In the beginning of yet another year, I spend much of my personal time immersed in reading the thoughts and lives of many current atheists and religious agnostics. Their arguments are rarely new, but their openness and self-disclosure is more pronounced than the older popular and academic intellectuals. Many of their personal narratives are similar, and most of their targets end up being a straw-man version of the Christian faith haunting them from an extremely conservative upbringing. Most of them exercise an intense tone, while routinely engaging in mockery of the Christian faith.
In my perusal of various outspoken members of this guild of such popular figures, I ran into A. N. Wilson’s recent thoughts on his life. Wilson’s experience is similar to that of Anthony Flew. Flew was the leading philosophical atheist that came to believe in God’s existence. A. N. Wilson is one of the world’s foremost biographers who used to mock the existence of God in general, and Christianity in particular – each in a rather rude and demeaning manner. Wilson has returned to the historic Christian faith in recent years. He wrote a nice article about this slow change in his life in April of 2009.
His self-disclosure in this article is quite interesting. He shares with us in the article both his quick conversion to atheism and his slow return to the faith. Of his conversion to atheism he says:
For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own generation. I had become like one of the Billy Grahamites, only in reverse. If I bumped into Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford days) or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens (as I did either on that trip to interview Billy Graham or another), I did not have to feel out on a limb. Hitchens was excited to greet a new convert to his non-creed and put me through a catechism before uncorking some stupendous claret.
Of his growing doubt of the adequacy of his materialistic atheism he says:
This creed that religion can be dispatched in a few brisk arguments (outlined in Davie Hume’s masterly Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and then laughed off kept me going for some years. When I found myself wavering, I would return to Hume in order to pull myself together, rather as a Catholic having doubts might return to the shrine of a particular saint to sustain them while the springs of faith ran dry.
The article is a nice, short and interesting read. I would encourage you to take a look at it. It can be found online here: http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism. The quotes above are from this article.
It seems rare that someone in one generation adopts the faith of their parents, so it does not surprise me that the men in your examples reject the denominational training given to them during their upbringing. It seems most often that the children of each generation rejects the kind of faith they were brought up in by their parents and move to a faith developed after their own personal search and study as they enter adulthood. Hopefully, Christian education provided to children and youth provide an adequate foundation and the tools necessary so that the struggle to come to establish a personal understanding and relationship with God is concluded with an acceptable outcome…not a rejection of God. My wife and I were both brought up in quite conservative Christian churches and became moderate Presbyterians after we each went through a period study, prayer, and reflection that occurred before we met. In fact, I met my wife in singles group at a Presbyterian church. I have always been thankful for my Baptist religious education and the time spent by our Baptist ministers and Sunday Schools teachers to give me the tools to find my own way to discover God…even though I came to some different conclusions regarding what God expects and what my response to God should be. An exception to my statement at the beginning is my son, Ben, that I believe is due mostly to the influence of his Christian peers. God works in mysterious ways, and I do not know how former Christians who are now aetheists and agnostics fit into God’s plan. It is a puzzle.
Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing.