In a moving interview, author and Daily Wire personality Andrew Klavan explained that he took a “long, long journey” to find Jesus, telling CBN’s Billy Hallowell that he had previously struggled with debilitating mental health issues for a decade, going on to find God and turn into a “joyful human being” thanks to what he described as a miracle.
For background, on August 2, 2025, Andrew Klavan spoke to Billy Hallowell about his journey of faith, his career as an author, and his belief in the importance of confronting “the reality of life” as a Christian, stressing the importance of being prepared to see and accept the darkness in the world instead of relying on “happy talk” and feel-good Christianity.
During the interview, Klavan explained that he had been prompted to explore Christianity by reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment during a dark time in his teenage years. He told Hallowell, “That idea that you cannot justify some things, that some things are just evil, started me thinking.” He added, “I went through some bad times in my youth. I had real mental problems. I lost 10 years to mental struggle. I came out of that in what I believe to be in a miraculous way.”
Moreover, Klavan said that he had gone from struggling with suicidal ideation to being a “joyful human being” after becoming a Christian. However, he clarified that he still confronts the darkness in the world through his writing, which he described as an exploration of “human nature to discover how we might find joy and beauty in the world while still being clear-eyed about the evil found in it.
Explaining further, Klavan told Hallowell, “I’m a crime writer and I always get this letter, ‘You call yourself a Christian and you write about all these horrible things, and these horrible people’ and they say horrible things.” He went on, “I was just trying to explain that I think that that’s an important thing to do. I think that it is actually a good thing to write about the evil that men do.”
Furthermore, the author and host said that he believes that confronting evil in a “very dark world” is an essential part of the Christian faith. He said, “If your faith is based on this kind of happy talk idea that nothing bad happens or that everything is going to turn out all right because you have faith, I think you’re going to lose your faith pretty quickly when you confront the reality of life.”
Continuing, Klavan summed up the philosophy of his work by saying that the human race is “part of a beautiful design in which, sometimes, you come into patches of darkness in that design.” He added, “I can’t quite grasp it because I’m just a person, but I think that art gives you a hint of how that works — the fact that you can have a sculpture like the Pieta, the dead Jesus lying in his mother’s arms, and it can be so beautiful at the same time it’s so incredibly tragic. It tells me that there is a beauty that can come out of darkness.”
Watch the interview:
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