Why an Atheist became a Christain

Image via WikipediaThough atheists may argue that the existence of a supreme being is impossible, their arguments often reveal a belief that God just doesn't behave as they think he should. In a debate, Christopher Hitchens complained about war and killing in the Old Testament. He said he wrote his book God Is Not Great in response to the murders in Muslim countries that followed the publishing of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. None of these are arguments against God's existence, but rather arguments against how God and especially his followers act.


Timothy Larsen, professor of history at Wheaton College and author of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, says he has come to see doubt as a way in which we take our faith seriously: "If you haven't doubted, you haven't re-owned your faith." Many Victorian atheists, Larsen discovered, converted back to Christianity. "Some actually are really trying to answer questions. That's why they sound so angry," he says. "They're in a struggle for their own soul."

Though Camus, who died 50 years ago this year, wasn't the "high and dry nineteenth-century type" of atheist, nor did he return to Christianity, I've maintained a similar fondness toward him. He saw the world coldly, not as he wished it to be, but as he found it. He was brutally honest, yet hopeful. He was moral, in the sense that he believed in right and wrong and worked for what was right. His disbelief remained an obstacle in his search for meaning, but Camus continued to look for reasons to hope, to find meaning in life.

The world, as Camus found it, is absurd. Humans yearn for meaning, yet life offers none. God is absent. But Camus argued against the nihilism of his fellow Europeans who found life meaningless and therefore flocked to totalitarian, fascist, or communist philosophies. "I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it," Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, his argument against suicide. "But I know that I do not know that meaning." Rather than take a leap of faith, Camus sought to "know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone."

He illustrated his philosophy of creating meaning in the face of meaninglessness in the novel The Plague. When the city of Oran is struck by disease, officials quarantine the city. The main character, the physician Rieux, chooses to stay, throwing himself into caring for the sick. This is how one creates meaning amid the meaninglessness of the sudden outbreak of plague. And life is no different, Camus believed. We are to work against wrongs and injustice, with humility, trying to aid others in small ways.

It is no lofty idealism. Rieux describes how he first came to his philosophy in his campaign against the death penalty. In order to outlaw capital punishment, he realized, his party was on occasion forced to murder. Shocked by an execution, Rieux rejects his activism. He realized that "I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I'd believed … I was fighting it." Not only that: "I have realized that we all have plague."

A Creature of Christianity It was this scene that struck me most forcefully. Camus was right, I knew, and I, too, had plague. I was sick and in need of a Physician. Camus' willingness to accept the truth that human beings are fallen allowed me to do the same. Camus held a mirror to my face—in a way that no pastor, preacher, or professor had—and I knew I needed salvation.

Certainly not all atheists lead readers to such Christian conclusions. And just as certainly, not every atheist writer deals as honestly with himself and with God as Camus. But, at their best, atheists show Christians how our teaching or our practice is failing our society.

In The Plague, Camus describes Father Paneloux, a priest who has no real answer to suffering but nevertheless thunders that the plague is God's judgment on a wicked city. The epidemic is the fault of the people, he says, and it will remain until they repent. But Camus presents the death of a child as a counterargument: a good God would not punish an innocent child with such suffering.

The church's inability to answer the problem of suffering is still atheists' most common complaint against God, and it teaches us how we may be setting people up for spiritual disappointment and failure. Maybe the modern church puts too much emphasis on better living through God. Or perhaps we don't adequately explain that God suffers with us and redeems our suffering without eliminating it. Whatever the cause, atheism remains an attractive worldview for those who have witnessed suffering or been in pain and can't reconcile the idea of a good and powerful God with the reality of life on earth. Another flaw of the faith revealed by atheists, especially the New Atheists, is the frequency with which Christianity or any religion appears oppressive. It was no coincidence that the New Atheism exploded during the second half of the Bush administration, when Christians were widely perceived (correctly or not) to be using their political power to influence public policy. When some Christian leaders were found to be violating their professed beliefs, whether in sexual behavior or other ethical lapses, it cast all attempts to bring Christian moral arguments into the political process as hypocritical manipulations for power.

"The attractiveness of atheism is directly dependent upon the corruption of Christian institutions," says McGrath. "History strongly suggests that those who are attracted to atheism are first repelled by theism."

Atheism is a creature of Christianity. My turn away from God came at a time when I had questions about my faith. My pastors and youth group leaders, rather than hearing out my questions, prescribed more intense devotions, more fervent prayers, and further exclamations of biblical truth. My friends who wandered from the faith faced similar prescriptions. Our questions were heard first and foremost as a desire to flout the rules and to sin without compunction. In truth, there was no real correlation between those who lost their faith and those who flouted the rules of their Christian high school and college, though our behavior was often described as the evidence of our lack of faith (while the infractions of our more faithful colleagues were seen as mere lapses of good judgment).

Most of my wandering friends, like me, seem to have returned to Christ. But I've found that a surprising number who had fully accepted the faith have now left it. Each tended to have had some experience in which Christian leaders acted as hypocritical, power hungry, judgmental, or arrogant elites. For some, the church's inability to shepherd during a painful period led directly to rejecting God. "If God isn't there when I need him," they say, "I don't need him."

Atheists may have an arsenal of arguments against God or religion. But at heart, rejection of God seems not to be a purely logical choice against the possibility or desirability of God. Rather, it is often a rejection of God's people. Atheism's recent popularity should serve as a warning to us. Apologetics conferences and passionate rebuttals may have their place. Certainly we should be ready with reasons for our faith. But before we begin dueling on blogs and arming ourselves with television talking points, let's learn to see atheists not as deniers of God, but as wrestlers with him. And let's remember that their deepest arguments against belief are the people they're arguing with.