New York Times Book Review: What Is the Argument for Believing in God?, by Timothy Egan (reviewing Christopher Beha, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026)):

Christopher Beha’s long and winding road from well-read atheist to even better-read Christian begins with a compelling image: An angel appears to him. Not Jimmy Stewart’s befuddled buddy Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but a demanding and persistent apparition.

As he explains in his deep-dive meditation on faith and philosophy, “Why I Am Not an Atheist,” the spirit told him to put his trust in God. “This was no dream,” he writes of the initial visitation in the mid-1990s, when he was 15. “I was awake — I am as certain of that as I’m certain that I’m awake while I write these words — and a terrifying presence was communicating to me.”

The visits continued for years. Beha was raised Catholic, on New York’s Upper East Side, by a very bookish family that sent him to Princeton. He is a former editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of four previous books, whose range of subjects — from clever novels on emotional complications to a survey of the classics — shows his ambidextrous literary talents.

A few years after the imperious cherub told him to get right by the Lord, Beha realized the whole thing could be explained by science. He’d experienced sleep paralysis, awake but unable to move, complete with hallucinations.

“I had suffered a reasonably common physical affliction and, rather than trying to find a rational cause for it, I had retreated into superstition,” he writes. “I’d actually convinced myself that God was sending me a message.”

As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”

In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view. …

The book is built as a long counter to “Why I Am Not a Christian,” a famous essay by the British polymath Bertrand Russell, who called belief in God “a conception quite unworthy of free men.” Russell was one of the minds that nudged Beha into years of committed faithlessness.

Ultimately, atheism failed him, as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?

Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.

The Dispatch: How to Be a Skeptical Atheist, or Believer, by Alan Jacobs (Baylor) (reviewing Christopher Beha, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026)):

You often find the debates between religious believers and atheists are conducted by people whose position is evidently true to them, and who have difficulty understanding how it could be otherwise for other folks. That leads, I think, to the assumption of either bad faith or stupidity on the part of those who somehow refuse to acknowledge what seems so palpably correct.

The primary purpose of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer is to show atheists—of two varieties, as we’ll see—that what is obviously true to them about their views is, in fact, something that has been constructed over a period of centuries. Previous thinkers, going back hundreds of years, built up, step by step and bit by bit, a frame of reference from within which religious belief is obviously wrong. Beha demonstrates that these beliefs have a history. If you endorse them completely and see no way they could be wrong, that’s possible for you because you are the beneficiary of centuries of labor to construct a worldview (Beha’s preferred term) that offers its adherents an “artificial obvious” …

Beha explains that when he abandoned the Catholic faith in which he was raised, it was romantic idealism to which he eventually turned—but what led him to unbelief in the first place was a book by one of the most influential scientific materialists, British philosopher Bertrand Russell. The book that did the most to consolidate Beha’s youthful atheism, and that also provides the shape of his title, is Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian (1927). …

If we have settled on a particular set of convictions by which we direct our lives, it is painful to reconsider them. Hasn’t everyone who’s had an argument with someone who adheres to a very different politics than theirs experienced this? It’s difficult to get people even to articulate why they believe what they believe: Often there is no “why” to it. I believe it because it’s obviously correct. But what if that obviousness is artificially constructed? People hate views other than their own and are afraid that they might be true—thus the fierceness with which they repel any offered alternative. I found Beha’s book clear and compelling—but I’m not the audience.

Or am I? Maybe not the primary audience, but these “confessions of a skeptical believer” are sobering, and meaningful, for me too. For Beha’s history is not meant merely to refute atheism, of either chief variety, but also to show why such atheisms arose. There are serious reasons why people doubt God, or lose their faith altogether. Is is not the Psalmist who cries out, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13) Beha turned away from belief and trust in God and then, after a long intermission, turned back again. But when one turns back so, those intervening years of unbelief are never forgotten. They continue to shape the character of one’s faith. This is a point upon which Beha is particularly insistent.

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once wrote that “Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.” Beha has been called again. But those who have dwelt in the desert are always marked by that experience. There is, as Ricoeur said, a great difference between believing still and believing again, and to navigate from the first to the second is perilous. So the story Beha tells is profoundly challenging to scientific materialists, to romantic idealists—and to Christians like me.

Christianity Today: This Ex-Atheist Has Some Explaining to Do, by Kara Bettis Carvalho (reviewing Christopher Beha, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026)):

Two years ago, CT declared New Atheism dead, referring to an angry and vitriolic form of unbelief that arose in the early 2000s. Writer and editor Christopher Beha tackles today’s atheism—what he calls “romantic idealism”—more than 20 years later in his book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.

Beha defines romantic idealism as an irrational worldview that elevates free will and personal experience, whereas older forms of atheism focused on scientific materialism that looks to the physical world as the extent of existence.

Why I Am Not an Atheist explores these two forms of unbelief, documenting Beha’s own journey out of organized religion, through atheism and agnosticism, and eventually back to the Catholic church.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• NY Times: Ash Wednesday and the Burden of Living Your Beliefs (Feb. 15, 2026)

Editor’s Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.