James Beamont was raised Catholic, but when he graduated high school, he felt like he graduated from Catholicism as well. Encounters with Evangelical Christian friends led him to wrestle with who God was and what that meant for him, but it was when he met his wife, Kelli, that his faith really took off, and he became involved in Methodist youth ministry.

But when some friends of his became Catholic, James was deeply disturbed, and tried to talk them out of it. That process of revisiting the Catholic Church with eyes ended up helping James to see a number of aspects of Catholicism that he had simply missed as a cradle Catholic.