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If you’ve ever felt hopeless watching someone you love walk away from the faith, this conversation is pure gold. Guest host Brooke Taylor sits down with Joseph Enabnit, a former militant atheist turned devout Catholic, to unpack one of the most unexpected, beautiful, and inspirational conversion stories you’ll hear in a long time. You can listen to the entire conversation here.
Joseph grew up in a devout evangelical family in small-town Iowa; by college, he’d swung hard into atheism, joining a group of self-described “freethinkers.” At the time, he was all in on the neopagan, edgy-intellectual way of life… but something started to crack.
What did it?
It was a Shakespeare speech. At an atheist conference, Joseph watched a speaker read part of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V., and he wept. Everyone else in the room was cringing because they saw this speech as something too right-wing. He was crying. Something deep in his heart awakened, and he suddenly knew:👉 “I don’t want to be an atheist anymore.”
-He realized he wasn’t like the other atheists around him who had become so progressive.
-He had a love for marriage.
-He formed a life-changing bond with his godfather who also happened to be a Catholic professor and also a Tolkien scholar.
-He started reading the Latin Mass missal before ever attending a liturgy.
-He had a conversation with a priest who told him that JPII was familiar with phenomenology; that greatly surprised him.
-And then… finally attending a Traditional Latin Mass was where everything changed.
When Joseph saw the consecration at that first Mass, he remembered Tolkien’s words to his son: “I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament…”
And that was it.
The Real Presence. The beauty. The truth. The reverence.
He wanted in. And he came home to the Catholic Church, bringing his wife and family with him.
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