Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently announced that she has converted to Christianity. Her announcement created a significant amount of discussion on the Internet and social media, with criticism from both the left and the right.
If you’re not familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969. At the age of five, Ali underwent female genital mutilation (FGM). At age 23, she sought and received political asylum in the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage. In her early 30s she renounced Islam, identified as an atheist and became involved in Dutch politics.
She was friends with Theo van Gogh (a great-grand-nephew of Vincent van Gogh), with whom she collaborated on a film critical of Islam, called “Submission.” He was murdered in November 2004 by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist who objected to the film’s message. The murderer stuck a note to van Gogh’s chest with a small knife, in which he threatened the life of Hirsi Ali.
With that threat and an ongoing controversy over how she had obtained her Dutch citizenship, she emigrated to the United States in 2006 and became a citizen in 2013. Due to her outspoken atheism and denunciation of all religion, she was widely considered one of the five leading “New Atheists,” who included Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.
With that as background, Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity elicited reactions from both atheists and evangelicals. But it’s not just her “conversion” that stirred the emotions; it was how she described her choice of Christianity that caused the greatest debate over what her conversion meant.
After reviewing the indoctrination she experienced growing up under the Muslim Brotherhood—a relentless and uncompromising education that allowed no dissent—she goes on to describe how she came to leave Islam and embrace atheism.
You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”
As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun.
The reference to Bertrand Russell is a lecture that he had given in 1927 entitled “Why I am Not a Christian” which she read in 2002. She then turns to why she left atheism and embraced Christianity.
So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?
Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.
She recognizes that Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization and that without it, we find ourselves in an increasingly chaotic, violent and illogical world that isn’t sustainable.
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.
[…]
And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.
Her decision turns out to be socio-political in nature—we have to embrace “the Judeo-Christian tradition” in order to fend off the global threats we face. That seems to be a Christ-less conversion which, if scripture is to be believed, is no conversion at all.
But wait! There’s hope.
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?
In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.
As I read her testimony, it seems to be a mostly pragmatic adoption of an organizing philosophy that has succeeded better than any other in human history. But … she also has found a lack of personal meaning in her life to be “unendurable.”
So while she never mentions Jesus, salvation or the cross, it does look as though she has placed herself in close proximity to the Truth. She writes, “I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday.” My prayer for her is that she comes to a personal relationship with God through Christ as she attends services each week.
I encourage you to read the whole thing.