Converts from unbelief — in their own words
Famous atheists turned Christian, in their own words
The commonest modern story — faith lost to reason — has an older counterpart: the return journey. Some of the fiercest public skeptics of the last two centuries — secularist lecturers, freethought editors, a scientist of Darwin’s circle, and the greatest novelist alive — argued their way out of unbelief and wrote down how. If you’re looking for real conversion stories from atheism to Christianity, these are the first-person accounts, free to read in the public domain and offered here as clean editions — with two modern accounts, Lee Strobel’s and Guillaume Bignon’s, still in print.
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The novelist
11882 · Russia · The great novelist
A Confession
Leo Tolstoy · 1882
An unbeliever from his youth, at the height of his fame — Anna Karenina just finished — Tolstoy found himself unable to answer why he should live, and hid the rope from himself for fear of suicide. A Confession is his own record of the crisis and the return to faith; counted honestly, the Christianity he reached was his own radical reading of the Gospels, and it cost him excommunication.
What it cost Nothing you could count. He turned his back on the outlook of his own class, made himself go through rites he did not understand, and in the end broke with the Church he had come back to. (ch. X, XIII, XV–XVI)
The scientist
21895 · England · Darwin’s colleague
The Examination and the Return
George John Romanes · 1895
The evolutionary biologist George Romanes — Darwin’s friend and protégé — published the era’s most famous case for scientific agnosticism as a young man. These posthumous notes record the painstaking, unfinished journey back: a first-rank Victorian scientist reasoning his way toward the faith he had dismantled.
What it cost His trust in his own reason. Giving up his intellect, he wrote, was the hardest sacrifice of all. His return to church is told by his editor, not by him. (Book Two, Part II, §4; Concluding Note)
Paid to argue against it
31874 · England & America · Secularist lecturer
Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again
Joseph Barker · 1874
Joseph Barker went the whole way out — from Methodist preacher to one of the most active secularist lecturers of his generation, co-editing the National Reformer with Bradlaugh — and then the whole way back. Modern Skepticism is his own map of ‘the land of doubt,’ written by a man who had lived on both sides of the argument. (His full autobiography, The Life of Joseph Barker, is also in the library.)
What it cost His living. He walked out of a paid post as an infidel lecturer, he and his family went through hard times, and Christians did not trust him either. (ch. 17, 19)
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1872 · England · Chartist & platform skeptic
The Autobiography of Thomas Cooper
Thomas Cooper · 1872
Published as The Life of Thomas Cooper, Written by Himself
A shoemaker’s apprentice who taught himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, led the Leicester Chartists, wrote an epic poem in prison — and lectured against Christianity for years before reconverting. He spent his last decades as a walking Christian-evidence lecturer, debating the same halls he had once filled as a skeptic.
What it cost His audience and his income. The crowd he had lectured for years called him a turncoat and a traitor, and he spent nearly two years copying letters in a cellar at a penny for seventy words. (ch. 31, 33)
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1882 · England · Secularism’s advocate
Christianity and Secularism
George Sexton and Charles Watts · 1882
George Sexton held a doctorate, edited freethought journals, and stood among the leading platform advocates of Victorian secularism before renouncing his unbelief in 1876. This debate, argued from the Christian side of the platform he once held for the other, is the closest thing the movement produced to a defection document from its own front rank.
What it cost The goodwill of his old movement. Secularists handed out a slanderous flyer about him at the door of his lectures. This book is a debate, though, not his story. (Dr. Sexton’s Sixth Letter)
The editors and writers
61857 · New England · Freethought editor
The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience
Orestes Brownson · 1857
Orestes Brownson passed through nearly every position American religion offered — Presbyterian, Universalist, freethought editor, socialist, transcendentalist — before landing, to the scandal of literary Boston, in the Catholic Church. The Convert is his own unsparing autopsy of each station on the way.
What it cost His reputation and many of his readers. He had just made his name in American letters, and becoming a Catholic made him look fickle to Protestants and suspect to Catholics. (ch. XVII–XVIII)
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1907 · France · Militant atheist poet
From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu)
Adolphe Retté · 1907
The symbolist poet Adolphe Retté was, by his own and his contemporaries’ account, a militant atheist and anarchist — a fixture of anticlerical Paris. Du Diable à Dieu (‘From the Devil to God’) is his account of the conversion that stunned it.
What it cost The woman he had lived with for four years. And every book he had written against the Church came back to haunt him. (ch. X)
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1913 · Italy · Anticlerical intellectual
The Failure (Un uomo finito)
Giovanni Papini · 1913
Giovanni Papini edited journals dedicated to attacking Christianity and wrote himself to the edge of nihilism. The Failure (Un uomo finito) is the autobiography of that dead end — the conversion it set up broke publicly with his Story of Christ a few years later, one of the loudest reversals in European letters.
What it cost The name he had made as the Church’s enemy. Raised without faith by an anticlerical father, he announced his conversion in 1919, six years after this book, and went on to write a life of Christ. (Wikipedia, citing his biographers)
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1804 · England · The mocking bookseller
The Confessions of J. Lackington
James Lackington · 1804
James Lackington built London’s largest bookshop and used his famous Memoirs to ridicule the Methodists of his youth. The Confessions is the retraction: the old freethinking bookseller, in later life, taking it all back in print.
What it cost Very little. He was already retired and rich. He stopped selling atheist books, took back what he had written about the Methodists, and put up with his friends laughing at him. (Preface; Letters XIX, XXV)
The investigators
101930 · London · The book that refused to be written
Who Moved the Stone?
Frank Morison · 1930
Frank Morison, a London advertising man, planned a book on Jesus’ last seven days with the miraculous left out, because he believed science had ruled miracles out. When he finally did the research it turned him round, and he wrote this instead.
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1998 · Chicago · The legal editor
The Case for Christ
Lee Strobel · 1998
Lee Strobel was an atheist and the Chicago Tribune’s legal editor when his wife became a Christian. He spent nearly two years cross-examining the evidence the way he would a trial, and dates his own conversion to November 8, 1981. Still in print, so we link to retailers.
What it cost Not much. His wife became a Christian first, and their marriage nearly ended over it. His own conversion is what saved it. (Christian Post interview)
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2022 · France & America · The modern account
Confessions of a French Atheist
Guillaume Bignon · 2022
Guillaume Bignon was a contented French atheist when he fell for an American girl. He took on Christianity’s arguments — morality, science, the Bible — and followed them all the way to becoming a theologian. Still in print, so we link to retailers and our review.
What it cost Not much, and he would say so. Mostly his pride: he said he would have died of shame if his friends or family had seen him in a church. (Christianity Today interview, 2014)
Questions about atheists who turned Christian
- Which famous atheists turned Christian?
- From the public-domain record: Leo Tolstoy, whose A Confession records his crisis of unbelief and return to faith, and George John Romanes — Darwin’s colleague and the author of a rigorous case for scientific agnosticism — who reasoned his way back before his death. In the modern era the best-known are C.S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy), the geneticist Francis Collins (The Language of God), and the journalist Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ).
- Did any famous scientists convert to Christianity?
- Yes. The outstanding historical case is George John Romanes, the evolutionary biologist who was Darwin’s friend and protégé. As a young man he published A Candid Examination of Theism, the period’s most respected scientific case for agnosticism; his posthumous Thoughts on Religion records his deliberate journey back toward Christian faith. In our own day, Francis Collins — director of the Human Genome Project — has told a similar story.
- Is there a book by an atheist turned Christian?
- Several — this page lists twelve, each written by the convert himself. For the inner crisis, start with Tolstoy’s A Confession. For the evidence, Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? and Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. For a recent account, Guillaume Bignon’s Confessions of a French Atheist.
- What convinced these skeptics to convert?
- It differs by the man, and each tells his own story: for Tolstoy it began with the failure of reason to answer why he should live at all; for Romanes, the slow scientific case that his youthful agnosticism had claimed too much; for the secularist lecturers Barker, Cooper, and Sexton, years of arguing the negative side wore through. None converted in ignorance of the objections — that is the point of reading them first-hand.
- Where can I read testimonies of atheists who became Christians for free?
- Every historical account on this page is in the public domain, and we link a free source on each title. Our clean editions add readable typesetting for a small price, but none of those is paywalled — the testimony itself is free. Two modern accounts, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and Guillaume Bignon’s Confessions of a French Atheist (2022), are still in print, so for those we link to retailers.
More reading lists
T.S. Baker — testimonies in their own words, free sources linked.