I was in my second year of university when I overheard my anthropology professor telling a few students after class that if you weren’t an atheist before university, chances are you would become one by the time you graduated. They laughed as they were supposed to and so did I, even though we knew “better” than to believe we needed religion. At the time, I was imagining what it would be like to tell my good Catholic mother over dinner what we discussed after class that day. 

I didn’t become an atheist, nor did I tell my mom about the discussion I overheard, but I was tempted to every time she asked me why I didn’t go to church. Truth is, I had already begun to rethink God long before I went to university. As a rule, I always shy away from discussions about God or religion. I stand for letting people believe what they want to believe. If anyone asks me about my views, I quickly nix the conversation by safely responding, “I’m still searching.”

So, it was with much intrigue that I picked up David Adams Richards’ God Is: My Search for Faith in a Secular World. In it, the author of the Governor General’s Award-winning Lines on the Water and co-winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Mercy Among the Children offers a deeply intimate and fresh perspective on the age-old debate about religious belief. Adams Richards claims that “the presence of God cannot be denied, and that many of those who espouse atheism also know that presence, though they would not admit it to anyone – including themselves.”

As a writer, Adams Richards has always grappled with questions of faith, morality and religion. Those who are familiar with his fictional works know how these issues play an integral part in shaping his characters’ lives. In this book, he examines how they play a role in his own life and reveals how he arrived at his own belief in God.

It wasn’t a popular stance. In fact, this celebrated Canadian author is used to being a social outcast in some of his circles. It began in university when popular opinion deemed religion unnecessary in the pursuit of freedom. He didn’t think he was wiser than his intellectual colleagues nor did religion necessarily please him. Though he believed in the blood of the saints as true and sacred, Adams Richards wasn’t really a religious person. He had simply found that atheism and social activism were not based on truth, but rather on compliance to the strict rules governing socially acceptable behaviour.

In time, the author would discover that the world of faith was generous; however much someone put into it, one received. In fact, the more he came to know religious people, the more they struck him as being “grander, wiser and even more at peace than he had ever dreamed possible.” 

To prove that there is Something and that it persists, Adams Richards draws on references from key historical figures such as the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Adams Richards believes Stalin is the “key, the lesson, for people to ponder when they doubt the existence of God.” When there was state-enforced atheism in the Soviet Union before World War II, Stalin believed the only way to save Russia was through the faith of its people and he re-opened the churches. As Adams Richards puts it, “God was the last thing Stalin ever needed, until God was the last thing he had.”

But when Adams Richards writes about his battles with his own demons - being born “different” because his mother fell while she was pregnant with him, his excessive drinking, the company he kept with murderers, and the remarkable instances in his life when he has recognized the presence of God – that’s when this book came together for me in the most humble, imposing and convincing of ways.

Marisa Iacobucci is a freelance writer who enjoys a good debate.