Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently rebuked a claim that he was formerly an atheist during an earlier stage in his life. While he admitted that he once pretended to believe in God, RFK Jr. maintained that he embodied the principle of “fake it till you make it,” which ultimately solidified his faith in God.
The presidential candidate made the remarks during an interview with conservative commentator Eric Metaxas on his podcast “Socrates in the City,” during which he detailed how he found faith. “I was never an atheist. I was raised in a deeply religious family, and I integrated that,” RFK Jr. said after Metaxas suggested he was an atheist at one point in his life.
However, after his father was assassinated in 1968 during his presidential bid, Kennedy resorted to heroin use at the young age of 15. He explained that living a life of drug addiction was no recipe for maintaining a relationship with God.
“I was doing that for a lot of years. And when you’re doing that, when you’re living against conscience, which is what happens when you’re an addict, you tend to push any kind of notion of God over the periphery of your horizons,” he continued.
However, he noted that he claimed to have had an “iron willpower” as a teenager where he gave up candy for Lent, not consuming anymore until he was in college. Although he said his special willpower was no match for his addiction.
“To me, most of the demoralizing feature of addiction was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself. I would tell myself at 9 o’clock in the morning, I’m never going to do that again, and at 4 o’clock, I’d be doing it,” he said, detailing the grip of drug addiction.
According to the presidential candidate, he eventually sobered up in 1983 after discovering research from famed psychiatrist Carl Jung, who discussed how those with religious convictions recover from addiction substantially better. This ultimately led RFK Jr. to put his faith in God. “I made a decision, an intellectual decision [that] I’m going to start believing in God,” he said.
However, he pointed out that he didn’t exactly know how to truly believe in God. “Then I was presented with the dilemma that anybody who’s in that position would say, which is ‘how do you start believing in something that you can’t see or smell or touch or taste or hear or acquire through senses?” he posited.
Explaining his method to attaining faith, Kennedy said, “He said, you fake it till you make it. And that was it. And he says the obedience will precede the evidence. In other words, if you start doing what you’re supposed to do, then you will then see an evidence, a tangible, undeniable evidence of God’s presence in life.”
He further described how he would envision God watching him at all times. “And so I started doing that. I just said, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m going to do.’ And I started pretending that, you know, … that God was there watching the whole time, everything I did in life was a test.” RFK said, “I don’t pretend anymore.”
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