Muslim -> Atheist -> Christian
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Richard Dawkins would like a word.
This argument of his, that smart people can't possibly believe in Christianity, seems quaint at best to me these days. I probably would have agreed 20 years ago.
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There’s no indication Ali ‘believes in Christianity’. Rather it seems she believes it to be useful.
Andrew Sullivan’s take:
When I first heard about and read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essay on converting to Christianity, I have to admit I bristled a bit. It read, at first blush, like a political conversion rather than a spiritual one, the kind of argument a neoconservative might make. “False but convenient” is the Straussian take on Christianity, and it strongly suggests that faith is simply an organizing tool for society. It keeps the masses in line, tamps down their earthly expectations, and inculcates socially useful virtues. “Atheists for Christianity” is, in fact, a pretty good synopsis of neoconservatism. And Ayaan has, after all, long been a neoconservative.
Her defense of the Christian faith therefore makes almost no mention of Jesus of Nazareth, nor of the Creed — the core of Christian belief. There are no saints or pilgrims or miracles in her account. We don’t know which denomination Ayaan has joined. We have no discussion of the Incarnation, or the Resurrection, let alone the Trinity. We don’t even have a first-person testimony of the process of conversion, how it happened, and when. There is not a trace of the supernatural or the eternal. We do not know the key religious texts that moved her; or the prayers that might sustain her; or about the voice she may or may not have heard.
More at Substack, but I think paywalled.
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Sullivan is right. Her article doesn't really sound like somebody who's found Jesus. It sounds like somebody who's worried about the way things are going and she think there's probably kind sorta a God, so she's picked the traditional Western religion to believe in.
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So, God works in mysterious ways. Voila, all the objections are destroyed. It's not a compelling way to establish a lack of true belief. In fact if Jesus were real and his teachings divine, one would expect the proof to be in the pudding, and Ali appears to love the pudding. As far as whether she'd be skeptical of what she'd see if she got into a time machine and watched whether Jesus rose from the dead, I think she joins the majority of other Christians by being happy the truth claims are not subject to scientific verification.
Litigating true belief is silly when discussing humans and their deeply flawed psyches anyway. How many millions of people believe that Republicans represent a meaningful threat to American democracy? Probably a true belief, as true as any other human belief. Why do they believe it? Because of plausible paths Republicans could take to commandeer America via paperwork? Or do they believe it because they hate Republican politics, want Democrat politics, and therefore as normal humans will do, their minds retreat into faith-based truth claims that make their decision as simple and virtuous as possible?
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Don't sneer at Democrats, Horace. It's not their fault. They were probably born into Democrat households. Not everybody can be a free thinker like me.
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I read her letter. I suspect that through her Muslim upbringing belief in a supreme being is instilled deep in her mind. That she now professes to be (once again) attracted to a concept of God should therefore come as no revelation. At the same though I doubt that she has embraced any Church or ecclesial community of the Christian faith that could be regarded as Chalcedon compliant or that she professes the Nicene Creed. Both of which are pretty much de rigueur for people of the Christian faith.
Still, she is characterising herself to adhere to what she understands as a Christian faith. Adherents to Mormonism, readers of Christian Science and even some who identify with Unitarianism do as well. I am quite sure she is embracing Christianity for its moral teachings similar to people such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Adams and others of the late 18 and early 19th century.
So is she a Christian? Doesn’t matter. In fact, it is irrelevant whether she is or is not. She is still married to the historian, Niall Ferguson, a professed atheist and close friend of Richard Dawkins and the late, Christopher Hitchens.
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I think she is more describing how she views her world and how a religious faith reflects that more than any deep expression of said faith.
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I think she is more describing how she views her world and how a religious faith reflects that more than any deep expression of said faith.
