A.N. Wilson -- the British novelist and biographer -- has returned to the Christian faith of his youth.He wrote about it recently for The Daily Mail -- while simultaneously getting some licks in against Britain's highly secularized elites.I don't know how many of you have followed Wilson's career, but in the early 1980s, when he was still a believer, he wrote a number of novels and biographies that had a refreshingly offbeat take on life. Many of these books are out of print but I remember loving a novel of his called Wise Virgin. His biography of Hilaire Belloc demonstrated a full awareness of the monstrousness of some of Belloc's ideas but it was balanced with a graceful appreciation of Belloc's many gifts.His biography of C.S. Lewis -- and a short apologetic book entitled How Can We Know? -- signalled his parting of ways with Christianity."It felt so uncool to be religious," he writes in the Mail. "With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs."By his own admission, Wilson became a fairly conventional mocker of Christianity. The article in the Mail is somewhat ironic, of course, because Wilson lashes out against the likes of Christopher Hitchens -- after spending the better part of two decades sounding rather like...Christopher Hitchens.It will be interesting to see what he writes next. He'll have to go deeper than newspaper articles to regain credibility. I for one hope he does.

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