Show notes
Former skeptic Anna Gray Smith questioned her childhood faith and sought other avenues of belief to find identity, meaning, and truth. Her search led her back to a more robust, grounded faith in God. Anna Gray Smith’s Resources: Instagram: @annagraysmithphoto Moral Tea Podcast: Spilling the moral tea on culture, taboo topics, and gray areas. A podcast exposing the artificial sweeteners of the world by multi-gen duo Renee Leonard Kennedy and Anna Gray Smith. Moral Tea Podcast Instagram is: @moralteapodcast Resources mentioned by Anna Gray: How Shall We Then Live, Frances Schaffer 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 these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page and through our email at info@sidebstories.com. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, but at the end of each episode, they give advice to curious skeptics on how they can pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has, again, once been a skeptic and now a believer. We have so much to learn from them. Deconstruction of Christian faith is something we hear more of these days, especially from former prominent Christian artists and musicians. They seem to leave Christianity behind and find freedom in what they’ve come to believe as religious constraints and untruths. They embrace a new kind of life apart from God, towards what they believe are in many cases more culturally relevant ways of thinking and living. Deconstruction can lead to crumbling foundations of faith, but it can also lead towards an exploration towards truth. If truth doesn’t fear questioning, it can allow for an honest search to discover what exactly is and isn’t true, what exactly is and isn’t worthy of belief. If someone is a genuine truth seeker, it can lead them back to the faith they once rejected. It can lead back to the One Who is truth, to God Himself. Deconstruction of faith can and sometimes does lead to a faith built on a firmer foundation than once thought possible. In today’s story, former skeptic Anna Gray Smith took the long road of deconstructing her childhood and adolescent faith and searching for truth outside of Christianity, but ultimately finding and reconstructing a more solid rock in God upon which to stand. I hope you’ll come and hear her story. Welcome to Side B Stories, Anna Gray. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thank you so much! It is an honor to be here, and especially after our brief encounter at NRB back in May. Yes, yes! For those who don’t know, NRB is the National Religious Broadcasters Conference, or Convention, and Anna Gray and I met there. So I am so curious about your story. Again, we met briefly there at the convention, and you told me a little bit about it, but I am so excited to get into the fullness of your story today. As we’re getting started, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about who you are right now, so we get a glimpse of who you are at the current moment before we back into your story. Sure. So my name is Anna Gray Smith. I go by A.G. or Anna Grayville. I’m a photographer. I’m based out of Greensboro, North Carolina, and I’m also co-host of Moral Tea podcast. And I’m a creative by nature. I feel like I live and breathe anything artistic, anything creative. So my brain is always powered on, always seeking beauty, always trying to find joy and beautiful things even in the mundane, even in the ugly. So that’s me in a nutshell. Oh, I love that perspective! I think that many of us can really benefit from having a little glimpse of being able to find beauty and joy wherever we look, no matter where. What is the Moral Tea podcast? I’m curious about that. Yes. So Moral Tea podcast is geared towards tackling taboo topics, gray areas of culture and society, things you might not necessarily even ask your mother, but my co-host, Renee Leonard Kennedy, and I, we tackle those topics from a multi-generational perspective. I’m a twenty something, she’s a sixty something, so we come back and talk about these different issues of the world from our two different perspectives, which we share, but from two completely different generations. Wow! That’s fascinating. And we will put the name of your podcast and a link to your podcast in our episode notes. So thanks for bringing that to our attention. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, no. So, Anna Gray, let’s start back at the beginning of your story of who you are, how your life and your perspectives got started. Tell us where you were born, the kind of family in which you were raised, your culture, your surroundings. Were there glimpses of religion or God? Did that dot your landscape at all? Yes. I was born and raised in a very small town in North Carolina, Thomasville. It used to be known for furniture. But we were a very tiny town, like one coffee shop. You go into a grocery store, post office, you’re going to see probably ten people you know at some point. Everybody knows each other. I was born into a Christian family. My dad was actually a pastor for about six, seven years, so I was a PK for a period of time, up until I was thirteen years old. My dad had some gaps in between pastoral ministry, so pastored for a few years, switched churches, took a break, and then pastored for a few more years. So I was born basically being taught the principles of Christianity. I knew who God was, and I understood and had these questions for eternity, heaven, hell, and I became a believer when I was five. But the whole idea of working out your salvation, I think, was more a progress as I grew. But my parents and my church were an influence on me as a child. And I would say I always had a deep faith in the idea that God existed, and I think especially being surrounded by mostly Christian families. I was home schooled as well, so I was the… I don’t want to say stereotype of a PK and home-school kid, but I was surrounded mostly by Christianity, and even in schooling, that was very much the basis of everything I was taught. As a preacher’s kid, a PK, sometimes… well, it’s not the easiest thing to be the daughter or the son of a pastor. And I know that there’s a certain amount of pressure that’s put upon you to believe or to behave in a certain way, but it sounds like, early on, that you embraced that role, you embraced the belief of your family. Were there any reservations or doubts or difficulties along that road, in childhood at least? I would say yes at different times, and I remember it terrified me, too, because I remember when I was ten years old, I would always get so in my head. I lived in my head a lot of the time, and I remember I’d go to bed at night, and I’d wrestle with this deep anxiety. And I remember I had this thought process of, “Is God actually real?” because it’s like my soul wanted to believe it and I had grown up knowing that, but I always had that doubt of, “What if everything I’ve known to be true is not true?” And it would start to almost panic me, because I had, especially as a kid, a really, really deep fear of death. I was very much a hypochondriac, dealt with a lot of stuff with my inner world, as I call it, a lot of really deeply rooted anxiety. And so it wasn’t that I was shredding myself in a way of, “Oh, I want to go my own way,” but even as a young child, like I said, ten years old, I would have these doubts, like I wanted to believe and know it was all true, but I just had these hesitations of, “What if it’s not true at all? And what did you do with those doubts? Did you keep them to yourself or did you try to talk with your parents or anyone else about these thoughts that you were having? No. At that time, honestly, I was terrified. And I remember, even in my head, I would brainstorm, “Okay, how do I ask this to my mom?” or, “How do I ask this to someone? How do I tell someone?” I felt like it almost had to be this like, coming out kind of moment. Because I was terrified. I think because I had been raised believing this, that if I even hinted to anybody that I had doubts, that…. It wasn’t a fear of, “Oh, what if I’m punished and in trouble,” but almost this fear of, “What if I’m told I’m going to hell or something or that I am not a believer,” because my worst fear is, “What if I’m not actually saved?” And so no. I kept all of it in my head for the next, my gosh, almost decade, if I’m being honest, decade to eleven years. I kept absolutely all of it in my head. So as you were becoming a teenager, I guess, and that’s a time when we’re either really embracing or questioning what our beliefs are, authority, what the authorities are saying, what we’re thinking, but it sounds as if you still found it wasn’t safe, I guess, in a way, to come forward and express doubts. How did that work its way out from, say ten, thirteen on, you said the next decade? What did that look like for you? Were you kind of crumbling inside because of doubt? Or were you dismissing it and just continuing forward to do the Christian thing? How did that look? Yeah. It really was a blend of the two, because it was like, deep inside, when I would go through all these different scenarios in my head, almost like debating with myself the idea of salvation, Christianity, the teaching of the Bible versus the philosophies of the world. I loved philosophy as a teenager, too, like philosophy, all sorts of things that really took your mind to different places, if that makes sense. But I would say that I had an innate faith like that mustard seed, if that makes sense, but there was so much doubt that I did crumble inside. And it’s almost like in hindsight, when I came out of that and a lot of stuff I wrestled with. I started with my body image, identity, not so much in what we see in today’s culture of identity, but for me, it was I wanted to be something. I didn’t want to be seen, when I was 12 and 13. I was just a PK and a goody two shoes. I wanted to have this freedom and autonomy. I really wanted to know what I believed and why. And I wanted to be different from everybody else. I cringed at the idea of having to blend, and I think that, in my search for even identity and for truth, I did crumble a lot inside, mentally with things I dealt with, the anxiety. I struggled with a lot of issues with eating as a teenager and wrestled with starving myself a bit at times. So yeah, it’s like it came out in different ways that, at the time, I thought was maybe rooted in something else, when really, I think, my search for identity and finding it in all these different places, which resulted in more emptiness. And I think inside it was almost a slow deconstructive phase. Not that I was looking to get out of Christianity. Because, like I said, it’s like I wanted to believe it was all true. I just didn’t. There were times I truly just didn’t. And I’m like, “How do I tell anybody this?” because again, it’s not that I necessarily would have had this hard core, being damned to hell or something judgment, but I was really afraid of that. I really was afraid that, “What if it’s exposed? What if I’m not actually a believer because I have these questions?” And so I kept it all inside, and truthfully, the more I stuffed stuff down, it ends up coming out in really terrible ways, which I think is a lot of my struggles as a teenager. That was a result of keeping it all inside and not being honest or feeling really safe to basically tell someone what it’s like to be me and to seek wisdom in that area. Yeah. Adolescence is just such a challenging time, isn’t it? For anyone. But yet these internal struggles and anxieties can really cause you to question your foundations and can cause you to question yourself. And it sounds like, again, you were reading some philosophy, which is giving, perhaps, if it’s a secular philosophy, is giving you another perspective on reality. Were those thinkers or writers that you were reading, were they pulling you away from the idea that there was a real God? Or did they make it seem as if religion was something that was man made? What were you reading that was also probably feeding into your pulling away? I would say it was a blend of things, because, at this time—this is going to sound really weird at first. I was vegan. I was highly into yoga practice and fell in that when I was about age 17. And also reading philosophy. And also shredding articles on atheism, Gnosticism, and then on top, because the philosophy was just for school, actually, but I was more so compelled by these thinkers who questioned what they had always been told. And on top of reading about reading the philosophy, I would watch these documentaries, and it really was a curiosity at first, because there was a lot that I resonated with. I think maybe a lot of their deep depression and, like, you know, Plato’s cave. Allegory was really interesting to me. But again even when I was really immersed in practices such as yoga, which I told myself, “Okay, yoga is even philosophy.” But I would always sit in these classes that, when I look back, really had some rather… I don’t want to say brainwashing. That’s a bit extreme. But deconstructive practices and things that I would combat, so I’d think, in my head, “Okay, if I just implement God even in my questioning phase, then that eradicates the fact that maybe this isn’t so good for me.” So I think yoga and being around such a diverse culture. And then, on top of that, I was… Like I said, I’m a creative by nature. And I was in the whole TV/film acting realm at that time, too. So I had just signed with an agent, which people think, “Oh, that’s great! That’s a stepping stone to making it as creative.” But really being around that culture, I think, and a lot of the ways of thinking and just influence, I so highly wanted to feel beautiful, wonderful, capable, lovable, all these things, again searching for identity, while still questioning my core values and beliefs and who I actually am as a person which interestingly all of those lead to almost nihilism, emptiness at the end of it, so it was really a blend of things that I resorted to. It’s not like I was consciously even thinking, “Oh, I’m going to use this in place of God.” It was more so the search, and I’ve always been so curious. So you had a lot of different influences in your life, it sounds like, and again, it sounds like you were open in a sense, searching, wanting acceptance, wanting an identity that’s meaningful, Did you realize that these philosophies and the things that you were dabbling in, that they may have been satisfying for the moment or meeting some kind of need or felt need or curiosity, satisfying a curiosity. Did you know at the time that they led to a sense of nihilism or emptiness? Or were you just participating, trying to experience things fully, trying to find your place, trying to figure out where you belong, and you didn’t realize at the time where they led. That was exactly it. Because I think a lot of people—and I was literally that person. I was thinking, “Oh, this is life giving, this is good,” and for me, it was the people, too, because the people in this yoga community were so crunchy and open. And even most of them not believers. And I’d still identify as a believer to them, even though I had doubts, but they were even accepting of me, and whereas I felt, in so many places in my life, kind of crumbs and nothingness, interestingly enough, that nothing is always the common denominator, I felt so loved and seen.…
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