On Nov. 11, activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay titled “Why I am Now a Christian.” Her declaration has understandably made waves. For 20 years, Ali has written, spoken, and acted as a committed atheist. Rejecting the Islamic teachings she was indoctrinated with during her teenage years, she has long argued for secularism as the needed lens for furthering humanity and countering the world’s evils so often perpetrated by religious dogma.
Ali grounds the explanation for her conversion on the usefulness of Christianity . I do not mean “useful” in a trite way, as one might find a spoon more helpful to eat soup than a fork. Ali sees the use of Christianity as fundamental on a societal and personal level. In this way, Ali grounds her turn to belief on the same principles that led her to reject God and organized religion. She now sees Christianity not as a foe to her cause but as a needed ally.
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First, Ali articulates Christianity’s crucial role in constructing a just society ordered toward human good. Ali has been a longtime advocate of human rights such as freedom of conscience, free speech and press, and economic freedom. Before, she thought these “secular” insights and projects. Now, she declares that Christianity played a major, even definitive, part in creating these best components of the modern West. Christianity is committed to upholding “human life, freedom, and dignity.” In fact, the institutions that best uphold these principles originate from and garnered needed sustenance from Christian doctrine, practice, and structures.
Atheism, by Ali’s account, has not and cannot provide this support to such essential values. She alludes to inherent flaws in atheism that undermine true freedom and human dignity. But the more crucial weakness of unbelief relates to the personal.
Second, therefore, Ali found in Christianity the fulfillment of deep personal needs. As much as atheism relieved her of the hatreds and straitjackets of Islam, it left her wanting in ultimate purpose. She found her “God-shaped hole,” in her words, “unendurable” and “very nearly self-destructive.” The retreat of personal and collective religion results in a “nihilistic vacuum” that gets filled with concocted, “irrational quasi-religious dogma.” That’s why Ali now sees “wokeness” as an attempt to create a religion from nonreligion, a dogma from a dearth of doctrine.
Christianity filled that void for Ali. “Christianity has it all,” she writes with what comes across as tired relief. And in what Christianity offers, she sees a way to reignite for others the civilizational fight she has waged for decades. In that, she sounds a bit like Whittaker Chambers, who wished in his own conversion from communistic atheism to Christianity that the West would refind its own self-confidence and strength from its religious belief.
Christians should be thankful for Ali’s statement. It no doubt took plenty of courage to make, given her past commitments and social circle. We also should exercise cautious support of her. She mentions at the end of her essay that “I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday.” Judging by her essay, she still might need guidance in seeing the centrality of grace in Christianity and how that grace is most manifest in the person and work of the Son of God, made flesh. Sometimes, those truths take time to know and to feel. In some sense, we spend our entire lives trying to rest in God’s grace, not save ourselves as is the normal human inclination.
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But we also should be thankful that Ali sees the political and social goods of Christianity, historically and today. In its witness, we see the dignity of humanity made in the image of its Creator. In its doctrine, we see the need for politics that protects the innocent, punishes the guilty, and guards the right. In Christianity, we also see the need for mercy, not just from God, but with each other as neighbors and citizens.
That such commitments to dignity, law, and mercy seem obvious to so many of us is not the insight of secular humanism. Ali has joined us in seeing its origins in the God revealed in the Bible.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion recounts the debt the West owes to Christianity
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17.11.2023
On Nov. 11, activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay titled “Why I am Now a Christian.” Her declaration has understandably made waves. For 20 years, Ali has written, spoken, and acted as a committed atheist. Rejecting the Islamic teachings she was indoctrinated with during her teenage years, she has long argued for secularism as the needed lens for furthering humanity and countering the world’s evils so often perpetrated by religious dogma.
Ali grounds the explanation for her conversion on the usefulness of Christianity . I do not mean “useful” in a trite way, as one might find a spoon more helpful to eat soup than a fork. Ali sees the use of Christianity as fundamental on a societal and personal level. In this way, Ali grounds her turn to belief on the same principles that led her to reject God and organized religion. She now sees Christianity not as a foe to her cause but as a needed ally.
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First, Ali articulates Christianity’s crucial role in........
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