[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
In the long tradition of Christian spiritual autobiographies – from St. Augustine’s Confessions and St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul through C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy and Frederick Buechner’s The Sacred Journey – the most powerful and resonant are not mere self-absorbed memoirs of conversion but passionate wrestling bouts with life’s deepest questions and even with God Himself. The latest book by Jason D. Hill, Letters to God From a Former Atheist, is a compelling new entry in that mold.
Hill is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University and the author of 5 previous books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People and What Do White Americans Owe Black People? Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression (I interviewed him about the latter book a few years ago at FrontPage Mag here). He is also a Shillman Fellow at the Horowitz Freedom Center, a FrontPage Mag contributor, and one of the boldest living thinkers on race, ethics, gender ideology, and other controversial topics.
His new book, which I discussed with him on the most recent episode of my Freedom Center podcast The Right Take with Mark Tapson, is not, as one might expect from a philosophy professor, a detached, loftily cerebral contemplation of the nature of our relationship(s) with God. This collection of intimate prayers two decades in the making is a nakedly personal, vulnerable and restless, raw and honest testament of the spiritual evolution of a man learning to lay down his shame and guilt and arrogance, and to take up gratitude, joy, and humility instead.
Raised Roman Catholic in a middle-class Jamaican household, Hill embraced atheism in his late teens shortly before emigrating to America at the age of twenty in 1985. “What better way to enter a wonderful country where I would inherit a new world and make a new life for myself,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “than with a clear and distinct mind devoid of superstitious beliefs about an ineffable God who resided in some translucent sky”?
“I relished in the new freedom I found in my intransigent atheism,” Hill continues, calling the perceived empowerment “intoxicating.” But in his early to mid-thirties, a hollowness crept in, a restless longing, the nagging sense that Something was missing, and “my atheism began to undo itself.” He panicked at the thought of losing his identity as a free-thinking atheist but found himself “in the occasional throes of deep religious sensibilities for which I had no explanation.”
For the next decade he “traversed the irreconcilable states of belief and disbelief.” Desperately unhappy despite finding worldly success and projecting an outward aura of confidence, he strove but failed to recover a satisfying prayer life – until one day over two decades ago, on the way to teaching a logic class, Hill experienced an inner voice urging him to use his passion and talent for writing as a form of prayer: “Write me letters.”
Hill raced home to begin producing, in “delirious ecstasy,” the first of an ongoing series of letters to God which, over the next 22 years, ultimately found public expression in his new book. Along the way, his spiritual journey led through a near-death experience, subsequent hospitalizations, and a bout of suicidal depression, until he submitted to “accept His will and plan for my life as the highest good that could ever possible exist for me here on earth.”
Some of the book’s mix of letters and devotional prayers are raw and demanding, others serene and grateful. His letters to the Lord aren’t polished dissertations; the prayers arise from a soul laid bare, such as one in which he asks for the strength to forgive himself. The book is a very slim volume but one best read in digestible bites; otherwise its intensity can feel overwhelming. In any case, the power of Letters to God from a Former Atheist lies in Hill’s honesty, sincerity, authenticity, and humanity – his courage to question, not just himself, but God.
Hill’s prose is a mix of earnest directness and poetic insight. This observation, for example: “Loneliness is like being in a room alone and then realizing that room has expanded into the whole world, and no one sees you.” Or this exploration of the meaning of faith:
What is faith to me?… I think that for me faith is belief in the rationality of Your will. Faith is the gift of realizing that there is logic to Your decisions and plans for my life even when I can’t see them. It is the belief that nothing that is given to me can be detrimental to me regardless of how it appears to me….
Faith is seeing through the contingencies and finite nature of things on this earth, to recognize that my powers of interpretation and analysis cannot fully penetrate the providential plan You have carved for my life and the life of others.
It should be noted that there is a presence in the book, or rather, an absence, that looms large, and it is of Hill’s father, a man who struggled with mental illness and abandoned his family to commit to being “God’s servant” in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Hill makes his pain from this abandonment palpable in the book, and it resonates deeply for those of us male readers (and that would be most of us) who suffer from the trauma called a father wound. It is a trauma he cannot forget but is nonetheless able to resolve in a heavenly Father.
What helps elevate this spiritual memoir is Hill’s refusal to sugarcoat his doubts, his demands, and his anger. He alternately pleads and grapples with God like Jacob with the angel over questions of suffering, forgiveness, and divine will. Why does suffering endure? Why does evil exist? How does one atone for disbelief? What does God want of me? These aren’t mere academic exercises for Hill; they’re personal, urgent, and healing.
The transformation Hill undergoes doesn’t strike like a road-to-Damascus bolt of lightning. It is gradual and hard-won, and in the end he triumphs by surrendering to the mystery of grace.
At the close of one of his letters to God, Hill addresses the reader: “God loves your voice, and he wants to hear from you.” That is a message and an invitation that every struggling person – i.e. each one of us – needs to take to heart. Letters to God from a Former Atheist is both a mirror and a map, showing us the cost of turning away from God and the courage it takes to turn back. Jason Hill’s journey reminds us that faith isn’t a ponderous sermon; it’s a living conversation. In this collection of letters through which he carried on his conversation with God, Hill found his way home. I believe he hopes it can help point you toward home too.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
