Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Voltaire once said that if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him. I agree with the words of that statement, but perhaps not with the spirit in which Voltaire uttered it. I suspect Voltaire’s meaning was the cynical observation that people often invoke the Deity to exert control over people. Appealing to God has been a means to justify the rule of autocrats from the Pharaohs and Caesars demanding worship to the divine right of kings proclaimed by Louis XIV and his kind.

It would be necessary to invent God for almost the opposite reason. It would be necessary to invent God because God is necessary for the human soul for the same reason oxygen is essential for the human body. If oxygen did not exist, we would have to invent it. But oxygen does exist. We know that oxygen exists because we would not live without oxygen. Oxygen fulfills a need in our bodies. We know that God exists because we would not exist without God. God satisfies a need in our souls. For this reason, atheism as a philosophy cannot endure. Atheism cannot endure because it ignores a fundamental need of the human soul. The atheist is like a child who insists on holding his breath and denying himself oxygen.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave and intelligent woman. She is intelligent enough to understand that, in the end, atheism fails to satisfy a basic human need. She is brave enough to admit when she has changed her mind.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells of her spiritual journey from Islam to atheism and finally to Christianity in an article she wrote for Unherd.

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

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?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali did not convert to Christianity solely to satisfy her spiritual needs. She is also concerned about the future of Western civilization and particularly the freedom that only Western civilization brings to the world.
I have often thought of the so-called New Atheists, the Hitchenses, the Dawkinses, and others as being a little like a man who is walking around in a beautiful cathedral. He sees before him a pillar that is in his way. Perhaps he does not like the shape or the color of the pillar. He decides the cathedral would be better without the pillar blocking people’s way, so he pulls it down. The man does not see that the pillar he dislikes is holding up the ceiling, and if he succeeds in pulling it down, the whole edifice will come crashing down on top of him. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it:

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.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

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 legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

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.

For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of (former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian country. Think about how unique that was nearly a century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

The New Atheists have made a career of debunking and discrediting Christianity. They have sought to debunk and discredit Christianity in the defense of Western Enlightenment values such as freedom of speech and thought. The problem is that by debunking and discrediting Christianity, they are debunking and discrediting Western Civilization. They are debunking and discrediting the ideals they hope to defend. The result of their efforts will not be the free and rational world they expect. The skeptics who attempted to debunk Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not create a free, rational world. They have created a world in which people searched for new faiths in the form of Fascism and Communism. The skeptics who are debunking Christianity today may well form a world in which people search for faith in the form of neo-fascism, Islam, and nihilism.

If I may be permitted the presumption of criticizing a woman my superior in courage and intelligence I notice that Ayaan Hirsi Ali omits the most important reason for becoming a Christian. The reasons she cites for converting to Christianity are practical. However, the only real reason to become a Christian is because Christianity is true. One becomes a Christian because the central belief of Christianity, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins and that he was resurrected, defeating sin and death for all time, is a true belief.

It is this belief that separates Christianity from every other religion. In Islam, Allah demands that we die for Him. In Christianity, YHWH gives His only son to die for us. In Hinduism, gods like Vishnu assume human form to smite their enemies. In Christianity, God becomes human to be smitten. Socrates, the Buddha, and Confucius taught the truth. Jesus asserts He is the truth.

The Christian belief that each human being is worth dying for leads to the liberal Enlightenment ideal of liberty. The Christian belief leads directly to the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.” In Islam, we are all slaves of God. In Christianity, God makes us His sons. Slaves have no rights. Sons inherit the Kingdom.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is humble enough to admit that she is only a beginning Christian. Let us all pray that she grows in her new faith and continues to be a powerful warrior on the side of Western civilization.