Before psychology had become the explanation and answer for the human condition, there was a healthy debate regarding the claims of the born-again experience. Today, the presumption is, if there is a born-again experience, it’s a wholly psychological process, with no influence from an outside force (i.e., the Holy Spirit), and therefore, subject to the claims of science.

It has not always been this way. Here’s an excerpt from a book written in 1910 by a secular social reformer on the changes in prisoners who’d been born again:

“The evidence for the reality of these immense changes in character is overwhelming, and the only point where the psychologists find themselves at issue is the means by which they have been accomplished … conversion is the only means by which a radically bad person can be changed into a radically good person. … It produces not a change, but a revolution in character. It does not alter, it creates a new personality. Men who have been irretrievably bad, and under conversion have become ardent savers of the lost, tell us, with all the pathetic emphasis or their inexpressible and impenetrable discovery, that in the change that overcame them, they were conscious of being ‘born again.’”1