Bestselling author Eric Metaxas said most Americans “have only seen the phony variety” of Christianity and heard a barrage of negative stories about the faith.
Metaxas urged the more than 800 parliamentarians — among them Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau — pastors and governmental staff and wider religious community to stand up for religious freedom and push against the “imposed state religion” of secular orthodoxy that on issues like abortion and sexuality says “shut up and move along” and the “debate is settled.”
“Do not accept a cartoon, negative version” of the Christian faith, he said. “Real faith, we call it the Good News. It’s meant to be Good News. It’s not meant to be oppressive.
“When I saw the real thing, I had a passion to share it,” said the author of 30 children’s books, of many Veggie Tales episodes, as well as the bestselling biographies Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery and Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
Metaxas said he had absorbed the secular orthodoxy before God turned his life around during a painful time in his life when he was 25. After graduating from Yale university, Metaxas found himself floating around wanting to be a writer, but ending up moving back in with his parents.
“My parents forced me to get a job,” he said. “All I could do with a Yale English degree was find a job for $11 an hour as a proofreader for Union Carbide.”
Describing his experience there as “Gehenna,” a name for hell, as an “incredibly boring job” in a “fluorescent room a quarter mile from the nearest window,” Metaxas said God in His mercy provided a friend in a bright graphics designer who knew the Bible backwards and forwards. Though he had been “trained at Yale” to avoid “insane born-again Christians,” this friend was an Episcopalian, so he thought he would be safe engaging in the conversation, since he joked Episcopalians don’t really believe in all that.
He kept on having conversations with his new friend. “Tell me more,” he said. “I was astounded and shocked by what I didn’t know.”
He was in pain during this period of his life and he at times let out a heartfelt cry to the God he didn’t know. God answered his prayer in a dream. “This dream is not something I chose,” he said.
“How much faith did Lazarus have?” he asked. “He was a rotting corpse; spiritually we are rotting corpses.”
God spoke to him in a dream in “a way no one else could have spoken to me” and the next morning, “I woke up a changed person,” he said. Before the dream he had been thinking the Christian faith “might be true but no intelligent person can possibly know for sure.”
“I woke up and I knew. Now I was one of those boobs I had always made fun of,” he said.
He offered his life to God and has since had a “strange career” working for Veggie Tales and writing children’s books, and biographies.