The Free Press: The Vegan Catholic Philosophers of Princeton, by Suzy Weiss:
Did these grad students study their way into believing in God, or was the intervention more divine than that?
Joe Schmid, 26, has spent years arguing that there is no God. Or at least, that you can’t prove He’s up there. As a professional philosopher, he’d devoted his career to writing articles like “Simply Unsuccessful: The Neoplatonic Proof of God’s Existence,” and blog posts like “A Failed Demonstration of God’s Existence.” He even co-wrote a book in 2022 defending the niche theory of existential inertia, the idea that there need not be an outside force—i.e., God—compelling the universe to exist. But recently, he’s changed his mind, or his mind was changed, anyway. These days, Schmid is a devout Catholic.
“Do you mind if we pray?” he asked me this week. We were at a restaurant right off Princeton’s campus, where Schmid is studying to get his PhD. He wasn’t the only newly anointed Catholic at the table. Noah McKay, 27, is another doctoral student in the same department, and he converted about six months ago. He and Schmid had just come from Mass. They bowed their heads, and when they were done giving thanks, we all dug into a summer hummus board, sans feta cheese, since Princeton’s Gen Z philosopher-Catholics are both vegans, too.
I’d taken the train to Princeton because I wanted to find out what’s in the water in New Jersey. I assumed philosophy was a field where reason trumps faith, and that anyone who thinks about it long and hard enough, in the halls of the progressive Ivy League, will come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. I thought postmodern academia had made everyone believe in nothing. Did these grad students study their way into believing in God, or was the intervention more divine than that? And does it have something to do with America’s much-vaunted “Catholic boom”?
Both these gentlemen were clean-cut—polos, khakis, a leather messenger bag—and clearly brilliant. They talked fast and opined on the finer points of magisterial doctrine from the 18th century, between bites of vegan corn ravioli. They’ve both been studying and debating apologetics for years, and met each other a few years ago at a conference, before they were students at Princeton together.
Neither of them grew up in secular households. Schmid was raised in a Catholic family in Carmel, Indiana, but he became an atheist a decade ago, because he believed the evidence was stacked against the divine. “I thought that the natural world is all that there is,” he said. “There’s no supernatural world, there are no Gods.” He struggled especially with the problem of animal suffering. Why would a benevolent God make it that so many millions of animals were hunted and killed by each other? “It’s never going to be purely intellectual for anyone, even if you’re a professional philosopher,” said Schmid. By the senior year of high school, he was agnostic, which is to say, he believed that nothing definitive could be proven about whether God exists.
McKay was always a believer, but not in the Catholic church. He grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, in an evangelical family; when he got to college, he was a Christian, but a “tentative one”; he’d have given “60 to 40 odds that some version of Christianity or other is true.” He was stuck on the problem of evil, and also divine hiddenness, which is the question of why God, if he exists, doesn’t reveal himself. By the end of grad school—he went to The University of Edinburgh for a master’s, then Purdue University for his doctorate, before transferring to Princeton—he was still a theist, but with doubts. He wondered if the stakes were making it hard for him to soberly assess the evidence: “It’s almost impossible to do that when the thing that you’re uncertain about is the thing around which you should organize your whole life if it’s true.”
When McKay and Schmid met—it was in October 2022 at the Rutgers Philosophy of Religion Conference, also in New Jersey—they discussed what arguments might actually convince them to become believers, and they were in agreement: miracles. They weren’t talking about finding the image of the Madonna in a slice of toast. What they wanted to find was “strong empirical evidence” for miracles, and instances of “medical documentation, X-rays, hundreds of thousands of witnesses, including skeptical and hostile witnesses.” So, they got to work.
They studied the Marian apparitions, like the one in Fátima, Portugal, where three shepherd children reported seeing “a Lady more brilliant than the Sun.” They studied the miraculous healings at Lourdes, in southwest France, where the waters are said to have cured more than 7,000 people in the last 150 years or so. (The Pope is visiting this weekend.) The Catholic Church has verified 72 of these healings, and McKay was impressed with their rigor—anyone healed at Lourdes goes back each year for reexamination—and the canonization process, in which a Catholic considered for sainthood has to have at least two miracles attributed to them. “I still think miracles are rare, and I still think most miracle claims are false,” said McKay. But by the end of 2025, “I believed that Catholicism was true.”
For Schmid, the tipping point was studying Padre Pio, a Catholic saint who died in 1968, and was said to exhibit stigmata: wounds that appear on the same parts of the body where Jesus was nailed to the cross. “Naturalistic explanations don’t seem to account for their persistence, their character,” said Schmid. He was working on the case of Padre Pio with Ethan Muse, a philosopher at Rutgers, who had likewise been convinced that Catholicism is the one true faith, after spending years as an atheist, by studying miracles. …
“We would just spend hours upon hours on various evenings going through my objections to Catholicism on the phone,” said Schmid. He kept recordings of the phone calls, because “I wanted to go back and study these things.” Schmid also made a 200-page Word document with his objections to Catholicism, regarding things like hell and religious liberty. “I basically had to see my way through many of those sufficiently in order to even be in a position to convert,” he said.
Then, in early January, Schmid was sitting in the gym, when “a feeling in waves” came over him, and he got the message “You could be a saint” over and over again. “I just sort of was like, Okay, I give up, I’ve lost, God has won, and I’ve got to become Catholic,” said Schmid. A month later, on February 7, he went to a general confessional—because Schmid’s family is Catholic, he had been baptized and confirmed as a kid—and considered himself officially converted. “Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord and he established the Catholic Church,” Schmid told his followers, in a video he posted to his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason, where he’d previously made arguments against the existence of God. In the video, Schmid added, “I’m not kidding.”
McKay looked away in concentration as he explained the “head and heart factors” that led to his own conversion. He was particularly influenced by the work of Craig Keener, a contemporary New Testament scholar. “I became convinced that there is some supernatural agent out there who answers at least to the name of Jesus and heals people, raises them from the dead.” Keener’s books, he says, “contain some pretty convincing cases of resurrection, no silver bullets, but pretty compelling.”
He was also in constant conversation with Schmid. They argued about the Papacy, and the eucharist. They agreed that the evidence favored Catholicism, rather than, say, Orthodoxy. Both were won over by the fine-tuning argument, which says the properties of the universe that allow for human existence, from the strength of gravity to the mass of the electron, are so specific that they call out for an explanation beyond randomness. “The probabilities involved here are insane,” said Schmid.
Finally, McKay was confirmed, in April, which involved getting anointed with oil and making vows. “I feel like I’ve discovered the fullness of truth,” McKay told me of his conversion. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” While his evangelical family has been very supportive, McKay said that “they’re not excited about the change, understandably,” and that the transition has been “very hard” for his wife, who is a Protestant. “She came to my confirmation, which I’m very thankful for.”
After their conversion, McKay and Schmid set up a Substack dedicated to the defense of Catholicism.
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