The twentieth century
In this century unbelief turned up in the courtroom, the lecture hall, the prison and the laboratory. Its people include a defence lawyer cross-examining the Bible, an anarchist deported for her politics, a philosopher who lost a professorship over his views, a novelist who loved the faith she did not share, a mother who took school prayer to the Supreme Court, and an astronomer who offered wonder in place of worship.
The lives
G. W. Foote
G. W. Foote was a Plymouth boy raised Anglican and Unitarian, who read himself into scepticism and reached London in 1868 "with very little religion". He became Bradlaugh's disciple, then a moderate Secularist. After Parliament's treatment of Bradlaugh he turned to ridicule, founding The Freethinker (1881) on the principle that superstition hates laughter. He served twelve months for blasphemy in 1883 with "Religion none" on his cell card, and succeeded Bradlaugh in 1890 as "an Atheist, and a teacher of Atheism".
Shibli Shumayyil
Shibli Shumayyil was a Catholic boy from Mount Lebanon who lost his religion training as a doctor in France, and then lost his last "cause of causes" to the question "what is the cause of your cause?" In 1884 he carried Büchner's Darwin into Arabic, with a preface tracing the gods to fear and ignorance. He spent thirty years in Cairo denying a hidden power that watches and judges human deeds, while defending the faith of others. He renamed his unbelief "natural monism" and "the religion of humanity", and never called it atheism.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was a Jewish boy in Catholic Vienna, turned to science by Goethe and trained in Brücke's laboratory. He left no public-domain account of losing a faith. From 1907 he made unbelief clinical, treating religion as a wish-fulfilment rooted in the child's longing for a father: an "illusion" in 1927 that was not necessarily an error, and a "mass-delusion" by 1930. He kept a pastor as a friend, and granted religion's history respect.
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow was raised by a doubting father in a churchgoing village. He came to unbelief through a philosophy of pity, the view that every person is made by heredity and circumstance, and he gave up the hope of immortality reluctantly. At Dayton in 1925 he accepted the word agnostic as a compliment, while cross-examining the Bible's most famous defender.
Francisco Ferrer
Francisco Ferrer was raised by devout Catholic farmers at Alella, and broke with their faith and politics as a young Republican. In his Paris years he called himself "a convinced atheist". He spent a Catholic pupil's legacy on a Barcelona school meant to banish religion from children's minds. He was acquitted once, and then shot at Montjuïc in 1909 as "author and chief" of a rising no single act of his was shown to have caused. He refused the priests to the last, and forbade any cult, even of himself.
Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre was named for Voltaire by a freethinking father who then returned to the church and put her in a convent. She came out "a freethinker" after refusing to say what she did not feel. She lectured a nature-theist freethought until the Chicago hangings of 1887 turned it against the state. In her last years she held that belief in God had little to do with freedom, while her own view stayed "no God in the soul or out of it". The refusal to lie held the whole life together.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie was a devout Catholic girl in Russian-ruled Warsaw who lost her eldest sister and then her mother. By her daughter's account she felt revolt against the God she had prayed to. She let her faith lapse among the Warsaw positivists while keeping up appearances. From 1895 she declared her unbelief by acts rather than words: a civil marriage, unbaptised daughters and funerals without ceremony. She left only one published sentence of her own: "I myself did not practice any."
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman had no faith to lose, only a religion she met as discipline in a Jewish childhood. Her atheism grew out of her pity for the hanged and out of her anarchism, and by 1893 it was a flat public statement. In 1913 and 1916 it became an argument for the earth over heaven. In Soviet Russia it turned on the revolution's own church.
Kōtoku Shūsui
Kōtoku Shūsui was schooled in the Confucian classics and formed as the pupil of Nakae Chōmin, whose last book denied God and the soul. In 1901 he refused his Christian friend Uchimura's God, for a morality without fear or future judgment. In politics he moved from socialism to anarchism. He spent his last months in Tokyo Prison writing a book to obliterate Christ from history, and went to the gallows in 1911 having, as his last poem says, prayed to no god.
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell was raised in his grandmother's devout Unitarian household after his freethinking parents died. At eighteen he gave up the First Cause over a sentence of Mill's. He tried for twenty years to keep a religion without God, then declared himself a dissenter from all religions, and paid for it in 1940. He never claimed more than that there was no evidence for God.
E. V. Ramasamy (Periyar)
Periyar was a merchant's son who said he could never remember believing. He fought caste first and God second. His paper denied saying "there is no God" in the 1920s; after his Soviet journey he called God each member's private business; he rejected the word "atheist" while asking what God had ever done for anyone. Only at ninety-one did he give the flat formula that his followers carved on his statues.
Chen Duxiu
Chen Duxiu left no record of a lost faith. A boy who mocked a village spirit-medium became, in a political fight against Kang Youwei's Confucian state religion (1916), the New Culture editor who called all religions idols and chose "the godless road of light" (1918). He paused in 1920 to offer Jesus's character and feeling as a new faith, turned on the church in 1922, and refused even the agnostic's doubt in 1923. At the end he used "religion" as his word for blind faith in his own party's doctrine.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a devout boy in a freethinking Jewish household, and at twelve he lost his "deep religiosity" to popular science books. In 1929–30, under a cardinal's charge of atheism, he declared that he believed in Spinoza's God and a "cosmic religious sense", but not in a God who rewards and punishes. In his last decades he grew harder on religion, as in the Gutkind letter of 1954. He refused to be enlisted by the atheists, whom he thought as dogmatic as the believers.
E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster came from an evangelical Clapham family and left no record of how or when he lost his faith, only the unfussed unbelief of King's, Cambridge. For thirty years he gave unbelief to his characters: an agnostic Cambridge, a freethinking father, an echo that turned Christianity to "boum". He said it in his own voice only in 1938, "I do not believe in belief", putting personal relationships in place of creed. In old age he lent his name to the humanist movement.
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger was raised in Catholic Corning by a freethinking stonecutter who brought Ingersoll to town and taught her to question God as a "baker". She told no story of lost faith. She aimed her inherited unbelief, under the 1914 slogan "No Gods, No Masters", at the power of the churches over women's bodies. After the 1921 Town Hall raid she met the Catholic hierarchy as her chief opponent, and insisted she quarrelled with the Church's authority rather than its faith. Late in life she was reported to call herself an Episcopalian.
H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken was raised in a family two generations indifferent to religion, and was confirmed in his first long trousers. He never had a faith to lose. He took up Nietzsche in his twenties, and spent his thirties and forties ridiculing American piety, with Dayton as the great set piece. At fifty he studied what he had mocked, and came out an "amiable" sceptic who thought religion unproved and unnecessary, but no longer a mere aberration.
Lu Xun
Lu Xun lost faith first in the doctors who failed his dying father. By way of Huxley and the Sendai dissecting room he came to "don't know" about the soul. He defended the farmers' gods against the reformers in 1908, attacked "ghost-talk" in the name of science from 1918, and wrote of the Shaoxing ghosts with love in 1926. Only in the last month of his life, never calling himself an atheist, did he say he was certain that when people die there are no ghosts.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born to a clergyman who had resigned his orders to become an agnostic, and a mother who wrote for "agnostic women". She never had a faith to lose. She tried unbelief out through her characters from 1915 to 1927, and declared it privately in 1928, when Eliot's conversion struck her as obscene. In Three Guineas (1938) she turned it on the Church as an institution. In her last memoir she wrote that there was certainly no God, but a pattern behind the cotton wool of the world.
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera was the son of a Freemason father and a devout mother, and said he had been an atheist since he was five or six, with no faith to lose. His unbelief was a painter's weapon against priests who blessed the powerful. In 1947 he put it into three words borrowed from Ignacio Ramírez, "Dios no existe", and in June 1948 defended them against an archbishop, the press and a student mob. In April 1956, ill with cancer, he painted them out, and by one report called himself a Catholic. His own explanation spoke of peace, national symbols and historical truth, so whether it was conversion, reconciliation or self-censorship the sources do not settle.
M. N. Roy
M. N. Roy was a priest's son who began among the Bengal revolutionaries "fanatically believing in the spiritual mission of their Motherland". He left that spiritual nationalism for Marx in New York and Mexico (1916–19), and declared in 1922 that liberation could not be fought with religious ideology. In jail in the 1930s he rebuilt his materialism on natural science, against Marxism's certainties. At the end he judged Marxism itself a faith, and offered a humanism that would claim "neither finality nor infallibility". In no text found did he call himself an atheist.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru was raised by a father who treated religion as a woman's affair, and was initiated into Theosophy by Annie Besant at thirteen. At Harrow and Cambridge it faded into a scientific humanism without "the religious temper", and Gandhi's fasts sharpened him against religion in politics. In his prison Autobiography (1934–35) he declared that organised religion filled him with horror and that he preferred the open sea. In 1944 he softened to "I do not know". As Prime Minister he kept his agnosticism apart from a state that guaranteed every faith and named no God.
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was a Baptist preacher's daughter in Eatonville who said she loved God because it was the expected answer. Her childhood questions slept until college, where history and philosophy woke them. As Boas's anthropologist she learned belief from the inside, even taking hoodoo initiation, without sharing it. In Dust Tracks (1942) she refused prayer and organized creeds for herself while leaving others their consolation, called herself one with the infinite, and never took the label atheist.
Hu Shih
Hu Shih was raised among his mother's Buddhist devotions. At about eleven he lost his fear of hell from two old sentences by Sima Guang and Fan Zhen. He kept his unbelief from his mother, and declared it in print only after her death, in the 1919 essay that offered "social immortality" as his religion. In 1923 he called himself an atheist on the evidence, ready to change if the evidence changed. In old age he held the same view, with a new insistence on tolerance for believers.
Abraham Kovoor
Abraham Kovoor was a Kerala vicar general's son who lost his faith as a student in Calcutta. He kept silent through thirty years of teaching in religious schools, because he needed the salary. In his retirement in Ceylon he said plainly that no god made the world, that no soul survives death, and that the godmen were frauds. He backed it with a standing cash challenge that, by his own account, nobody ever took up.
Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel's "really blind" faith of medieval Calanda went in three stages: a Jesuit schoolboy's doubt about Hell at fourteen, the loss completed by Darwin at seventeen, and a declaration made not in words but in L'Âge d'or (1930), which right-wing leagues attacked and the police banned. The unbelief was blasphemy in his thirties. In his sixties it calmed into "still an atheist, thank God" (1959), and in his 1982 memoir into a meditation on chance in which believing and not believing came to the same thing.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (Gora)
Gora was a Brahmin boy who lost faith in a packet of holy ash. He read his way to the conclusion that people had made God, and lost two teaching posts for saying so. He kept the word atheism against Gandhi's advice, and made it into a programme of eating, marrying and living across caste. It never softened into belief.
Margaret Knight
Margaret Knight had a nominally Christian education and a quiet loss of belief at Cambridge in the mid-1920s. In January 1955 she said on the BBC Home Service, carefully and for doubting parents, that children need not be taught a God any more than Santa Claus, and that Scientific Humanism could ground morals. The national uproar sent her, at her critics' urging, to the Bible and church history. In 1975 she judged Christianity far more harshly than she had on the radio.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, and left no account of a childhood faith or its loss. From her first philosophic journal in 1934 she made the rejection of faith the foundation of a philosophy of reason, and said so plainly from the 1940s to the 1960s. Late in life she changed only the label ("Objectivist") and the tone ("intransigent, though not militant"), never the position.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was baptised into a family whose faith was more form than conviction. By his own account the belief never took root: it went first through his grandparents' indifference, and then, one morning at La Rochelle in 1917, in a single thought that God did not exist. He made that absence the premise of a philosophy of freedom, and spent years expelling the substitute faith of writing as salvation. In old age he admitted that traces of the idea of God remained in him.
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn did not lose a faith but inherited an unbelief, from Ingersoll-going grandparents and a father who called Christianity bunk. She held it through her brother's death when she was thirteen. She stated it plainly only once, at eighty-four, in 1991. In her last talks she softened the word to a "higher power", while keeping the same creed of kindness without heaven or hell.
Bhagat Singh
Bhagat Singh was an Arya Samaj schoolboy who prayed for hours. He read his way out of belief in God during a crisis in his revolutionary party in 1925–26, and in 1927 refused prayer when the police offered it as a way out. In the condemned cell in 1930 he answered the charge that his atheism was vanity. What he revised in his last months was the bomb, not the unbelief.
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir was raised by a devout mother and an unbelieving father as an exalted Catholic girl who thought of becoming a nun. She lost her faith gradually at about fourteen, and at eighteen felt its meaning as the word "alone". She did not campaign against belief but built an ethics on its absence (1944–47), arguing that without God we are wholly responsible, and wrote The Second Sex (1949), which the Vatican banned. She held to the position through the death of her believing mother (1963) and what she saw as Sartre's last turn toward religious language (1980).
Ismail Adham
Ismail Adham was raised, by his own account, between a father who forced Islam on him and sisters who mocked miracles, and told his father at thirteen that he was a Darwinian. In 1937 he published in Arabic, under his own name, an essay defining atheism as the positive belief that nothing lies beyond the universe, and arguing it from a mathematics of chance. He was answered courteously by al-Azhar's editor and harshly by others. He died at twenty-nine without retracting it, leaving a life story that rested largely on his own word and an essay that does not depend on it.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing was a confirmed Anglican schoolboy at Sherborne. He met the death of his friend Christopher Morcom in 1930 not with lost faith but with a deeper hope that the spirit survives, and worked that hope out through Eddington's physics in "Nature of Spirit" (1932). At some undated point before the end of the war he gave it up for what his biographer calls a determinist and atheistic view. In 1950 he answered the soul argument against thinking machines with a theologian's joke. In nothing read did he give his unbelief a name.
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was raised in a household that was Catholic only by custom, and never lost a faith he never held. The absence of God became his starting point in the essays of 1936 and The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. From 1944 he turned that unbelief from opposition into alliance. He told the Dominicans in 1948 that he could not accept their truth but would not call it an illusion, and asked Christians to remain Christians and speak out against evil.
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman was raised in a Reform Jewish community by an unbelieving father who taught him that names and uniforms are not knowledge. He left Sunday school at almost thirteen because its history mixed fiction with fact, and refused his father's Kaddish in 1946. In 1956 he argued that science turns "Is there a God?" into "How sure is it?", and in 1967 he refused to be counted among Jewish Nobel winners. Late in life he called himself as strong an atheist as anyone was likely to find, at ease with doubt and not knowing.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Madalyn Murray O'Hair was baptised a Presbyterian. In her own later telling she dated her unbelief to a weekend reading of the Bible in grade school. She declared it in 1960 by petitioning Baltimore's schools with her son, and won the 1963 Supreme Court case against required Bible reading. She spent the rest of her life in confrontation as "the Atheist", never revising her unbelief but paying for it with flight, an estranged son and, in the end, a murder that had nothing to do with it.
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was raised in Brooklyn by Orthodox parents who, by his memoirs' account, did not press their religion on him. He was an atheist for years before he would use the word, holding to "humanist" and "agnostic" as the honest labels. In 1982 he declared himself an atheist outright. In his last essay, with death close, he thanked atheism for taking away his fear of it.
José Saramago
José Saramago never had a faith to lose, so his unbelief is the story of where he aimed it. He aimed it at a Church allied with the landlords (1980), and at the God of the Gospels after what he called "the lesson of doubt" (1991). When the Portuguese government kept his Gospel from a European prize in 1992, it became a public quarrel, and he left for Lanzarote. In 2001 he signed his own word, "atheism". In 2009, while attacking the God of the Bible in Caim, he admitted that "atheist" was only a word, that he was steeped in Christian values, and that there are no absolute atheists.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut inherited his unbelief from a line of German-American freethinkers, beginning with a great-grandfather who asked for no prayers at his coffin. He never had a faith to lose, and found his unbelief confirmed by war and anthropology. In later life he turned not toward God but toward the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. He called himself a Christ-loving atheist, and a humanist in honour of his parents.
Barbara Smoker
Barbara Smoker was a convent child who wanted to be a Carmelite, and saw no halfway house between the Church and atheism. The war in Ceylon, a confessor's charge of intellectual pride and a reading programme meant to save her faith wore it down, until on 5 November 1949, at a library's philosophy shelves, she found she was no longer a theist of any kind. She never doubted again. She spent the rest of her life on the unbelief in public, at the head of the National Secular Society, at thousands of secular funerals and beside the 1989 march against Rushdie, insisting that atheists had not lost their faith but outgrown it.
Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg was born to Jewish parents, with no faith on record to lose. From cosmology he drew the conclusion that the universe has no purpose built into it. He said so first as physics softened by "the grace of tragedy" (1977), then as a moral charge against religion grounded in his own family's deaths (1999). In "Without God" (2008) he gave an honest account of what living without God costs and how it can be done with good humour. In print he never called himself an atheist.
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was raised in a Jewish household in Brooklyn and told no story of lost faith, though as a teenager he filled a notebook with arguments about God. From 1979 he stated in print a position that refused both the certainty of belief and the certainty of atheism. He argued all his life that religious claims should be tested like any others, and found his awe in nature. He faced his death in 1996 calling himself an agnostic and expressly not an atheist, with no revision and no deathbed conversion.
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem had no faith to lose, only an inheritance of Theosophist grandmothers, a Jewish father, a Protestant mother and a childhood baptism. Feminism, from 1969, made her see religion as power. She said so in 1970 (the church as a support of myth), in 2001 ("politics made sacred") and in 2014 ("politics in the sky"). In 2012 she named herself a humanist, and a spiritual one, refusing "atheist" as a definition by absence.
John Lennon
John Lennon was brought up lightly Anglican by his Aunt Mimi at St Peter's, Woolton, and drifted from belief with fame. In 1966 he stumbled into an accidental declaration that he had to apologise for. He looked for a teacher in the Maharishi and came away disappointed. He chose his declaration in the song "God" (1970), renouncing every authority from Jesus to the Beatles. In 1980 he revised the tone, calling himself neither anti-Christ nor antireligious, but a man who refused every package, Christian, Buddhist or Marxist.