Larry Sanger built Wikipedia, and now he’s building his faith.
In a recent blog post, the 56-year-old detailed his conversion to Christianity after decades of nonbelief.
“I spent over 35 years as a nonbeliever,” he wrote. “I will not try to portray myself as a converted ‘enemy of the faith.’ I never was; I was merely a skeptic.”
Now, he hopes to reach others like him—intellectuals who might be open to God but need more convincing.
Sanger has always had a reputation for questioning the system. After launching Wikipedia in 2001, he distanced himself from the platform, calling it “part anarchy, part mob rule.” He has since become one of its loudest critics, arguing that it’s controlled by ideological gatekeepers.
“There’s a lot of Nobel prize winners and distinguished doctors whose views are not only not welcome on Wikipedia—they’re literally censored on YouTube and sometimes Facebook and Twitter [X] because they contradict the narrative,” he told the New York Post.
But while he was busy challenging internet institutions, his personal worldview was undergoing an overhaul. Raised in the Lutheran Church, he drifted from faith in his teens after his father introduced him to New Age philosophies. His skepticism solidified in college at Reed—a school he describes as having the unofficial motto “Communism, Atheism, Free Love.” He even reached out to a pastor with his doubts, only to be brushed off, which sealed the deal on his agnosticism.
Still, cracks started forming. He found New Atheist arguments unimpressive—“I scanned books produced by New Atheists such as Dawkins and Harris and could never bring myself to actually buy one: they were just so transparently mediocre.” By 2011, he started publicly defending Christians against what he saw as unfair attacks, and in 2019, he picked up the Bible—not as an act of faith, but as an intellectual exercise. But something unexpected happened.
“I was ashamed to realize that, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is,” he wrote.
Now, after years of internal debates, Sanger has come to a firm conclusion: he believes the Bible is true, God is real, and Jesus is the Savior of the world. And because he can’t do anything halfway, he’s spent the last five years writing God Exists: A Philosophical Case for the Christian God—a 200,000-word (and counting) deep dive into the intellectual foundation for faith.
His key takeaway? “Everybody should read the Bible daily.”
For a guy who once built the world’s biggest open-source encyclopedia, Sanger has arrived at a different kind of truth—one that doesn’t rely on user edits.
