(ANALYSIS) After he decided to kick heroin, the young Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to think about daily life in a totally different way.

Rather than trusting his willpower to do the right thing for a whole day, he began dividing each day into 40 or more decisions.

“When the alarm goes off in the morning, do I get immediately out of bed, or do I stay in bed for an extra 20 minutes with my indolent thoughts?” asked Kennedy, speaking to a recent Socrates in the City gathering. “When I reach in the closet and pull out a pair of blue jeans, and all those wire hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the door like I used to and say that, 'I'm too much of a big shot, that's somebody else's job,' or do I go in there and clean up my own mess?”

After 14 years of addiction, Kennedy said he tried to act as if each decision was a moral test and God was watching. This was a leap of faith, since his addiction attacked the Catholic faith of his childhood.

This New York City audience — Socrates events focus on “life, God and other small topics” — knew Kennedy would discuss his independent White House campaign and his edgy views on the environment, vaccines, autism, assassinations and similar topics.

Basic questions would be covered, as with previous guests since 2000 — such as scientist Francis Collins, author Malcolm Gladwell, television legend Dick Cavett, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of England, Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright and Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, JFK's daughter.

But politics isn't the only reality. Socrates in the City founder and host Eric Metaxas — a conservative Christian radio host and the New York Times bestselling author of “Bonhoeffer,” “Miracles” and other books — would ask Kennedy about the role of faith in his complicated and controversial life.

“I was never an atheist — ever. I was raised in a deeply religious family, and I integrated that,” said Kennedy. “My dad was killed when I was 14. I became a heroin addict when I was 15. ... When you're ... living against conscience, which is what happens when you're an addict, you tend to push any kind of notion of God over the periphery of your horizon.”

As a Catholic child, Kennedy was proud of his own willpower. Heroin burned that away.

“The most demoralizing feature of addiction was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself,” he said. “I would tell myself at 9 o'clock in the morning I am never going to do that again, and at 4 o'clock I'd be doing it. It was baffling to me that I could not bind that person who I was going to be later on in the day to do anything.”

Kennedy said that he “had to change at a deep, fundamental way, who I was, because I didn't want to be an addict, but just be white-knuckling it and be miserable all the time — and wanting a drug. ... I knew that was going to require a spiritual awakening.”

From years of reading, Kennedy knew about saints — such as St. Augustine — who struggled with all kinds of depravity and escaped their sin. He had read Carl Jung and learned about religious believers whose faith helped them escape addiction.

As an adult, Kennedy has struggled with addictions of various kinds. In private diaries leaked to the press, he described his struggles with infidelity and “lust demons” during his post-heroin marriage to Mary Kennedy, who died by suicide as their union crashed. These private diaries described his waves of guilt as he failed while struggling to change.

“After you have a spiritual awakening — you can't live off the laurels of the spiritual awakening,” Kennedy told the Socrates audience. “You have to renew it every day. ... You have to renew it by staying in that posture of surrender.”

After beating his addiction to heroin, he was ready "to turn my life over to God,” he added.

Then, as the “cash and prizes start flowing back in, you're like, ‘Thanks, God. I've got it from here.’ And then you take the wheel and drive that car off the cliff again, and you have to come in on your knees.”

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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.