At the recent ARC conference in London, Ayaan Hirsi Ali stunned the audience by mentioning almost in passing that she now identified as a Christian. This was news.
Hirsi Ali shot to fame in 2002 when, as a Somali woman who had gained asylum in the Netherlands, where she had fled a decade earlier, escaping a forced marriage. Though once a pious Muslim radicalized in her youth by Saudi-funded teachers, both the 9/11 terror attacks and her experiences translating for Muslim women seeking asylum, led Hirsi Ali to re-examine her religion, and renounce it. She became a member of the Dutch parliament and an internationally known critic of Islam, particularly the way Islam subjugates women. She had to go into hiding after jihadists issued death threats, and slaughtered her film collaborator Theo van Gogh.
Hirsi Ali quickly became one of the leading figures in the New Atheism movement of the 2000s. Because it was dominated by white males from post-Christian Western culture—think of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens—the movement benefited by having a black, Africa-born woman as a global icon. Eventually Hirsi Ali moved to the United States, and married historian Niall Ferguson in 2011.
And now, on a London stage, the world’s most famous Muslim apostate was announcing a second conversion: this time away from atheism, and to Christianity. She did so at a time of intense anxiety in the United Kingdom, as huge crowds of Islamic demonstrators gathered in the city to express support for mass killings of Jews carried out by Hamas militants. In the same presentation, Hirsi Ali affirmed her unwavering support for Israel, and said of the Islamic extremists: “It’s not just Jewish babies they kill; they will kill your babies too if you don’t fit into their agenda.”
The awkward language the soft-spoken Hirsi Ali deployed to proclaim her faith (“Today I am proudly of Judeo-Christian religion”) caused some in the crowd to wonder if she was truly a Christian, or simply identified with Christianity as a cultural weapon with which to resist Islam. Last week in UnHerd, Hirsi Ali clarified her stance somewhat, saying straightforwardly that she is a Christian. But it didn’t help much.
Why not? Because the reasons she gave for her conversion were instrumental. She declared that Christianity is the only force capable of resisting three key threats to Western civilization: wokeness, Islam, and “great power authoritarianism and expansionism,” meaning China and Russia. All our money and technology avails us nothing. She goes on:
But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order.” The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That may be true, but it’s not exactly soul-stirring. There was more:
Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable—indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
Well, that’s relatable. Many of us who call ourselves Christian today have been exactly in this place on our journey. Hirsi Ali concluded her UnHerd essay by saying that she is a regular churchgoer who still has much to learn about the faith. Still, a number of Christian critics pointed out that calling Christianity a better answer than atheism to the problem of nihilism is not the same thing as calling Christianity true.
Absent a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion moment for Hirsi Ali, it seems to these critics that she is merely a ‘cultural Christian’ as opposed to a believing one. This is ungracious. At this woebegone moment for Christianity in the West, we ought to be grateful that anyone is willing to stand up and be counted as on our side.
Nevertheless, as a theological matter, they have a point. In the end, the incense, the cathedrals, the great art, the humanitarianism—all of these things are epiphenomena of true belief that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. They are signs pointing the way to conversion and what we Orthodox Christians call theosis: ultimate union with God. They are the map, not the territory.
Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, has spoken with warmth and feeling about his love of the musical heritage of the Church of England, but he remains an atheist. In the end, without affirming the religious claims of Christianity, Hirsi Ali remains on that spectrum; she would not have abandoned her essential atheism.
My fellow conservative Christian intellectuals who call out Hirsi Ali’s ‘instrumentalist’ Christianity may mean well, but they are making a serious mistake. For one, they lack charity. It is an astonishing thing to see a woman who renounced the idea of God because of the cruel and insane treatment she received from Muslims, and who turned herself into a prophet of atheism, now publicly attest to being a follower of Jesus Christ. Note well that she has done this while living around Stanford University in northern California, one of the most woke and anti-Christian places in America. This is difficult and very brave. It seems to me that we owed her more understanding than some of us gave her in light of her news.
More importantly, these critics misunderstand the nature of religious conversion, and do so in a way that is particular to intellectuals. St. Paul’s dramatic experience on the aforementioned road to Damascus is the paradigmatic conversion: in a flash of overwhelming awe, a man experiences God, and is changed instantly. That’s not how it works with most people.
For many of us, conversion is a process, a pilgrim’s road that leads us to a moment of decision. In my case, it took eight years from an awe-filled mystical experience as a teenager in the Chartres cathedral until I could admit, without hesitation, that Jesus was Lord. A year later, I was received into the Catholic faith. The road to faith began as I left the Chartres cathedral, and it took me on a spiritual and intellectual quest that was, in the end, a long process of dying to myself, to my willfulness, and to my intellectual pride.
I had for a time tried to make cultural Christianity an acceptable substitute for real faith, but it didn’t work. With me, the form it took was trying to make a deal with God in which I upheld the things I liked about Christianity, but reserved the right to reject the parts that I found hard to understand or difficult to live. It doesn’t work that way. Either Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as he said, or he isn’t. In the end, nobody is willing to live or die for the sake of a mere useful idea.
Perhaps Hirsi Ali understands that now, and simply has kept the more personal parts of her conversion to herself. Or perhaps she is at the stage of the pilgrim’s path that I once was. It is no minor thing to die to one’s illusions, especially in a culture that has abandoned the Christian faith, and substituted worship of the sacred Self. Like the great ideological dissenter Whittaker Chambers before her, Hirsi Ali has chosen what she has every reason to believe is, in worldly terms, the losing side. We who believe in Christ more conventionally should be there to help her along the road, not tear her down for perceived shortcomings.
The truth is, very few of us came to faith in a clean, intellectually respectable conversion. Intellectuals often have the idea that one arrives at faith by sitting down in the quiet of a library, examining the arguments for the faith, and calmly concluding that yes, this God business seems sound. That’s a caricature, but not much of one. Intellectuals being intellectuals, they place far more emphasis on the rationalistic approach to religion.
The thing is, faith is poetry, not syllogism. In my own case, the event that tipped me into accepting the full implications of what I already believed, but was afraid to admit, was an interview I conducted with an elderly monsignor who wept as he described the vivid miracles, many decades earlier, that brought him out of his atheism, to the Catholic faith. As I sat there with him, a young journalist in the presence of a frail old man in his mid-90s, something told me that this man was a reliable witness, and that I had reached the end of my running from the truth.
An atheist or some other rationalist could have shot my conclusion down without breaking a sweat. But so what? After leaving old Monsignor Sanchez’s room, I fully embraced a conversion that had been slowly building for years. At that point, it would have required more faith for me to have stayed away from that decision than to take it.
As I grew into my Catholicism, I reveled in its intellectual riches. Without fully realizing what I was doing, though, I thought I was growing in faith as I learned more about Catholic doctrine and teaching. The arguments for Catholicism became a citadel I built that would, I believed, withstand any attack.
I was wrong. In 2001, when I began writing about the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I was confident that my faith was rock-solid and impregnable. After all, the sins of priests do not negate the teachings of the Church. I could not have imagined, though, how confronting the particular nature of this satanic evil—child sexual abuse by clergy, I mean—would undermine my capacity to believe. Slowly but steadily, my Catholic faith drained away from me, the walls of my intellectual fortress responding under stress like the thin skin of a hemophiliac.
After years of this, including a close encounter with a lying priest whose deception I failed to detect, I arrived at the point where I simply could not believe in the truth claims of the Catholic Church. Reason was useless. Had I put more effort over the years into the conversion of my heart, as distinct from my head, things might have gone differently. But I did not, and I found myself one Sunday after Mass in the once-unthinkable position of unbelief.
By God’s grace, I had not yet lost faith in Christ. For theological and historical reasons, I began attending an Eastern Orthodox Church. And there was this personal reason: I understood that the only thing that would save me, or anyone, is a real spiritual relationship with the living God. If I could not find that in Catholicism, owing to the brokenness of the Catholic Church in this time and place, and my own faults, then I would have to find a church where I could reach Him. I did, and a year later, formally converted.
Just as some atheists and Muslim commentators assail Hirsi Ali’s conversion, some angry conservative Catholic intellectuals assailed me for the irrationality of mine, for its supposed emotionalism. They had something of a point, admittedly, but in the end, just as you cannot rationalize your way into a real conversion, you cannot after a certain point rationalize yourself into staying when the grounds for belief have washed away. If it were possible to reason oneself into holding on with one’s bare hands to an iron skillet grown red-hot from being over a fire, I would still be a Catholic today.
To be honest, I was for a long time ashamed of my conversion to Orthodoxy, because it wasn’t intellectually clean. I wanted to be able to state with the kind of clarity of an expert witness in the dock that I had examined the claims for authority of the Roman church, and of the Eastern churches, and the weight of evidence lay with Byzantium. It didn’t happen that way. I came into Orthodoxy as a drowning man desperate to keep his head above water. In the end, this was the best way for me to have done it. My intellectual pride—my sin, not the Catholic Church’s—had led to my spiritual shipwreck. By showing me the primacy of the conversion of the heart, and teaching me how to achieve it, Orthodox Christianity showed me out of the dark wood.
I say all this not to make a pitch for Orthodoxy, but simply to show, by using my own example, how ragged these things can be. Most people I know who arrived at the Christian faith, or who found their way from one of the great traditions (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox) to another, did so like the pilgrim Dante in the Divine Comedy: via a path that was not entirely clean, paved, and well-lighted. Yet they are no less Christian for that fact.
Others are still on that path, making their way forward. Purgatorio, the middle volume in Dante Alighieri’s trilogy, is my favorite of the three, in part because it shows repentant sinners, joyful despite their suffering, helping each other make their way up the mountain road to Paradise. It is an allegory of repentance, and fellowship amid repentance, which is what Dante said the Christian life on this earth should be.
That’s how I feel about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion. She has her own internal obstacles to the total conversion that is theosis; indeed, though the saints are close, none of us in this life achieve full theosis. When I heard her in London, and read her testimony in Unherd, I felt not like marking down a theology undergraduate paper with a red pen, but like rushing in with my prayers to help a broken angel learn to fly. She is imperfectly Christian today; she may be more perfectly Christian tomorrow. And so, by God’s grace, will you and I.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and one of my Christian heroes, once said that the best arguments for the faith are not the propositions and syllogisms, but rather the Church’s art and the Church’s saints. His point was that people need to experience embodiments of holiness before they can admit doctrinal and propositional truths to their consideration. Seeing a beautiful cathedral, hearing a Bach mass, or being in the presence of someone like St. Teresa of Calcutta, a living vessel of divine love—these things prepare one’s mind for formal conversion by harrowing the hardness of our hearts to make it ready to receive seeds of truth.
This, I think, is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali sees in the institutions and practices of the West. The fire of the faith upon which we built a civilization has grown dim in our hearts, but to one like her, who ran to be with us out of the darkness of Islamic fundamentalism, even our embers shine like lighthouses. Hirsi Ali, the renegade Muslim, now knows that atheism did not build the West, and make it, despite all its flaws, the best place for human habitation. Maybe she is a geopolitical version of teenage me in the Chartres cathedral, gazing around with awe and gratitude, and surprised by the desire to know the God who inspired anonymous men to build such a temple to His glory.
Whatever the truth, Hirsi Ali reads the signs of the times more clearly than many of us who have been practicing the Christian faith for longer. While many of us try hard to avoid drawing the obvious conclusions from the sight of tens of thousands of Muslims in Western capitals calling for the murder of Jews, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is neither deceived nor silent. Would that we could say the same about our own Christian leaders, ordained and otherwise.
It could be that Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn’t the only one in need of deeper conversion in this dire hour. Her example challenges me, a frequent critic of the decadent wasteland of the post-Christian West, to find a more realistic patriotism, to somehow shore these embers, these shards of light, against our ruins.
