The New Kind of Flesh: "Abruptly cease to deny your god"

Here again, the autobiographical referent is to my time in Swaziland.  I think it was Christmas Eve 1982, in Manzini, an evening out with my fellow volunteers, conversation outside a church where Christmas was happening -- something hit me, and just like that I knew I had to set my heart at rest by rejoining my churchly roots.  I ceased to deny my god then, and continued to do so for more than two decades before returning to the atheism that reason alone (reason by itself sufficient?  reason the only route? solitary reason?) has remorselessly led me to in the end.

But that ceasing to deny, it was abrupt.  Nothing to do with evidence.  In fact, the very lack of evidence was evidence (if I were the same person now that I was then, I'm sure properly primed that I could have voted for Trump).