pull-quote]“All I want to do is bring people to God. I want to bring those people to God who were as lost as I was.” —Thomas[.pull-quote]

Thomas fell in the large overlap between gaming fandom and internet atheist fandom, reading Sam Harris and listening to streamers like Carl Benjamin. They confirmed his view of religion as “something intrinsically harmful to human development . . . a distraction.” But as atheist communities became increasingly preoccupied with leftist identity politics, he felt increasingly disconnected. He began to withdraw from LGBT subcultures, and from a performative aesthetic that struck him as “gaudy and unappealing.”

When Jordan Peterson came on the scene, Thomas snapped up his psychology lectures. He was less excited to explore Peterson’s series on Genesis, but he had to admit that if anyone was going to decode these fairy tales in an interesting way, it was this curiously eloquent professor. What he found turned his thinking upside down. For the first time in his life, someone had “made the critical connections between authority, human obligation, and our relationship to the divine, which made it clear that the Bible was no longer something I could afford to ignore.” By late 2018, when Peterson was debating Sam Harris, Thomas was arguing Peterson’s side against an acquaintance who argued like his “old self.”

But unlike Peterson, Thomas kept searching. If Christ was the archetypal virtuous man, then “it was incumbent on me to seek Christ wherever he may be found.” So he started visiting the closest church he could find – another mainline church, where he gravitated to the men’s Bible study. They brought a seriousness to their studies that impressed him, “genuinely introspecting on matters of faith.” After reflecting in community with them for a while, he gradually realized it was time to surrender his alter ego. The fantasy could not measure up to the solid reality of Christ. It was a false idol that had lost all relevance, “because something even greater was standing out there for the taking.”

[.pull-quote]No two lost sheep have the same story, and no two paths toward the light will look exactly alike.[.pull-quote]

Although he was shedding the identity, he still had some contacts in his old subculture. One day in 2019, a German friend from this circle mentioned the Traditional Latin Mass. This was completely unfamiliar to Thomas, but he knew he had to try it. When he walked up to the church, he was looking for the crypt where the Mass was meant to take place. “I don’t know what a crypt is,” he remembers thinking. “Is it some, like, above-ground area where dead people are interred? What’s going on here?” He smiles at the memory of the figure he must have cut to the woman who found him hopelessly wandering in circles, with his dyed hair and piercings. When he said he was looking for the Latin Mass, she took his hand and said, “Come with me.”

“Immediately, I was flabbergasted,” he remembers. “The reverence was unlike anything I had ever seen. I had no idea what was going on, but it was incredibly orderly.”

Two months later, he brought a Roman missal on his first date with a girl he met online, hoping she might have some interest. Not only was she interested, she had just come from confession. Love took its swift course from there.

After their marriage in 2021, she started working as a doula. When she delivered a child for another Catholic, the couples shared a meal, and the husband gave Thomas a copy of Aquinas’s Compendium of Theology. This, too, was love at first sight. He found himself no longer compelled to pursue his former career interests in psychology and neuroscience; Thomistic metaphysics had turned all his old assumptions into mincemeat. So he set out to earn a master’s degree in theology, which he’s now close to finishing.

How else did becoming a Christian change Thomas? Let him count the ways. He understood clearly now that “you are to be docile in the hands of God. You are to allow him to impress himself upon you.” He looked back with shame at the “petulant child” he had been and made things right with his parents. When God brings sorrow into his life, he sees how even this is “seated within the grand narrative,” and it can’t take away from his “inner joy.”

What does he want to do now? “All I want to do is bring people to God. I want to bring those people to God who were as lost as I was.”

To an atheist looking at Thomas’s story, it might appear as nothing more dramatic than hopping from one fantasy to another. But for Thomas, the stories he loved as a child only make sense as echoes of that which is most real. He still remembers Lucario and Pokémon fondly, but he no longer depends on them for his identity. Like Ben’s daughter, he now understands where fantasy ends and truth begins. He only wishes Jordan Peterson would follow him there.

Ben’s and Thomas’s stories are two anecdotes in a sea of data, data that can be read positively or negatively. Christians are by turns encouraged by news of revival and discouraged by surveys showing decline. With each new generation, each cultural wave, we search in vain for the magic formula that will tilt the statistics back in our favor. We learn best when we descend from the abstract to the particular, when we turn from number-crunching to the stories of individual souls. Only then do we come to understand that no two lost sheep have the same story, and no two paths toward the light will look exactly alike. But all are equally precious to the Good Shepherd, who carries each of them home rejoicing. 

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