Yet, for Wilson addicts, despite its esoteric subject, Wilson’s potent mixture of strong opinions, lightness of touch and an effortless style always makes for entertaining reading.
Wilson is not afraid to put out his views, regardless of how controversial or eccentric they may be. And he’s not afraid to change his mind.
For many years, Wilson wavered between Anglicanism and Catholicism and became a staunch defender of religion in an increasingly secular English society.
Then suddenly, in the mid-1990s, he announced that he had decided to give up on religion. His about turn was described in a pamphlet, ‘Against Religion’, where he declared that religion, not money, was the root of all evil.
And he brought to his new belief (or non-belief) his full powers of expression, ridiculing religion: "If your next-door neighbour believed that pigs could fly, it would be simple politeness to smile and nod while he explained the reason for his belief. If you discovered that a dozen people met each week in this man’s house to swap sightings of flying pigs, you might feel there was cause for concern. If you then found that he belonged to a worldwide organisation with a membership of millions . . . you would be aware that some very strange phenomenon was at work."
Wilson was scathing of how easily intelligent and independent-minded people can suspend their critical faculties and believe what were for him (at that time) little more than fairytales. And he listed other compelling arguments for non-belief, including an impressive religious catalogue of intolerance, fanaticism, bigotry, cruelty, corruption, terrorism, violence and so on.
All of which, Wilson argued, stemmed not from a perversion of religion but from religion itself.
It was an impressive demolition of the religious project and yet Wilson seemed to keep the ultimate question open. In a memorable passage, he wrote: "I can never walk by the sea-shore, nor read Wordsworth, nor listen to Beethoven without feeling that there are more things in Heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in a purely materialist view of things."
It’s a view redolent of Nuala O’Faolain‘s famous comment that, while she regarded herself as a non-believer, when she looked up at the stars on a clear night she couldn’t quite believe that the majesty of life could possibly be merely accidental.
After his ‘conversion’ to atheism, Wilson felt that, for the first time in his 38 years, he was at one with his own disbelieving generation.
When he bumped into Richard Dawkins, an old colleague from Oxford days, or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens, both God-deniers, he no longer felt out on a limb. It was such a relief, he felt, to discard it all that for months he walked on air.
But Wilson changed his mind about religion.
"For ten or fifteen of my middle years, I, too, was one of the mockers. But, as time passed, I found myself going back to church (and) sometime over the past five or six years – I could not tell you exactly when – I found that I had changed."
But while his conversion to atheism may have had a road to Damascus experience feel about it, Wilson felt drawn to the disconcerting recognition that so many of the people he had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers.
Reading a life of Gandhi, who was so focused on God, reminded him of the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit, he said, like trying to assert that music is an aberration and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense.
The death of loved ones – including his mother’s – edged him back towards a religious faith. He became convinced that purely materialist ‘explanations’ for our mysterious human existence simply wouldn't do on an intellectual level.
The existence of language too, he concluded, was one of many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggests that humans are spiritual beings, not just "collections of meat". His atheist friends began to seem like people who had no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
For a few years, he resisted his growing belief that his atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. And discovered that in line with advice given him many years earlier that if he returned to a practice of the faith, that faith itself would return.
The confusion of A.N. Wilson represents an honest and authentic response to the search for truth in our bewildering times.
The popularity of evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens gives the impression that atheism is a good fit for the age we live in.
Or rather that religion is a bad fit now for people who have moved beyond superstition into a new enlightenment. But Wilson’s intellectual honesty challenged that easy consensus.
The truth is that religion will always be an awkward and difficult fit because it challenges us to think ‘outside the box’, not to allow others to do our thinking for us and to listen closely to the hungers of the heart.
The belief that religion can be despatched in a few brisk arguments and then laughed off kept Wilson going for years but it didn’t last because it wasn’t enough.
The great questions lurking under the surface of our lives lead us to God if we give them space.
Even if, like A.N. Wilson, we have to change our minds – twice!