Christopher Beha: And it came to feel in the way that these things can, when things go well, like this whole journey had been leading me this way. I had passed through these different stages because that’s precisely what I needed to do in order to come to the full appreciation of the place where I’d started.

Mark Oppenheimer: Hello, friends. This is Mark Oppenheimer and you are listening to Arc: The Podcast, which is the biweekly audio companion to the web magazine Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which is online at arcmag.org. Arc is a publication of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. And I’m so pleased this week to tell you that my guest is Christopher Beha. He is an editor, he was the editor of Harper’s Magazine for some time. He’s a novelist. He’s an all around soulful dude. And he’s the author of the new book, “Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer,” which was published last month and is the story of his journey from a fairly Roman Catholic upbringing through the lapsing of his Catholicism, his drift away from faith while a student at Princeton University, and then his slow, ginger, delicate return to devotion and Catholic practice as an older, married Catholic dad.

It’s a lovely story. He’s a wonderful guest and it’s my honor to have him on the show. Before we get to that interview, I just want to say that in the coming fiscal year, that’s to say when it all resets economically for us in July, I’m hoping that we’re going to bump the podcast up to more like once a week. So more Arc coming your way. If there are things you’d like us to be doing, if there are guests that you hope I will have on, if there are other features you’d like me to add, drop me a line. I’m at mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s mark with a k.o at wustl.edu. Always looking for ways to improve the pod, always looking for ways to spread the gospel of audio goodness that I bring to your ears right now about twice a month and maybe soon, more frequently than that.

But now we turn to my interview with Christopher Beha, author of the new book, “Why I Am Not An Atheist, The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.”

Chris, very nice to meet you. I was a longtime fan of your editorship at Harper’s Magazine, and I’ve read one of your novels. Are there more than one novels? I read one.

CB: There are three novels.

MO: Okay. And I read one of them and it must have been the most recent one. So now I’ve read two of your books.

CB: Yeah. Well, one of three novels, that batting average will get you into the Hall of Fame. So I’ll take it.

MO: Hey, if I met someone who’d read two of my six books, I would feel like we’re besties for life.

It’s really good having you here. The new book is awesome, and with a title like “Why I’m Not An Atheist,” is pretty much catnip for me, and it delivered. You begin by talking about your upbringing in New York City. Was it Manhattan, right? You were on the Upper East Side.

CB: Yes. Upper East Side of Manhattan.

MO: And you said, “Actually, there are Catholics in New York City.” And I knew this, but maybe you could say a little bit about your upbringing, how religious it was, what it was like growing up Catholic in Manhattan.

CB: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been talking a lot about my upbringing recently because I do write about it a lot in the book and I’ve been talking about the book, but I do, in a way, I tend to emphasize the Catholic piece of it rather than the sort of Upper East Side piece of it. And that gives a not entirely complete picture. So if you kind of were going to give the sociologist demographer’s view of my childhood or fit me into a recognizable type, I think there would be two types. One was, I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. My father was a lawyer, my mother was a teacher. We were affluent relative to most of the country and the world, but my father wasn’t a Wall Street banker and we weren’t flying in private jets and things like that, but I was going to school with some people who were.

I was like, that’s the thing about growing up in New York is you’re around some of it, but education was a really big deal for my family. There were books everywhere. My father was someone who was always reading the new Roth or Updike novel that came out that year. And I decided very early on that I had a literary vocation and that was very much encouraged by my family.
Everyone in the family sort of in the way of the meritocracy worked hard towards the goal of getting the kids into top name brand universities, where we did wind up. And I’m sure that you knew a lot of people in college who kind of fit, who came from this exact type, who arrived at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, places like that with a certain kind of what they saw as sophistication and the sense of, it’s like they’d read some rule book that the Midwestern public school kids had not had access to or whatever, and they had friends who’d gone to all the boarding schools, et cetera, et cetera.

MO: Where did you go to high school, by the way?

CB: Well, that’s the other piece of it is I went to a high school, a Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side.

MO: You went to Regis?

CB: It’s called Loyola. It’s right next to Regis, actually. The backs of them are touching each other. And that was where my father had gone. Got it. And my mother had gone to an old school on the Upper East Side called the Covenant of the Sacred Heart and they met while they were students there, high school students there at a Catholic school mixer. And then all of their two sons and their daughter then went to those schools growing up. And that’s the other feature of my life, which is more relevant to the book. When you think of that kind of person I just described, you don’t necessarily think of them as being particularly religiously observant. They might be secular, non-observant Jews, or they might be WASPs who go to church on Christmas and Easter, or they might be kind of secular humanists who are quite proudly not religious at all.

They believe in the kind of church of art and books, et cetera, et cetera. We were not that. We were a deeply religious Catholic one and both of my parents had come similarly from that background and they had met very young and married young, and a big part of their compatibility was this shared religious upbringing.

MO: This, by the way, I’m sure you’ve had this thought already, this is very evangelical, right? This is very, this strain of Catholic aristocracy in the midst of Anglican, Episcopalian, WASP, secular Jewish. I mean, you have this in England as well where there are these Catholics who are, to all external appearances are just Church of England, Protestant landed gentry, but they are very proud and can sort of wink at each other across the party as the people who maintained their Catholicism through all of that in that scene, right? Yes. I mean, you must have, and I’m sure you knew the dozen other families who were also the Upper East Side serious Catholics.

CB: Yes, absolutely. And in fact, so as it happens tonight, I’m going to the 75th anniversary gala of the elementary school I went to, which is a lay run Catholic school on the Upper East Side called St. David’s. And it was founded 75 years ago because these Irish and German immigrant families who were finally making their way up in society wanted not just the parochial school, but the kind of private school that the Protestants had. And then it winds up being the school where John F. Kennedy Jr. Went and where it’s like that, that sort of … And my father went there in one of the early classes and then I went there. And so yeah, that was a big part of where we were culturally as well. But the big thing was, for me, was that there wasn’t a conflict between these two. These two different ways of being in the world were not understood to be in tension with each other.

They were actually understood to be part of the same thing, including the intellectual side, the artistic side. We were reading Updike and Roth, but we were also reading the various Catholic novelists and writers coming from a … We were very aware of there being a distinctively Catholic intellectual tradition.

MO: So that cannon is like, it’s Graham Greene, I’m assuming.

CB: Graham Greene, Muriel Spark …

Muriel Spark, absolutely. And then among Americans, obviously it’s Flannery O’Connor, but also Walker Percy. And Percy was alive and writing and putting out new books when I was growing up. So books like that would be on the shelf. A writer named Wilfrid Sheed, whose … I believe his parents were Sheed and Ward were the Catholic publishing house, but he came from, that was that Sheed family. He’s one of those people. There’s certain people of every generation.

MO: I imagine Thomas Merton is on every bookshelf although if anyone’s ever finished “The Seven Storey Mountain,” all 700 pages, maybe you? Have you?

CB: Yes. But Merton was on the shelf and not just “The Seven Storey Mountain,” but also his writings of the sayings of the Desert Fathers and various others and stuff like that. So yeah, that was definitely part of all of it.

MO: There could be a fun piece on this because there’s the Jewish version also, right? It’s like once you get past Roth, they also have, they have Bernard Malamud, the nonfiction. They always have Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers.” I mean, there’s a whole kind of like … Yeah. There’s the deeper cuts as well that you get in the Jewish households.

CB: Right. And when we think of the Catholic writers, it’s very often Anglo Catholic writers. And because the UK is a predominantly Protestant country, they’re very often convoys. Ward and Green and Spark, all three were convoys. Flannery O’Connor was a cradle Catholic, and then there’s all the French writers, and François Mauriac who won the Nobel Prize and was mid 20th century, was considered one of the real literary titans and has been largely forgotten. All of his books and translation were on the shelves growing up. So people like that, Georges Bernanos who wrote “The Diary of a Country Priest,” there is a much broader canon than people realize.

MO: So that was your upbringing. And then you get to Princeton and you’re still Catholic, going to mass.

CB: Yes.

MO: And your twin brother’s there and your older sister’s there, right?

CB: Yes, they’re all there. And my sister’s just a year older and then I have a twin brother. So the three of us are within one year of each other there and all very close.

MO: And what happened?

CB: Well, what happened was about a month into our freshman year, my brother was struck by a car right off of campus. I was in my room at the time, which was lucky because this was not in the era of cell phones. Someone who was on the scene with him called to my dorm room number. I answered the phone and was told that an ambulance was coming to get him. I ran over there. I rode with him in the ambulance. I called my sister. She met us at the hospital. While we were in the ambulance, he was awake and in good spirits and obviously had a broken leg, but it seemed like he had gotten off easy, basically. And what appears to have happened is a bit of bone from that broken leg got into his bloodstream and into his lungs because by the time we arrived at the hospital, his oxygen levels were dropping.

He was sort of stopping making sense. The doctors very soon intubated him, put him on a ventilator, rolled him away to the intensive care unit. My sister and I waited. My parents were already on the road down from Manhattan to New Jersey, and an emergency room doctor came over and explained to us that he was going on the ventilator and in a quite offhanded way, with not the best bedside manner, told us that there was a pretty good chance he wasn’t going to make it through the night. So there the two of us are together being told that my identical twin and for Alice, her brother, who she’s in this very close sort of triangular sibling relationship with might not be around by morning. And the two of us immediately, we prayed. That’s what we did. And that’s what people of our upbringing would have done. And not just as a way to console ourselves and pass the time, but with the sense that there was a power to prayer, that it could actually do something in the world, and we prayed for him to make it, which he did.
And I’m happy to say that he is alive and well and 100% today. And so in that sense, our prayers were answered and it doesn’t seem like the kind of event that would necessarily cause a crisis of faith. However, it was my first real introduction to what they call the problem of suffering.

I’d gone to this Jesuit high school, I had been told about the problem. The Jesuits will raise for you a lot of dilemmas that people of faith face more pointedly than even a kind of questioning atheist will. So I’ve been told this is a real problem for people of faith and you’re going to have to figure out some answer for it. But I thought of it in a very abstract way or else maybe I thought I had suffered because sometimes the girl I wanted to take to the dance didn’t want to go with me. I was going to say, adolescent suffering; you got an A minus on a very important English paper.

Right. So they’re suffering and they’re suffering. And so when you have a kind of adolescent simulacrum of suffering, you might think that you recognize intellectually the quote unquote problem of suffering, but it’s not a real problem. And then real suffering occurs and then all of a sudden you do start getting faced with these questions. And in particular, I became acutely aware of the fact that we’d got actually gotten off easy, that lots of people did die under those sorts of circumstances and that lots of people did lose in this very abrupt way, the person who was closest to them in their lives.

MO: And I think you had mentioned your book, you also were mindful of the fact that had it been 50 years earlier or a hundred, this would have been game over, that the contingency of being in this time and place with access to excellent care was also importan.

CB: Well, I was particularly, just to also possibly jump forward in the story, a couple of years later before we’d even graduated, I wound up getting diagnosed with lymphoma and it had spread quite a bit by the time it was caught. And Hodgkin’s lymphoma is now extremely treatable, but it didn’t used to be and even not that long ago. 30 years ago, or I guess this is almost 30 years ago that it happened, but another 20 years before that, the vast majority of young people who were diagnosed with Hodgkin’s died. So I was, again, in that case, very aware of the contingency of it, and I just felt it had a very strong sense of human vulnerability and my own vulnerability. And what happened in between, which informs the title of this book, is I read a famous book by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I’m Not a Christian.”

And interestingly, this book came off of the same shelves when were discussing all of the Muriel and the Graham Greene and the Thomas Merton; there was also this odd book by this famous, world famous philosopher who was very hostile to religion.

MO: Do you think your mom and dad had it because they, in good Jesuit fashion, had been testing their own beliefs? Do you think they had it because fancy people had Bertrand Russell?

CB: It was on my grandparents’ shelves and the book came out in the 50s and I think it was one of the first … The background to it is Russell, as a lot of your listeners probably know, was in the early decades of the 20th century, the world’s most famous philosopher, and he was primarily famous for his philosophy of logic and mathematics, work that was not really readable to non-experts. It’s the kind of philosophy written in logical notation where it looks like you’re reading math problems and not like you’re reading English language, but he also had a very robust following from writing popular works of political and social and ethical commentary, for which he was incredibly controversial. And one of the things was that at a time where it wasn’t really done, he spoke out very loudly against the effects of organized religion and in favor of things like contraception and sexual liberation and things that certain religious forces are still pushing back against 125 years later, but certainly in 1927 or something was a really controversial thing to do.

So he was hired, he lived a very long life and he was hired in the fifties to be a visiting professor at City College. And a lot of the cultural forces in the city and some of the political forces in the city pulled out all the stops to overturn that hiring. It’s the kind of thing that would happen now as well. A group of ostensibly independent academics made the decision to hire the world’s most distinguished philosopher to come teach philosophy for a semester and then all of a sudden the locals get wind of some of the stuff he taught and put the Kaibash on. And so he became very, very famous and particularly if you were in New York Catholic circles, you would have known him from that. And I think there was probably a desire to know what the fuss was all about. And this book was in part put out, it’s a collection of his writings over the course of his entire very long career, all of his writings that kind of touch on religion and ethics, and it was put out in part to sort of clarify what exactly he did and did not say, because there was a lot of misrepresentation of his thought as well. And so if you had some people within religious circles claiming that he said X, Y, and Z, and then you had other people saying, “Well, that’s not actually what he said.” Then if you were sufficiently independent minded, what you wanted to do was actually read the stuff and see what he did say. And that is, I think, consistent with the milieu that I was describing. It’s not a kind of … We do or think whatever the priest tells us on Sunday from the pulpit, we’re real believers, but we’re going to read this stuff and find out what other people are saying. At any rate, there it was on the shelf, a book called “Why I’m Not a Christian,” which obviously jumps out as being somewhat out of place on those shelves.

And when I started having some of these doubts, I also happened to have read some of Russell’s much more strictly philosophical work in an undergraduate course, so he was familiar to me. So I pulled the book down and I started reading. And one of the things that he says about religion is that fear is the basis of the whole thing. We believe in superstitions that can’t be rationally supported because we are aware of ourselves as mortal creatures, we fear our own death, and we fear these large powers outside of our control, and we’d like to believe that there is some power above and beyond those powers, and that there is some way in which we can carry the favor of that power. And that’s a view about the sort of evolutionary or psychological cause of theism that was very popular in the early modern age, and is roughly what Hobbes argues and is roughly what David Hume argues.

And so it’s not original to Russell, but it was rare at that time that it was being made in a particular kind of mainstream context. And it was very striking to me because I was facing precisely that kind of sense of vulnerability and sense of my own mortality and the mortality of the people around me. And when I then looked back on that moment of my sister and I starting to pray, I thought, oh yeah, I was scared. And so I was trying to invoke some power that I didn’t actually have good reason to believe even existed, except for my own wishful thinking. And I started … Also, Russell said you have to look the world frankly in the face, people shouldn’t believe things just because it’s what they were told by their parents to believe. They should think for themselves and they should approach the world with a certain amount of skepticism and those were values that I decided I was going to try and take on.
And at the time at least, it seemed obvious that taking those values on meant not just abandoning this institution in which I’d been raised, which not incidentally was also showing itself to have various levels of corruption within it right around that same time, but abandoning theistic belief entirely.

MO: And so you started slipping away from mass. Were you going to mass daily at Princeton or on Sundays?

CB: No, I was going on Sundays, but when I was in high school, I would often go … School started at 8:30 and there’d be an 8:00 AM mass at the chapel by one of the Jesuits. And I would often do that. So I was not a daily communicant, but I would go more often than just on Sundays. I would usually go a few times a week. And then my brother and my high school girlfriend and I, and the Jesuit priest, Father Curry, would go slip out and have a smoke again and have a smoke. I loved that.
Yeah. Can I just say, that was such a funny moment. So when did you graduate from high school? What year were you? You’re about my age? This is 97, when I graduated. It’s about 95 or so, 96 that this happened.

MO: You’re five years younger than me, exactly, but it was still cool. I mean, obviously he wasn’t supposed to be smoking with you, but he wouldn’t have been fired if he’d been caught smoking. There was enough smoking going on still that he probably would have gotten taken to task by his superior, but it wouldn’t have been … I mean, today, imagine if you were taking teenagers out to smoke cigarettes, then tobacco is so disfavored now. Yes.

CB: No, it’s true. But it is also true that, and this is part of … This gets into much darker things that happened in these Catholic contexts, is that on some level, the priest kind of got to do what he wanted. And this guy happened to be a smoker and some other people knew about it and doubtless didn’t love that he was having a cigarette with the students, but he had this old school kind of attitude and no one was going to step up and stop him. But when I arrived at Yale, the New Yorkers seemed approximately a thousand times more sophisticated. Look, I mean, if you’d been at Loomis as I was, or even at Exeter, Andover, yes, there were certain codes you knew and you got a very good education, but fundamentally, you were going to school in the woods of New England. There was no clubbing, there was no … Drinking had to be highly secretive. I remember getting to college and the New York City day school kids, the Dalton kids, Loyola, let’s say, Regis, despite their highly virtuous education, I mean, a lot of the girls had been getting into clubs underage since they were 14, 15, everyone knew how to smoke cigarettes. A lot of people had done cocaine. That didn’t seem crazy. It wasn’t just like the fast crowd that did like everyone had tried. It was just the level of what you had been allowed to do, of how quickly you could grow up as a teenager in the city, far outstripped what anyone from New England knew.

Yes. Yeah. No, it’s crazy. And I think part of it, also versus a suburban existence, was you never drove. And so parents sort of assumed that there was a real limit to the amount of trouble you could get into. Whereas people from outside of the city would think that the city, it’s actually where you can really get really dangerous, but there was a sense of like the subway’s around all night. Like, you could still get home safely. And in the pre-Giuliani era in the Dinkins years, you could get into … A 14 year old could get into a bar, no problem. And you’d hang out in the back of the bar with your high school friends all night, and then you’d take a cab home, and there was a bit of a view of like, it’s sort of harmless. To relate this back to these other questions, I do think that part of what growing up in New York gives you is a certain kind of knowingness and possibly a certain kind of cynicism and cynicism as a kind of a pose that maybe is a kind of cool pose towards the world. And I think those feelings certainly were what I fell back on as I was losing this other side of my upbringing, which was-

MO: I was going to say, I’m picturing your senior year of high school, let’s say. Was it a bit of an effort to maintain your earnest religiosity in a city and milieu where being religious is about the least cool thing you could be? Were you sort of being primed to fall away from it? Because if you were going to be a literary New Yorker, 10 years hence, you weren’t going to mass. I mean, who was doing that, frankly?

CB: Yeah. I think it may be that those things just felt very bifurcated. I had the thing over here and the thing over there, but I also … I was really into the beats when I was in high school, which- And they were

MO: Very Catholic. Yeah.

CB: And yeah, Kerouac was very Catholic and I had a sense, I think of a real, like a kind of literary pose that had to do with a sense of the sacramental. I think that’s how Kerouac would put it too, and that there was a kind of wildness to it. It wasn’t the like Mandarin, New York intellectuals kind of thing. And there was a really interesting overlap between a particular kind of sort of outsider art and a sense of religious faith.

MO: Was Robert Stone a bit of a bridge there, his novels? I mean, he was a New York City Catholic. He was A New York City Catholic. He’s post-beatnik, he was a Mary Prankster cohort, but very Catholic, New York City guy, I think went to parochial schools, right? At least very early on.

Yeah, I think he spent some time in a Catholic orphanage run by nuns, I believe. Yeah, he was someone who I read a couple of the books back then, but then later would get very into … When I was in college, I started reading DeLillo, who is a huge, huge influence for me. And DeLillo is a Catholic novelist. I think without qualification, I would describe him that way, regardless of what his actual metaphysical commitments are. He was raised in this Italian enclave in the Bronx. He went to Cardinal Hayes for high school, and then he went to Fordham, a Jesuit University in the Bronx for college. The language spoken at home was Italian. He lived with his grandparents who didn’t speak any English. And it’s always been interesting to me that DeLillo has, I think, roughly the same relationship to his ethnic roots, let’s say, as Roth does. And Roth is very strongly thought of as a Jewish writer, also an American writer.

This is something that Roth talked a lot about. If I’m not an American writer, I’m nothing. But Roth’s own parents were born in America. It was multiple generations back before they came over from Eastern Europe. But he was in this Jewish ethnic enclave in Newark, and that is considered and very identified as a big part of who he became as a novelist. DeLillo had a very similar situation with this Italian Catholic enclave in New York. And it’s in his work. I mean, Underworld, a lot of it is set in that world. The most powerful stuff in Underworld is recapturing the Bronx in the 1950s.
And are they about the same age? I think, I mean, Roth was probably born in 35 or 36. I think he’d be pushing fifty years.

CB: Yeah, that’s right about how old Don has. So Roth obviously started publishing very, very early and made a huge splash with his very first book when he was in his early 20s. So he’s someone who you think of the work starts coming out in the 50s. Whereas DeLillo was, I think, past 30, maybe when Americana came out for the early works, he was more of a kind of underground cult kind of writer. When White Noise came out, which is for many sort of general readers where DeLillo starts, that’s when you … He was 50 years old.

MO: Well, thank goodness, right? Or the rest of us would have to completely pack it in and just stab our eyeballs out and slit our wrists. I mean, Roth was … Yeah, he was 26 when I think Goodbye Columbus, the collection came out and the stories have been coming out already. I mean, it’s insane. It’s insane. I think after Roth, the next person that precocious was probably Zadie Smith. Though the next great writer, I mean, it’s 50 years almost between, 40 years between that level of voice.

CB: Well, it’s interesting. It’s happening almost at the same time as it’s happening with Roth. It’s also happening with Updyke. Yes, it’s true. Updike is publishing in The New Yorker starting when he was … I think he might have published there for the first time when he was in undergrad at Harvard, but in any case, very soon. And I mean, this is getting us far afield from the conversation, but it’s an interesting one. Updike is also someone who is a religious writer, Protestant Christian writer.

MO: Before we leave them behind, one thing I want to ask about DeLillo, whom I’m not as familiar with, I’m familiar with him, but I haven’t read that deeply in him. I mean, Roth has almost no scenes of religious observance, especially once you get past the early short stories, which have a kind of sardonic relationship to some religious observance. Later on, his characters, you will never find Zackerment or Portnoy or any of those guys. You’ll never find them in Shul. They’re not going to synagogue. Do DeLillo’s characters go to mass?

CB: Yeah. So there’s a couple of things. There are some … In Underworld, there is a young character who is taken under the wing of a Jesuit priest, and that relationship is very important. There is also a figure named Sister Edgar in Underworld, a nun who plays a very important role, and who is going up to the Bronx later, into the ’80s when it is now there’s been the urban flight and is taking care of doing outreach to poor people in the Bronx. And there is this sighting of an angel. So it’s an explicitly sort of a religious visitation kind of thing. There is a … Towards the end of white noise, there’s a quite dramatic moment that is sort of explicitly religious. The opening of Mao II, which is a really wonderful set piece, takes place at a moony wedding, a mass wedding at Yankee Stadium. I remember those. I remember the movie, where 20,000 people are getting married at once. And so religious ritual and in all sorts of different forms is a thing for him. And very often he’s mixing that with a sense of encounters with art that have the power of religion. There’s often artists, visual artists, or film artists or painters or installation artists or video artists who are very clearly trying to invoke a sense of the sacred in their work.

MO: So you actually had this sort of beautifully integrated sense of your trajectory as somebody who was going to be observant, religious, a communicant, going to mass, embedded in not only a family history, but also a kind of literary patrimony of Catholic writers. And then you have this experience of great contingency where you realize, holy cow, if this is a few years earlier, my brother’s dead. You fall away from mass. There’s a very beautiful scene where you talk about how you would go home and you reach this kind of detente with your parents where you’d go, but you wouldn’t take communion, right? And then your dad would sort of put his hand on you as well. Which is a much bigger deal than it probably sounds like to people outside of that context.

And is it a symbolic statement? Is it just, “I don’t believe in this enough to do it, ” or is it that I’veb not confessed, I haven’t been to confession or I’ve been sinning. You are not obliged to participate in the Eucharist every time you go to mass. And in some Catholic cultures, in Europe, people actually only get communion a few times a year or something like that, even if they go to mass every Sunday, because they take very seriously this idea that you’re not supposed to go if you are knowingly in a state of sin, particularly moral sin. So you need to go to confession before you go to mass. How it actually kind of works in practice in, I think most modern contexts, but certainly in the American context is you go every Sunday. It’s part of going to mass is going to communion. Going to community. And if you really have a strong sense of you have a mortal sin on your conscience, then you might not go and you try and get yourself to confession.

But if you are a young man who goes to church with your family every Sunday and you haven’t told them that you’ve stopped going at college and you haven’t told them about some of the doubts you’ve had, and you have decided that for whatever reason you can in good conscience because you do not believe this thing, go up and get communion, and then all of a sudden, everyone’s walking up and you step aside and go back into the pew, then they may conclude that you have done something really horrible and that you have it on your conscience and that’s the reason that you’re not doing this.

So I mean, a lot of your book is concerned with the reasons that people give for atheism. And you talk about too, broadly speaking. You talk about the scientific materialist atheists and the sort of romantic idealist atheists.

CB: Yes.

MO: Did I get that right? Am I getting the-

CB: Yes. Yes. And I guess I would say that rather than putting it as their reasons for being atheist, I would say that atheists, if you kind of ask, “Well, what do you believe instead of believing in God?” Most of them, or many of them would say that that just fundamentally misunderstands what’s going on. They’d say, “Well, I don’t believe anything. You guys have beliefs and I just have the world. I have the facts. I have common sense and my own observation or whatever.” But I contend everybody has, and this is obviously not original to me as an idea, everybody has a worldview. And nobody has just sort of like neutral, unmediated access to the world that everyone else can’t see because everyone has a lens through which they’re interpreting things.

MO: And I want to thank you for not having called it a Weltanschauung, which means worldview in German and which people often deploy, especially in the religious studies context. I’m sure somebody along the way said, “Don’t you mean a Weltanschauung?” And you said-

CB: And I said, “I’m not going to do that.” I’m just going to call it a worldview, which is a perfectly good English word for it.

MO: And so you spend a lot of the book elucidating the lineages of these two, one a more scientific and materialist and empiricist one, one a more, I guess, post 18th century romantic idealist way of looking at the world, and one of them is the lineage of people like Sam Harris and the scientists. And another one kind of leads into a new age sensibility that you don’t want to look for deities, you want to look for moods and feelings and gestalts and it’s where you get a lot of new age and crystals and even pseudoscience. Yeah, you get that, but you also get a lot of the basically identitarianism. The belief that my subjective experience, which has to do with the way that I personally am situated as a black person, as a Jew, as a queer person. Yes. As you know, a bald white Catholic, it sufficiently conditions the way I take in the world, that it has a defining role in reality as such for me. And in a sense, these are two pretty contrary outlooks, right? So if you’re an atheist who says it’s about empiricism and science, if you’re Sam Harris, although he’s weird too, because he gets into the psychedelics and the personal experience a lot, but let’s say a Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, that’s a very like, you don’t matter, what you want to do is get past your own outlook and see what are the objective things we can agree on. And that’s why we don’t need God. And then if you have the more romantic idealist one, it’s, I’m all that matters. We all have our own subjectivity that cannot be overcome. Each of us has only our own positionality and we will just carry forth in the world as the bald, straight Roman Catholic or as the queer black person or just doing our best to be ethical according to our own best lights, right? So they’re actually pretty, they’re kind of opposite even though they both find a home in contemporary progressive thought.

CB: They’re absolutely opposite. And I think it’s not quite a contemporary progressive thought. I mean, because Dawkins, I don’t think people would call it progressive. What he is, I think by his definition, he’d probably call himself a sort of small L liberal, which this empirical tradition running through Locke and Mill is very closely connected to the liberal tradition. And I think that a lot of the radical centrists, but the people who are looking around the world right now and kind of see the religious believers and the sort of MAGA folks and the left wing identitarians all as being part of the same thing and they on the other hand are the rational people who can see what’s actually going on and believe in evidence-based X and Y. That’s who the scientific materialists of today are, I think.

So what do we say about someone like RFK Jr.? I mean, he’s not a religious person. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in his family’s Roman Catholic heritage. On the one hand, he’s kind of interested in profound anti-empiricism, but he thinks it’s an empiricism, although it seems to be identitarian. It’s more like, it seems tribal when I look at it. I don’t know, like how do we parse his kind of anti-rationalism that in a sense also seems religious? Well, who is he in these traditions?
Yeah. I mean, to be 100% honest, I don’t know. And I don’t pretend that every single human being you take up can be classified easily into this taxonomy, but I do think that broadly speaking, these two worldviews dominate contemporary atheist thoughts. Most people who are not religious believers fit fairly neatly into one or view.

MO: And so as you fell into atheism in your 20s and 30s, which kind were you?

CB: Well, initially, the events we were discussing before are happening in 2000, 2001, 2002. 9/11 happens at that point, this was sort of another reason to feel like religion was a real problem because you had this sense that radical Islam was causing this major threat to the world. At the other hand, you had this sense that the Bush/Ashcroft kind of religious right in America was, it’s arguably a kind of mirror image of it, et cetera. And then out of that, as you know, arises in the New Atheists, and that begins with Harris in 2005. Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennet had all been around for a long time before Harris came along, but this hadn’t been their major area of focus. And then Harris sort of comes out of nowhere with this book, The End of Faith. Sam Harris. So circa 2003 or something? 2005, it comes out. I remember seeing in the bookstore and it just kept selling and selling. It was like a hardcover you kept expecting to go away and go into paperback and it just kept selling. And then, yeah, then God is Not Great. The Hitchens book comes along pretty soon thereafter.

Yes. And then the Dawkins is the God Delusion and Dennet is Breaking the Spell and those all came out within a couple of years of each other. And Harris, I think right at the start of the End of Faith says, “I began writing this book on September 12th, 2001.” And I think it’s part of the reason why they haven’t really lasted, although for people of our generation who were interested as you and I both were in these topics, they were enormous. They had a huge cultural influence and now it makes me feel quite old that I have to sort of explain to people who they were and why they mattered. And I think part of that was that they were to a far greater degree than they realized, really responding to a particular historical moment rather than sort of conveying timeless truths about the way that reality is.

But anyway, they all subscribed in their different ways roughly to scientific materialism, and that was the main way for someone who was trying to be intellectually honest at that time to be an atheist. That was the inviting path. And so that was the path that I went down first.

MO: And I mean, to all outward observers, it served you fairly well. I mean, there you are. Your career was taking off. You were publishing books. You were moving up the ladder at Harper’s where you ended up editor. A magazine that very close to my own heart, my grandfather, who I think did all of his reading from the ages of 19 to 23 when he read through the entire Western canon, but he had a child very young, out of wedlock pregnancy, married my grandmother, had to go work two jobs and basically stopped reading except for the Nation and Harpers, which he subscribed to from the 1930s through his death in the 2000s. And I remember going to Philadelphia and seeing the Nation was always there and Harpers was always there. Did he read them? I don’t know, but what he was trying to signal to himself and the world was that he was a certain kind of labor lefty who got the Nation, but also a certain kind of skeptical intellectual who got Harpers.

And so there are few classier magazines to be editor of, let’s put it that way. Yeah. And yet, as one gets along in your book and you get toward the end, you sort of come clean and say, “But all was not well, I don’t want to mischaracterize it. ” You were drinking a bit, you were a little bit lonely. I mean, what was it that, before we get to your meeting your wife, which kind of sealed the deal, you were already on your road back to religion, yeah?

CB: Yeah. So the first thing is, let me just give a brief precis of what I mean by scientific materialism, and then I’ll say why it didn’t work for me, basically. And scientific materialism, by materialism, I mean to say that it is the view that physical matter is all that exists, and it has a scientific epistemology, meaning that scientific materials believe that we can come to know this physical world outside of our heads by way of observation through the senses, but also in particular, that even though we inevitably take things in through the senses in this subjective first person way, the way that we transform that experience into real knowledge is to find some way to objectify it, is to quantify it and remove as much as possible our own subjective moods and feelings and emotions and passions and see the thing as it is in such a way that another person coming along from a different perspective could look at it and have a shared understanding of it. And then there’s obviously a lot about prediction and experimentation and the generation of broad laws for the behavior of physical reality, but that’s the core of it. So there’s a lot that’s compelling about that. And as a way of viewing the world, it obviously has achieved a great deal.

MO: It’s given us vaccines and Central Air and-

CB: Yes. And the technology that cured my Hotkin’s disease came by way of people looking at the world in this way. So I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for what can be achieved when we treat the world in this way. But as a description of reality as such, rather than as a mechanism for achieving certain things, it seems to me, from the beginning, I think radically incomplete. And a big part of that is the way that it deals with consciousness, which is that it understands consciousness to be a physical process going on in the brain, and it has to be Neuro inspiring somehow. Because if you are going to say that everything that exists is material, then consciousness must not simply emerge from a physical process, but it must actually, in some sense, be a physical process. Now, to me, that just doesn’t make sense as a contention about consciousness, and to most people in human history, it hasn’t made sense. And if you look at even the path that empiricism took, that was basically what Thomas Hobbes said. He was a hardcore materialist and very soon the kind of next empiricist to come after him, Locke, we introduced a kind of dualism with this idea that we have ideas and ideas because prima facie it isn’t the case that thoughts are physical objects in our brains. There is, we are experiencing them. And in a way, it has been stripped away from modern people, just how counterintuitive materialism is. And in fact, most people think materialism, or certainly most materialists, think materialism is commonsensical and sort of obviously true, and that people who are not materialists, they are the ones who are not really, again, looking.

MO: And I should say, this isn’t really part of your story, but I should say there’s a tremendous financial incentive to believe that consciousness is a material process. I mean, the AI bubble is built on the idea that what our brains do in terms of thinking and feeling and having emotions and intuiting is something that computers given enough computational power can replicate. Yes. And we have trillions of dollars that I think is going to disappear from the economy in three or four years when it becomes pretty clear that those problems are not going to be solved by climbing that particular mountain. Yes. And I think there’s a lot of philosophers of mine who are not themselves religious, who would say that the whole idea of artificial general intelligence doesn’t actually make a lot of sense- David Chalmers, people like that.

Yeah.

CB: Yeah. So there’s that. So there’s this sense that it doesn’t actually give a sufficiently robust description of reality as we experience it. And then the other piece of it is, if you’re a young man who has lost this leftist tradition that you grew up in, part of what you want is you want an ethic, you want to know what to do, you want to know how to act in the world, and scientific materialism isn’t very good on that front. For the most part, the scientific materialists tend to be some version of utilitarians, because utilitarianism grounds the good in the physical experience of pleasure. So it has a grounding in something physical and observable. It also is a way of making the good a kind of fungible, quantifiable thing that you can, in the properly experimental way, you can make predictions about what will produce the most good.

You can have experiments. You can do some of the engineering and fine tuning that the scientific mindset tends to like. But it’s not a … Most utilitarians move from our sense of the good is grounded in our own feelings of pleasure and pain. Two, we ought to concern ourselves with maximizing the sum total of pleasure in the world or in society and minimizing with some total pain, right? But it’s not at all clear as a strictly intellectual matter how you get from, as David Hume would put it, the is to the ought. Scientific materialism doesn’t actually have a good account for why it is that we should care what happens to other people. What most scientific materialists … And I want to make clear that what I’m not saying is that atheists on balance are more likely to be bad people than theists, but that this kind of atheism doesn’t have a coherent picture of the good that actually can be binding on people.

And what they have tended to say is, for whatever reason, having to do with evolution and the way that game theory operates and the advantages of altruism, et cetera, most of us just are hardwired to be good on balance. We don’t need a reason for it. It is how we are, and that there are certain outliers who are kind of sociopaths, basically, and we need to try and control them, but basically we don’t need a theory of the good. We all know that we ourselves value pleasure and we all sort of know intuitively that it follows from that, that we should want the same for others and we should act in ways that minimizes the pain of others. We should not cause others pain for no good reason, et cetera. And in fact, what they very often said is, and I don’t have the line offhand, but there was a line that Hitchens like to quote from somebody that was something to the effect of, “There exists bad people who do bad things, but to make a good person do bad things, that takes religion.” And that really what it is, is it’s precisely institutional religion that makes people act in ways that cause suffering for others. Now, I know I listened to your conversation with Ross about that, and something that he’s very good at, that he talks in a really interesting way about, is the experiment in living without religion that American society has undertaken in the last 20 years.

One thing I think we have learned from Donald Trump, who is certainly not a religious person, and from the many people who support Trump, and the cruelest of his policies, which very often do not seem to be motivated by religion, is that it is not the case that religion is the only thing that makes people act in cruel ways. And it is also not the case that we can just take for granted that the vast, vast majority of human beings are just kind of naturally good, that we don’t need to work out a theory of the good because evolution and natural physical processes have taken care of.

MO: Yeah. And I mean, the people, there are various theories of people in their natural state being good that sadly tend to fail. It turns out that under communism, there’s a lot of mass murder that under a kind of pagan fascism there’s a lot of mass murder. It also turns out that the theories of a peaceful matriarchal pre-history are all bunk, that there’s a lot of human bad in these situations and that we could do worse than having a compelling affirmative theory of the good.

CB: Yes, yes. There is a line from Hume to the effect of who among us, if we were walking down the street and saw someone’s gouty foot would step out of our way to walk out of our way to step on it. And the obvious answer that he’s trying to draw there is nobody. That’s not a real person. Or if it is, that’s a major outlier that it is true that we are all more concerned with our own pleasure than with that of others. We’re more concerned with our own good. And of course, Adam Smith was a contemporary friend of Hume’s and this idea of all of us pursuing our good can lead to the good of others, provided we don’t have people who are just needlessly cruel, who get their kicks out of causing harm to others, but basically it assumes that that doesn’t really exist or it exists in rare enough cases that it’s not something the system needs to be overly concerned with.
And I think as an empirical matter, I think we have good evidence that sadly, there’s a bit of that cruelty in all of us, at least a bit, and that some of us, some many of us have a lot of it.

MO: So was it that sense of reckoning for a purpose or an ethic that made you begin thinking of Catholicism again?

CB: Well, so where I went after scientific materialism was to this other atheist worldview, which I call romantic idealism, which basically starts where scientific materialism ends, in that it starts with the sense of consciousness and subjectivity and first person experience, and in some cases goes so far as to be truly philosophically idealist in the sense of saying that there is no reality at set for our subjective ideas. But even if it does believe that there is a reality out there, it might believe that it’s a kind of Kantian thing in itself, something we can never have unmediated access to. And that this project that somehow we’re going to transcend our subjectivity and arrive at this objective knowledge of external reality, it just misunderstands the way that these things work. And this view also, it’s romantic because instead of trying to be scientific and strip away the emotions and the passions and try and get at objective reality, it understands our emotions as being part of the process all along. It’s how we’re taking stuff in. And so we can’t transcend it. And this goes back as I trace the lineage, it goes back certainly to Kant and maybe before him to Spinoza and Rousseau, but it starts to come into its own in the post-Kantian world with Schopenhauer, with Nature, and then into the existentialists. And it’s also, it tends to really prize the imagination, creativity, the artist as a sort of heroic figure. So if like me, you’re someone who has had this sense of vocation, literary vocation from a young age, it’s really a very powerful idea. It says that it’s your job to make the meaning of the world. There’s no meaning inherent in the world. You’re bringing it to it and that’s what your project is. That’s your vocation, that’s your calling.

MO: Yeah. I should add the American transcendentalists are part of that lineage as well.

CB: Yes, absolutely. Emerson.

MO: For sure. Yes. And yet ultimately that wasn’t enough for you.

CB: Yeah. I mean, what I found was that it’s incredibly isolating and lonely. I think if you take the view seriously, because it really does suggest on a fundamental level that we’re stuck in our own heads and we can’t really, not only can we never arrive at a knowledge of the physical world outside us, we can’t connect up with other human beings either. There’s a deep sense of existential isolation to it.

MO: I would also say, I wonder if it’s also bad for the working artist in the sense that it raises the stakes very high, right? Because what if the art you produce is, as it is for most of us, a bit derivative, a bit minor, unlikely to outlast us. If we’re looking for cosmic meaning or for purpose in the words we get on the page every day, and most of us are lucky to do a little bit that might merit other people’s attention, we’re almost consigning ourselves to irrelevance in the cosmic sense, right? Whereas if I think of myself in the Jewish language as b’tzelem Elohim, made in the image of God, and mattering, having intrinsic worth, then it’s nice if my art is good, but if my art’s not good, but my work as a line cook or a mailman or an accountant is good, it doesn’t matter actually. The stakes, the worth doesn’t come from the work. It comes from the existence.

CB: Yes. And that’s absolutely true. And there’s another piece to it too, which is that for most of human history, people who’ve understood the … Well, I’m speaking in these very broad terms, but there’s a few things that art is for, right? And one of them may be to get us in touch with the divine and to orient us in that way and to give us some sense of the majesty of reality, et cetera. But then as you get into the sort of into the secular age, there’s the rise of realism and the sense is that there is an external reality and depicting that is part of the artist’s job. But if you are someone who really goes in for the romantic ideal, then it’s tough to even know by what standard you would even judge whether your art is successful, because you are meant to be creating a thing in itself rather than something that has some relationship to the world.

And I spent, that does relate to some of this. I spent the bulk of my 20s working on a novel that took place in this sort of invented world that I wanted to have nothing to do with the facts of my life. And I didn’t want to write the young person’s autobiographical novel. It was sort of the very opposite of like the auto fiction and the work wasn’t very good and I drove myself crazy with it and I really sacrificed a lot of other portions of my life with this commitment. I also had a strong sense because of my brush with mortality that I wasn’t going to live very long and that none of this meant anything unless I made it mean something and really whether my life had been worth living at all was going to depend on whether I finished this novel and whether it was a great one, which is an enormous amount of pressure for a 27 year old to put on the writing that they’re doing when they go home at night from their job.

And I was just deeply unhappy. And you know, this strain of atheism has always engaged in a very serious way with the problem of suicide. Camus, who is one of the avatars of this strain, famously said that only suicide is the only serious philosophical problem. The fact that we can, that in a certain sense, we have to in every moment of our lives choose to continue going on because we are aware that we have this power to end our lives. Now, that is an interesting fact that is a sort of theoretically promising fact to spend some time working through. However, if you are constantly every moment in your life, feeling like you have to choose life, because suicide every moment of your life feels like a really live option, something’s gone wrong. That’s no way to live a life. And romantic idealism is often quite open about the fact that it has no good explanation for why a person shouldn’t just get out as early as they can, as Philip Larkin says, and don’t have any kids yourself.

They suggest that possibly suicide is cheating, it’s inauthentic, you should be holding up the mantle of living through this existential experience, but it doesn’t have a story to tell you about why this life is quote unquote, worth living. And that’s not a sort of factual problem. That’s not a limitation of the sort that I think materialism has, but if a worldview is one that can’t really be lived in, that is a major knock against the worldview, even if in some other sense it is more quote, true.

MO: You’ve been listening to me talking with Christopher Beha. It’s spelled B-E-H-A, by the way. If you were listening to the interview thinking, “Holy cow, I got to go buy this guy’s book.” And you’re wondering, how do you spell Beha? If I heard Beha and knew nothing else, I might think it’s B-A-Y-A. I don’t know what I’d think it was. And by contrast, I always thought that his name, which I’ve seen written for 20 years now, was pronounced Beha, because it’s B-E-H-A. In any event, it’s Christopher Beha, Christopher like Christopher and Beha, B-E-H-A. You should go by “Why I’m Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.”

We have some really cool guests coming up in the weeks to come on this podcast. Arielle Angel, who is stepping down as editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, the left-wing Jewish magazine, is going to be on the show, and that’s going to be pretty soon up in a week or two. And then a little bit further down the line, the theologian Miroslav Volf and the poet, Christian Wiman, have just published a collection of their epistolary conversation about faith. They wrote each other letters back and forth and published them as a book. So it’s sort of a poet talks to a theologian, and I’m going to be sitting down with both of them talking about faith, Christianity, and of course, letter writing, which I might love even more than the other two. And now back to my conversation with Christopher Beha.

What brought you back to the church?

CB: Well, it was a slow process, but part of it was having been through these two different versions of atheism and felt them both unsatisfying, I started to think about, and also thinking of them as, in a way, mirror images of each other. I started thinking about what would it look like to have a worldview that combined both of those things? That’s what I was sort of in a classic dialectical way, having passed through those things, that’s what I was on the lookout for, intellectually. On a personal level, what happened was I met my wife and I fell in love with a person who made, when I was at the depths of this sort of existential despair of my passage through romantic idealism, made life feel like a joyful thing, worth having, worth cherishing. And I had that feeling without being able to make intellectual sense of it.

I also had that feeling, well, in theory, ascribing to an intellectual view that says, “You need to take your emotions seriously, that your emotions are telling you that your emotions condition your reality in important ways.” So it mattered that I felt this way.

MO: I love the way you say in the book, you just wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. Your meeting her only takes up a page or two, but it’s very beautifully done, and I found very moving. I teared up when I read that.

CB: I appreciate that. I mean, it really was that kind of life altering event and not everybody, and this is part of, I recognize part of how I am wired, not everybody who gets changed in that way then needs to have a coherent worldview in which that fits. A lot of people … So for example, plenty of scientific materialists love their spouses, love them deeply, while also feeling as an intellectual matter that love is an evolutionary strategy that has been randomly hit upon, not by humans, but by the self-replicating proteins in our bodies, have decided that the survival machines, to use Dawkins evocative phrase, that have this habit of having this neurochemical response to meeting certain other people, that those ones on balance are more fit to pass down the genes.

MO: I’ll tell you that I kind of like you on some deep level found that so implausible that, and I actually haven’t thought through the journey as well, but I know that at some point I realized that religion for me was what made sense of love and art and consciousness, that there were these kind of indescribable, numerous things that other stories didn’t account for, that God did or religion or whatever language you want to use for it, that something transcendent was at work there, that scientific materialism was not going to account for me. And I mean, certainly there are many scientific materialists who love their spouses and would say, if you press them on it, it’s chemical reactions. One has to wonder how much they actually ascent to the belief that their love, their passionate love for their spouse and the family they’ve built is purely chemical reactions. I mean, it seems to me a hard claim to feel, even if you can kind of name it.

But people are built differently, right?

CB: Yes. Yes. People are built different. I think that there are people who are able to hold mutually opposing views in their mind at the same time. I am not one of them. I want it all to fit together.

MO: And your wife had been, you were falling in love, you were at some point, I guess, living with her, and she was raised Episcopalian, did not have warm feelings, in a fairly attenuated way. And you said- Well, tell you tell the story.

CB: Well, it wasn’t just me at the time, we both were sort of like, “It would be nice to go do something on the weekend to … ” I think we both had had our emotional and relationship up and downs before we met each other, and I think we both felt an enormous sense of gratitude that we found each other, and we wanted to do something that structured our lives in some way. This is all very vague, but these feelings were very vague, that could give us a sense of appreciation. So we actually went a couple of times to a Unitarian church, and I think Unitarianism, I don’t think I’m being glib when I say it’s for people who want to go to church without actually believing any of the stuff that people who go to church believe in, or … I was just talking to a rabbi who was talking about the rabbi of the Warsaw ghetto whose name I’m forgetting, but who left behind some writings.

And anyway, long story short, one of the things he left behind was a tract for young people, for adolescents or college age people who might be studying religion. And it was a kind of like guide, an apologia for young people trying to figure out, am I going to do this? And he had a line the rabbi was telling me about that this rabbi prizes or this late dead rabbi said, “This is for people who want to want to be religious.” And it might be fair to say that a lot of Unitarians are people who want to want to be religious. Yeah. I also do think being more honest about it, there’s a lot of multi-faith families who go and mixed Jewish and Christian couples where there may be Jews who would love to go to a church that doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about God that the Jews put up on the cross. But at any rate, we did that a few times. And then my wife had been raised Episcopalian and in our neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights, there’s an Episcopal church with a lot of members in the community and we started going there occasionally and without really committing to any kind of belief one way or another, but having been through this journey that I’ve been on, I started listening in a different way to a lot of stories that I’ve been told many, many times throughout my childhood. None of it was new to me.

Some people may know that the Episcopal liturgy is very, very similar to the Catholic liturgy, just in terms of the structure of it. So it felt in a lot of ways like what I was used to, and you start hearing things about how God is love, and love is God, and that is the most important teaching is to love God and to love your neighbor. And when this sense of this force of love in your life and wanting a worldview that takes that force seriously was part of what was driving you there, it can have a real powerful hold on you. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the idea of the world as the product of a loving creation, the idea that both the material reality described by materialism and the subjective experience described by idealism, that both of those things are real and both of those things need to be taken seriously.

And part of the reason that we can say they’re both real is that we are both bodies and souls. I think it’s very important that Christianity, because it comes … The famous thing about the line about Christianity is that it combines Athens with Jerusalem, and it’s not idealist in the Platonic sense, because it has the Jewish sense of the material world as a creation of God. It really exists, and not only does it really exist, but it’s good. It is the product of a loving creation. It is not something we’re trying to transcend to get to the ideational world in the way that a Platonist would say. So the story being told started … It made a lot of sense to me in a way that it hadn’t before, and it came to feel in the way that these things can, when things go well, like this whole journey had been leading me this way.

I had passed through these different stages because that’s precisely what I needed to do in order to come to the full appreciation of the place where I’d started. And then what happened was, my wife was slightly less enthusiastic about going than I was, and occasionally she would say, “I don’t really feel like going today.” And then instead of going to the Episcopal church, I could turn right out the door instead of left and I’d go to the Catholic church and I wasn’t taking communion again. I still had not taken it since the day when I was in college after reading Bertrandwrote Russell and I told my parents I wasn’t going up, but I just started going. And then eventually I started to feel again like this was where I belonged and I wasn’t sure exactly what to make of it. I wasn’t really talking with anyone other than my wife about it.

I didn’t tell my family, the rest of my parents or my siblings. And then at a certain point, I went to go talk to the priest at this parish where I’d been going and I said, “I think I may be kind of working my way back into the church.” And he said, “Well, do you want me to take your confession?” And I hadn’t really, that wasn’t my intention having a meeting with him, but I said, “Sure.” And I made my confession to him and it was a really sort of emotional-

MO: Bless me Father, it’s been 27 years since my last confession, right? Yeah. We all know the Liturgy from TV.

CB: And it was a profoundly cathartic experience. And then after that, I started receiving communion again and considered myself back in the church. And I think I obviously had this acronym of confession growing up, but it wasn’t necessarily the thing that was most emphasized. And I came to understand that a big part of my sense of, my call to religion had to do with the sense of my own limitations and my own fallibility. And the idea that there is a God who loves you and that you can do things that get you out of joint with that God, but that ultimately you can fix that, that there’s forgiveness and that a certain amount of healing can be had. Those are, I think, really powerful emotions.

I quote towards the end of the book, a line from Wittgenstein who said, “Christianity is for the man who needs infinite help.” And that’s sort of what I felt. I did not arrive at this place feeling like, “Man, now I finally have it all figured out. I’ve solved the problem. I did all this reading. I read all of it and now I’ve cracked it and I know more than other people. ” It was much more an emotional sense of, I’ve come to recognize after all of this effort of trying to figure it out by myself that I’m not going to figure it out, I’m never going to figure it out by myself and that I need to submit to a kind of help and that help exists, that help can be had.

MO: Yeah. We ran an article in Arc Magazine recently about the sort of alleged religious revival that we’re going through, which is not supported by the evidence, and one of the sociologists or somebody who our terrific reporter quoted, said, “In previous revivals, the evidence of the revival was a lot of people talking about how sinful they were.” These were revivals. The great awakenings were awakenings of humility and of how much repair people personally needed, but then also society needed. So you needed abolition or you needed temperance, so forth. A lot of the evidence for the current revival is people who are coming from a place of tremendous pride and machismo and trying to append Christianity to that. And that struck me as right, that that’s actually not … The revival spirit is not one of, we’re going to conquer the world through returning to extremely traditionalist parishes.

It’s a spirit of we are so profoundly broken and so badly want to lean on the church and God and each other in trying to figure out how to be less broken. And I’m using very Christian language here, but I think there are Jewish and probably other analogs as well. And that struck me as a very important distinction.

CB: Yeah, I agree. And I think some of that revival that you’re talking about comes from people who arrive in a political camp or a cultural camp or have arrived at a set of ethics or whatever, and then they notice that the people on their team tend to associate with Christianity or with a particular kind of Catholicism, and then it becomes the driver of that rather than the other way around.

MO: It becomes a tribal cultural style.

CB: Yeah.

MO: Chris, this has been so great and I have a lot more I want to ask you. I hope we can do this again.

CB: I’d love to.

MO: Yeah. But while I have you now, can I hit you with my rapid fire last five questions?

CB: Yeah, absolutely.

MO: Okay. So lightning round. The first one is usually, do you believe in God, but I’m going to skip past that because I think we’ve talked about that.

CB: Yes.

MO: So, the second one, which actually I’m really curious about, it’s a little personal, but given that you don’t seem to have a day job, I try to ask all my guests, how do you support yourself financially?

CB: So the answer is, the honest answer is that I probably will be going back to a day job before too long. As you mentioned, I’ve worked as a magazine editor for a long time and I wrote around that, primarily fiction. Fiction that is not of the sort that-

MO: That makes millions.

CB: Yes, because it takes me a long time to write them and then not a lot of people read them, although I think the people who do read them get something out of them. So that was the model for a long time. And then I had the idea to write this book and was able to sell it on proposal as one does with a nonfiction book. And I was lucky enough for various reasons to get a decent size advance that allowed me to leave my editorial job to finish it. And now it’s finished and I will be going back at some point to some kind of full-time work. And then the other piece of it is my wife, who is also a full-time writer, but she writes books that people do want to read, so that helps a lot.

MO: That’s a great answer. If you could have any other career, something possibly realistic, not like being a fictional superhero or an Olympic sprinter, but something that if you’d made different choices you might have been able to do, what would it be?

CB: I would love to be a musician.

MO: Are you one?

CB: I play guitar. I don’t play well. I’ve recently been taking it slightly more seriously than I used to, but it’s always been something that I do at home by myself as a kind of … I took lessons when I was young, so I can play. I know all the chords, I can strong, I can pick up most songs and stuff, and I do a lot of just sitting at home playing as a kind of stress reliever or something to do. But I’ve recently started to play with other people and get slightly more serious about it as a hobby, not serious about it like it’s something I’d start putting my stuff up on Spotify or anything. But the other thing, essentially, there’s only three things I’ve ever really wanted to be in my life. One was the third baseman for the New York Yankees.

MO: Yeah. Greg Nettles.

CB: One was a … Scott Brosius maybe.

MO: Okay.

CB: Yeah. But Nettles, I watch Nettles play a little.

MO: Okay. So third baseman, writer.

CB: And writer and musician. I had this idea, it was like a thing to relatively late in my adolescence that I was like, “I’d like to do that.” And I think there’s the level of collaboration that musicians have is something that every writer I think has to envy a little bit.

MO: I also always say, I think musicians are the only people who enjoy even the practicing of their art.

CB: Yes.

MO: Right? Like writers, when we’re sitting around and it’s not coming, it’s horrible. And even when it is coming, it’s horrible. But musicians, when they’re jamming and practicing, it’s not always great, but a lot of time it’s fun. And I just think that’s not true for sculptors and writers and the rest of us, it’s usually painful. What’s your biggest regret or what’s a big regret you have?

CB: I mean, I’ll get deeply personal about this if we’re going to go there. I wish I’d quit drinking a lot sooner than I did.

MO: Are you now sober? You don’t drink?

CB: Yeah, I’ve been sober for a while now, for about a decade, but I think a lot of things in my 20s and early 30s could have gone a lot differently if I had recognized the problem that it was posing in my life. And maybe this part of the story that I’m telling in this book is this is the way that it had to happen, but I think there are things that I did while I was drinking that I regret in terms of my actions and things, which we don’t need to get into on the podcast, but I think as a-

MO: We’ll assume the worst.

CB: As a broad thing, I think probably I would have been better off making that decision sooner.

MO: Sure. What’s a song for you that evokes an intense feeling of nostalgia?

CB: I was maybe six years old or something on the video when Paul Simon’s album “Graceland” came out. And do you remember the video for the song called “You Can Call Me Al”?

MO: With Chevy Chase? Of course.

CB: Chevy Chase and Paul Simon. I didn’t know who either of those people were. I mean, I probably had seen one of the Vacation movies and right around that time was the first time I saw the Caddy Shack.

MO: Exactly.

CB: I may have been getting into Chevy Chase, but I didn’t know who. And for those who haven’t seen it, the video is just the two of them in a room together.

MO: Lip syncing, right?

CB: And Chevy Chase is lip syncing it and Paul Simon is not. Every time. And the joke is that Chevy Chase is tall and handsome and moves in a certain way and that Paul Simon is not those things. And it’s actually, it’s a wonderful song and the lyrics-

MO: Oh, it’s a beautiful song. That whole album is astonishing.

CB: Yeah. And the lyrics are really actually sort of profound at the end and it has that he looks around, he sees angels in the architecture for spinning for infinity. He says, Amen, Aleah. And I so loved that song. I got so into that video and I just thought it was sort of silly. I can call you Betty and you can call me out. And my parents got me the cassette of “Graceland.” So it was the first cassette I ever owned and I wore it out. You know, boy in the bubble.

MO: Can I tell you how many people I know whose families that was the cassette they played in the car over and over again? Yeah. I mean, that album was such, I think for a certain, maybe it was urban middle class, the kind of people who had dads who’d been attuned to Simon and Garfunkel, I think is almost a precondition. And that Paul Simon was having this career renaissance because he had done all this great solo work in the seventies, but this was the mid to late eighties. And he was back with this album that just blew everyone’s mind and was so beautiful and every song was so hummble and singable and good. It did something. And he was on Saturday Night Live with it and the video was good.

CB: And then the next album, the follow up, which was “Rhythm of the Saints,” which is also a really fantastic album. And I went through a period where I was more into that album, but I still listen to “Graceland” constantly now. So that whole album, but I think I’d have to say like that, I’ve probably listened to that song more times than any other song in my entire life.

MO: All right, last question. So recommend a book for us. Contemporary, old, yours besides yours, besides “Why I’m Not An Atheist” by Christopher Beha.

CB: Am I allowed to? My wife’s new book, which is called “The Fine Art of Lying,” will actually not become out until June, but I recommend that everyone go out and pre-order it now, which they can do.

MO: You know what? I’m going to do that. I’m not even lying. I’m going to do that.

CB: It’s a wonderful book, truly. It’s quite different from mine. It’s a literary thriller and it’s a real page turner, but it’s very smart, very funny, and truly thrilling. And she grew up around the corner from me on the Upper East Side to refer back to some of the conversations we’ve been having. And it is also set in that world, so it gives a very different view of it than my book.

MO: Christopher Beha, thank you so much. This has been really fun. Yeah,

CB: It’s been a pleasure. I hope we do it again.

MO: Christopher Beha is the author of “Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer,” just published last month and available at fine purveyors of books near you. Let’s look at religious holidays. It’s a serious time for religious holidays. We just passed the Jewish holiday of Purim and the day before Purim, which is Ta’anit Esther, the Fast of Esther, and the day after Purim, which is Shushan Purim. And then the Catholics are bringing us St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. Also, the Feast of St. Joseph in the Roman Catholic Church is March 19. The Persian New Year Nowruz is on March 20. And Holi, the Hindu holiday, also falls generally in March, although the dates vary by the lunar calendar. So it’s basically a worldwide cornucopia of holidays.

Celebrity birthdays in and around now. Liza Minelli who has a new memoir out. Her birthday is March 12. Bruce Willis is March 19 and in between the two, perhaps the finest thespian of my generation. I grew up with him. I’m still with him. He never goes away. The great Rob Lowe’s birthday, March 17.

You’ve been listening to Arc: The Podcast. It’s the audio companion to Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, online at arcmag.org. We are a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. And the team includes me and my producer and editor, David Sugarman, and the interns of Caroline Coffey and Ben Esther and the newer interns, Ezra Ellenbogen and Sadie Davis-Suskind. And then the team at the Danforth Center includes Debra Kennard and Mark Valeri and Abram Van Engen and Sheri Peña, who is our controller, which is spelled comptroller, but I was always told it was pronounced controller, so I’m going to roll with that. Let’s go old school with that.

And we hope that you will be listening to us now and forever. If you enjoyed the show, could you just take 10 seconds and give us five stars on the platform, Your You, and maybe write a quick review because that stuff does help us find our audience.

Until next time, I’m Mark. Keep listening. Thank you.