Disillusioned with the disenchanted world

Christopher Beha, the former editor of Harper’s Magazine, opens Why I Am Not an Atheist (Penguin, 432 pp.) with a scene that would make even a hardened skeptic suddenly pay attention. At 15, he wakes to a presence that “pinned me to my bed, and demanded that I put my trust in the Lord.” He insists it isn’t a dream but a full-bodied terror he feels in his limbs, lungs, and soul. It’s an arresting way to begin a book that ultimately argues for belief, because it shows the reader exactly what belief first cost him: fear, confusion, and the unsettling sense that something beyond sight might be calling him to account.

From here, Beha moves through the landscape of his childhood, which he describes not merely as a Catholic home but a “Catholic world.”

Mass, rosaries, holy water fonts by the door—these were the familiar furnishings of his early life, as ordinary as the VHS tapes of Airplane! and Caddyshack with their carefully clipped scenes. His account of this time has a kind of golden-hour glow, full of tenderness but never sentimentality. He shows the comfort of belonging to something vast and ancient, carried by ritual, tradition, and familiar routine.

Then everything breaks. During Beha’s first semester at Princeton, his twin brother Jim is struck by a car. The scene is visceral. Oxygen levels dropping, doctors fearing the worst, Beha and his sister waiting for their parents. “The first thing we did … was to pray,” he writes, a natural response for a family raised to turn toward God when life feels most fragile.

Jim survives, but Beha is haunted less by the miracle than by the math. Other families pray. Other brothers die. Luck feels too small a word and too large a mystery. This marks the real beginning of his unbelief. The suffering around him—and the potential suffering ahead—makes it feel obscene to imagine himself uniquely protected. Into that vulnerable space drops the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Beha picks up Why I Am Not a Christian one summer, drawn by the title, and finds himself disarmed by Russell’s bold claim that “fear is the basis of the whole thing” when it comes to religious belief.

The line strikes him like a chair being pulled out just as he sits. Fear of death, fear of untruth, fear of uncertainty. Suddenly his earlier certainty feels like something he has already outgrown.

This discovery becomes a low point in his life, though not in the book. Beha unhooks himself from faith. He refuses Communion and commits to what he believes is the clear-eyed, cool-headed world of reason. But while he’s busy rejecting religion, his body begins rejecting him: depression, dread, sleep paralysis, and finally cancer—“caked with tumors,” his doctor tells him.

These chapters are intense but engrossing. Even his eventual diagnosis of a treatable cancer doesn’t feel hopeful. It merely removes the immediate threat while leaving him with the larger one: a life he no longer knows how to live.

This is where the book becomes its most compelling. Beha dives into the world of the New Atheists—Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens—and finds them clever, sharp, even admirable. But he also realizes they tell him what not to believe without offering much guidance on how to live. He is struck by how often their arguments rely not on reason but on underlying moral intuitions they never fully explain. They condemn religious cruelty, but they rarely account for the source of their own ethical certainty. He reads them because he wants direction, but finds, instead, a chorus of men insisting he doesn’t need any.

He goes looking for it himself. His 20s and 30s become a long, arduous reading life: Locke, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger. He’s searching not for abstract theories but for something workable, something that speaks to his own stubborn questions. How am I to live? What is a good life? What is a meaningful life? The materialists offer a universe of particles and laws. The romantics offer a universe built from will and authenticity. Both, in different ways, leave him staring into the void.

The darkest point in the book arrives when Beha admits how often he thought about suicide. Not out of melodrama, but out of a bleak kind of logic. If the world is indifferent and the self is sovereign, why not step away? “I was not afraid of anything, but I was still afraid,” he says, describing the peculiar terror that comes from believing in nothing at all.

This is where the writing becomes most moving: calm, clear, and unmistakably honest. It is also where the story begins to turn.

After decades of searching for a livable form of unbelief, Beha realizes he may not be rejecting God so much as rejecting the ambiguous, airless world the modern atheist inherits. He begins to suspect that the very impulse to ask how one should live is itself a clue that points beyond materialism or self-invented meaning. His eventual return to Catholicism isn’t triumphant or emotional. It’s sober, almost stoic. “The journey will never end while I am still alive,” he writes, capturing the humility of a man who knows that faith—real faith—isn’t a finish line but a direction.

The greatest strength of Why I Am Not an Atheist is this humility. Beha never tries to win. He doesn’t preach or posture. Instead, he offers the rarest thing in modern writing on belief: openness without hostility, emotion without excess, and a measured voice without a hint of self-importance. The highs are the moments of insight that feel earned. The lows are the dark corridors he walks without self-pity. Beha leans on the idea that meaning grows when we face the world in its fullness, with all its doubt, difficulty, and wonder.