The best books to help a secular person understand the weirdest parts of religion

Tanya (T.M.) Luhrmann tried to do the impossible.

She set out to describe what happens when Christians say God talks to them—and she wanted to do it in a way that makes Christian readers think “huh, she kind of gets us, even though she’s not one of us” and makes nonbelievers think “Oh! Maybe those people are not as crazy as I thought.”

She basically succeeds, and as a result, this book is one of the few accounts of the so-called “Christian Right” that does not drive me up the wall with condescension and reductionism. 

Luhrmann spent four years doing fieldwork in Vineyard churches, an evangelical Protestant denomination that, if you are not one of them, may score fairly high on your craziness scale. These people put their hands in the air during worship, sit at the kitchen table talking to God, and think God gives them predictions and advice that they are supposed to pass on to other people.

Most of them also vote Republican, but I was relieved to discover that Luhrmann is one of the few secular scholars who does not treat faith as just a pious varnish on political preferences. I love how seriously she takes their desire to know the divine, and how she maps out the methods they use to do so.

As to whether God is really there, or whether these Christians have simply made up a bossy imaginary friend—well, Luhrmann leaves that an open question. 

I read this book during a very intense summer a few years ago when I was trying to figure out if Christianity could possibly be true, and how a nerdy secular academic like myself could even begin to ask that question.

I found a kindred spirit in Sheldon Vanauken. In this memoir set mainly in the 1950s, he tells the story of how he took a sabbatical from his teaching job at a little college in Virginia to go to Oxford with his wife. Neither of them was religious at the time. In fact, the first part of the book is a very intense (some might say: cloyingly sentimental) account of their romance, when they basically worshipped each other instead of a deity.

If you’re like me, you’ll want to shout “get a room already” and throw the book at the wall during the first few chapters. But I’m glad I stuck it out, because the story gets much more interesting once they get to Oxford and meet various smart, fun Anglicans, including C.S. Lewis.

Pretty soon, they realize that being a smart, fun Christian is not a contradiction in terms. They start investigating the claims of Christianity, doing a lot of reading, having late-night conversations with thoughtful Christians, and so on.

“The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!” Lewis writes to Vanauken in a letter. I love how he captures the agony of a seeker, especially when he realizes that he’s reasoned his way to this awkward middle ground: sure, accepting Christianity would mean a leap of faith, but (it turns out) going back to his old worldview would be an even bigger leap, in the other direction. He’s on this little plateau between two chasms, and he has to make a choice because it’s crumbling fast.

When I picked up this book, I was vaguely aware that a lot of people pray when someone they know gets sick, and I had read that there’s interesting social science research on how religion helps people lead healthier, happier lives. But I had never really thought about whether prayer actually works.

Candy Gunther Brown takes up this dicey question of what scientists should do when people say that prayer cured cancer, restored sight to the blind, or even raised someone from the dead. She gets into the history of how people in the medical world and the church world have thought about whether it’s possible to “test prayer”—and, if it is, whether it’s a good idea to try. 

I came to the subject of miraculous healing in a skeptical frame of mind, but Brown is so meticulous in going through medical records, clinical trials, a zillion surveys and interviews—plus, she is extremely cautious about drawing conclusions.

She made me think differently about the line between scientific investigation and religious belief, and question my own biases as a Western, minority-world person on a planet where most human beings rely at least as much on God for healing as on earthly medicine. I had to ask myself: am I really willing to say most of those people are nuts?

I read this one when I was trying to check out the best arguments for the existence of God—at a time when I was skeptical that any of them could convince me.

A pastor named Tim Keller told me to read this book. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, and he operates at a pretty hardcore level; this one is not exactly beach reading. But I have to admit, I found it oddly gripping—it’s unusual that I can listen to dense theology on audiobook, but I did with this one.

Hart’s basic point is that most atheists make a category error when they attack the existence of God because they have totally the wrong idea of the God that most religious people believe in.

He shows why they have it wrong, and along the way he gives you this brilliant account of the history of Western science and how it kind of went off the rails when scientists (or, more often, the journalists who wrote popular books about science) started treating it as not just a method for learning about the world, but a metaphysics.

After I read his last chapter on cultivating a mindset of wonder, I went on a walk in the fall twilight and practiced trying to recalibrate my mind to keep marveling at the fact that there’s something rather than nothing.

He is so hilariously good at swearing!

That’s a major reason I love this book: Francis Spufford raises profanity to a high art, and he does it in a book that is, ostensibly, about Jesus.

A Christian friend recommended this one to me, and I bought it and let it sit on the shelf for a long time before I finally picked it up. Then I read it in maybe three sittings, because it’s silly and profound at the same time. (Also it’s short and carries you along—this is a good one to stick in your bag and read a couple pages at a time whenever you are at a bus stop.)

Spufford is mainly a novelist, and his aim here is not to convince you that Christianity’s fact claims are true. (Although he does think it’s all true.) Instead, he’s explaining the way the Christian picture of God and Jesus’s rescue mission resonates at the heart level, and why he came back to faith after “twenty-odd years of atheism.” He lays out his own process in a way that made me realize that I had spent a lot of time rationalizing my own emotional reactions to the world, and that a rationalization is not the same thing as a reasoned argument.

A lot of people say they can’t believe in an all-powerful, loving God because of all the evil and suffering in the world, and Spufford gets it. He doesn’t offer a pat answer. But he has so many gorgeous ways of explaining that “creation is not the same as the creator. He may sustain it all, He may be its bright backing, He may be as near to us at every moment as our neck-veins: but it is not Him, it is not-Him, it is in some utterly mysterious sense what happens where He isn’t.” I love that.