Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry. (Luke 15:23-24)

England’s prodigal son has returned! A. N. Wilson, one of the finest writers that England has produced in the latter half of the twentieth century, has returned to Christian belief after many years in the atheist wilderness. This is indeed a reason to be merry!

For those of you who do not know A. N. Wilson, he is a novelist, an Oxford academic, a biographer, and an essayist of the first order. I first came across him upon purchasing a copy of his excellent biography of Hilaire Belloc, way back in the eighties. His book helped me significantly on my own faltering path to religious conversion but little did I know that Wilson and I were walking in different directions. As I was moving slowly towards the Christian faith, Wilson was about to walk dramatically away from it. The warning signs were there when I read his biography of C. S. Lewis. The book was well-written, as one would expect from Wilson’s illustrious pen, but the whole biography was coloured with Wilson’s cynicism towards Lewis’s religious faith and muscular apologetics. Soon afterwards I was shocked to come across a small pamphlet by Wilson, entitled “Against God”, a work of muscular atheist apologetics that signalled the prodigy’s metamorphosis into the prodigal, and heralded his departure from his Father’s house.

For the next decade or so, Wilson placed his formidable and God-given gifts at the disposal of the new atheism. One can only imagine how Wilson’s friends and fellow atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, must have rejoiced at his apostasy. In their eyes, he had seen the light or, more to the point, he had finally seen that there was no light! Together, Dawkins, Hitchens and Wilson formed a triumphalist triumvirate passing supercilious judgment on the Faith of their fathers.

And yet, in spite of his apostasy, I couldn’t help liking A. N. Wilson. It was not just that he was an excellent writer but that he seemed to possess a genuine intellectual honesty that is lacking in so many others who find themselves adherents of the non-creed of materialism. To be honest, and one can hardly fail to be honest if we’re praising intellectual honesty, I remained favourably disposed to ANW, at least in part, because he had been very supportive of my own work, thereby bestowing a degree of gravitas upon it in the eyes of his peers. He had praised my book, Literary Converts, in a review published in the Telegraph, Times, Evening Standard or some such newspaper, and had even gone so far as to state that my biography of Belloc was much better than his! Apart from the unhealthy sense of prideful satisfaction that such praise aroused in me, it was nonetheless gratifying to learn that the author of a book that I greatly admired seriously thought that my book was better than his. But the preening of my own ego aside, how many writers would have the humility and honesty to praise a rival volume as being superior to their own? Such a man demands and commands respect, whether we like it or not, or whether we like his beliefs or not.

For all these reasons, I never quite believed that Wilson would remain with the pigs, far from his Father’s house, casting his literary pearls before swine. Sooner or later, he would return.

Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.