by Susan Jacoby
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A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Jacoby is the author of eleven previous books, including Never Say Die, The Age of American Unreason, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. She began her career as a reporter for The Washington Post and is now an independent scholar specializing in the history of secularism and religious liberty. She lives in New York City. For more information, visit www.susanjacoby.com.
The fifth-century terracotta statue is believed to represent the Alexandrian philosopher and mathematician Hypatia (c. 350–415), who was literally torn to pieces by a Christian mob for the dual offense of being a female intellectual and expounding classical pagan philosophy as Christianity triumphed throughout the Roman Empire. (Ancient Art and Architecture Collection Ltd./Bridgeman Images)
The future church father Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was encouraged to convert to Christianity from paganism by his mother, Monica. This 1855 painting by the Dutch-born Romantic artist Ary Scheffer presents an idealized, somewhat saccharine image of their devotion to each other. (Louvre, Paris, France, Peter Willi/Bridgeman Images)
Born in Spain in 1511, Michael Servetus was a physician and Renaissance humanist whose challenges to orthodox doctrine, especially the Holy Trinity, were equally offensive to Catholics and Protestants. He was burned to death at the stake in Geneva, with the complicity of John Calvin, on October 27, 1553.
John Donne (1572–1631) is portrayed here by an anonymous artist, c. 1595, as the romantic, rakish young poet he was. Raised in a Roman Catholic family, Donne converted to the Church of England and eventually became one of the most prominent preachers of his day. (National Portrait Gallery, London, U.K./Bridgeman Images)
Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591–1643) ran afoul of the male theocrats in charge of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when she led prayer meetings and preached in her own home. She was convicted of heresy and expelled from the colony in 1638 for her views on salvation by grace alone and for being a woman who dared to lead biblical discussions. This 1901 illustration originally appeared in an article in Harper’s Monthly. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division)
Margaret Fell (1614–1702), an outspoken English Quaker advocate for female intellectuality and equality with men in religious affairs, wrote one of the earliest defenses of women’s speaking in public, nearly three decades after Hutchinson’s conviction in Massachusetts. The first edition of Fell’s then controversial pamphlet was published in London in 1666. (Copyright © Religious Society of Friends [Quakers] in Britain)
Fell converted from Puritanism to the new Quaker religion and is often called the “mother of Quakerism.” She never had her portrait painted during her lifetime, in keeping with Quaker ideas about personal humility. In this nineteenth-century engraving, Robert Spence envisions Fell as a young girl (third from left, standing), surrounded by the Lancashire family into which she was born. (Copyright © Religious Society of Friends [Quakers] in Britain)
The great German lyric poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was born a Jew and later regretted his conversion to Lutheranism. This 1831 portrait by Moritz Oppenheim captures the romantic appeal that led some to call Heine a “German Apollo.” (Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany/Bridgeman Images)
Raised in an observant German Jewish family, Edith Stein (1891–1942) converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. But she was murdered at Auschwitz because she had been born a Jew. This stamp was issued by the German postal service in 1983 to honor Stein, who would later be canonized by the church in a move that offended many Jews.
Whittaker Chambers (1901–61), pictured here at the trial of Alger Hiss in 1949, wrote about his embrace of Communism in the 1920s as a form of conversion and emphasized his return to belief in God after he left the Party. He is best known as Hiss’s chief accuser and wrote about all of his conversions in his best-selling autobiography, Witness. (Photo by Ed Jackson/New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), a prominent English journalist, literary critic, Christian apologist, and author of the Father Brown mystery series, was raised in a Unitarian family and moved steadily in the direction of ultra-orthodox Christianity. In the 1920s—the same decade in which left-wing intellectuals like Chambers were converting to Stalinist Communism—Chesterton chose the most conservative brand of Roman Catholicism over the Church of England. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division)
An English convert from atheism to the Church of England, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), pictured here at Oxford University, was one of the most eloquent literary defenders of Christianity in the twentieth century. A Renaissance scholar as well as a theologian, he is best known in the United States as the author of the children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. (Photo by Hans Wild/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images)
The future world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali (second from right), then named Cassius Clay, represented the United States at the 1960 Olympics in Rome when he was eighteen and won the light-heavyweight Olympic gold medal. Raised a Baptist, Ali would become the most famous American convert to Islam in the mid-1960s. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)
Though he had been reviled in the 1960s for his conversion to Islam and opposition to the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President George W. Bush in 2005. (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
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