He was a self-destructive alcoholic and a hellraiser, so why, asks the artist Peter Howson, is society now so embarrassed by the fact he believes in Jesus?

I was chatting to Bob Geldof, backstage at his recent Glasgow show. The first thing he said to me was: " I hear you’ve found Jesus."
"Yes, it's true" I replied.
‘Oh, f***". he groaned. Then, after a pause "Well, I suppose you’d better come and speak to one of my hard. He’s a f****** born again too"

It was a joke and taken as such: Geldof is an old friend. He was guest of honour at my wedding. There was no animus in what he said. He just couldn’t understand this religion thing himself. (He’d had a similar conversation with Mother Teresa, he said, presumably without the four ­letter words.)

But his reaction was hardly unique. Scotland may still have a sentimental picture of itself as a Christian country but the truth is that there are few things that infuriate, embarrass and amuse as surely as a profession of orthodox Christian faith.

For the record: I believe in the virgin birth, the physical reality of the resurrection, the inevitability of the second coming, the raising of Lazarus and the parting of the Red Sea. I believe in the existence of angels. Although I have not seen one, and that the devil is a real power who can take on human form. (Bob would have run out of expletives.)
Even in a society increasingly addicted to the washing of its laundry in public, this tends to be greeted as a. confession too far.

It is ironic that people are more comfortable with me discussing the alcoholism and drug abuse that ruined my marriage, made my daughter’s life a living hell and threatened to destroy my career as an artist than they are hearing about my Christian faith.

In the popular imagination, artists are meant to do things like that anyway. Better the out-of-control bohemian than the God squad weirdo.

This is the first time I have written about my conversion to Christianity which took place in 2001. The newspapers picked up on it at the time. The symmetry of the situation made it irresistible: I was received into the Church of Scotland on the same day I finished my nude portrait of Madonna. They loved the idea that I underwent a sudden dramatic epiphany. Presented like that, I suppose my leap Into faith could be read as extension of my previous waywardness, another irrational act from a man who had become known for them.

After all it was only the year before during a mammoth drinking session that I claimed (falsely) to a journalist that I had sold a series of paintings to Arthur Thompson, the gangland boss.

For me however, the most unusual thing about my conversion was the length of time it took. By the age of 12 I believed that God existed, but it took me mote than 30 years to find Him and surrender my life to His care.
In the eyes of my loving parents I was a strange child. When I was 12 years of age, my family moved from Prestwick to Ayr, to a large gothic house with an attic room. I turned this into a studio from which I was increasingly reluctant to emerge.

Even at that age I was obsessed by the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. I went to lots of sermons painted hundreds of pictures of crucifixions and became obsessed with the Book of Revelation and the second coming of Jesus Christ.

As I walked along the beach I had what I understand as visions in the same way that another of my heroes, William Blake, the poet and artist, had visions. To him they were as real as any rock or grain of sand. He saw no division between the material world and that of the imagination. Neither did I.

I remember someone’s mother telling me off for frightening her children. The truth was that I was the one who was frightened and bullied at school.

But there was already another side to my life. By the age of eight I had acquired a taste for drink by stealing from my father’s cocktail cabinet. By the age of 11, alcohol was my secret hobby. I would wait desperately for my parents to leave the house. Years later, in my twenties, I would steal jewelry from my mother to pay for drink.

A lodger stayed with us. She was 16. I had a brief and unpleasant sexual escapade with her when I was 13. When a few years later my family found out, the girl was banished. That early experience warped me and I thought of women in a very unhealthy way. My obsession with God ended abruptly. I fell away from Christianity and went away to Glasgow school of art.

At college I resumed drinking with a passion, mostly alone. I still believed that God existed, but I did not care for his company any more. During the next few years I shut Him out almost completely. Sometimes, during a period of crisis, I would pray and made promises. But I would never admit my tentative religious gestures to anyone.

During my twenties a feeling of joy interrupted frequent depressions. I tried to hold on to it but it always slipped away. In 19831 was married and divorced within three months. After a year of madness I fell in love with a schoolteacher called Terry. We rented a modest flat together and in 1986 Lucie, our daughter, was born.

She became very ill just days after I watched her being born. This gave me an excuse to increase my drinking bouts to epic proportions.

I still worked very hard. My ambition was rewarded with success as an artist. I lusted after money; I made lots and spent even more. This gave me an opportunity to run away as much as I could.

Even going to Bosnia as the official British war artist in 1993 was an attempt to escape my responsibilities as a husband and father. When I returned, I left my wife and daughter and went to London.

During 2000 I reached my lowest point. It had been a year of scandal. I was nearly bankrupt; my drinking had made me useless both as a per­son and as a father. I did not have the energy to work. I summoned up all my reserves to finish a huge oil painting which I now call The First Step. It shows a naked man dragging along an enormous load of writhing and contorted people on his hack. He is cut and wounded but still tries to find the strength to go on.

As soon as I had finished the painting, my daughter came to spend the weekend with me. Instead of taking care of her, I drank myself into a coma. Lucie, who is autistic, took her overnight bag, left my flat and wandered round Kelvingrove Park all night. When she returned I was just coining round. A couple of hours later, after many tears, she told me she no longer wanted to see me if I continued drinking.

My friend John, a recovering alcoholic, told me what I should do. In November 2000 I checked into Castle Craig clinic in Peebles. I was in good company: an SAS man, a priest who had fallen, and a former rock star. All the clichés.
This time, though, escape was not possible. Castle Craig uses the Twelve Step programme, which insists the alcoholic/addict finds “a higher power”. After a numb first week I felt as if I was totally trapped, but a presence I know to be God was talking to me quietly and gently.

As the weeks went by, my self-pity started to go. One day I knelt down by my bed and prayed to stop drinking. Every dark compartment in my mind started to empty its rubbish. Something of infinite power was prodding about within me and straightening me up. I came through a grogginess and started to wake up out of my bad dream.

When I came out of the clinic I felt different. I did not crave a drink. I felt that I needed people but, for the first time in many years. I started to enjoy my own company.

Now that I was sober I was able to read, and picked up a book that I had read many times but never fully understood. The Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis is a series of letters written by a senior demon called Screwtape, giving advice to his nephew Wormwood on how to corrupt a human soul. Through this devil’s words I started to understand what had been unintelligible to me before. Something mysterious and wonderful was happening in my life. It did not happen instantly, but over a few weeks. It seemed as if layers of scab and leprous skin were falling off me. Now I walked through the park and noticed squirrels and birds and the colours of the trees.

A month passed and my daughter agreed to come and stay with me again. She was amazed not to see me disappearing to retrieve a bottle. I was no longer screaming at her. I had never really enjoyed our times together in the past. Now I could not wait to have her back with me.

Reading another book by Lewis, Mere Christianity. I knew that I was entering the final stage in my search for God and the big decision that I must make, In the book I was confronted by the question of Jesus. Was he mad bad or really what he said he was - the Son of God? The truth struck me like a thunderbolt and I fell down, on my knees and surrendered myself into the arms of Jesus Christ. My old life died and I was reborn into the new.

There’s psychologist I was quite friendly with when I'd been out of Castle Craig for six months. He said to me: "It won’t last. It’s just another obsession." I am aware that the tumultuous history of my life to date will inevitably lead to such reactions. I have got used to it.

But sometimes I wonder whether it is not just to do with me. That it’s a sign of a much more fundamental change in our society. This week the Pope spoke about the spiritual state of Scotland. Two comments in particular ring true with me. “The concept of holiness should not be thought of as something extraordinary. As something outside the bounds of normal everyday life" and “We may observe that in Scotland... there no longer exists the reality of a ‘Christian society’; that is the measure of its life and values”.

Certainly this seems to be implied in my attempts to find a Scottish gallery to show my religious work. Guy Peploe of the Scottish Gallery had stocked my work for 15 years but was quoted at the time as saving: “If he comes to me I will have to say to him that he is looking to a market that is not particularly deep. Religious subjects are the commercial kiss of death as far as selling painting is concerned.

“Modern art is all about ambiguity and it allows people to bring their own perceptions to a work. Religious art doesn’t allow people that freedom but tends to have a very clear message."

It is hardly Peploe’s fault: he would doubtless argue that you can’t buck the market. But I find it a strange paradox that thousands will flock to see Mantegna’s paintings at the Royal Academy’ or stand in rapture before the religious works of Titian at the National Gallery. There clearly is a widespread spiritual need out there, but unless it can be experienced through the work of the long dead - those who are not still around to embarrass, irritate or amuse - It cannot be expressed.

All this leaves me in a strange position. I am a happy anomaly, unfashionable but more fulfilled than I have ever been.

Two years have passed. So I suppose as a Christian I am only very young. I have joined the Sandyford Henderson Memorial church just round the corner from my flat in Glasgow. The minister is Reverend Peter White and he is very good to me. I don’t always want to go to church and sometimes I would rather do anything but go to church. Mostly, though, I enjoy it and every now and then I feel the presence of God so strongly that I come out feeling elated. I especially like a strong sermon and the austere melodies of the Psalms.

I have never thought of of myself an apologist for Christianity but I can see myself becoming one. I am now conscious that I have a contribution to make. First through my art. which I believe can move people. I have been painting The Stations of the Cross, showing the last stages of the life of Christ, from the sentence of death to his entombment.
It has been an incredible struggle and sometimes I have been in a kind of agony over it, but I have felt a force guiding my brush. It has taken a long time to realise that my talent for painting and drawing is a gift from God.

Secondly I am going to shout about my Christianity. That is why I have recently written to newspapers taking issue with the works of the scientist Richard Dawkins. He calls Christianity a disease of the mind. I call it a cure for the mind. Paradoxically I think an atheist such as Davvkins is nearer to Christianity than an agnostic. I would rather have a hard-boiled atheist like Dawkins than someone who doesn't care.

I am thinking of the way that the atheist C S Lewis was dragged screaming and kicking into the arms of God in the late 1920s, and later became one of the greatest Christian apologists of the 20th century. Later, he wrote of being helped towards God by his friends J R R Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

His final conversion still moves me greatly. "I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Not in great emotion . . . It was more like when a man, after long sleep still lying motionless in bed becomes aware that he is now fully awake.’

My own pilgrimage has only just started, after having walked around in circles for most of my life. I don’t know what is round the next bend, but I do know that Jesus is with me all the way.

Peter Howson is exhibiting Stations of the Cross at Angela Flowers Gallery. London, (020 7920 7777), on Friday 11th April