Daniel Fried explored a range of religions while in college. He chose Chritianity after reading the New Testament. (By Tom Allen – Washington Post)

By Daniel Fried
Saturday, August 29, 1998; Page B09

My conversion story is of the most hackneyed type, and the type most likely to incite letters of protest from your readers. I am a Jew who has become a Christian.

During my upbringing in synagogue, I was introduced to all of the rituals of the faith, as well as the culture and tradition of the indisputably great Jewish people. I was given a sense of God, but not a faith in God, and after I got through my bar mitzvah, I very easily succumbed to the delusion that science was omnipotent and had disproved religion.

It was during my senior year at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda that I began to question the assumptions which come easily in pampered suburbs: that the world is only material and that faith is only for the not-very-well educated. I felt free in my coming liberation from high school and began to explore the possibility of the spirit.

The summer after graduation, I delved into everything Eastern – the Bhagavad-Gita, Upanishads, Tao Te Ching, and various sutras and Vedas. Turning westward, I got through about a third of the Koran, but was stopped by Page 2 of Genesis when I attempted to read the Bible.

Too dry.

My head was set spinning during freshman year at the University of Chicago, when I learned how to think critically for the first time in my life. All sorts of questions about the nature of thought and faith and certainty chased each other around my brain until I felt carsick. And in the midst of that confusion, a friend explained unconvincingly why he was a Christian and suggested that I read the New Testament.

And so it was that in Chicago's dim and howling December, I came, haltingly, to the words of Christ: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

In my philosophical tusslings, I had grown perfectly skeptical, doubting not only faith but also science and all knowledge as ultimately unprovable. But I eventually reasoned that if an omnipotent Something did exist, then that Something could effectively reveal ultimate Truth, despite the limits of human knowledge.

And the New Testament was the most likely candidate for a revelation I had seen. It revealed to me what it seemed I should have known all along: that my suburban snubbing of religion was simply snobbery; that sin, despite what the commercials say, is not sexy or chocolaty, but violent and painful; that forgiveness is essential and that humility is liberating.

My father was shocked; my mother turned weepy for months. By choosing to believe in Jesus, I had committed the unspeakable Jewish sin, and for a while, they feared that I was mentally ill or had become a member of some cult. I came home from school in May, and we jointly endured a summer of unquiet, uneasy suppers.

But we were in the end still family, and the sharp words petered out. Some Jewish families would have demanded my renunciation or disowned me; by that scale, I am lucky. But even had they done so, blood is not thicker than spirit. I must worship God as I understand God, and I refuse to be shamed into silence.

Following Christ can be a zigzag walk. It has made me more conservative in some ways, more liberal in others. It has given me peace in some ways, and also has caused me more agitation than I had ever known before.

If you believe that the Creator of the universe cares for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, it gives you a new terror at clear-cutting of the rain forests. If you believe that God loves all people, it gives you a new hatred of racism in yourself and in society. I have found the imitation of Christ to be largely an exercise in heartbreak.

Not that I seem much like an imitator of Christ: A pious marble statue I am not. Believing in Christ has made me more aware of my faults and better at fixing them, but I am not a great model. I am not poor in spirit, I am not meek, and I don't love my neighbor all that much. I try much harder than I used to, but I still fail. Looking at myself, I am not surprised that Christians often get blamed for hypocrisy.

But that's really Christianity's point. The central teaching of the religion is that no matter how well we humans know what we ought to do, we can't do it, at least not all of the time. We can be pretty petty creatures, even pretty monstrous ones in the wrong circumstances.

But the glorious kicker of it all is that God loves us anyway. We may prefer to wallow in our silly prides and pointless desires, but God forgives us for it and wants to drag us, kicking and screaming, into the sweet kingdom of gentleness and openness and acceptance.

And I'm perfectly content to be dragged.

Daniel Fried, 25, will begin a doctoral program next month in comparative literature at Harvard University, with a specialty in Chinese poetry. He met his wife, Xu Jiajuan, three years ago at a Chinese church in Chicago while preparing for a year-long teaching assignment in Beijing.