The co-founder of the largest free online encyclopedia in the world is signaling his plans to convert to Christianity after spending most of his adult life as a religious skeptic.
In a thread posted to X on Thursday, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announced his intention to “seek to be confirmed in early September into the Anglican Church of North America.” Sanger quipped that he was “fairly sure they’ll let me in.”
Sanger explained why he decided to join the Anglican Church, noting, “I attended a local ACNA church last Sunday, and I absolutely loved the liturgy, which I found deeply spiritual, as well as the fellowship.”
He added, “It helps that the liturgy is all on overhead projectors, and the acoustics are such that I could actually hear the sermon if I turned my hearing aids all the way up.”
Sanger, who spent most of his adult life as a religious skeptic, detailed his newfound embrace of Christianity in a February blog post on his personal website. While Sanger stopped believing in God as a teenager, he had spent the past two decades studying Christianity on his own time as he noticed growing anti-Christian sentiment in the United States.
After reading the Gospel accounts in February 2020, Sanger concluded that he does believe in God and needed to “pray to God properly.” He characterized his initial theological beliefs as “something like an Orthodox Christian faith” while acknowledging that he had “not yet adopted a church home” and was continuing to engage in intense research to determine which denomination of Christianity he wanted to join.
In a blog post published on Aug. 16, five days before he announced his plans to join the Anglican Church of North America, Sanger said he had narrowed his options down to three, including the Anglican Church of North America, the Evangelical Free Church of America and the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. The Aug. 16 entry marked the third in a series of blog posts written by Sanger examining each of the Christian denominations.
Sanger identified the ACNA as “entirely consistent with my approach” because “they have been set up to be welcoming to a wide variety of Christians, while being firm on the fundamentals.”
He also stressed that he did “not want to be pressured by those who approach theology dogmatically and who have no sympathy with a systematic, careful approach to God’s own truth, one that leaves some questions answered.” He maintained that its “intellectual style” made the ACNA “more simpatico” with his “outlook.”
While Sanger played an instrumental role in founding Wikipedia at the beginning of the 21st century, he has since emerged as a staunch critic of the online encyclopedia. In 2020, Sanger contended that the site’s neutrality policy was “dead.”
According to Sanger, “There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call ‘false balance.’ The notion that we should avoid ‘false balance’ is directly contrary to the original neutrality policy.”
Sanger pointed to Wikipedia’s piece about Jesus as an example of how it no longer has a neutral approach. “It simply asserts, again in its own voice, that ‘the quest for the historical Jesus has yielded major uncertainty on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the Jesus portrayed in the Bible reflects the historical Jesus,” he said.
“In another place, the article simply asserts, ‘the gospels are not independent nor consistent records of Jesus’ ‘life.’ A great many Christians would take issue with such statements, which means it is not neutral for that reason — in other words, the very fact that most Christians believe in the historical reliability of the Gospels, and that they are wholly consistent, means that the article is biased if it simply asserts, without attribution or qualification, that this is a matter of ‘major uncertainty.’”
Classifying the article as “a ‘liberal’ academic discussion of Jesus” that focused “especially on assorted difficulties and controversies, while failing to explain traditional or orthodox views of those issues,” Sanger suggested that “it might be ‘academic,’ but what it is not is neutral, not in the original sense we defined for Wikipedia.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
