Losing religious faith can be a shattering experience, turning a universe that seemed full of providential order into a frightening and meaningless void. It is first of all an internal catastrophe – the voice of God falls silent, comforting certainties are overturned, notions of right and wrong vanish into thin air. This is surely one reason why writers of literature, the best means we have for depicting interiority, have been drawn again and again to the drama of faith and doubt in the individual soul. But a process that begins in the soul rarely ends there: losing faith can also mean losing family or community, and can force the former believer into seeking different ways of living, new illusions or new salves for pain.
In my memoir Original Sins I tell the story of my own religious crisis and its aftermath. I grew up the son of a fundamentalist Baptist preacher in south Wales, but a devastating loss of faith in my teens soon led me to search for a substitute for God. At first alcohol and drugs seemed to provide the same sense of heavenly transcendence I’d once felt in church. But soon I developed a near-deadly addiction to heroin and crack, leading to brushes with suicidality and homelessness, a spell in a psychiatric unit and Hepatitis C. At last I set out to try and discover what life might look like without either drugs or God.
