From Laid-Back Buddhist to Catholic on a Mission

Today, Davison is executive director of Catholic World Mission, an apostolate designed to transform Third World poverty, particularly in Latin America, through long-term, Gospel-based assistance rather than quick-fix approaches. The former Air Force officer and marketing executive spoke with Register correspondent Ellen Rossini about his personal transformation.

What were the spiritual influences in your early life?

I grew up in a Methodist family in North Dakota and it was always a very happy family. We went to church every Sunday, and my mother would read Bible stories to us as bedtime stories. We didn't miss church for any reason, always prayed before the meals and ate as a family together at least two times a day.

When I was 6 years old, my mother's mother died. I remember praying and just wondering how this all fit, what really happens when you die and knowing you're supposed to go to heaven. From that time on it was just the basics of Christianity, and I didn't really confront them or think about them too much. It was just a given in my life.

You lost your faith in college. How did you regain it?

I still felt Christianity was important until my senior year, when I took a “Great Religions of the World” course. The professor was very good at presenting the various religions as kind of historical time periods. So first you have all these Eastern religions that he would present as philosophies. He would always present them very sympathetically and then at the end point out all the problems and difficulties. When it came time for Christianity, he began by saying, “Here are the inconsistencies.” For example, this idea of one God. Let's go back to the beginning in Genesis: “Let us make man in our image.” So, the professor said, this whole idea of one God at the beginning is just a misunderstanding, a misreading. He would show various things in the Bible that were inconsistent with the Christian idea — human sacrifices, this sort of thing.

At that point I was “cured” of my Christianity. I went off to grad school at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and I carried with me this new Eastern religion.

How did this new belief system work out for you?

Now that I look back, what is so attractive about [Eastern philosophy] is there is no moral demand made upon you. You can create your own religion, your own personal path to God, whatever fits your personality. It was nice, because I didn't really have to do anything. There isn't any life after death, there's just this great spiritual consciousness that we're either more or less in touch with.

There were a number of my friends [at Oxford] that were studying to be priests, and other friends who were Catholic, and we'd have discussions.

One time a friend said, “So if this is all there is, and you’re telling me that Buddha tells us that life is suffering, and we need to minimize suffering, you're saying we need to minimize life. That doesn't make any sense.” As he was leaving, he said, “The thing I don't understand is how you could possibly live really believing this.” Both of those phrases really stuck in my mind.

Yet that wasn't enough to bring you back to Christianity. What led you back?

When I got married, my wife was Catholic, but she was not really practicing. Every once in awhile she'd go to Mass. We had discussions — and they were not good discussions — about religion, but we could always just drop it. When our first child was born, we got her baptized, and I had a little difficulty with that. But again I just rationalized — it's just a ritual, it's meaningless. My wife didn't really understand [baptism], but she felt she should [do it]. I said fine, there's no harm done.

Then when it reached the point that we had to decide how to educate our daughter, we came under the influence of some Baptist home schoolers nearby. My wife became more and more friends with these people, and they of course wanted to evangelize us.

They were very nice, very sincere and very open with their beliefs and their faith in a very friendly, attractive manner. So one evening they invited us to their church to a presentation being made by a scientist, a biologist.

This man, as an atheist and anti-Christian, had set out to prove that the whole basis of Christianity is false — you have no real sources, the sources don't make sense, they're contradictory, it's all based on an illusion. So he basically started from a historical perspective — you take a look at the number of sources you have, how close they are to the time of the events they're recording, do they contradict each other, how consistent are they, the error rate, and then you can determine whether they're reliable or not.

What did he find out about the historicity of the Bible?

What he discovered was that of all the ancient documents that we have, we have more copies — many, many more copies of the New Testament and the Gospels — than any other ancient writing. The copies we have are closer to the time the originals were written than anything you've ever seen. And the internal consistency is supernatural.

There were marginal percent differences that you could obviously have a scribe missing a letter or missing a word, but not like you'd find in Julius Caesar's war diaries, where entire chapters are missing. In the Iliad or the Odyssey or the Bhagavad Gita, where you have conflicting texts, and the experts say this must be the real one and this is some corruption that says something completely different from this text, and we'll just choose one. In the Gospels it's less than half a percent; they're all absolutely consistent.

From this I have to conclude that this is history. I have to conclude that this man Jesus Christ is a historical figure. He claimed he was God. He did things that God would do. He must be God.

What was it about this presentation that won you over?

I have a history degree. I had never had this religion presented to me as anything other than a philosophy in which it apparently fell short. It was not treated as the historical reality of this man Jesus but as a “Christ-consciousness.” But this is not somebody that you can equate with Confucius or Buddha. I was convinced. I got his book; I read his book. And I said, Okay, I guess I have to be Christian because Christ actually lived, he was God, nobody else did these things, nobody else claimed to be God. I guess I better do what he says.

So quite quickly, my wife reverts, and it looks at this point that we're going to become evangelical Baptists because the people that brought the intellectual conversion are now leading us through Bible studies.

How then did you come into the Catholic Church?

My wife, with these Catholic sensibilities, said, “I think I'm going to have to be Baptist and evangelical. But from an aesthetic perspective, having been in Europe with these beautiful churches, beautiful art, I can't believe that that's bad, and I have to go to these plain churches.” So before we actually did that, she went to a Catholic bookstore, walked in and said, “Listen, I need one book, a short book, that explains the difference between Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism. We don't have time; we're not going to read anything long. I need something I know my husband will read.“

And the woman said, “Here's your book, Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, right here, by David Currie.” My wife took it home, she read it, she kept it in the car, and she said, “We're leaving Virginia with a baby sitter, you're coming with me, and we're going to a restaurant. You have to read this book.” Again it was a purely intellectual approach, explaining the teachings from the Bible and misunderstandings, etc. So I read the book, and again, probably in another hour and a half or two hours, we're Catholic.

What about your evangelical friends?

For the next few months we're finishing up Bible studies with the group that included a number of ex-Catholics. And after these Bible studies we'd call them on the phone and say, “I know it's 10 o'clock at night and you have to go to work, but come over here, I've got to correct some misinformation they gave you.”

By this time we're back to the Catholic bookstore buying a lot more books, and we have all the books out and we're saying, What they told you here wasn't true, this is inconsistent, this says that, that says the other thing.

At the end of that Bible study I'm accepted into the Church, my wife reverts back. With another couple, the wife becomes a fervent Catholic, her husband who was never confirmed is back in RCIA, and he gets confirmed. There was another couple where the wife was Catholic, the husband wasn't. Although it was unclear, suddenly they have another child when they were never going to have a child again.

How long have you been Catholic?

I've been Catholic now for five years. There are human beings alive in our family that would not be alive if we weren't Catholic, because we'd had the children we were going to have. Our oldest is 10, and the others are 6, 4, 2 and 1.

It's been obviously very fast. We were set up. God just said, “I don't want to waste a whole lot of time with you.”

How did this conversion lead to a career change?

I had started the master's in theology program through Ave Maria's Institute for Pastoral Theology; I just finished that in May. As I went through that program after the second year I started thinking, I have these business skills, too. I'm selling payroll services; I'm selling Internet types of capabilities. Is this really what I'm supposed to do? I decided it wasn't.

I ended up doing business strategy, marketing-consulting kinds of things just as the Internet bubble burst. When no other consultant can find work I can find work, because I'm going to Catholic apostolates and Catholic organizations and saying, “You need marketing help, you need business strategy help.”

How did you arrive at Catholic World Mission?

I'm living in Northern California, where it's very expensive. I'm now flying all over the place doing little contracts with Catholic organizations that don't have a lot of money but love the expertise. It's not real stable. I have four children, a fifth on the way, and we decide I really can't be doing this consulting type of thing.

My wife and I are praying, “Just give me a job.” I'm too busy trying to make money. If I'm supposed to have some sort of consistent, stable, full-time job, make it very obvious to me. I don't know what my wife was praying, but I just prayed, “I want it to be this obvious: Have someone make me an offer for a full-time job.”

I end up at Catholic World Mission, what I thought was another consulting opportunity. They said, “Could you come up and just talk to us?” I said, “Do you have a job?” And they said, “No, but we could always use some marketing help.” It's very small. My wife and I said, “There's no way there is a consulting job here.” But it's good to meet people; it's a networking opportunity. I said, “I'll just do it. I can take a day.”

It's the end of the day, and they say, “Have you ever heard of Catholic World Mission?” I said, “No. That's your first problem.” That's when they said they were looking for an executive director.

How do your work and faith life now intersect?

It's perfect because [at Catholic World Mission], we evangelize. We teach people to be Catholic. We are dealing with poverty from a Catholic perspective: We have a human body, we have a mind, and we have a spirit. We approach it from all the dimensions.

There is no other job, I think, that would have been as attractive to me. We wanted to learn more and more about the faith, learn more about the universal Church and the body of Christ, to not just be dealing with middle-class people but going down to El Salvador, going down to Mexico, going on the medical missions.

It's been great for me spiritually because I've been let out to see the rest of the Church and put face-to-face with the Catholic spirituality that is not purely intellectual, like my whole story has been, but that's felt in the heart, despite an ignorance of the faith.

Ellen Rossini writes from Richardson, Texas.

------- EXCERPT: Ken Davison was raised a Methodist, rejected Christianity for Buddhism, married a nonpracticing Catholic and almost became a Baptist.