Out of darkness: How dabbling in demonology led to discovering Jesus

The son of an abusive alcoholic mother, former atheist Chris Adam rejected God and embraced darkness and control over the chaos he longed to escape. It seemed there was little to no chance that he would ever want God, much less pursue that kind of authority. He wanted to be the one in charge, yet he ended up surrendering, laying down his control to the one who gave him life, truth and peace in exchange. 

Chris is now clear in his new belief, bold in his faith and undaunted by opposition. He has walked away from darkness and death into life and light, and there is no going back. His love is for Christ and his new life in God. He is passionate for God’s word and for his ways, driven by his desire for others to know what he has found. How did that happen? Here’s his story.

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Hope in despair

From radical atheist to Christian

Death has lost its sting

Fighting against God

Rejected

Catholic mass was a difficult place to be as a child. Bored and annoyed, Chris counted the minutes until the service was over and he could go get a doughnut, the reward for making it through. Church and God meant nothing to him, especially after his mother was rejected by a priest for counsel after she approached him on a Sunday morning. 

After all, the distress from her divorce could wait until office hours. This rebuff pushed her away not only for the morning, but for ever as far as she was concerned. From that point forward, “the rule in the house was you could not be a Christian. You could be any faith you wanted, but not Christianity”. Case closed.

Outwardly, his mother adopted a “humanistic focus”, that “the answer to life’s problems were just well-educated people”. Behind the scenes, she was violent, physically abusive towards Chris. Before their divorce, his father sat passively on the couch and watched her beat her own son. 

His dad had his own brand of violence, an episodic rage directed towards things, not people - throwing household objects, punching holes in the walls while screaming and swearing. Illegal drugs fuelled the attitudes and actions of both parents, both using and selling. 

Strangers often made themselves comfortable in his home, waiting for their fix. Childhood trauma became the norm, difficult for Chris to process, much less understand. He recalls how it negatively affected his distorted view of self, of God:

“There were a lot of things that I began to believe about myself that weren’t true, just because that’s the way children process pain. When you’re being beaten and you don’t know why, you have to tell yourself why. You have to define, ‘Why is this happening? It must be because I’m ugly. It must be because I’m stupid. It must be because I’m…’ I had so many reasons that I convinced myself of. I remember in the bathroom once crying badly. I looked at my face while I was crying after she had beaten me one day and I said to myself, ‘That’s why she beats you. You’re so ugly when you cry.’ And I believed that. 

“You tell yourself these things as a kid: ‘You’re not good enough. You’re dumb.’ And I believed that I was just an absolutely terrible person. I believed I was dumb, very stupid, very ugly, worthless. I just believed it was 100 per cent fact growing up. That’s all that I knew. So, was there God in the middle of all that? It would have been nice to lean on something that told me otherwise, even if I just had to convince myself it was true. It would have been nice to have a counterbalance one way or another, but no.”

Controlling the chaos

Once his new stepfather entered their lives, the abuse at home was tempered. However, at school Chris’ intellectual genius was grossly underestimated, mistaken for stupidity. He, too, believed that he was “very unintelligent and very useless”, showing no effort in school. 

In hindsight, as a cutting-edge developer in technology, this was “very damaging, very lonely and very hard to deal with”. The toxic nature of felt inadequacy at home and school left Chris in a world which vastly underestimated and undermined his sense of self. Although life was “destructive”, “terrible” and “painful”, he believed there had to be more to life than he had experienced. It drove him to find something different, something more, but there was a problem. He reflects:

“When you mix a broken, wounded child with the pursuit of something more, you typically aren’t looking for something more. I was looking for something more for me. I was looking for power and control. I wasn’t really looking for God. I was seeking something to pull me out of the chaos, out of the lack of control. I felt like there would be something that may or may not have the answers but is simply bigger than my circumstance. And that’s what I really, really longed to find. And so, I began this journey of looking for that. 

“I didn’t go the humanistic route, the secular route, because I felt like people were like abusive dog owners. They might love you one minute and kick you the next. And so, I didn’t want to invest in that. When you’re a beaten child, you don’t know why you’re being hit, like an abused dog unless there’s some rule you know you broke. But if an owner comes in and just kicks a dog, the dog doesn’t know what’s up. And if it happens from the time they’re a puppy to the time they’re full grown, that’s how they view people. But the problem with dogs is that they want the love of their owner so bad, and that was me, too. 

“So, being beaten and destroyed also drove me deeper and deeper into a desire to be loved. Why couldn’t my mom just love me? If I could make a joke, and she would laugh, my world would open for a few seconds, but a minute later she’d be hitting me. So, looking for kind of a spirit or a god was more of a pursuit of power and control.” 

Read more:

When atheism isn’t enough – an intellectual’s search for meaning

Fighting against God – a staunch atheist encounters God after a suicide attempt

Running from God – a Jehovah’s Witness’ journey away from and back towards God

Anything But God: Adrienne Johnson’s unlikely conversion to Christianity

Behind the curtain

Power and control came in the form of Wicca and witchcraft, a form of self-empowerment with the benefits of fantasy escapism. Chris was also tapping into spirits through tarot cards and Ouija boards. He was looking for the power and source “behind the curtain”. He began speaking to spirits, asking them for guidance, summoning creatures, in hindsight he would now call demons. 

At the time, he didn’t perceive this underworld to be dark and had no desire to pursue darkness. What he wanted more than anything was to gain power in and over his life, not love, not God:

“If a Christian came to me and said, ‘There is a God, and he wants you and loves you.’ I know what love looks like. Love looks like I smile at you one minute and I backhand you the next. I didn’t want to be loved. I wanted power. I didn’t want to be loved. I wanted to not be weak…My friends and I hated Christians. They were so pathetic. Weak minded. Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

Paradoxically, the more power he granted these dark entities in his life, the deception caused him to become weaker. Once he realised these spirits were causing more problems, he moved towards Eastern religion, embracing the idea of a universal power source through Taoism and Buddhism. 

He eventually rejected those as well, sensing they were beautiful but empty, all the while continuing to reject the perceived anti-intellectualism of Christianity, “hating the idea of the God of the Bible”.

Back into darkness

Still hungry for power but with no interest in God, Chris continued toying with demonology, this time as a leader. He was considered “the advanced one” in his group, with others looking to him for guidance. Years later, he had become “very dark” and “hit a crescendo of not doing well”. 

Around that time, his mother ran into a Christian neighbour at a grocery store. Asking about Chris, his mom told of her concern, of his need for help. The neighbour suggested that Chris might want to go talk with the youth pastor at his church about his problems. To her surprise, he agreed to go. 

At the time, Chris and others in his “little demon club” had been talking to a spirit through the Ouija board who called himself Jesus Christ. This demonic spirit had been instructing them daily on rewriting the Bible and history among other things and they were doing it. Chris didn’t want to go talk to the youth pastor about his problems. Rather, he wanted to go talk to the youth pastor to “obliterate his faith and destroy the Church because they didn’t know the real Jesus Christ” like he did. 

Chris and his friend entered the youth pastor Bob’s office. Although they received a friendly reception, the mood quickly turned dark when Chris challenged Bob’s false perception of Jesus. Driven to “show Bob who Jesus is”, Chris told his friend to channel the demonic spirit through Bob’s computer keyboard, no longer needing the Ouija board for communication. She moved into a trance and began typing things about Bob’s wife that they could not have known. When Bob saw that, he knew it was real, pulled her back and said: 

“Stop! Stop! This is wrong! If you want to know what real power is, because it’s obvious you’re looking for power, then you need to go to the source of power. But, the source of power is Jesus Christ, the real Jesus Christ from the father. What you’re doing isn’t power. You’re messing with things that are evil. This isn’t right!” 

At that moment, the girl who was with Chris fell on the ground in Bob’s office, began to weep and said: “Help me, please. Please help me.” Bob prayed with her at that moment, and she accepted Jesus into her life. At this, Chris was filled with rage, refusing to relent as she had. It was a long, silent road home.

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The ‘book’

With her newfound faith, Chris’ friend began to come to his house every day and try to get him to read the Bible. Frustrated at her continual attempts, he finally said: “Leave the stupid book and don’t ever come back here again.” That was the last time he ever saw her. 

From that day forward, Chris began to experience vivid, terrifying dreams of the end of the world. He began to see tidal waves crashing, the Earth splitting, wars, earthquakes, experiencing death, loss and grief again and again. Plagued with these nightmares over the next five months, he became afraid of sleep, of these constant dreams. 

They set him on another search to understand what he was experiencing and he came across “end of the world” literature at the library. Dissatisfied, a friend finally recommended he read the last book in the Bible, Revelation, that talks about the end of the world. Exhausted and desperate, he agreed to read it. What he found there infuriated him. What he found was:

“A God who had the power to do whatever he wanted. And it made me mad because I thought about my life growing up. I thought about who I was. ‘Why did you make me such a loser? Why did you make me so pathetic? Why did you make me so weak?’ He was the Alpha and the Omega. I knew what that meant. It confirmed all my suspicions that he was in charge. I knew what it was saying. The totality of all things is in God. He had the control and power, and I hated it.” 

A new life

That night, Chris went to sleep but woke up to a voice that said one word: “Move,” Ignoring it, the voice came back a little stronger and said: “Move now.” Still fighting against someone telling him what to do, Chris ignored it again and decided to roll over, to say “no” with his body. But, when he attempted to roll over, he realised that he couldn’t move his knees down to his feet. They were stuck. Thinking they had fallen asleep, he sat up to feel them. There was no tingle, no nothing. He then realised he couldn’t move his upper legs, thighs or hips. Confused, he began to process what was happening. 

The paralysis was spreading like concrete slowly pouring over his entire body up through his chest. Lying in bed completely frozen head to toe, he opened his mouth to scream but was only able to wheeze. Nothing moved. Not even his eyeballs. After what felt like an eternity, Chris continued to internally struggle. Everything inside of him was beginning to break down and erupt. At this point, he was convinced he was going to die, literally feeling “the cold hand of death”. 

His life flashed before his eyes, first seeing the broken, angry, bitter, raging part of life that left him gripped with sorrow. Then instantly, he saw another part of his life, all the good he had repressed, that he hadn’t paid attention to, of people saying how special, kind, loving, generous, good or smart he was. He couldn’t understand it. If both were true, why had he only seen the man who was bad? He had never opened his eyes to gratitude or love or kindness. It was veiled from him. 

At this realization, he wished more than anything he could go back and live this second life. Filled with regret, he knew it was the end, that there was nothing left. Or was it? If the God of the Bible was real, then he could do anything he wants. And he realised the God of the Bible was the only one he wanted and needed, so Chris cried out to him:

“’If you keep me alive, I promise I’ll change. Please help me.’ I said: ‘If you let me see the sun come in tomorrow morning, then I will make myself something for you. Please.’ I said: ‘Don’t let me die.’ And, right when I prayed that, I went into a seizure, and I began to spit and fling around and flop, and I remember my eyes were open the whole time. Because I remember my thought was, ‘I don’t want to get spit on my eyes. But what in the hell’s happening here?’ 

“And then it was over. I was very, very tired. And I was covered in nasty…And I tried to struggle again to get up, to stop this whole thing, and I was still paralysed. And this time, when I went to move, I heard another voice. It was different. It said: ‘Don’t move.’ And it said, ‘Right now, when you move, you make it worse. You just rest.’ And I thought it was the God of the Bible at that point, which is all I understood of him at the moment. 

“And so, I just said ‘OK’ and went to sleep, and I woke up that next morning with dried, nasty stuff on my face and shirt, but I was able to move. I woke up late actually. I slept in, and the second I felt the sun reddish through my eyelids, my life changed, because God gave me what I asked for.”

Then Chris walked into the room and announced to his friend: “I am never, ever going to bed without praying and reading my Bible every day. You’ve got to hear what happened to me!” From that moment forward, Chris began to read his Bible every day for “it was like water to a dry land”. 

Over time, wrestling and diligent study, he began to see how his questions were answered, that he had the love of a good God despite his turbulent past, that the Bible provided a lifeline to the real Jesus. Now, he spends his life helping others find life through the God he once rejected.

If you’d like to listen to Chris Adam tell his full story, tune into the Side B Stories (Episode #83). 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.