Why would you trust the destiny of your eternal soul to a system of belief that someone else thought through?

That’s how my guest Abdu Murray used to talk to Christians.

He grew up a committed Shi‘a Muslim in suburban Michigan, the tall, athletic “strange duck” who loved both basketball and philosophy. In the 1980s and ‘90s, it was still fashionable to say you were a Christian, whether or not you meant it. Abdu would look these “cultural Christians” in the eye and ask a question that stopped them cold:

“Why are you a Christian?”

They almost never had an answer beyond, “My family is… we go on Christmas and Easter… it’s just what we do.”

Then came his line about the destiny of their eternal soul.

That nine‑year investigation—from defending Islam against Christianity, to embracing the very faith he once attacked—is at the heart of his work today, and of his newest book, Fake ID: How AI and Identity Ideology Are Collapsing Reality, and What You Can Do About It.

Our conversation left me with three intertwined lessons:

Why the search for truth still matters, even when it’s uncomfortable.
How our culture has thinned out identity into something paper‑fragile.

And why we desperately need a way to hold on to objective truth without turning into the caricature of a fundamentalist.

A Natural‑Born Advocate Meets Cultural Christianity

Abdu’s parents immigrated from Lebanon. His father was a devout Muslim; his mother, originally Catholic, embraced Islam and became an even more committed Muslim herself. Their home was serious about faith.

He grew up in southeast Michigan, where his Lebanese Muslim family were, as he put it, “the dollop of olive oil in the pot of rice.” Exotic, interesting, and very much a minority. This was long before 9/11; most Americans weren’t thinking about Islam. But they were curious enough that he could talk to them.

From a young age he absorbed two convictions:

Islam is true. Anything that contradicts its core claims is, by definition, false.
Truth is objective. “True is true whether anyone believes it or not,” he told me. “Our opinions are sort of irrelevant.”

Relativism—“what’s true for you is true for you, what’s true for me is true for me”—simply didn’t fit with his worldview, or with reality as he experienced it.

At the same time, he was a 6’7” athlete, a martial artist, a scholarship‑level basketball player. “Super jocky, super sportsy,” as he said. But he also loved “nerdy stuff”—arguments about God, meaning, and truth.

So he did what natural‑born advocates do: he went after other people’s beliefs.

Muslim kids in the West are often raised on a steady diet of apologetics (reasons to believe Islam is true) and polemics (arguments for why other faiths, especially Christianity, are false). Christianity was “low‑hanging fruit,” as he put it. In his mind, Islam wasn’t just another chapter in a story; it was college, while Judaism was grade school and Christianity high school.

He used that image to keep himself anchored as a Muslim in a society he saw as “Christian culture.” His identity wasn’t just in converting others; it was in staying Muslim despite social pressure to assimilate.

Then something happened he didn’t intend.

As he continued to challenge Christians—on the Trinity, the incarnation, the cross—he began to encounter answers that didn’t fit the caricatures he’d been given. He found himself questioning whether his assumptions about Jesus actually lined up with the historical and textual evidence.

He also discovered something about himself: he was, in his own words, a “natural‑born advocate” who loved both the psychology of how people think and the rigor of how evidence is marshaled.

He studied psychology in college, went on to law school, and became a trial lawyer. And right as he passed the bar and began his legal career, he did something that shocked his family and friends:

He became a Christian.

The very doctrines he had once thought insulted God’s greatness—the Trinity, the incarnation, the cross—he now saw as demonstrating that greatness.

The faith he’d tried hardest not to have turned out to be the one he believed was actually true.

The Search for Truth Is Glorious… and Uncomfortable

Abdu spent nine years examining Christianity’s claims:

Historically: Did Jesus actually live, die by crucifixion, and rise?
Textually: Are the New Testament documents reliable?
Philosophically: Does the Christian understanding of God make coherent sense?
Theologically: Does the cross fit with what earlier revelation (including the Hebrew Bible) anticipates?
Scientifically: Is a rational belief in God compatible with what we know of the world?

This wasn’t a quick emotional decision. It was a slow, sometimes agonizing journey.

“I understand what it’s like,” he told me, “to have your identity wrapped up in your religious expression, and then to have to confront the possibility that some of what you’ve built on is wrong.”

He’s honest about the cost:

Disappointing family and community.
Losing the ready‑made identity that came with being part of a minority faith in America.
Admitting that some of what he’d confidently argued for years didn’t hold up.

But he’s also clear about the reward:

“The search for truth is actually glorious and always worth it—even when it’s uncomfortable. In fact, especially when it’s uncomfortable.”

That line resonated deeply with me.

I’ve walked my own path from a very literalist, fundamentalist approach to the Bible, through years of wrestling with theology and experience, into the Bahá’í understanding of progressive revelation. I know what it’s like to have cherished certainties challenged—not by cynicism, but by deeper study and honest questions.

In a culture that often treats “deconstruction” as an end in itself, Abdu and I share a conviction: the search is not the destination. Truth is.

And that brings us to a tricky subject.

Objective Truth vs. the Caricature of Fundamentalism

We live in a time when the phrase “objective truth” is almost automatically associated with backwardness, bigotry, or “fundamentalism.”

Abdu doesn’t accept that either.

He makes a simple logical point:

If you say, “There are no objective truths,”
That statement itself must be objectively true for it to mean anything.
Which means you’ve just asserted the existence of at least one objective truth.

So the question isn’t whether objective truth exists. The question is:

How do we know it (that’s an epistemology problem)?
And how do we treat people who disagree (that’s a moral and spiritual problem)?

On the first, he’s modest. Our knowledge is imperfect; our reasoning is fallible. We “approximate” the truth as best we can, with humility.

On the second, he’s uncompromising—and this is where his commitment to objective truth actually makes him less fundamentalist in the worst sense.

The key is a doctrine central to both Christianity and the Bahá’í Faith, and to this show’s name:

Every human being is created in the image of God.

No matter what they believe. No matter what they say, think, or do.

For Abdu, that means:

The person has an inviolable worth, a value God Himself has stamped on them.
Their ideas do not share that inviolability.

He puts it this way:

“I can divorce the value of someone’s idea from the value of the person. I can work hard to refute or even ‘combat’ an idea I think is false or harmful—but I dare not try to eradicate the person who holds it.”

That’s a crucial distinction we are rapidly losing.

When identities become paper‑thin, glued to our opinions by the weakest adhesive, then:

Criticizing my ideas feels like attacking my very existence.
Disagreement becomes “denying my right to be.”
And if I feel that way about myself, I will treat your positions the same way.

“This,” Abdu said, “is why cancel culture in the West has leveled up to assassination culture.”

We’ve stopped believing there is a difference between person and position, between image‑bearer and idea.

A robust belief in the imago Dei—everyone made in the image of God—actually provides a non‑fundamentalist way to hold on to objective truth:

It says, “Yes, some things are genuinely true and some genuinely false.”
It also says, “The person in front of me is more than the sum of their current opinions.”

You can see why I wanted this conversation on a show called Created in the Image of God.

How Identity Got So Thin

Abdu offered a helpful mini‑history of how we got from a thick, transcendent self to the fragile, easily‑shattered identities we see today.

In broad strokes:

Classical view:
- We are embodied souls: a real body, and a real immaterial soul capable of communion with God and others.
- Our deepest identity lies in that soul and its relationship to the divine—what both Christianity and the Bahá’í Faith would call the image of God.
Psychological self:
- Over time, we “over‑psychologized” and “under‑spiritualized” ourselves.
- The focus shifted to trauma, inner narratives, emotions. Still meaningful, but increasingly inward and horizontal, less vertical.
Identity as label:
- In recent decades, “identity” has been reduced to the sum of our self‑chosen labels and opinions.
- As Abdu put it, today’s self is “barely thicker than the bumper stickers we slap on the back of our Subarus.”

In that context:

To critique someone’s position is to attack them.
There’s little room for “hate the sin, love the sinner”—a phrase you and I grew up hearing, now deconstructed into oblivion.
Nuance dies. Everything is existential.

We see it in politics, gender debates, race conversations—and, of course, in religion.

Abdu’s proposal isn’t to retreat into some imagined golden age, or to flatten all differences. It’s to:

Recover a thicker identity rooted in the image of God.
Relearn the art of separating people from ideas.
Recommit to a patient, humble search for truth—even when it threatens our current self‑understanding.

Where This Leaves Us

Abdu’s story raises as many questions as it answers. We don’t agree on everything theologically. My Bahá’í understanding of progressive revelation differs from his evangelical Christian convictions in key ways.

But we do agree on these:

Truth is real, not merely constructed.
Human beings are more than machines, more than data, more than feelings.
Identity must be rooted in something deeper than our current opinions and alliances.
And the search for truth, pursued with integrity and humility, is always worth the discomfort.

You are created in the image of God.

And God loves His creation.

That means you:

Can ask hard questions without fear that God will punish your honesty.
Can critique and be critiqued without losing your worth.
Can walk into conversations across deep divides—not to win a war, but to seek what is true, together.

If Abdu’s journey from Shi‘a Islam to Christianity teaches us anything, it’s that the One who made us is big enough to handle our doubts and bold enough to call us to change.

The question is whether we will love truth enough to follow it where it leads.

Sneak Peek: Tonight on Created in the Image of God

On tonight’s episode, I’ll be joined by Gina Zurlo, senior researcher and lecturer in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, and co‑director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.

Gina edits the World Christian Database and helped compile the World Christian Encyclopedia, which she personally presented to Pope Francis in 2019.

We’ll talk about:

How you even begin to track and update data on religious affiliation in every country on earth, across almost every world religion and denomination.
What the numbers actually show about where Christianity—and other major faiths—are growing, shifting, or declining.
How understanding these quantitative trends can help local communities, churches, and seekers situate themselves in the bigger picture of what God is doing in the world.

If you’ve ever wondered what the global religious landscape really looks like—beyond headlines and anecdotes—this conversation will be eye‑opening.

Join us tonight at 8 PM Central for Created in the Image of God with Gina Zurlo.