What Atheism Could Not Explain

Christopher Beha’s path to atheism began in college. Close encounters with death—a brother’s car accident, his own cancer diagnosis—led to a period of disenchantment. He picked up Bertrand Russell’s anti-religious diatribes and started skipping Mass, which he’d attended since childhood. In the years that followed, he immersed himself in the work of atheists such as Albert Camus and Arthur Schopenhauer.

As he grew older, something shifted. In his new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist, Beha—a novelist and a former editor of Harper’s Magazine—describes why he ultimately rejected the conclusions of these thinkers and others. The choice was, in part, due to philosophical objections. But he describes another motive for his return to faith—a refreshing counter to how religious conversions, and religion more broadly, are frequently talked about today.

In short: He fell in love.

Comparisons between faith and romantic love crop up throughout the centuries, appearing in the Bible—the “Song of Songs” is one long love poem—and the reflections of early Christians such as Origen and Saint Augustine. In his 1923 biography of Francis of Assisi, the British critic G. K. Chesterton remarked that for the medieval saint, “religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair,” a proposition echoed by David Brooks a century later when he wrote that “faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question.” With both faith and romance, the comparison suggests, abstractions and proofs only approximate what experience reveals: ineffable wonder, a shout-it-from-the-mountaintops elation, confidence in the unconditionality of another’s love.

For Beha, though, falling in love was more than merely analogous to having faith; it was a catalyst. More than a decade after first reading Russell, he began seeing someone. It went poorly at first—he acted “wooden and self-conscious” and rambled about his literary ambitions while she nodded politely. (“She was not the kind of person who judged other people on what they did for a living,” Beha writes.) But once he changed course and tried to make her laugh instead, she taught him two things: that he could, and that he was “still capable” of both being happy and making another person so. Within a year, they were engaged.

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That wasn’t the only change. He quit drinking. His depression receded. The thought of having kids, something he had previously written off as a futile act, now appealed to him. As he tells the story, atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him. “My life was filled with love,” he writes, “but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.”

The various forms of atheism espoused by the thinkers he’d read seemed unable to provide an explanation. The scientific bent exemplified by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offered, in his view, a reductive account of his love, flattening it to “a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain,” a handshake between dopamine and oxytocin. Romantic idealism—Beha’s term for the belief of atheists such as Friedrich Nietzsche that each individual must fashion meaning in a meaningless universe—could not contend with the fact that Beha hadn’t brought about his newfound sense of meaning on his own. It was external, at the mercy of someone else.

To Beha’s surprise, the Catholic faith that he thought he had left behind provided the meaning he was seeking. Inspired by medieval-Christian mysticism—a tradition that emphasizes contemplation and a “willingness to live with perplexity”—and the New Testament’s claim that God is not just loving but love itself, he started attending Mass once again.

Beha’s wife, however, has remained an atheist. Although “completely supportive and mostly good-natured about it,” she was admittedly mystified by his return to faith. Did her husband really believe in this, she wondered—the miracles, the social doctrines, the resurrection? Beha’s response is to describe himself as “a skeptical believer”; for him, moments of certainty commingle with moments of doubt. Sometimes faith feels like “wishful thinking”; sometimes skepticism seems “willful and obtuse.” Yet he persists. “Belief is not, after all,” he writes, “something that is done once and for all.”

Other recent conversion stories share Beha’s focus on both love and what their authors come to view as the limits of atheism. The philosopher Matthew Crawford described to The Free Press how he became a Christian after meeting his wife: As he put it, faith opened a previously unseen “layer of reality” that scientific explanations miss. “A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything,” Crawford remarked, “are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more.” The Pepperdine University political-science professor Jason Blakely wrote in America magazine that his atheism began to crumble when he realized that he had been “surviving on a meaning” that came from outside himself. His conversion’s genesis, as with Beha’s, was his future wife’s love.

This emphasis on love has potential pitfalls. It may strike some readers as sentimental. And many people argue that at some point, a religious person must commit themselves to particular doctrinal claims and practices, the details of which Beha, in his book, does not extensively explore. His accounts and others’ are nevertheless valuable because they depict a path to faith that’s an alternative to the one portrayed in many prominent conversion stories, which paint Christianity as a sort of cultural antidote for civilizational decay.

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Take the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In 2023, after many years as a committed atheist, she described her conversion to Christianity as being motivated by a desire to “fight off” the “formidable forces” of authoritarianism, Islam, and “woke ideology.” She made no mention of Christ, or of love. At a 2021 conference, J. D. Vance described his conversion to Catholicism by saying, “I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old. I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.” The British rapper Zuby posted on X a few years ago that “the West is absolutely screwed if it loses Christianity.” (The post received nearly 2 million views and earned a reply from Elon Musk, who said, “I think you’re probably right.”)

Is it possible to understand Christianity as a bulwark against social change and still hold on to faith sincerely? I think so—Ali and Vance have elsewhere also reflected more personally on their conversions, for example. But describing one’s religion primarily as a tool to harken back to the past, or as a way to defeat your enemies, risks overlooking the humanizing power of belief. This is what makes Beha’s book so worthwhile, for showing how religion at its best offers more than a theory of cultural renewal. As his there-and-back-again story conveys, faith can foster humility, of the mind and of the heart, and a desire to see others with the love that they believe God sees in people.