Love has its reasons
Review of "Why I Am Not an Atheist" by Christopher Beha.
Why I am not an Atheist: The confessions of a skeptical believer
Christopher Beha
Penguin, 2026.
“When I was fifteen . . . an angel of God came to me in the night, pinned me to my bed, and demanded that I trust in the Lord.” So begins Christopher Beha’s book Why I am Not an Atheist. The former Harper’s Magazine editor writes of growing up Roman Catholic, turning to atheism and finally being drawn to faith again.
While the angel visits were “unmistakeably real,” he still slid into skepticism. He chanced on Bertrand Russell’s classic Why I am Not a Christian and was impressed with the two arguments: religion lacks evidence and causes untold misery.
Beha characterizes his university years as a mix of depression, drugs and alcohol: “I spent much time during my twenties and early thirties contemplating suicide.” Yearning to be a great writer, he sacrificed much ordinary human interaction, entering into bleak atheism. He regarded the angel visitation as medically diagnosable “sleep paralysis,” believing in no call from beyond, only the internal world of his psyche acting up.
Losing the story
This book is more philosophical than a number of recent ones speaking of re-found faith. If you are willing to put in the effort, the payoff is worth it.
He divides atheism into two camps: scientific materialists (Descartes, Hume, New Atheists) and romantic idealists (Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche). The first camp pursues objective truth, reducing all things to matter, discounting human perspective. The second is preoccupied with our subjective world, reducing all things to products of our minds. Each creates individualistic “reality.”
The first is “unethical” (without good and evil) and “unlivable” as it makes no room for human consciousness or agency. The latter, where we create our own meanings, leads to anxiety and endless disputes without a common reference point.
The brilliant philosophical tour could have been done in fewer pages. Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian was around 200 pages. Beha’s book is twice that.
Finding love
The 36-page “postlude” most directly relates to the title’s promise. He returns to his autobiographical style and talks of resigning himself to unhappiness for the rest of his life.
A friend introduces him to a new date. “Everything changed that night,” he writes. His dark, brooding soul was flooded with light. He quit drinking and got married, drunk with gratitude. “It is not just that I was happy but that this happiness was not of my own making.”
He sees that love is an unprovable foundation that replaces the materialist option while acknowledging the reality of the physical world. It comes in time and space with bodies that eventually die. It denies that we are alone in our own “reality” and reaches out to know and be known by the reality of others. Love brings objective and subjective worlds together.
Beha lands back as a Roman Catholic, realizing that what brought surprising joy and meaning to his life was what he ran from since teenagerhood. “It turned out that the thing I couldn’t face without God was love.”
Female role models
Intriguingly, he observes “many of the great spiritual examples I’ve had in my life have been women.” His hundreds of pages of philosophizing were exclusively male dialogue; now he turns to Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich and Flannery O’Connor.
Reformed Christians will recognize: the priority of faith over reason, the pure gift of grace and the response of gratitude, and the vital importance of love and family. Some may be uncomfortable with his mysticism, but I’m glad for a book about deconstructing atheism rather than deconstructing Christianity, and to see someone’s existential despair turn to love, life and joy.
