For reasons I described earlier; the most famous Christian conversion of the twentieth century - i.e. that of CS Lewis - is not valid for modern Man.
Modern Man must choose to become a Christian - and that choice typically comes from a context of disbelief not only in God, but the objectivity of Good, the existence of spirit and the soul; and indeed disbelief in any purpose or meaning in the universe.
Contrast this mainstream, normal modern nihilism with Lewis's well-known account of how he came to believe in God (the belief in the necessity of Jesus came later). From Surprised by Joy:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
I fully accept the truth of Lewis's account - I am sure that is how it was for him. But Lewis was born in 1898 in a socially-enforced, strictly Christian-church part of Ireland; where people then and later would suffer, risk and die for their church - and for Lewis conversion involved return.
Furthermore, in Lewis's Godless youth and younger-adulthood, atheists retained (unconsciously) most of the metaphysical assumptions of theism and the ethical assumptions of traditional Christianity. They were a long way from the generations-deep nihilism that is mainstream and normal nowadays.
Nowadays; I would say that the experience of being hunted-down by a relentless God, out to reclaim his own; a God that must actively be resisted! - must be very rare indeed.
In such a world as this, the idea that we convert when we can no longer resist God is probably counter-productive. It was for me.
I read Surprised By Joy in about 1985, when I was exploring Christianity quite actively (Note: I did not actually become a Christian until 2008). I enjoyed the book, but took away the idea that the time to believe in God was when that belief could not be resisted - when one was overwhelmed by God. So I was - to an extent - waiting for that to happen.
I did not take personal responsibility for my belief - but equated truth with being-overwhelmed; and of course what one is overwhelmed by in modern life is not God but the ideology of secular leftism as it impinges from all-directions.
So, if our assumption is that belief is dictated by a sense of being hunted-down and compelled by external ideas; this now leads to mainstream, secular, leftist nihilism - not to God*.
Ironically; all this was fully and deeply understood by CS Lewis's best friend Owen Barfield; whose 'conversion story' is so lacking in drama that it has no real beginning or end. He simply, gradually, chose to believe in God and the necessity of Jesus; and (in middle age) joined the Church of England (without strictly subordinating himself to its rules - e.g. he remained an Anthroposophist and believed in that type of reincarnation).
Barfield realised (and wrote - in essays and books that CS Lewis read and, apparently, liked!) that modern Man's consciousness experiences the world in an alienated fashion and from-this chooses to believe what it believes.
But Barfield was Not any kind of relativist or post-modernist: he believed in a real-reality, a really-real God, that Christ was the single most important 'event' in the history of the universe etc. But he also recognized that these 'objective' truths do not force-themselves upon modern Man from outside; but must be recognized by modern Man with a free act of choice and from a state of alienation, from a detached consciousness.
(Modern Man chooses God or Not-God, from a state beyond even that 'solipsism' in which the reality of other people is doubted. Modern Man has reached a nihilism in which even the reality of one's own thinking consciousness is doubted! It is now quite normal and mainstream for Men to (choose to) believe that their own consciousness is an epiphenomenon, an inessential and non-functional artifact of brain electrical activity. People even discuss - with bland unconcern - that they themselves might be no more than software simulations in some kind of Matrix...)
Barfield also made clear that this situation led to the opposite possibilities of either the first freely-chosen Christianity in history; or else to types of moral and aesthetic inversion and depravity never before seen in history (which is what has actually happened).
At any rate; my advice to modern people who are interested in the possibility of becoming a Christian would be very different from what Lewis described.
I would emphasize that anyone who relies on being overwhelmed by the strength of external persuasion or compulsion will almost certainly accept the dominant nihilism and evil; whereas God, truth, beauty and virtue must be chosen, and by a responsible inner act deriving from absolutely free agency.
In brief; Truth is real but must be chosen; and then we get what we want.
So we need to be sure that we really (from our true-selves, by full acceptance of responsibility) actually-want, what we suppose-we-want.
*I am thinking of those evangelists who make the error of assuming that anyone not a Christian must actively be resisting the obvious dictates of reason and the promptings of their deepest and most spontaneous emotions. Yet, such is the depth of skepticism, cynicism, nihilism; that modern people reflexively doubt all their good impulses, all logic and reason, all choices that lead to life eternal, happiness, love, creativity! Increasingly, as of 2021; we see that 'belief' is just for here and now and today; passively adopted for reasons of expediency - especially from fear and despair (fear of being exiled-from and scapegoated-by the 'community' - which is now obviously controlled top-down by the Establishment; and despair of a materialist life without the 'optimism' offered as carrot for obedience to the Establishment).
