From meaningless atheism to the satisfying answers of faith: the story of Christine Mooney-Flynn

In today’s culture, some say that people are open to anything but Christianity. Being “spiritual not religious” is more socially acceptable than taking part in traditional religion. You can pick and choose what spirituality best suit you, or you can reject any form of spirituality altogether. In either case, you become your own god. You decide what is true and what is good, and you control your own life. 

But what happens when someone has tried life without God, or tried life with self-made spirituality, and come up short? Where then do they go? Can someone become willing to look beyond their past decisions and become open to another possibility? That’s what happened to Christine Mooney-Flynn. 

Religious belief “isn’t good”

Christine was born into a stable, loving home that left faith behind. As a child, she didn’t hear much about God except for when she occasionally attended Catholic Mass with her friend. All she knew was that religion was not a topic for discussion, unless to criticise it.  From what she knew, it wasn’t good:

“Whether outwardly said or maybe just implied, religion was a problem, the root cause of a lot of the problems in the world. It was more for people who needed some kind of guidance, that they couldn’t just follow their own inner moral code. They maybe need somebody outside of them to tell them what to do, a weaker set of people…I didn’t think that there could be logic and faith side by side.  They didn’t know why they were really going to church, and they couldn’t explain to me much about the faith.  I really didn’t have any positive experiences with Christianity, unfortunately… It just seemed like, if there was a loving God or Creator of the universe, he certainly wouldn’t promote this mean spiritedness of a lot of the Christians that I encountered, at least the ones that were willing to tell me about their faith.”

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Searching for answers

As Christine grew older, she began to be troubled by the deep questions, such as: “Why are we here? Who made us? Where are we going?”.  Her search to find answers led her into New Age spirituality where she pieced together “a religion of one” with practices like dream interpretation, journaling, and chakras.  She says she was “piecing together something that felt good and fulfilling, way more so than anything that I had learned about Christianity.”  

Christine’s individualistic pursuits also gave herself permission to “act in pretty immoral ways,” justifying it in the name of personal growth.  But her learning did not lead her to enlightenment, but rather to atheism and then to nihilism.  The answers she found in her spiritual path were not satisfactory so she embraced the reality that there were no answers to be found, deciding:

“There was nothing at all. It is all just what you can see under a microscope. We ‘poof’ at the end of our lives, nothing meaningful. And so, at that point I was a pretty miserable, sad person. Maybe not all the time outwardly, but I was really struggling at this point, and I was deadened or numb to life in general. Nothing mattered. There wasn’t really any right or wrong. We are just here, experiencing physical reality and just trying to get by, day by day, week by week, year by year. In the grand scheme, the history of the world, the future of the world, none of it matters. There’s nothing… There was a lot of fluff and show on the outside and a lot of emptiness within. I remember sitting on the edge of our bed, concluding I did not believe that God existed.”

A problem with atheism

Christine’s husband was a brilliant thinker and an atheist.  So were their friends.  Over the next ten years, atheist identity and beliefs became comfortable for her. But when she became a mother, something changed.  The birth of her son caused her to rethink everything again. She reflected:

“I had become a mother. I looked at my son and completely fell in love with him. I became petrified that there was nothing. But I was committed to the fact that there wasn’t anything past this life, so all this care I was giving him, the time I was spending caring for him, the late nights, the diaper changes, feeding, loving, it didn’t matter. It was all meaningless. I had such a hard time with that, because it didn’t feel meaningless. It pushed me a little bit to think about all this stuff again and made things worse for a time, because then I was really scared that there wasn’t anything past this life and I was going to lose him eventually. And so, I became worse off for a while in my belief, even more downtrodden so I started digging into my beliefs again.”

Her children also seemed to exude a kind of youthful joy and playful energy that drew her out of her years of scepticism, cynicism, and negativity. In the meantime, her husband Patrick began reading philosophy and religious texts and began attending Mass and asking questions about Jesus. This angered her because he had led her to the ‘muck and mire of atheism’ and was then leaving her behind to live in a meaningless existence.

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Entering church

Over time, Christianity became more important to Patrick. As a good wife, Christine decided to attend church with him, even if just to teach their children good moral values and be “upright citizens”. She wanted them to learn the “moral code without the foundation of the code.”  Wanting to resist her nominal Catholic heritage, they agreed to attend a Lutheran church. After attending for a while, her husband asked her to read The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel, a former atheistic journalist who set out to de-convert his wife who had become a Christian.  She began reading.  When she picked up the book, Christine didn’t believe the historical case for Jesus, thinking it was nothing more than myth.  But, chapter by chapter, the author interviewed different experts refuting her presumptions.  It caused her to take a step back and rethink her own views.  

Christine also struggled with the idea of Jesus dying for the sins of the world.  he didn’t understand the idea of sin and why it was important. But she began to understand that Jesus was willing to take the penalty for our sin and gave us pardon instead. We only need to accept it.  But then new questions and fears began to arise. Christine decided that she would read the Bible, pray, and go to church for the next 30 days.  If she realised she was wrong, she’d return to atheism. Journalling her thoughts through the journey, Christine recalls:

“As it turned out, it didn’t take thirty days for me to believe in Christ. It took about seven. Once I said, ‘okay, I’m not going to be resistant to this. I will listen and try my best and see what I can do to believe in all this stuff,’ the Lord just swooped right in and made me a believer really, really quickly.”

Finally, after years of not having good answers to her questions, they began to come. She found satisfying answers and deep satisfaction in life itself. Led though her husband’s earnest passion for Mass, Christine and her family found a spiritual home in Catholicism. Her willingness to become open to God completely transformed her life. For Christine, there is now much more in this life with Christ and even more in the life to come.

If you’d like to listen to Christine Mooney-Flynn tell her full story, tune into the Side B Stories Episode #84, 19 January, 2024.  You can find it on the Side B Stories YouTube channel or website  www.sidebstories.com.

Jana Harmon hosts the Side B Stories podcast where former atheists and sceptics talk about their turn from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. She is a teaching fellow for the CS Lewis Institute of Atlanta and former adjunct professor in cultural apologetics at Biola University where she received an MA in Christian apologetics. Jana also holds a PhD in religion and theology from the University of Birmingham in England. Her research focused on religious conversion of atheists to Christianity and related book is entitled Atheists Finding God: Unlikely Stories of Conversions to Christianity in the Contemporary West.