One night in high school, I showed up to a house party with some classmates. In the chaos of people mingling and dancing, I spotted a group of tough-looking guys in the corner.
Many of them had their heads shaved. They wore Doc Marten boots and red or white suspenders. It was a local neo-Nazi skinhead crew.
At that time, I was an angsty teenager who didn’t have many friends. I knew the men in the corner were powerful, and they called each other brothers. What’s more, they saw me standing nearby and invited me over, saying, “Hey, bro, come here. Have a beer.” I felt a thrill at being seen and chosen and eagerly took up their offer.
Over the following weeks, they invited me to gatherings, informal hangouts, and rallies around my hometown of Phoenix. Eventually, I shaved my head and donned the uniform of laces, braces, and boots, and the skinheads became my new family.
Mostly we’d party, get drunk, and listen to heavy metal. The majority of the 30 or so members had day jobs—except for the guy with a swastika tattooed on one eye who was always wondering why no one would hire him.
Sometimes we would join or initiate street fights, fiercely defending our own. If we saw a white man walking around with a Black woman, we’d scream expletives and call him a race traitor. At our gatherings, we chanted white supremacist propaganda with references to “Heil Hitler,” proclaiming that white people were superior to all others and that nonwhites should “go back to where they came from.”
When we arrived at parties, we were respected, even feared. I sat in the corner with my group and knew that no one was going to mess with me.
In exchange for this sense of security, I joined a movement that (I know now) made itself a vile threat to others. What started as an antidote to my own insecurities led me to dehumanize others and engage in violence toward people of color and their communities.
But my desire to join this crew did not start by reading Mein Kampf. What drew me was the things the group offered: a sense of strength and inclusion in something greater than myself. The belonging, no matter how flawed, came first. Ideology followed.
Years later, a different invitation to belong led me to Jesus.
I was raised by loving Christian parents. Because of the church I attended as a kid, much of what I perceived to be Christianity was a message of “Don’t do these things or God will punish you.” This list of don’ts included dancing, smoking, drinking alcohol, and watching R-rated movies.
But as I entered junior high in the early ’90s, I noticed that many churchgoers hypocritically did the things on the list of vices. I began to suspect that Christianity was all a scam.
When I visited the house of a pastor and spotted a VHS copy of The Terminator—a forbidden R-rated film—I decided, in my adolescent mind, that this was all the proof I needed to show that Christianity was a hoax. I gave up right then on God and his church.
During my time as a neo-Nazi, however, the same feeling of disillusionment crept in. As I surveyed my skinhead peers, I saw they had no real joy, financial stability, or actual strength.
Instead, they were running from the law, ruining their careers, and destroying their families. The way they lived their lives did not match the promises of their ideology. After a few years in the movement, I grew suspicious that their pledges of safety, belonging, and purpose—which I had embraced—were in fact hollow.
In 2000, federal law officers started rounding up skinheads in the Phoenix area for selling ecstasy, throwing our group into disarray. Many members scattered and left the group. Between that and my growing dissatisfaction, I knew it was time for me to leave too. I stopped attending gatherings, got a new phone, and moved to a different part of town.
I was in my early 20s, alone and aching for something real. Not knowing how to process all of this, I buried my insecurities with a combative stance toward anyone and anything that might threaten me. I had left neo-Nazism behind, but my anger remained and became my armor.
I had a good job and spent much of my time outside of work playing the drums, which I’d picked up in high school. While I still had a sense that God existed, I was resistant to religion in general and Christianity in particular. I didn’t want anything to do with what I perceived to be a hypocritical, self-righteous movement.
At the same time, I knew I couldn’t keep going about my life in isolation. Through that tiny crack in my armor, God began to pursue me—through a phone call from some place called Desert Springs Bible Church.
The lady on the phone had seen my number in the musician section of the local classifieds. She asked if I could fill in as a drummer for the worship team the upcoming Sunday. I thought, Why not? I guess I should do something good.
I expected it to feel unbearably awkward to step back inside a church after all those years, but I was surprised at how the worship team welcomed me without judgment or pretense and how natural it felt to be there. One Sunday became two, then three, and soon I was a part of the regular rotation.
After a time, one of the guys, Seth, invited me over for dinner at his house. I accepted, half expecting him to back out. But when I showed up, he and his wife, Jayme, served me a meal and even had a cold beer ready. That was not what I was expecting. We spent the evening talking and laughing.
They invited me back the next week and the week after that, until these dinners became a weekly ritual. There was no agenda, no pressure—just warm hospitality.
One evening, Seth said, “How about after dinner we talk about what makes you angry about Christianity?”
Oh, I was all in on this. I had a lot of rage and was ready to share it.
He patiently listened as I vented all my frustrations—the hypocrisy of Christians, the failures of pastors, and the shallow faith I’d seen in others. To my surprise, he wasn’t defensive. He nodded and said, “I share some of your concerns. I think Jesus does too.”
Sometimes he’d pull out his Bible and ask me to read a section of the Gospels, asking, “What do you think Jesus would say about this?”
I didn’t know it at the time, but he was discipling me—connecting me to the living Jesus. Gradually, I found that my heart had softened to the message of the gospel.
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My anger and resentment lingered, but they began to fade in the light of something new dawning in my life. I found myself liking this Jesus, and I wanted to know more. And the more I knew him, the more I wanted to follow him and be a part of what he was doing in the world.
That was more than 20 years ago. Much to my surprise, four years after that first dinner with Seth, I was asked to join the church staff. I went to seminary, became ordained, and now serve as the lead pastor of the church that welcomed me when I was lost.
I, who was once a skinhead, now lead a congregation committed to the biblical vision of a church made up of people from all races and walks of life. Importantly, at the Spirit’s leading, I have wrestled with the bigotry in my own heart, confessing and repenting both publicly and privately of the ways I took part in racist acts.
God in his mercy has also given me deep friendships with men and women of color, who have extended forgiveness to me, mentored me, and convicted me of sin that I could not (or would not) see without their perspectives.
This transformation—slow but real—began unexpectedly at a table. Seth and Jayme embraced me and modeled Jesus’ love week after week. They honored me by treating me as a friend and showing me how safe it could be to reconsider long-held beliefs and explore who Jesus really was. At their table, I put down my armor and began to take up my cross.
Jesus set exponentially more tables than he flipped. At the tables set by his people, even the broken neo-Nazi can experience God’s grace. And I am grateful to God that I did.
Caleb Campbell is pastor of Desert Springs Bible Church in Phoenix and the author of Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor.
This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Testimony".
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