José Luis Orella in Spain has sent me this excellent account by the science fiction novelist, John C. Wright, of his conversion to Catholicism from a background of militant atheism. It offers a truly powerful witness.

I would point out, however, that his history is awry when he discusses the historic tensions between Christendom and Islam. He seems to be under the impression that the Siege of Vienna (1683) preceded the Battle of Lepanto (1571), whereas in fact it happened more than a century later. I was pleased, however, that he made the connection that the defeat of the Muslim forces at Vienna happened on 9/11.

My only other difficulty with Wright’s otherwise cogent account of the rational underpinnings of his rejection of atheism and embrace of Christ’s Mystical Body is his too shallow understanding of Western Civilization. It will simply not do to lump Christendom together with the Enlightenment, which is effectively what his neo-conservative interpretation of the war between Islam and modern secularism does. As a Catholic, I feel no more affinity to the atheism and secular fundamentalism of modernity than I feel towards Islam (in fact, less). The war between Islam and the modern secular “West” is not a war in which Christians should take sides. The Church does not choose between opposing heresies. She offers the truth, plain and simple, and calls for heretics of all shades to repent and convert.

Enough of my quibbling. Here is Wright’s otherwise excellent conversion story:

Q: You were raised as a Protestant, you grew into an atheist, you married a Christian Scientist and then you went and became a Catholic. It’s hard not to think of a miracle. How were you led into the fold?

A: Odd as this will sound to Christian readers, my reason for being an atheist was because of a deeply rooted love of truth.

Since a young age, I believed that human reason, and only human reason, was man’s path to discover the nature of reality and virtue, to discover what one is and what one ought to be, provided one was sufficiently fearless and objective and dispassionate in the investigation. All belief in anything supernatural I rejected as insufficiently supported the evidence; even the concept of a natural above nature I rejected as paradox. But for all my skepticism I never lost my love of truth.

Three things happened which eroded my faith in atheism.

First, when I became a husband, I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of unborn children. The atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended and acted as if my son were not alive, not human, not important; when, of course, any man who loves the truth cannot help but see that he has a duty to love and protect his beloved children. The secular not only lied, they tempted young mothers to commit the most atrocious crime imaginable, for surely to kill one’s own little helpless baby is worse than to kill a stranger, because when a mother who should love her helpless child kills a relative, there is treason involved, a betrayal of her highest duty and her deepest instincts. The baby has no one else to protect him.

My son was wrongly diagnosed with having a disease, and the doctor gently suggested killing him. My wife was a Christian, and would not even hear of the issue. To my infinite shame and regret, for a moment, just for a moment, overcome with the fear of the burdens raising a crippled child would lay on me, I was tempted by the offer, and contemplated killing my own son. You see, I did not have the staff of the Church on which to lean. I was trying with my own unaided human reason to find my way through the thicket of vice and virtue, right and wrong, and so for a moment my foot touched the pathway to hell.

For that moment, in my heart, I thought as a murderer thinks, and not just a healthy, normal murderer, no, a kin-slayer; an infanticide.

What was wrong with the atheist world, if we atheists were so right on so many things, that we could be so grossly wrong about this?

Second, when I became a father, I realized that my duty as a father was to raise my sons to be men, real men, and not to be weak and foolish creatures enslaved to degrading vices. This was not a matter of opinion or preference: it was a matter of iron duty, which I could not evade any more than I could evade the fact that twice two equals four.  The atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended and acted as if all moral choices are equal and all equally meaningless: that no matter what you choose, your choice is sacred and praiseworthy, because there is no wrong choice. This doctrine is not only a lie, it is illogical, on the grounds that a father cannot instruct his children to make choices without standards, and a standard by definition is something one does not choose. It is a given.

So, once again, I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of human vice and human sexuality. I had been told by the secular culture and by my fellow atheists that sex was a recreation, a source of meaningless pleasure, and I had been told that fornication was better than monogamy, and sexual perversion was better than chastity. Upon becoming a father, logic told me that no matter what my preferences or opinions in the matter, I would be failing in my duty to my sons if I taught them to be unchaste or to be perverts. But everyone around me, the entire world, the media, the press, the culture, the academia, the laws, all were unified against that single, simple idea that truth is better than falsehood and purity better than vice. I realized with a sensation of seasickness that I was surrounded by an empire of lies.

So for the second time I asked myself, what was wrong with the atheist world, if we atheists were so right on so many things, that we could be so grossly wrong about this?

On September 11th, the anniversary of the defeat of the Paynims of the Battle of Vienna, America, and all the Western world, was viciously and cravenly attacked by Mohammedans, and the long war between Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, suspended since Lepanto, was renewed.  As an atheist, I saw this as an example of the extravagant evils of religion in action, and was certain that my fellow atheists would be as outraged as was I with the attack on our most beloved institutions of the West, the liberty – particular intellectual and academic liberty – which we enjoyed.

Instead, the atheists, particularly those of the American Left, vocally and wholeheartedly supported and applauded every effort to stop any retaliation for the unprovoked attack, and sided, wherever possible, with our enemies. While not coming out and saying they wished for enemy victory, they rushed to aid and comfort them, put legal and social barriers in place against our forces to protect the foe, and played the grossly dishonest word-games of moral equivalence and blaming the victim.

I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of secularism. It was not, as it so often claimed to be, a merely rational and human concern for human life on Earth. To judge from the public reaction of the majority of atheists after the Twin Towers fell, the atheists did not side with civilization against the dark and barbaric terrorists. No, they sided with the terrorists against the Christians.

I stared in all directions in astonishment, with wide eyes and mouth hanging open. What had driven the world I served insane? They were suicidal. The atheists were aiding and abetting the Jihad, offering apologetics and support for it.

The thing I had thought my whole life was atheism was not atheism, it was merely antichristianity.

I was ashamed to the core of my being to see my fellow atheists behaving in such a fashion. In three areas of paramount importance, the nature of life and death, the nature of sex and romance, and the nature of war and peace, my fellow atheists were not only wrong, they were extraordinarily and absurdly and profoundly wrong, wrong to the point of insanity.

At about this same time, atheism started becoming popular, and many books and articles were published that were openly atheistic: authors such as Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris. One would think I would rejoice to see the ideas I supported at long last receiving public attention. But the books and articles were lies. My fellow atheists were not attacking the things about religion I thought mistaken and evil, they were attacking the good things which made religion tolerable, those same three issues of life versus death, chastity versus perversion, self-defense versus self-destruction. They were attacking reason.

I was an atheist because I loved truth and I thought that the truth, the unpleasant truth, was that no gods were or could be real. Because I loved truth, I loved virtue, life, reason, and goodness. And I found myself alone. All my fellow atheists, to one degree or another, were on the side of falsehood, death, nonsense and madness and evil.

I have three times mentioned how shocked I was, but I did not say what shocked me so. I was shocked by the sheer frivolity, the lightheartedness, the silliness of my fellow atheists and the whole secular world in their approach to these deep matters of life and death, purity and perversity, peace and war. They treated all issues of philosophy like questions of fashion.

None of my fellow atheists, not one, was an inspiration for me as a husband, or as a father, or as a patriot of the civilization of the West. Even men whom I admired for other reasons, or were dear friends, treated selfishness as if it were the norm, treated love of life as if it were an oddity, or treated history as if it had never happened.

The idea haunted me that the atheists could not be wrong about all the important issues in life, but right about the one paramount issue of whether God existed.

Once my faith in atheism was lost, my deep-seated hatred of Christianity eroded. I began reading Christian authors, particularly C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. In them, I found the sanity and sobriety that was missing in my atheist allies. Lewis and Chesterton were not merely right, but deeply and soundly and soberly right, right in the way a healthy man is right: their hearts were in the right place.

The idea haunted me that the Christians could be right about all the important issues in life, but wrong about the one paramount issue of whether God existed.

So I sat down to read the Summa Theologica. Remember that it was my firm belief that unaided human reason was the only tool men had to discover the nature of reality and morality. I reasoned that this work, written by the most reasonable writer of all time, could settle the matter. If he could not reason me into belief in God, no one could.

Well, the thickness and the dryness, the sheer hard work of the intellectual effort defeated my attempt. I gazed with weary eyes at the endless pages of tightly-reasoned proofs, each as difficult as a math problem, and decided that God Almighty would not, if He were real, expect every illiterate farmer in every village too small to have a paved road run to it to go through this careful and painstaking means of reasoning to discover Him. If He were Almighty, as well as being the creator of the laws of nature of the universe, He would have some means by which the people whom He wished to save from death could be saved.

Armed with this simple reasoning, I decided to put all my lifetime of philosophy to an empirical test! I knelt and prayed perhaps the most arrogant prayer of all time (albeit, at the time, being an atheist, I had no idea how arrogant it was).