It is with strong – undiminished – respect that I now feel compelled to argue with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

She is brilliant, courageous, principled. But she has turned from rationality and atheism, where she found intellectual asylum from the cruel and preposterous religion of Islam, back to superstition in the form of the no-longer-cruel but still preposterous religion of Christianity.

She writes (in part – please read it all) under the title Why I Am Now a Christian:

During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

 …

 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. 

 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.

 …

So far, good. No argument. 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.

Leaving aside the question of whether there is something that can be justifiably labeled “the Judeo-Christian tradition” (I do not think there is – for my reasons see here), let’s consider the point she is making.

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. 

I have not read that work by Tom Holland and I am not now arguing with him.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes he is right that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms” – she notes in particular “of the market, of conscience and of the press” — “find their roots in Christianity”. It is with her I am arguing, and reasons to reject that claim leap to my mind. Freedom of the market? Doesn’t Christianity deny that rich men can “enter heaven”? Of conscience? Who can count the number of “heretics” put to death in war, on the rack, at the stake for holding opinions that Christians in power objected to? How many who put those opinions in writing before and after there came to be such a thing as “the press”? Christian persecution of its critics came to an end only with the Enlightenment, the European movement that broke the power of the churches and raised reason over irrational faith.

She writes:

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.

No, no, no, no, and no. Freedom of conscience and speech came after centuries of no debate with Jewish and Christian “communities”. It came from thinkers of the Age of Reason. Many of whom were atheists, and all of whom were skeptics. “Free thinkers”. The idea that such freedoms ought to be allowed is the product of rational thinking.  The Age of Science was born then. Not when Galileo or Giordano Bruno lived and experienced what the Catholic Church deemed to be a Christian correction – threatened torture and forced confinement for the one, the stake for the other. The Churches’ cruelty diminished because reason and freedom became the mood of a certain time. Superstition was hushed – never suppressed, unfortunately – by reasoned argument, critical examination. Institutions were built to protect freedom despite the dogmatism of the Christian churches – all of them, Catholic and Protestant. Christianity has not “outgrown”, will never “outgrow”, its “dogmatic stage”. “Christ’s teaching” can only be guessed at, and none of the known guesses suggest that it “implied …  a circumscribed role for religion”. Religion was most decidedly not “separate from politics” in the Judea of the first Caesars. As for compassion and humility, Christian sages from St. Paul onward have preached one or both – St. Paul stressed humility – but the history of the religion does not demonstrate the habitual observance of either to any convincing degree.

[A]theism 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. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Atheism does not ask that question. It is not a reasonable question. What could the meaning of life, of existence, possibly be? Why does it need meaning? Whose purpose? If no one made the universe and life there can be no purpose in their existence. Human beings make their own purposes. Only if you already believe in a supernatural Creator can you seek an elusive purpose or meaning in all “creation”.

The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

I would say, if you can believe in a god, you can believe in anything. The god hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny.

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.

A nihilistic vacuum? Freedom, reason, science, technology, material abundance, rule of law nihilistic? Free societies, Western civilization a vacuum? Contains no riches, just videos on TikTok? No, its enemies are the vacuum-makers. Sure, abundance will include silly things; freedom is messy, but you have choice. It is true that a great many people only discover how good their Western way of life was when they  have lost it. Nice that their ignorance gets cured, sad that their loss may be irrecoverable.

Woo Muslims away from their superstition by offering them another superstition named Christianity? Convert all the world to Christianity, which “has it all”, and the world will be again as Europe was between the fall of Rome and the rise of Reason? As good? Rather, as dark. As cruel. An erosion of our civilization more certain, more absolute, arguably even more tragic than the horrors she names  that threaten us now: “… 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.”

Her diagnosis of what ails our civilization is right enough. Her prescription for curing it is a mistake. Christianity has not been a force for good in history. And what is Christian belief? That a Jewish man who lived in a province of the Roman empire during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius was the Creator of the universe! (John 1:9,10. That [Jesus] was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.) How can that be easy, how can it be possible, for an intelligent thinker of our enlightened age to accept? Or the rest of the tale: that he was born of a virgin, performed miracles, came alive again three days after he’d died, and ascended bodily to a material heaven?

And what of Christianity’s moral message? “Resist  not evil” is not helpful advice for us in our present predicament. What of the reason ascribed to his sojourn on earth as a man – to suffer and die for the salvation of mankind? How he came to die an agonizing death by crucifixion – the Roman method of legal execution for crazy daredevils convicted of organizing or attempting insurgency – has a muddled background story and incompatible Christian  explanations. According to the believers, the Jews found him guilty of breaking some suddenly found and quickly forgotten law of their religion and insisted that the Romans execute him. The obliging Romans reluctantly acceded to their demand, so it is the Jews who are cursed forever as deicides. But also that he was born in order to be tortured to death, that it was his mission to sacrifice himself as the means to lift from humankind the original sin of Edenic disobedience (to himself);  so he was inevitably doomed to that extremely painful and prolonged form of  suffering – and a death that was not actually death – by his own decree.

O Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if you can believe all that, you have abandoned not only reason but common sense!

There is no formula for “saving”, let alone transfiguring, the human race. Not a proletarian revolution. Not a global coming to Jesus. It is not faith, not divinity,  but doubt – the instrument of vigorous intellectual humility – that promotes and protects tolerance and prosperity; that sustains “human life, freedom and dignity”.

Jillian Becker   November 12, 2023