Sir Anthony Hopkins spent decades as an ardent atheist. His conversion to Christianity started after a dramatic interaction at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The unnamed woman asked the acting superstar “Why don’t you just trust in God?” Shortly afterward, Hopkins’s psychology completely changed and his addiction to alcohol was broken.
Anthony Hopkins is one of the most successful actors of his generation. He earned the title of Sir Anthony Hopkins when Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1993 for his contributions to the performing arts. But early in his career, before he starred in classic films like The Silence of the Lambs, he struggled with alcoholism. The actor stated how “That’s what you do in theater, you drink.” He said that the addiction started ” innocently.”
However, by 1975 the addiction was out of control. In order to get his life back on track, Hopkins began attending AA meetings. However, he was still publicly an atheist. During one of the meetings, another attendee asked him a simple question. “Why don’t you just trust in God?” Hopkins took a leap of faith and it produced miraculous results.
“I could not stop [drinking], but I just asked for a little bit of help and suddenly, pow. It was just like bingo,” the actor recalls his experience. Hopkins says that after asking God for aid, his craving for a drink was gone, “never to return again.” From that moment, Anthony Hopkins was a committed Christian. Years later, when Piers Morgan asked if he believed in God, he responded wholeheartedly. “Yes, I do. I do,” the actor replied.
Anthony Hopkins feels sorry for atheists. “Well, okay, God bless them for feeling that way and I hope they’re happy… I wonder about some of them: why are they protesting so much? How are they so sure of what is out there? And who am I to refute the beliefs of so many great philosophers and martyrs all the way down the years?” He referred to their condition as “living in a closed cell with no windows.”
In the same interview, he motioned “I’d hate to have to live like that, wouldn’t you? We see them, mind you, on television today, many brilliant people who are professional atheists who say they know for a fact that it’s insanity to have a God or to believe in religion.” Hopkins recognizes that many atheists are smart people, but lack an essential perspective on the world.
Hopkins has made no secret of his faith and often references it in public appearances. Anthony was invited to speak at the annual Leadership, Excellence, and Accelerating Your Potential conference (LEAP). In attendance were nearly 500 high school and college students. He said. “If you chase the money, it’s not gonna work. And if you chase success, it’s not gonna work.”
He offered a hopeful message to the students in attendance. “I believe that we are capable of so much. From my own life, I still cannot believe that my life is what it is because I should have died in Wales drunk … We can talk ourselves into death, or we can talk ourselves into the best life we’ve ever lived. None of it was a mistake. It was all a destiny.”