Laurie said that Pastor Chuck Smith, founder of the Calvary Chapel movement, was also a father figure to him. Laurie recounted first seeing Smith preach. He said, “I looked at him and just [thought], ‘Ugh, an adult. I don’t want to listen to an adult.’”
“And he opened the Bible up, and he began to speak in such an understandable way,” Laurie said. “So he’s like a father but a benevolent father.”
Peterson pointed out that “there’s an innate longing for the realization of certain patterns.”
“The longing is vague and there’s various ways that it could be catalyzed,” Peterson said. “But my sense as a developmental psychologist is that a neurologically intact child needs one good example. Zero is too few. That’s fatal, so to speak. But if you’re neurologically intact, one example will do the trick.”
Peterson went on to describe his own teenage experience of Christian classmates, saying that he was “leery of them.”
“[Friedrich] Nietzsche said that most morality is cowardice,” Peterson said. “What he meant often was that people who were afraid justified their fear by giving it a facade of the moral.”
“And what I noticed about the ‘moral’ Christian teenagers that I knew is that they were timid and afraid and obedient, and they justified that by reference to their religious morality,” he continued. “When I watched the more religious types, they were too afraid to engage in life.”
For Laurie’s part, he said he “didn’t have any religious hypocrisy to rebel against” because he “didn’t know any religious people.” He even said that when he first came to faith under the teaching of Lonnie Frisbee, “no one invited me,” but he just “showed up” to the event being held on campus.
Even shortly after he came to faith, Laurie said that he had very little guidance. Nevertheless, he said, “God says, ‘Those who seek me will find me.’ And I think that if we genuinely reach out to God, God will respond.”
Eventually, with the support of Chuck Smith, Laurie found himself in the unlikely position of leading a new church plant. Today, Harvest Christian Fellowship is a multicampus megachurch, and Laurie’s Harvest Crusades have resulted in thousands of people turning to faith.
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Reflecting on the hardships he has endured throughout his life, including the loss of his eldest son in a car accident, Laurie said, “Even in tragedy, God can still do amazing things.”
