Zac Johnson, Cofounder, Truthly · July 25, 2026
I grew up Catholic in the Bible Belt, and by my late teens my favorite thing to do was talk about religion. Which meant I got myself in trouble a lot.
But nobody handed me the faith. I found it myself, at seventeen, mostly by accident. A Protestant preacher said I had to make a personal decision, I came across some books, and something caught. I spent the next several years reading like it was my job.
I met Jake during those years. We were both dating girls from Protestant traditions, and we spent a lot of time talking about the Bible, Christian history, and what was actually true. Those conversations were long and sometimes hard.
The conversations with their families were something else.
There was a "Bible study" that felt like it might come to blows. There was a time when one of them wasn't allowed to come home. And there was a Thanksgiving we've been having some version of ever since. I said what I wanted to say. I didn't say it well.
Both of our girlfriends came into the Church. They've been our wives for over ten years. One of my wife's family members followed her in, and that conversion led to another. Friends who were closed off a decade ago ask more questions now.
It doesn't always go that way. Plenty of these conversations don't end well, and some of the people I love most still won't have them.
Which is probably why we're told not to talk about religion. We see it as a matter of preference rather than a matter of truth. And if it were just about preference, pressing it would be rude — you'd be trying to make someone like what you like.
But C.S. Lewis put it as plainly as it can be put: Christianity, “if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
Religion is about truth, not preference. Which means pressing it isn't rude. It’s one of the friendliest things you could do. These are the ultimate questions — what we were made for, what will make us happy, what happens after we die — and seeking the answers, for ourselves and for those we love, is the most important thing we could do with our lives.
So the problem was never that we talk about religion too much. It's that most of us can't talk about it at all.
Somewhere in the middle of all that reading, I started telling my mom what I was finding. I remember watching her face. She was close to tears. She had been going to Mass her whole life and nobody had ever told her any of it.
She wasn't unwilling. She was never given it. And what I have, I have because I happened to get obsessed at seventeen. That isn't a virtue. It's a fluke — and a terrible way to hand on something that can't be moderately important.
So Jake and I built something to help change that. You can ask Truthly anything about the faith and get a clear answer — what the Church teaches, why, and where it came from. Then it's yours. And, just as important, you can hand it on to someone else.
It isn't meant to have the conversation for you. It's meant to make sure you can.
If there's something you were never told, you can ask it here.