Meet the ‘Precocious Atheist’ Still Pining for a Misplaced Faith

Donna Freitas’s spiritual autobiography, Wishful Thinking: How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It, stands in the tradition of the “dark-night-of-the-soul” memoir. But unlike mystics such as St. John of the Cross, who found their way through dark times into the light of faith, Freitas is unsure whether she ever believed in God to begin with.

A successful scholar and author of teen and adult fiction, Freitas was raised in a devout Catholic home in Rhode Island. She writes nostalgically about a childhood surrounded by spiritual memorabilia, such as angel figurines and Virgin Mary statuettes, beloved by her grandmother. Attending mass every Sunday was central to family life, especially for her Italian American mother, whose faith was simple, constant, and enduring.

However, belief didn’t come so easily for Freitas, who began to struggle with doubt from an early age. When an acquaintance described her as a “precocious atheist,” the label stuck. And despite going through the motions of confirmation in the Catholic church, she failed to inherit the devout faith of her mother. She writes with toe-curling embarrassment about her “angry atheist” phase as a young adult, including phone calls from college in which she told her mother that “your God is nothing but another Santa Claus.”

Philosophy to the rescue

As you may already suspect, this is as much a story about Freitas’s relationship with her mother as it is about her search for a relationship with God.

Despite a wealth of academic credentials—her research on the lives of young people has yielded notable books like Sex and the Soul and The Happiness Effect—the story Freitas tells is not primarily an intellectual quest. You won’t find any examination of core apologetics arguments, like attempts to reconcile science and faith or address the problem of evil. Belief in God is simply presented as something you either have or you don’t. And Freitas says she doesn’t have it. But she wishes she did, writing,

I may have lost my faith as a child, misplaced it very young. But I have never stopped searching to find it again because if my mother taught me anything, she instilled the notion that our belief in God is precious.

Freitas movingly describes how any hope of holding on to God seemed to disappear when she entered a period of deep depression in her early 20s. Although the darkness lifted eventually, it would return many times throughout her life. She knows that for many people, faith in God is the only thing that makes sense in the midst of such suffering. But the fact that she felt so alone in her “bottomless abyss” was the final confirmation that there was no divine hand waiting to pull her out.

Instead, something else came to the rescue: philosophy.

Freitas’s joyful discovery of the work of existential philosophers is an enchanting part of the book. She describes the emotional thrill of finding intellectual soulmates in Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. Their works not only spoke to her frequent encounters with the existential void within but also gave voice to her experience (or lack thereof) of faith. 

The book describes Freitas’s attempts to find peace and wholeness through academia and philosophy, which are both touching and agonizing to read. Time and again, she reminds us how much she longs for the simple faith of her mother, and why it seems to remain tantalizingly out of reach.

The memoir is also instructive in framing how Freitas’s journey has been shaped by the Catholicism she inherited. Aware that her readership will likely contain more evangelicals than Catholics—her publisher, Worthy Books, caters largely to this audience—Freitas devotes a chapter to the wildly different assumptions about Scripture and practice embodied by the two groups.

She contends that evangelicals read their Bibles and examine issues like sex and relationships in ways that are rarely encouraged among lay Catholics. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but her analysis probably reflects the type of cultural Catholicism that dominates a university like Georgetown, where she studied as an undergraduate.

Ironically, despite her own unfamiliarity with Scripture, Freitas’s love of philosophy led her to pursue a PhD in theology. The avowed atheist found herself studying alongside Catholic ordinands and theologians. This turned out to be both a blessing and a curse in her ongoing search for God.

Tragically, Freitas became the target of an obsessive sexual pursuit by an abusive academic priest. When she reported him to the authorities, she says, the church was only interested in protecting the professor and its institutional reputation. It left her devastated.

Yet much good came out of her theological studies. She discovered the lives and writings of female mystics, such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. They struck Freitas as proto-feminists of the medieval age—as torchbearers who dared to approach God in ways that transcended the norms of their era.

Unexpectedly, the nearest thing to evidence for God came as Freitas’s mother was dying from cancer. As she considered the countless acts of kindness shown during and after her mother’s illness, she found herself compelled to revise her opinion of the Catholic church: Institutionally, its record might be deeply flawed, but its local members could still minister great healing and love.

“During those months,” she writes,

When my mother was first receiving treatment, God took the form of sausage and meatballs and big pots of tomato sauce and God was in those sick days offered by my mother’s colleagues. God was in the prayers answered that we didn’t need to utter because the parish community got there first and made it so we didn’t have to pray for those things at all.

Faith in others’ faith

Wishful Thinking is a beautifully written memoir in which the journey is more emotional than theological. This will doubtless result in frustration for some readers, as it leaves the author’s search for God frustratingly unresolved.

Ultimately, however, those female voices from centuries past and the continuing influence of her own mother (and grandmother) helped Freitas to retain some form of Catholic identity, despite having every reason to reject it. As she reflects: “Maybe it seems a little weird to call myself Catholic given how the jury is still out—kind of way, way out—on the belief front for me.”

The closest we get to a final resolution is a moving description of how, despite struggling to find God in church, Freitas now finds that the familiar words, actions, and rituals of the Catholic Mass allow her to connect emotionally with the memory of her mother and grandmother. If she has any belief at all, it is faith in their faith.

This is a personal journey, honestly told. But, as a Christian myself, I wanted to reach through the pages of the book and encourage Freitas to give up searching for the same experience of God that her mother found comfort in. Far better to go to the source, seeking the image of God found in the Jesus of the Gospels.

Perhaps Freitas would tell me that’s the evangelical in me speaking—always fixated on Scripture. But I was struck by how rarely the figure of Christ featured in a book about someone trying to make sense of Christianity. If you want to find God, surely that’s the place to start?

A notable exception comes when Freitas describes a sudden moment of clarity while reading Sartre during her philosophical awakening. The philosopher’s concept of “bad faith” refers to the danger of investing our self-worth in temporal things—careers, relationships, love—that will inevitably let us down.

Freitas acknowledges that, for Christians, Jesus must be the answer to Sartre’s “bad faith” dilemma. But, when plunged into the abyss of depression by relationship breakdowns and traumatic life events, she says she has simply never found Jesus waiting for her:

This is where the difference between a believing Christian and a faith-challenged person like me reveals itself. I plunge into that darkness and wish for someone to carry me to the other side of this hell. But the only way I ever get there is if I somehow find the way out again alone.

For a season, Freitas tried to implement Sartre’s solution—surrendering to the meaninglessness of life and perhaps finding a way to live above the maelstrom of the storm. But she struggled to make it work in practice.

However, I believe Jesus has a better response to nihilism than Sartre. In his famous story about the wise and foolish builders (Matt. 7:24–27), he pointed out how easily life lets us down when we construct it on the shifting sands offered by this world. Instead, he advised his hearers to weatherproof their souls against the storms of life by building on the rock of his own life and teachings.

That may sound like wishful thinking to some people, but it has proven a solid foundation for countless lives and even whole civilizations. I hope that Wishful Thinking (beautifully written as it is) won’t be Freitas’s last word on her search. In my experience, Jesus often surprises those who keep seeking.

Justin Brierley is a writer, broadcaster, and speaker in the UK. He is the author of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again.

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