Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali became a Christian | Carl R. Trueman

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim and now atheist, recently said she converted to Christianity. This is a cause for great rejoicing.

It’s also a fascinating sign of the times. Her published account of why she is a Christian is somewhat strange, given that it only mentions Jesus once. It is not reasonable, however, to expect a new convert to offer a detailed account of the hypostatic union in the early days of the faith. This is why churches catechize disciples: conversion does not involve an infusion of complete doctrinal knowledge. And whatever the shortcomings of her statement, the authenticity of her profession rests with the pastor of the congregation of the Church of Christ to which she is attached.

Here’s what makes her public testimony a sign of the times: She says she converted in part because she understood that a truly humanist culture—and by that I mean a culture that treats human beings as people and not as things – must be based on some conception of the sacred order as set out in Christianity, with its claim that all are created in the image of God. “Western civilization is threatened by three different but related forces,” she writes. These are the resurgence of authoritarianism in China and Russia, global Islamism, and the “viral spread of woke ideology.” She states that she became a Christian in part because she recognized that “we cannot fight these formidable forces” with modern secular tools; Rather, we can only defeat these enemies if we are united by a “desire to preserve the heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” with its “ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, liberty, and dignity.” .

Recent years have seen a number of unexpected voices harshly attack the mores of our time, particularly in the area of ​​sexual ethics and its close relative, the ethics of embodiment. Mary Harrington wrote against the dehumanizing tendencies that lurk just beneath the surface of a society that views transgender and transhumanism as legitimate. Louise Perry pointed out that, despite its own propaganda, the sexual revolution is very bad news for women and children. Conservative Christians have obviously been making these kinds of comments for years. But because Harrington and Perry are feminists and wear no obvious religious commitments on their sleeves, their voices are louder and more culturally offensive. As far as society is concerned, they should know more than the ignorant simpletons of the religious world.

And now we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She, too, is concerned about how the West is dismantling its traditional cultural norms and what it intends to replace them with. Others have already said similar things. Philip Rieff and Sir Roger Scruton come to mind. But the impression they both leave is that, yes, they think God is a really good idea for anchoring a civilized culture, but they’re not entirely sure he exists. What Ali has done is take the obvious – and even necessary – next step: she sees the need for a holy order and is not afraid to say it. It will be interesting to see whether those who have so astutely analyzed the deadly diseases currently afflicting the West will follow suit.

Yet there is a challenge for Christianity here: the eternal problem of the link between the transcendent and the immanent, too often resolved in the history of the Church by instrumentalizing the Gospel in the service of social activism. This has always been the vulnerability of liberal Protestantism, with its traditional support for the dominant moral consensus. Whether beating the drum of anticommunism in the 1950s or waving the rainbow flag from church steeples in the 2020s, liberal Protestants are not so much offering a prophetic critique of power secular than a religious language for its expression. Today’s progressivism, bent on upending all stable categories, is a much more complicated creature to express through Christian language – which means that much more of the traditional language must be abandoned. Man and woman. God as Father. Jesus as a male. All of these principles posed little or no threat to anticommunism, but they impinged on modern identity politics. And they all speak of the absence of any sense of the transcendent, or even of any sense of the sacred, in liberal forms of Christianity.

Liberal Protestantism, however, is dying, with the major denominations fracturing and disintegrating at a rapid pace. And today we must also ensure that the truth of the Gospel is not exploited in the service of a different cultural campaign – even, for example, of a cause as worthy as opposing the warriors left-wing cultural groups who seek to overturn everything, from parenthood. to women’s rights. The most striking omission in Ali’s testimony is the only thing necessary to prevent this: a sense of the transcendent. God does not exist because he is useful in fighting woke or any other threat to Western civilization. It is useful because it exists, in holiness and transcendence.

This is not at all intended to cast doubt on Ali’s testimony. Indeed, his words are a cause for celebration and not for cynical criticism. Hopefully they also set a courageous example that others who see the problems in Western culture as clearly as they do might follow. I write this simply to echo the emphases of the Apostle Paul, whose understanding of this world was rooted in his understanding and concern for the glories of the other. Even the collapse of Western civilization would be only a mild and momentary affliction in light of the weight of the eternal glory to come.

Carl Trueman is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a member of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Image of Gage Skidmore licensed via Creative Commons. Cropped image.