Christopher Beha recounts his journey from a Manhattan Catholic upbringing to atheism following his twin brother's near-death and his own stage three lymphatic cancer diagnosis at 22. Influenced by Bertrand Russell, he rejected prayer as pride until falling in love with his wife shifted his worldview toward creation. After years of finding secular philosophy incomplete, Beha returned to faith through angelic visitations and communal joy, arguing that Catholicism reduces depression by fostering realistic hope in a loving Creator rather than self-centered existence. [Automatically generated summary]
So I went and I made a meeting with the priest and I said, you know, I'm in college and I'm having these doubts and I decided to stop going to Mass and I decided to stop receiving communion.
And the priest said, oh, yeah, I did that about the same time.
Hey, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Christopher Baer about his new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist, The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.
As you know, I think this is probably the most important issue.
Everything else in our country actually depends on this.
We have been sinking slowly, very slowly, really, since the 1600s into atheism.
And I think it has a kind of effect, a deadly effect.
And yet you can't believe in something if you don't believe in it.
And the only reason to really believe in it is because you think it's real.
The book, Why I Am Not an Atheist, The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, very beautifully written.
Christopher Bea is the former editor of Harper's Magazine, the author of four previous books, one of which, the Index of Self-Destructive Acts, was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award.
Chris, it's good to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thanks very much for having me.
So interesting title.
I was caught by the title right away, The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.
What does that mean?
How can you be a believer and skeptical at the same time?
Well, my contention is that these things are not in tension with each other, but are actually necessary components of each other.
We use this term skepticism or skeptic nowadays very much to mean a religious skeptic.
But historically, it's just meant someone who doubts the possibility of certain human knowledge.
And on that end, you know, there's some interesting philosophical examples of historical examples of early Greek skeptics who wouldn't even move out of the way of the cart coming down the road because they refused to trust their senses.
But that person always had a disciple who was moving them away.
In practice, we all have to go out into the world and walk around.
And if you are a skeptic and you do distrust reason as a tool of giving you really comprehensive human knowledge about what's going on in the world, then on some level, you have to act on faith.
You have to believe.
It's just a matter of what you're believing in.
So you started out, you were raised Catholic, right, Roman Catholic?
I was, yes.
And you were pretty much, that pretty much surrounded your life.
It was not a small thing.
No, I was both my parents were from families that had been Catholic as far back as anyone could remember.
They grew up in Manhattan and went to Catholic schools there, and they met in high school at the Catholic school mixer.
And they were very much of a generation of milieu where they were going to marry fellow Catholics and raise their children in the faith.
And that was understood.
And that's what they did.
My brother and I went to the same school my father had growing up, same Catholic school.
My sister went to the same Catholic girls' school as my mother.
And, you know, growing up in 80s and 90s, Manhattan, that people, you know, might associate with, you know, Gordon Gecko or whatever, or with the punk scene.
Or, you know, we were growing up in a real Catholic, you know, church going, culturally Catholic, but also absolutely, you know, believing practicing Catholic household.
So you, I'll get back to this in a minute.
You lost your faith over time.
Did your siblings?
My brother has had us had, who's my identical twin, as it happens, has himself had a journey out of and back into the church.
My sister had, you know, has, you know, well, having, I think, the same existential ups and downs that everyone has, has been, you know, a much more committed believer throughout her adult life.
Okay.
So explain the process of losing faith.
What was that like?
I mean, it must have been fairly intense for that atmosphere.
In my case, there was a couple of major events in early adulthood, right around the time I went off to college.
My brother, I just mentioned, you know, he's my twin and we were extraordinarily close.
We went off to college together.
Our older sister was also there.
And about a month into the school year, in our freshman year, he was struck by a car and almost died.
And that was, you know, obviously quite traumatic.
My sister and I were at the hospital as his oxygen levels were dropping and he was carted away.
And, you know, and we prayed together.
And that's, you know, what you did coming from the background that we did.
And he got better.
And on that level, you know, our prayers were answered.
But it stuck with me, this sense of fragility, this sense that things could get taken away at any instant.
And in particular, I was struck, you know, they talk about the problem of suffering, you know, but the problem of the suffering of others became a much bigger problem for me.
You know, on one level, you could say, again, oh, he made it, your prayers were answered.
But of course, I knew that in countless other cases, the person in question didn't make it.
So then I had to believe, if I were going to believe that he'd been saved by our prayers, that God, you know, had moved one bed over and plucked that person instead because they didn't happen to be doing, say, in the rosary.
And there's something obscene about that.
And as I've moved out of and back into belief, I still believe there's something obscene about that understanding of how God's will in the world works.
So that was a real problem for me.
And then a few years later, when I was still not even out of college, I became quite sick myself and was diagnosed with stage three lymphatic cancer and was uncertain how much longer I would survive as well.
So I had these personal challenges that were also calls to wake up to what was going on to other people routinely in the world, just the level of suffering, the amount of fragility, the reality of mortality, which everybody faces eventually, but not everyone does at a young age.
And those things move different people in different directions.
And there's plenty of people who are raised in secular contexts who are faced with those sorts of things.
And that's what leads them to seek out faith for the first time.
In my case, the result was that I decided that I really couldn't stay committed To this faith in which I've been raised.
It's fascinating.
When you had cancer, did you pray?
No.
And it became a real point of pride for me.
Actually, you know, my brother's accident had started a process that over the next year or two led me to decide to leave the church.
I also, you know, we may get into this later, but I read this classic work by Bertrand Russell called Why I'm Not a Christian, which, you know, my book's title alludes to that one.
And I had an idea that I wasn't just going to be someone who wasn't a Catholic, but I was self-identifying as a skeptic, as someone who, in Russell's phrase, looks the world frankly in the face, as someone I thought of myself as an intellectual, as someone who was going to, you know, follow reason, not faith, all of those things.
And I felt that when I was then faced with my own mortality and I could get through that, you know, I was the atheist in the foxhole.
I could face the ultimate test.
So that sort of hardened me as an atheist.
And I thought, okay, well, if this didn't make me retreat back to my childhood beliefs, then nothing will.
So now the question becomes, now what?
How do you live out the rest of your life when you've already sort of committed at age 22 to the idea that it's not going to involve this whole worldview and system of belief in which you were raised?
You know, it's fascinating as you're talking about this.
I'm thinking about C.S. Lewis, who lost his faith when his mother died.
He said he prayed and prayed.
And his line was, it just didn't work.
And he has a wonderful line in one of the Narnia books where he says, no one is told any story but his own.
Meaning in some ways that you can't look at the fact that the world is unfair.
You sort of go on your own.
But you had the experience of praying and it worked and lost your faith.
And so basically, I can't help but feel it's almost an attitude, you know, it's almost an inborn attitude.
So just out of curiosity, you have these devout parents and you've lost your faith and you're still young.
What's their reaction?
Well, they were certainly disappointed.
I remember the, it was this, I was home from college one summer and I picked up this Bertrand Russell book and I read it.
And that Sunday, we all went to Mass.
And I wasn't going to say, I'm not going.
But what I did was I didn't walk up for communion.
And I didn't say anything to my family beforehand.
I'm not going to do this.
I just did it.
I don't know if that was meant in a way of like teenage rebellion, but if I'd been a real teen rebel, I probably wouldn't have been in church that day in the first place.
So it seemed like a fair compromise.
It was that sense of I'm going to live by my intellectual principles.
I can be here.
I'm not going to say the creed when everyone else says the creed.
I'm not going to walk up and take the Eucharist when I don't believe what the church says this is.
And it was very distressing, I think, to my parents.
But they were very, ultimately very understanding about it.
I think they understood correctly that they weren't trying to talk me out of it or trying to pressure me about things wasn't going to help.
It was going to harden me about things.
I went to a Jesuit high school.
Some of your listeners may have a sense of who the Jesuits are as an order of Catholic priests, but they're very, very intellectual.
And our church was a Jesuit church.
And I went and I think somebody told me, go talk to a priest there.
So I went and I made a meeting with the priest and I said, you know, I'm in college and I'm having these doubts and I've decided to stop going to mass and I've decided to stop receiving communion.
And the priest said, oh yeah, I did that about the same time.
And maybe it'll be good for you.
You know, he didn't try to talk me out of it either.
He said, it's natural to want to think your way through these things yourself.
And he said, you know, he stayed away for three or four years and then not only came back, but immediately upon coming back, joined the order and took the first steps towards entering seminary.
But he wasn't even saying that's what will happen to you.
It wasn't in a, you'll see.
You just wait till you get out into the world.
It was more of a, you know, I trust the truth of what I believe enough that I trust you to make your way in this world and see what happens.
Yeah.
I mean, I have to say, I admire your integrity.
You stood up to cancer without praying, which I think took an enormous amount of courage.
And this obviously wasn't comfortable for you.
It's not comfortable to stand up to your parents when you love your parents.
And so you actually had the integrity of your non-belief and you were honest in this.
Where did the turn come?
Your book, as you say, is called Why I Am Not an Atheist, The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.
Where does that unbelief start to turn for you?
Well, as I said, once I'd had this experience with this brush with cancer and I'd sort of said, okay, I'm all in here.
This is going to be the rest of my life.
I'm not going back.
Finding Belief In Love00:02:48
This isn't just a bit of teenage rebellion.
I had the question, now what?
What are the principles by which I'm going to live?
What is going to be my worldview?
And as you know, when you talk to many atheists about what they do or do not quote unquote believe, they'll say, no, no, no, you guys have beliefs.
We have the facts.
Atheism isn't a belief system.
Now, it's true that atheism isn't a belief system in and of itself.
But inevitably, atheists have their beliefs, just like anyone else does.
And I wanted to figure out maybe what kind of atheist I was.
But I started reading basically a lot of philosophy, a lot of modern, modern meaning starting in the 15th century or 16th century, Western secular philosophy, in an effort to understand what the alternatives, robust alternatives to the faith in which I've been raised really were.
And I started working my way through them and I found them in different ways ultimately incomplete or unsatisfying.
Although I have to say that there was a great deal that I found valuable in them.
It's just that, like I said, I found them incomplete.
And I worked my way through this process.
And then eventually, I mean, what ultimately, so finding them incomplete or insufficient, I think at the very least, that opened my heart to the possibility that something else could be true.
And certainly I came through reading these people to think that it wouldn't necessarily be irrational to believe.
I started to think that you could be, as I said before, a skeptical believer.
And I actually started to think skepticism, as properly understood, entails a kind of belief.
I started to think that you could be Russell's man who looks the world frankly in the face and you could actually, when you look at that world, see something looking back at you.
You could believe that the world that you were looking at was the product of love and creation.
And then eventually what happened was not something intellectual.
It was something emotional.
I met my now wife.
I fell in love and I was really moved by the presence of this love in my life.
And I wanted to make sense of that.
And that pushed me in the direction of understanding all of us as the product of this love and creation.
Romanticizing Secular Meaning00:16:55
And the great call of being in this creation being to love the creator and to love each other, to love this creation.
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You know, one of the oddest parts of your story to me is that, I mean, I've gone through a lot of what you've gone through in various ways.
And yet I've only ever had, at the time of my conversion, I'd only ever had one truly mystical experience, which was the experience of watching my daughter born.
But you had a lot of very, very intense mystical experience.
Can you describe what that was like and when that happened?
Yeah, I write at the beginning of the book about these feelings I had started when I was maybe like 15 years old, where I had these experiences of angelic visitations.
I was in bed and I would wake up and be fully awake, but feel this presence, a spiritual presence really pushing down on me and making these demands that I've put my faith in God.
And they happened many times throughout this period.
And they were the thing that kept one foot in faith as I had these other things pulling me away.
And then The same summer I read Bertrand Russell and decided not to get communion.
I also heard a radio segment about sleep paralysis and came to understand that I suffered from a explicable physiological complaint where you come into full consciousness while you're still in deep REM sleep and that many people think that experience of sleep paralysis accounts for reports of alien abduction,
reports of medieval stories of incubi and succubi, all of that sort of stuff.
So suddenly I felt like I had a material explanation for this experience.
But in a certain sense, any experience has a material explanation in the sense that you could always look at a thing from the objective standpoint and say, this is what was going on.
But it also had this strong subjective component.
And I came over time to find that meaningful again.
But throughout my life, even while I was a really committed atheist, I continued to have these moments of ecstatic experience, essentially.
I, you know, like you, I'm a novelist and I thought of many of these things in terms of artistic creation, artistic production.
I became very enamored.
I said there's a number of different atheist worldviews.
The one that I most closely identified with, I call romantic idealism.
But I became very enamored of the sort of secular romantic idea of each of us being called to create our own meaning and create our own world in the face of a world that is sort of objectively meaningless and uncaring of our existence.
That was where you ended up as an atheist.
That's where I ended up as an atheist.
There's a couple of problems with that view.
And one of them is that it's incredibly isolating.
And you quoted C.S. Lewis about not only seeing our own story.
There is this tendency, if you are a romantic idealist, to understand yourself as the center of the universe, because you're the one doing all this meaning creation and everyone else is existing to be part of the story you're telling about your own project.
And that's, you know, unless you're a complete narcissist, you get very lonely that way.
What you actually want is to be in a world that's populated by other people.
And then the other thing is that, you know, as much as Nietzsche or others might want to say otherwise, the material world does exist and does frustrate our abilities to impose our will on it.
We can't actually simply will the meaning we want in the world.
We have to come face to face with something outside of ourselves.
This is what I actually wanted to ask you, that one of my big fears as I was struggling with conversion was I didn't want to become an idiot.
I didn't want to become like one of these smiley guys who's saying everything happens for a reason and everything turns out for the best.
And the opposite happened to me.
I actually became developed a much more dur sense of the world.
I was filled with sin and it was incredible.
The brokenness was incredible, almost endless sea of brokenness.
And yet at the same time, I became, I felt I became more realistic, but I did not become depressed.
became actually more joyful over time.
What was your experience as you started to come back out of this?
Yeah, so I definitely became less depressed.
And I write in the book that there are three sort of fundamental philosophical questions that are, and these were first, it was Immanuel Kant who first put them this way.
But that when I say atheists must have beliefs, I think there's three questions we all have to try to answer that cannot be answered simply through empiricism or common sense or through looking the world frankly in the face.
And they are, what can I know?
What must I do?
And what may I hope?
And the last one actually became incredibly important for me, this idea of what we are or are not rationally permitted to hope, you know.
And you mentioned earlier, like in terms of my response to my illness or to my brother's accident, that it's a temperament or a frame of mind.
I often think about, if you imagine a basically a cynic, just someone who has their whole life been trained to think the worst of all people and been in a certain sense rewarded for that.
It has matched up with their experience.
Now, it's matched up with their experience because you get selection bias and confirmation bias, but also because if you go out into the world treating everyone like assuming the worst, the world tends to respond in kind to you, you know?
So if you got someone who sort of was finding themselves deeply unhappy and someone said, well, you have this view of the world that makes you unhappy, they would tend to say, but it's correct.
But in fact, it's not correct or incorrect.
It is one way of interpreting a set of information.
And so what a therapist or someone would say to them is, just try to go through the world and behave as though, in fact, other people were good or something like that and see what happens, you know?
And so if you say to someone who is suffering from depression over meaninglessness, you know, or over hopelessness, well, imagine this, imagine this story.
Imagine a story that we've all been created by someone who, by an entity, not a someone, who cares about us and has it within its power to structure all of reality in a way that it's going to be good for us and meaningful for us.
Imagine that.
And imagine all these other people.
They were loved just as much as you by this creator, you know, and go through the world behaving that way and see what happens.
They would say, but that's not true.
That's a fairy tale.
That's something you tell yourself because you're afraid you're going to die.
That's X, Y, and Z.
But the point is, just try it.
But also, don't, you know, eventually what starts to happen, right?
As you know, is if you open your heart to this possibility, then you start to get evidence in the world that it's true.
So, you know, as you said, like the reason to believe is because you believe.
The reason to believe is because you think it's true.
But you have to get yourself to a place where you are willing to accept when the world gives you evidence for its truth.
And so it's not a matter of saying, well, do this because it's going to make you happy or do this because it's going to make you less depressed.
But it is a matter of saying, open your heart to the possibility that you could be wrong about this and attempt, this is sort of the Kierkegaardian leap.
Attempt, even if your head isn't there yet, to live out this reality.
Try it, you know?
But there is, you know, I had it, you had it, a sense of like, no, I'm a smart guy.
I think this stuff out.
I'm not like one of these people who just lives on wishful thinking, you know?
But then you start doing it.
And then all of a sudden, wow, there's a lot of stuff that didn't make sense before that makes sense now.
Yeah, that is, that's a very impressive fact, I think.
Have you become a Catholic again?
Yeah, I'm a practicing Catholic.
My children are baptized.
Last year, my daughter made her first communion and we go just a couple of blocks away in Brooklyn Heights to our church every Sunday.
So here's the thing I'm curious about.
That you, I mean, I have found that faith has made me more realistic about the world, that I understand the world better, that the things that I think will happen happen more often, and so on.
But there is a place where you get to pure faith.
I mean, the idea of something after death.
I mean, the Catholic Church has a lot of this very well thought out.
How do you stand on that?
I mean, are there things, are there still things where the church says, this is the truth, where you say, maybe, you know, or have you accepted basically that this is the place where these things are decided?
It's complicated for me because I think on certain of the things I, you know, the when I say things like that, some this, some people think that, that, that it's a cop-out, but it is what I really believe, right?
Is that, as I said before, part of what we're when we're what's in question here is whether or not you're going to live out a belief, you know.
And as I mentioned in the book, the etymological root of credo, creed, you know, I believe is actually related to core, to heart.
And it is in a certain sense to take, to, to take something to heart, you know, and to be faithful to an idea is like being faithful to your wife, you know, it is, it is, it is not straying and keeping it close to heart, you know?
And I think everything about the Catholic worldview, I am faithful to in that way.
And then there's many things where I think I like the afterlife.
The strange truth is, given that I'm someone who was really struck by these brushes with mortality at a young age, I don't think very much about it.
You know, people, I talk about I had these experiences.
I became very depressed.
I became very fearful of my own death.
And then later, I returned to faith and I felt this great solace.
And then what people assume you mean is, oh, now you believe that you had this immortal soul that was going to go to the magic place in the sky and get to see your grandparents again.
But it isn't really that.
It is about just feeling more generally permitted to hope and also about understanding yourself as one character in a larger, meaningful tapestry that makes sense, you know?
And in a way, understanding that because you're not the center of everything, it's not all, it's still going to matter after you, you know?
So none of which is to say that I don't believe in the afterlife or that I don't think it's important or anything like that, but it's not what I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, and I have, you know, seen some of the comments in the comments section in almost anything I write on this topic.
And you have a lot of people who make it their business to immediately explain to you the psychology of why it is you believe in something that's so fundamentally ridiculous and childish, et cetera.
Setting aside the childishness of making it your job to be the first to comment on these things, I would say that I'm not, it's not to me about I'm going to be reunited with the people I lost in eternity.
That's a very powerful idea, but it's not day-to-day what I'm thinking about.
What I'm thinking about is how do I participate in this creation in front of me in a way that does proper honor to it?
How do I express my love and gratitude for being here?
And how do I try to love the people around me in the way that God is calling me to do?
Yeah, and I certainly agree that finding a spouse that you love is just an incredibly illuminating experience because the reality of love is as forceful as anything else.
It's just not a, you know, this is not a chemical thing.
I mean, it is a chemical thing, but it's also not very, very clear.
The book is Why I Am Not an Atheist, The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, Christopher Bea.
It's spelled B-E-H-A.
Very gracefully, lovely book, gracefully written, lovely book.
Christopher, thank you so much for coming on.
Really interesting conversation.
I'm glad you came around.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate it.
I hope the book does well.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
One more time.
The book is Why I Am Not an Atheist, The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.
Obviously, Christopher Beau B-E-H-A, very thoughtful guy, writes very gracefully about this experience.
All conversion experiences, I think, have similarities to them, but each one is also wonderfully different, which I guess is true of all of us, of our personalities and our lives as well.
This is a very interesting version of the journey.
And if you really want to take a wonderful journey of faith, make your way to the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right.
It's probably not as important, but still, it's a good show.