When he was growing up, his family was not religious. The actor said, “When I was growing up, we didn’t go to church.”
“If you had asked me, I would have said I would be in the category of an atheist at 16 years old, 17 years old,” he surprisingly revealed later.
“I think I caught my atheism—it was by contagion,” he shared, he was referring to his teachers who taught him science and other subjects and regarded religion as “just a fairy tale.”
A chance encounter made the young boy reconsider his relationship with faith.
He met a girl he liked, and she asked him to attend church with her and her family. “I’ll be honest. It wasn’t because I was interested in God. I was interested in the girl,” he later admitted in a conversation.
However the visit to the church changed his life and the impact of it was even visible to his friends in Hollywood.
The 17-year-old’s real-life experience with his faith began to influence how he approached his role in “Growing Pains.” The show runners and his co-stars did not let this change go unnoticed.
