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Former atheist Stephen McWhirter rejected God because of Christian hypocrisy and abuse. Looking for comfort, he plunged into drug addiction. After an encounter with Christ, he left his skepticism and addiction behind and spends his life in leading others to Jesus. Stephen’s Resources: Websitehttps://worshipjesus.life Tiktokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@stephenmcwhirtermusic Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/stephenmcwhirter/ YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/user/stephenmcwhirter Facebook https://www.facebook.com/stephenmcwhirtermusic Resources mentioned by Stephen: Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of our stories on our website, at sidebstories.com or on our YouTube channel. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page and our YouTube channel. You can also email us directly at info@sidebstories.com. We always love hearing from you. We all have an idea of Who God is, whether He is real or true or good or relevant. Our ideas are based upon our own experiences, our understanding of Who God is supposed to be and whether our ideas of God match our own expectations. Oftentimes, life is difficult and disappointing, even devastating. We find it impossible to believe that a good God exists. When we look around, all we see is brokenness and lies and destruction. Envisioning a good God or powerful God becomes even more challenging when the brokenness and devastation is in your own home and in your own life. In rejecting the possibility of a good God, we often believe that we can life better on our own, but we often find, too, that when we’re in control, life doesn’t go as well as we thought it would. It can lead to a destructive path. In our story today, Stephen McWhirter angrily rejected God because of what he had seen and experienced in his own home and embraced a life of darkness and drug addiction. Yet today, he spends his life and influence as a musician, telling the world about a good God Who loves each person personally and generously. How did that happen? I hope you’ll come along to hear his amazing story. Welcome to Side B Stories, Stephen. It’s so great to be with you today. Oh, it’s good to be here. Thank you for having me, Jana. Perfect. As we’re getting started, I’d love for our audience to know a little bit about you, Stephen. Tell me about who you are now, what your world looks like. Oh, my goodness! That’s a big question. Today. Let me start at the very simplest part. I’m married. My my wife Tara and I have been together, gosh! Twenty-six years. We’ve dated since she was fourteen and I was sixteen. We have three boys, Andrew, Alex, and Austin, nineteen, sixteen, and eight. He’s about to be nine. Surprise. We live in Louisville, Kentucky. And yeah, we’re just blessed. I’ve been doing music, Christian music, songwriting, worship leader for, my gosh, a long time, over ten years full time as just a songwriter and artist traveling. But almost twenty years as a worship leader in general. I travel a great deal, overseas, local, in the United States, all over. It’s just a joy to get to see so many people come to Jesus. Just telling a story and just worshiping the Lord and letting Him do all the heavy lifting. Okay. Terrific. That really set us up. I’m curious because I know that that’s not where your story began. Right. Why don’t you tell us about your home life, where you were born. What was that world like? Were there Christians in your world? Was there God in your world? Let’s start there. Yeah. Well, my dad was an evangelist growing up, and so we traveled from church camp to church camp. That was my entire childhood, and I just remember the man that I saw behind a pulpit and then what I saw behind closed doors were not the same. I would literally see my dad get up and preach about Jesus but then physically abuse my mom behind closed doors. So I just remember at a young age being like, “Look, if God’s a real, He’s not good, and I don’t want anything to do with this Jesus guy.” Around thirteen, I think, through eleven, I was smoking, drinking, marijuana, all that. I was stealing cars. I was breaking into houses. It was a mess. By the time I was fifteen, I was using cocaine and pills, and I was selling drugs. By the time I was seventeen, I had become a full out crystal meth addict, and I was using crystal meth almost every day for over six years. I was arrested six times before I turned twenty-one. It was just a wrecking ball of bad decisions that I would say with confidence was rooted in this brokenness and this woundedness that I had, of seeing my dad talk about Jesus and then do this. And not to lay it all at his feet. At the end of the day, I believed a lie about God and about His character and just ran with it. And this made me truly hate Christianity and Christians. I remember being the guy that would cuss you out or try to knock you out if you mentioned the name Jesus around me. I would be the guy online right now with people in social media making fun of you for being a moron and believing in fairy tales. That’s literally who I was. I remember my sweet mom putting her hands on me one time when I was just having a total depression breakdown in my house, and she put her hands on me and started praying in the name of Jesus. And I just remember knocking her hand off of me, saying, “Never mention that name around me again,” and, “Get out my house.” I mean this is who I was. I was just the guy you would never think would come to Jesus. And so I had a lot of woundedness. Yeah. I had a lot of brokenness. And it was pouring itself out around everyone around me in the most brutal way. Wow. So, as you were growing up, I guess it sounds like you were fairly young when these experiences happened, so that you were really getting a tremendous disconnect between who your father was, who he presented himself to be as a representative of God, but yet being so abusive in your own home. I can imagine it would be very difficult to conceive… you said you had a misunderstanding of Who God was because of your earthly father. Who did you perceive God to be based upon the example of your father? I think I just thought He was a villain. But most of that was through the view of my dad. Like I said, I believed that if He was real He wasn’t good. This is something that I think I struggled with slightly even after becoming a Christian. And I think a lot of Christians, people that have given our life to Jesus, do struggle with what I’m about to say, which is: If God’s real, He’s good, but the plan that He has for my life is good for Him, but it’s bad for me, but I should want it because he’s God. And this is the internal battle that we have, because we’re mistaking goodness with something God just does, instead of realizing that it’s actually Who He is. And I think, for many of us, and myself at that time, I thought it was just something He does. I didn’t realize yet that it’s Who He is. Psalm 119:68 says, “You are good, and everything that You do is good.” And I think I just didn’t understand that, the whole time when I was striving to feel good, even through all the addiction, I was seeking after Him through broken ways and didn’t know it, because I can’t have good without the One Who is the very source of goodness. And so I struggled that greatly throughout that whole time. And again, I think most of it stemmed from…. We’re shaped a lot by our fathers, and by our parents, as kids especially. And what I witnessed was very traumatic. Some of the brutal moments where I saw my father physically beating on my mom. That’s something that’s really hard for an eight year old to sit and watch and process, right? So to me it was, “Okay, if this is Who Jesus is, He’s not good. If He’s even real at all, He’s not good, because this is obviously what people who believe in Him act like.” And so I think at the end of the day the biggest lie that stuck with me about God is if He’s real, He’s not good. Yeah. Because you were a child and your father was an evangelist, I’m sure that there was some keeping up the pretense that you have this family at home, that all is good, but there was this pretend going on. Because you were a child, were you forced in a sense to go to church and maintain this pretense? Or did they allow you to stay home? Oh, no. When I was a kid, kid, obviously, I had to go everywhere they went. By the time I started turning twelve, stuff like that, I just didn’t go at all. My dad was on the road a lot. I stayed home, stayed with my mom, stayed home at this point. And we lived with my grandma as well. And I’d just do whatever I wanted. I went wherever I wanted. And I think some of that, if I talk about it and I’m honest, I think I heaped a lot of agony on my mom, because part of me kind of blamed her for not leaving my dad, staying with him, and I was just kind of like, “If you’re not going to stand up for yourself, then I don’t respect you at all. I’m going to do whatever I want.” And so really I did. And no one stopped me. I hate to say that. I didn’t have any real…. My dad didn’t exist in my life. When he was on the road, he was gone. When he was home, he just hung out in his room. And then he left again. It was really messed up. And that’s fine, whatever. Some people have much darker stories than me, right? But it’s still real. And I remember, during that time, just thinking, “You know what? If nobody’s going to stop me, I’m going to do whatever I want, and I’m going to bury this anger and this brokenness under as much destructive behavior as I possibly can.” So you knew what you didn’t believe. You didn’t believe in God. I would say, deep down, if I was honest, I did believe. But I think that’s the thing about a lot of people. I don’t think it’s an issue of not believing God. I think it’s an issue of a lie you believe about the character of God. And you feel like, by then, you’ve gone so far, there’s no point in turning back, so just go all the way. Right? Which kind of makes sense. If you look at the Bible, where it says in Revelation the devil has come down to you, the enemy has come down to you, and he knows his time is short. He’s angry, and he’s coming against the bride, because he knows his time is short. And I think this is very characteristic of a lot of people that have decided, “Hey, I’m an atheist,” or, “I’m angry at God,” or whatever. Deep down, I think honestly they believe, but there’s this thing where they’ve said, “If He’s real, I’m His enemy, so I have to just succumb to this.” And that’s kind of where I was. I was like, “You and me are enemies. If You’re real at all, You’re my enemy.” So I just kind of went at it hoping He wasn’t real. And if he was, I was just going to go as far right as possible, because there’s no hope for me going left. And all this comes back down to a lie about who God is. Yeah. But there was also some pain there, I would imagine- Oh, totally. … that you were trying to numb, in a sense, through drug use. I guess you could say some of it was rebellion, like you were saying, but- Yeah. But even that rebellion, if I come back to everyone has believed a lie about who God is. At the core of it. I mean, if you’re going to be honest about it. Yes, my father was a mess. Yes, my childhood was a mess. But still, at the core of it, as much as I can blame all these other people, I still believed a lie about God and about Who He is. And I went all the way with that lie. And it’s deeply at that root. And for many of us, when we start to take that thing…. You know, you look at Jesus in the desert with Satan. All Satan does is lie about Who God is. He takes scripture, and he flips it. And all that Jesus does is turns it back around. Right? The battle of the ages is just this truth and lies thing. And so… yeah. For me, that was the heart of it. So you believed a lie, and you were rebelling, and you were running, I guess, away from God and towards drugs or anything self-destructive, it sounds like. In a pretty serious and significant way. what was life like out there, kind of in the wilderness, where you were running from God, you were heavily addicted, it sounds like, for several years and at a young age. What was that life like? I’d say, during that time, probably the biggest thing was anything I could get my hands on, to—and this sounds cliché, but to numb the brokenness, the woundedness, the anger, the childhood that we didn’t even talk about, you know what I mean? I mean, everybody knew I hated my dad. Nobody knew really quite why, because there was this like entrenched thing of like, “Just don’t talk about it. Just don’t talk about it. Because your dad’s a minister and will hurt all that,” blah, blah, blah. And I so didn’t talk about it. And I bottled it up. Every now and then, I would get so drunk or something I might mention it, but that was about it, right? So during that time, I just remember, even at a young age, around 11 through 12…. This is crazy. I got in trouble for the first time with the police for stealing cigarettes at a Winn Dixie grocery store. I know it was classy, but…. And then, after that, it was… The first time I ever smoked marijuana was at a church camp, actually, and people always say, “Really! That’s shocking!” I’m like, “Really, is it though? Think about this.” I mean back in the nineties, at least, when I was going to church camps a lot, this is where people would send a lot of their troubled children, where they hoped they would find Jesus, so it’s really not surprising that, when you put all these people together in a camp for a week that they’re going to get in trouble. I literally got kicked out of a church camp where my dad was preaching a revival for vandalizing the cafeteria and sneaking out after night, smoking marijuana, and all this kind of stuff. I can’t imagine now having somebody come to me and tell me. “The thing you’re preaching at or speaking at this week, your son’s getting kicked out. And this is what he did.” It was total rebellion on the next level. And during this time, this was what I was doing. I was drinking and all these things. It was just a blur. Like I said, by the time I’m 15, a lot of my friends I knew—and this was a small town, Corydon, Indiana, which is like… imagine Mayberry if Mayberry was a meth den. Okay. It looks like this really sweet little town with a gazebo and a square, but there’s just so much darkness going on in these mobile homes, and all these people are making drugs. It’s crazy, really. And so this was the world I lived in, with these people in these dark places, selling drugs, using, arrested, again, six times before I turned twenty-one. It was a blur. Even though I look back now, and this is over twenty years since then, and it just feels like an out of body experience, but yet when I write about it and think about it and talk about it, I’m like, “Man! That was really my life! I lived through that somehow.” Somehow I lived through it. There was many a time where I almost OD’ed or did something really stupid like that. I remember, in those moments, even thinking, Okay, God, if You’re real, You better do something, because if You’re not….” You know, “Prove it to me.” There was this part of me inside that was thinking that. I never said it out loud, but I know now, looking back, there was a part of me inside that was like, almost like I was testing Him. “If You’re not going to stop me, I’m just going to keep going, and I’m just going to butcher my life.” And that’s really where I was. You knew what you were headed towards. I mean, you knew what you were rejecting or Who you were rejecting. But when you’re running like a train over a cliff, you’re running into the darkness. But there’s a recklessness…
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