Hello. My name is Glenn White and I am the founder of Agnostic Christianity and the owner of this website: Agnostic-Christianity.com.
I was born in the early 1950s and spent most of that decade as a weird kid with Mickey Mouse ears living in an ethnic Russian neighborhood on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. My grandparents immigrated from Tsarist Russia and settled there during World War I. My mother was born there in the early 1920s, so I’m 2nd generation San Franciscan. My dad was born in The Bronx in the 1920s but was raised in a Catholic orphanage during the Great Depression. After moving west after World War II, he married my mother in the late 1940s who already had 2 children from a previous marriage.
Shortly after moving to Daly City in 1960, my parents split up. The last time I would see my father was in the summer of 1964. 2 years later, my mom remarried and I moved across the Bay to Alameda. During that time in Daly City, I was a geeky kid, reading crazy books about World War I and II and European history going back to the Middle Ages, who couldn’t get a date.
That all changed when, while living with my step dad’s family in Alameda, I found myself in the Haight Ashbury by chance during the Summer of Love where all my geekiness plus long hair made me cool. Very cool. So I spent my last year in high school fairly popular and eagerly awaited a repeat of the Summer of Love that never happened. Instead my mom divorced again so I lived with my single mom, on and off, until 1972.
At the end of summer, 1968, I was in a Jesus Freak commune, living like a monk, working, praying and reading the Bible until I “escaped” with another guy named Ken who knew of this cool commune in Southern California east of LA in the dessert that was just like the Summer of Love in the Haight Ashbury. In fact, he said, they came from there. So we stopped at my mom’s and went to a concert in SF with some friends and Ken got sick, spitting up blood. We took him to the hospital and they said he had hepatitis and come back the next day. The next day Ken left for the hospital and never came back. I never found the commune and never found the Summer of Love again. I struggled with my religion for decades after that, going from believer, to agnostic, to Greek pagan, back to believer and so forth.
1969 I went to Merritt College for the Spring quarter and later that summer, when the Charlie Manson story was breaking, I found myself in Lake Tahoe driving a friend’s brand new 1969 Shelby Mustang. I satisfied all my dreams of achieving coolness from my geeky days in Daly City. That Labor Day week, when I was cruising Hwy 50, I met a girl who would become my wife of 52 years. After that summer I went back to my mom’s and, later, my new girlfriend and I attended the Altamont Rock Concert east of Livermore where the Rolling Stones played. That was the end of the 1960s.
After the 1960s, I began a normal adult life, and I married in 1971. In 1972, I started a career in Data Processing. After the birth of our first daughter in 1974, we bought our first house in Dublin Ca in 1975 and had our second daughter in 1976. Then we bought our current home in 1978. My career spanned 48 years, starting in Data Processing as a computer programmer and ending in IT as a software developer in 2020.
During that time I continued my geeky reading of the Bible, history, mythology and some archaeology. We’ve travelled to Western Europe and British Isles, Southern Europe, Israel, Jordan and Egypt, Tunisia, Japan and China. We drove to Mexico City and back in the 1970s and in 2023 I drove across country with my daughter going east and with my wife coming back west. I can honestly say that I’ve had a full and satisfying life with travel, finances, career and family. I have been blessed and have been extremely lucky despite myself.
So in the spring of 2024 I decided to start a website to express my thoughts and invite others to come and share their thoughts on religion, history, mythology, archaeology and, yes, politics, if necessary. And agnostic-christianity.com is the result of that decision.
See Glenn's story in music by visiting Glenn's Playlist or see Glenn's more detailed spiritual journey by visiting Glenn's Witness:
Absolutely LOVE your story Glenn.... Thank you for sharing.
Absolutely LOVE your story!! Thank you for sharing. :)