I don’t know why, as a secular Jew, I am fascinated with crises of faith, and with Catholicism in particular, but the topic is a lifelong preoccupation. In this light, I was eager to dive into Christopher Beha’s Why I am not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.
I first encountered Beha’s work in 2012, when I attended the Tin House Summer Workshop. I’d been writing for a long time, but this was my first in-depth exposure to writers. We workshopped manuscripts in the mornings and attended craft lectures in the afternoons. I’d never heard of a craft lecture; I had no idea how writers talked or what they talked about. I was captivated. Too euphoric to sleep, I lapped up whatever I could. The experience became indelible.
Beha gave a craft lecture, but what stayed with me was his debut novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, which I read as soon as I returned home. I loved it. My sent box contains a contemporaneous, unanswered fan email to Beha. I praised his treatment of Sophie’s conversion to Catholicism and the way she grappled with faith, as well as Beha’s story telling in general. “The ending leaves readers considering the art of fiction as they are confronted with the fragility and preciousness of life,” I wrote.
Questions about faith continue to fascinate me. I recently studied Augustine’s Confessions in a class taught by Garth Greenwell. An avowed atheist, Greenwell approached the Confessions from a literary perspective, as, say, the first recorded memoir in the western tradition, or the earliest example of auto-fiction. At times, Greenwell went farther, asserting that Augustine invented writing as we know it today in the West.
Augustine (354 – 430 A.D) addresses God directly. His opening portends an agonized, searching, self-flagellating, and rhapsodic work of literature.
You are mighty, Master, and to be praised with a powerful voice: great is your goodness, and of your wisdom there can be no reckoning. Yet to praise you is the desire of a human being, who is some part of what you created; a human hauling his deathliness in a circle, hauling in a circle the evidence of his sin, the evidence that you stand against the arrogant.
[Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 1, Translated by Sarah Ruden.]
In the first part of Confessions, Augustine describes his rocky road to Christianity. He was born in Africa (modern day Algeria), went away to school in Carthage, and trained in Rome and Milan to be a rhetorician, which was then a lucrative career. In Milan, Augustine came under the tutelage of Bishop Ambrose and experienced his famous conversion. Augustine’s mother Monica, a devout Christian, was a patient and guiding light. Augustine pays homage to her faith and intellect in the Confessions. She prayed over him for a long time before he heard the call.
Augustine returned to Africa shortly after his conversion and Monica’s coincident death, where he spent the remainder of his life preaching, writing, studying, and interrogating his faith. The church had not yet embraced celibacy as a required practice for priests, but Augustine chose the monastic life for the remainder of his days.
Augustine’s search is difficult and strenuous and never-ending. A ruthless self-critic, he agonizes over his faith, condemns his youthful hubris, fights with himself over materialistic needs, earthly desires, and the strength of his commitment to the Almighty. Even if we are not of the same faith, we are drawn in by his all-too-human need to make peace with God and with himself.
Beha begins Why I am not an Atheist with his own startling admission.
When I was fifteen years old, an angel of God came to me at night, pinned me to my bed, and demanded that I put my trust in God.
With an opening like this, I plunged in. Beha describes his early relationship with the Catholic church, his family’s comfortable place within it, and his comfortable place within his family. “Catholicism provided the furniture of my world,” he writes. The angel comes back again. Both he and his twin brother face life threatening experiences as young men—his brother from being hit by a car, and Beha from lymphoma. The family members pray, Beha included, and both brothers survive. Their recoveries could be and were seen as miraculous.
Beha’s purpose in his new book is to answer the question How am I to live? Despite the miracles in his life, he moves toward atheism. He does not necessarily supply a reason—there are generally multiple, simultaneous influences—but as a voracious reader, he’s knocked over by Bertrand Russell’s essay “Why I am not a Christian,” which argues two points: (1) Intellectually, the teachings of the “major religions about God are almost certainly false,” and (2) Morally, “Religion is a great cause of suffering in the world.”
To find his path to living, Beha focuses on epistemology—the theory of knowledge. To sharpen his focus, he explores the philosophical canon. His is a disciplined, intellectual pursuit. He writes a sweeping history from the Greeks forward, considers how western thinkers (he acknowledges they’re mostly men) look at organized religion, rationality, science, and what it means to live. These hundreds of pages are clear, succinct explanations of philosophy’s evolution, interspersed with Beha’s commentary on weaknesses in reasoning, including why these thinkers do or do not support belief in God.
What they are not, is confessional.
This history stalled out for me. It was not the personal reckoning I expected. I wanted Beha’s voice. Instead, the book encapsulates his lifelong project—to understand how and why he thinks as he does, and where religion fits into that picture. To do this, he walks us through material that has been well trod before, with the effect of distancing the reader from the writer. Early on, he writes:
Every Catholic conversion narrative inevitably draws comparisons (seldom flattering) to the classics of the genre, from Augustine’s Confessions to Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain.”
Unfortunately, I found myself making these unflattering comparisons with his book. Where is the voice of the man, the believer or atheist, the person compelled to write this narrative?
And yet.
How many of us, especially writers, hone our thinking via books? I keep lists of books I’ve read and frequently refer to them. So do many others. I’m sufficiently obsessive that I read books about authors reading books. I read these books to open a window into authors’ reading journeys, and to mine them for suggested ideas and titles. Books are my writing inspiration and guide. My thinking comes via books.
I suspect Beha is wired similarly. About the time his first book was published, Beha’s devout aunt died a painful death after suffering terrible setbacks throughout her life. She was his beloved godmother, and he was intimately involved in her care through to her death. “I came to understand the project I’d backed into as part of my larger effort to displace my family’s religious tradition with a secular literary one.” This was a breakthrough; it taught him “that the struggle I was going through might be my real subject.” Beha communicates his struggle by sharing his reading and thinking journey.
Early on, Beha describes where this volume will end up—
This life is the product of a creative power far greater than myself, that I owe everything to the love of this creator, and that this creator calls me to discharge that debt by lavishing on the rest of his creation the same love he lavishes on me.
But it is not until the “Postlude” that Beha moves into the realms of chance and randomness and love, which are gardens for faith. This final Postlude section is confessional. My understanding of Christian faith is that spiritual belief surpasses rationality. It is a step into the beyond. A leap into faith is not only acceptable, but in some branches of Christianity, necessary.
Despite a deep depression, Beha’s life progresses. He takes a job as the editor of Harpers’ Magazine. At the prodding of a friend, he follows up with a woman he’s encouraged to meet at a party. He falls in love and marries her. For someone who’d been “committed” to unhappiness, he finds himself at a loss.
The best thing that had ever happened to me had undone fifteen years of work…. My life was filled with love, but there was something in this love that demanded that I make sense of it. The light and the warmth of this sun were baffling. Where were they coming from? What did they mean?
Love brings Beha to faith, which brings him to the Catholic mystic tradition, which brings him to women—Teresa of Ávila, for example, and to an important moral compass—the nun in charge of his Jesuit high school. With his recognition of the importance of women in the Catholic faith tradition, Beha nods to Augustine, whose devout mother Monica ultimately oversaw his conversion. Monica was not the scholar that her son became. She was, instead, animated by faith and lived accordingly. Her contemporaries, as well as later Christians understood that she spoke to and heard from God, in part through dreaming.
It may not be coincidental that in this last phase of the book, Beha moves from philosophy into literature. He tells an anecdote about Flannery O’Connor in which O’Connor affirms her Catholic faith as “the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” At age twenty-five, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus. She returned to her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she spent the remaining fifteen years of her life in pain, beginning each day with Mass, celebrating the Eucharist, then heading home, and, “with whatever energy she had left, she wrote.”
At the book’s conclusion, Beha addresses his two children, noting that his faith differs from his wife and their mother. “The two of you,” he writes, “have taught me more than anything else could have, the meaning of creation through love.”
As to the visit from the angel that opens the book, Beha comes to understand it as both miracle and physical event. “I had thought that once I’d faced down death without God, I could never possibly have need of him again. It turned out that the thing I couldn’t face without God was love.”
I sense that Beha will be turning over religious questions for the rest of his life. He will interrogate his beliefs and return again and again to a potent combination of rationality and belief, faith which fuels his artistic practice and infuses how he lives. Or, as he puts it: “If we take the word miracle to describe an event that can’t be reconciled to the natural physical order, then every thought is a miracle, and every thought put into action is a miracle indeed.”
***
Why I Am not an Atheist
by Christopher Beha
Penguin Press; 432 p.
Martha Anne Toll is a literary and cultural critic, and a novelist. Her second novel, Duet for One, a musical love story and a journey through grief, was published in spring 2025 to acclaim. Her prizewinning debut novel, Three Muses, was published in 2022. She comes to writing after a long career in social justice.