New York content creator Brian Guan planned to spend 30 days publicly faking Christianity on Instagram as a social experiment — but by day 20, he says the faith became real.
“This…is real, dude,” Guan said in a video posted to his Instagram account, @bdguan. “Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior…I’m not pretending anymore.”
That kind of turnaround is exactly why Movieguide® pays attention to stories like this one. This outlet has previously reported on a TikTok user named Felicia, who documented her own unexpected pull toward God after months of posting videos about her atheism. “Now I’m really confused because all I see are videos about God and Jesus, and I actually prayed,” she told followers. Guan’s public experiment follows a similar arc: a skeptic invites cameras into a spiritual search he never expected to take seriously, and the internet watches him arrive somewhere real.
Guan, a former cryptocurrency company founder, walked away from Christianity in college over what he described as concerns about political identity and nationalism. Years later, after he left the crypto industry feeling jaded, he went in search of deeper meaning and settled on an experiment he called “faithless Christianity” — he would act like a believer before he actually believed.
“Practice first, let faith catch up,” Guan wrote on Instagram, laying out the logic behind the challenge. His mornings started with an admittedly awkward prayer: “God, I don’t know if you’re real, but …”
Five days into the challenge, Guan wasn’t sure what to make of his own results. He questioned whether the sense of uplift he felt came from genuine spiritual change or simply from the attention his videos were drawing online.
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The changes kept showing up regardless. Guan told followers his nicotine addiction started to fade within eight days, and he found himself more patient and kind toward strangers than before. He compared the discipline to a gym routine — the results depend less on motivation than on simply showing up each day.
The practice reshaped his relationships, too. Guan and his girlfriend began to read the Gospel of John and the book of Acts together, and he recommitted to honoring his mother, a biblical command he said he’d neglected.
Not every part of the journey has been comfortable. Guan has also described troubling nightmares since he began to take his faith seriously, and he’s asked his followers to pray against what he calls spiritual opposition.
His take on evangelism sounds less like a sermon than a life philosophy.
“The best way to convert people, in my opinion, is just being really kind and happy and at peace,” he said.
Whatever pushed Guan to open a Bible in the first place, the story lands on familiar ground for Christian families: belief doesn’t always arrive the way people expect it to. Sometimes it starts as a bit, a challenge, a stunt built for the algorithm — and turns into something a person can no longer pretend isn’t real.
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