Acclaimed Writer Explains How He Left Atheism for Christianity, Says ‘I Now Feel at Home'
A veteran columnist for The Times newspaper in the United Kingdom says he has shed his atheism and embraced Christianity. Giles Coren has written for The Times since 1993 and is a well-known restaurant critic for his many television appearances and books, including The Food Book: The Stories, Science, and History of What We Eat. He previously won the British Press Awards food and drink writer of the year.
Yet on March 7, Coren’s column focused not on food but religion, under the headline, “This Lent I will turn atheism to ashes.” His atheism, he explained, has “waned in recent years.”
“Atheism is the assumed default position of every modern urban adult,” Coren wrote. “Although lately, many atheists think we want to hear their irrefutable arguments against belief and witty putdowns of the faithful, but I just wonder, ‘Why do you bother? To whom are you talking? Who do you think is not already an atheist?’ I think possibly these people grew up very close to religion and believe it is important to be endlessly forsaking it. But that isn’t the case with me. My childhood was godless, and there was room for improvement.”
Coren grew up Jewish but, as a child, had “no Hebrew classes, no Jewish environment, no bar mitzvah.”
His view on religion changed after his father’s death.
“It seemed to me, at the very end, that God might have been useful to him,” Coren wrote, explaining how his non-religious family struggled to put together a formal service and ended up with an “irreligious rabbi” performing a “partially Hebrew service amid crosses and carved angels.”
He took part in Jewish “simcha” ceremonies over the years, but said he always felt awkward, “unable to take part at any level, naked in my apostasy, uncomfortable in the yarmulke, bullied into wearing borrowed prayer shawls that made me feel fraudulent, understanding not a word of the Hebrew, freaked out by the separation of the women, my children regarded as mongrels.”
Coren, though, said he is now rooted in the Church of England. His son played a role in drawing him in.
“I now feel at home with Anglicanism,” he wrote.
“That’s my language in that prayer book, my tradition, my education, my country, my poetry,” he wrote. “And there is a building for it, usually a pretty one, on every street corner, opposite the pub, and any Englishman or woman can go in (to either) and take succour. That is why, when Esther and I walked into St Bride’s in Fleet Street 15 years ago next month, the canon married us without a quibble. It’s what an established church is for. I wouldn’t have felt properly married anywhere else. And when, some years later, my son, brought up like me into no tradition at all, said he wanted to go to church, I said OK, and we walked up the road to our local one the following Sunday and went in. And we’ve been going ever since.”
In his church, he said, the “homily is always good, the organ music magical.” There are “bells and incense, bowing and genuflecting, a sung Eucharist and much talk of saints and the Virgin.”
“And I do not not believe. I am not without faith. It’s weird, because Judaism does not require faith, only observance,” Coren wrote. “Christianity is the other way round (right?) So I observe, like a Jew, the Christian service,” he wrote. “And I have a sense that God is there -- in the tradition, the words, the 2,000 years of conviction, the imagination of all the people who came before me -- that I don’t get, I’m sorry, in a synagogue. Or, like, Pizza Express.”
“... I’ll still be a Jew, in the way that a black man would still be black. I’ll still use Yiddish words where English ones won’t do and say ‘his mother was Jewish, you know’ whenever Harrison Ford comes on screen. But I’ll be a Christian one.”
Photo Credit: ©Instagram/gilescoren
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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Originally published March 13, 2025.
