On November 11th of last year, the pundit Ayaan Hirsi Ali released an essay on the media platform UnHerd titled “Why I am now a Christian.” In the essay, Hirsi Ali—formerly a prominent ex-Muslim atheist—announces her conversion to Christianity and explicates the reasons for her change of faith. I don’t find her reasons to be good ones. Good opportunity for us to take stock and do some comparative analysis of where my own religiosity stands at present, and to follow a recurring thread in evangelical discourse: the identification of Western civilization with the Judeo-Christian religious lineage.
Let’s start with some background on Hirsi Ali. Unfortunately, certainty on the details of her early life is not to be had. The biographical details she herself has offered have been heavily disputed and her Wikipedia page has clearly seen some biased edits by those favorable to her interests. What I’m certain of is that she is Somali-born and that in 1992 she claimed asylum in the Netherlands. She has said that she sought asylum to escape a forced marriage but this is one of the facts under dispute. She studied at the University of Leiden and earned a Masters’ in Political Science, and from 2003 to 2006 served as an elected member of the Dutch parliament. She began during this period to speak polemically against Islam, arousing controversy.
In 2004, Hirsi Ali wrote a script for a film, Submission, directed by Theo van Gogh, critical of the Islamic treatment of women. The film’s release was met with the outrage of the Dutch Muslim community and Hirsi Ali faced threats against her life. In November of 2004, Theo van Gogh was murdered and Hirsi Ali went into hiding, though she continued to serve in parliament.
In 2006, after an exposé by the Dutch television program Zembla, questions about her story and disputes over the facts she offered during the naturalization process nearly caused the Dutch government to revoke her citizenship. She began working in the United States and in 2007 received her green card, and then full citizenship in 2013. She has since then spoken often and polemically against Islam. This has put her in something of a “strange bedfellows” situation: she was, throughout this period, an atheist, but at the same time offered viewpoints on Islam favored by American conservatives, who famously lean in the direction of fundamentalist Christianity. In 2016 she did a spot for the conservative propaganda mill PragerU and in 2020 she compared “wokeism” and the Black Lives Matter movement to the militant Islamic terrorist group ISIS. She has since been grouped with both New Atheism and the so-called intellectual dark web of pseudo-intellectuals like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro.
It’s hard to fault someone who grew up in Somalia for strong feelings concerning Islam, but one cannot accept her arguments on that account alone. There are certainly many valid grounds for criticism of Islamic religion and politics, but I think Hirsi Ali is simultaneously aiming her criticisms too broadly and too narrowly. Too broadly in that they take aim at the whole of a complex and multifaceted religion that is not limited to what she saw growing up in Africa, and too narrowly in that she fails to see how the problems of Islam are instantiations of the broader problems of ideology, problems she has not necessarily escaped through her conversion to Christianity.
Hirsi Ali endorses Western neoliberal ideology in opposition to Islamist ideology, but fails to see the functional role that fundamentalist Islam plays within the Western neoliberal order. This is something that came up in my recent episodes on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war: conflict is good for business, and Hamas serves Western business interests by producing valuable media images and motivating defense spending. Recall as well that the United States armed and trained Islamic militants in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden, in a proxy war with the Soviet Union fought over global economic control. That’s not what this episode is about, but we’ll see when we get into the content of Hirsi Ali’s essay that she’s very consistent in her presenting the problems of Islamic civilization as though such problems are absent from the West or occur without the involvement and even to a degree the consent of Western states.
As for me, for those new to this show or who haven’t been following the progression of my religion since the early blog days, I’m a diabolical Abrahamic heretic and theistic Satanist. I endorse a heretical interpretation of Abrahamic religion and venerate Satan as a real being. To be clear, though, my specific beliefs actually don’t land all that far from atheism. I’ve had conversations with atheists in which I’ve been accused of an abuse of language: “The word God,” they say, “refers to the personal deity of the Abrahamic religions; if you don’t believe such an entity exists, then you’re an atheist.” And in point of fact I don’t believe in any such personal deities but I’m not going to split hairs over the labels. Call me what you like; it doesn’t change anything.
So I’m religious but highly sympathetic to the modern atheist position that sees the claims made by modern religion in general to be poorly grounded and the ethics of the religious hypocritical. I’m less sympathetic to the New Atheist movement, which I find unnecessarily polemical and insufficiently studious of the subject matter of its attacks, but regardless, I’m broadly aligned with atheists in the political sense of being opposed to the specific religious hegemonies of the contemporary world: the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the evangelical organizations that have infiltrated the public sphere in the West, Salafist political organizations in the Middle East, the Ma Ha Na committee overseeing Buddhist religious affairs in Myanmar where a Muslim genocide is taking place, and so forth. I am not opposed to religion in general or to Islam, Christianity, or any other religion in particular. I’m opposed to ignorance and hypocrisy and to organizations which promote and enforce such thinking on religious grounds.
Let’s get into Hirsi Ali’s content.
She opens with a question: is it possible for Muslims to distance themselves from the September 11th attacks on the United States? This isn’t an especially difficult question; I don’t think anyone could reasonably assert that all Muslims share moral blame for those attacks. The thing is, though, it’s not a question she actually bothers to answer. She asks the question and then just moves on. Given the subject matter of the essay, it’s implied that her answer is no, that she and all Muslims were morally culpable for the attacks. That would be a very difficult position to defend; it’s quite bigoted and absurd on its face. By blowing past it, she implies that the answer is self-evident and avoids setting herself up for slam-dunk takedowns, like pointing out that consistency would require that she also blame all Americans for the baseless invasion and destabilization of Iraq.
She continues:
At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.
Sam Harris made this exact point in an essay from November responding to the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel; I responded in my essay “Reflections on the Eve of Insanity.” My rejoinder applies here as well: Hirsi Ali is not articulating a specific connection between Islam and the violence of the September 11th attacks, only insinuating that such a connection exists. Obviously Islam is involved and there are aspects of that involvement worthy of criticism, but she doesn’t make that case or any case at all. Once again Hirsi Ali has precluded even the possibility of a counterargument because she’s not actually saying anything in the first place, only making vague insinuations.
In point of fact, it’s not as though Osama bin Laden ever said anything along the lines of “I attacked the West because of Islam.” The reasons he articulated included American support for Israel, American military presence in the Holy Land, American sanctions against Iraq, and American support for authoritarian dictators in the Middle East. There’s a whole Wikipedia page called “Motivations for the September 11th attacks” that goes into extensive and well-supported detail. It’s complex and there are disputes, but it’s clear that the reasons bin Laden gave are not the ones that Hirsi Ali is attributing to him. They’re not issues that can be detached from bin Laden’s religion, but neither can they be reduced to it.
Hirsi Ali continues:
This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war.
Yeah, but is it though? To blame “the errors of US foreign policy,” we’d have to, at the minimum, face the possibility that the United States has made some errors in its foreign policy in the Middle East. We might even end up having to implicate ourselves and figure out different strategies for the future. We’d have to delve into a complex web of causes and effects and might even discover along the way that Islamic terrorism is not the inevitable consequence of religious difference but rather something that the West had a hand in constructing. Isn’t it in fact far easier to just call it a religious war? That’s a cause that’s simple, easy to understand, and lays the blame as far as possible from our own feet.
From there she transitions into discussing some of the aspects of her upbringing in Kenya under the Muslim Brotherhood. She admired their moral clarity but was understandably less enthusiastic about their hard-line policies on music and books. She continues on that point:
The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. As girls we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and make-up. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white dress-like tawb worn in Arab countries or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.
Putting aside the fact that “saying things” and “praying for things” are examples of “doing things,” she seems to be saying, “It’s bad for religion to cause people to do things rather than just believe them.” Does she hold her new religion to that same standard? Because it was not at all difficult for me to find reports of pastors advocating for Christian terrorism; I even found one who explicitly stated that Christians should imitate Islam in committing acts of religious terrorism and dying for their faith (Skinner, 2023). And this isn’t just rhetoric: many recent mass shooters have been motivated by Christian nationalism. There’s a theme for Hirsi Ali here: describing Islamic culture in a way that implies, but doesn’t state outright, that similar things don’t occur under Christianity in the West. Clearly she’s building a case here: “First they say you can’t listen to music, then they tell you what you can wear, and then they tell you to go hijack a plane.” I’m not taking the side of the Muslim Brotherhood here and yes, I think that there’s a process of grooming young Muslim men to commit acts of terrorism. But let’s see how this holds up with the rest of her argument. Take a look at the following paragraph, where she relates some of the indoctrination of her Islamic study sessions:
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 offenses 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.
That’s obviously terrible, but is it really any different from what Hirsi Ali is presenting herself in this essay? As an experiment, I took that paragraph and swapped out some of the terms to reflect Hirsi Ali’s own arguments, keeping the form and structure the same:
Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of believer: the Muslim. We cursed the Muslims multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offenses they had allegedly committed. The Muslims had betrayed Western liberal values. They had occupied the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.
The content differs, but the form and thus the substance and validity of the argument is exactly the same. If what she learned about the Jews in her Islamic study sessions was bigoted and hateful—and that’s obviously the case—then, necessarily, so is what she’s presenting here.
From here, Hirsi Ali gets into the reasons for her recent conversion.
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.
Where even to start? I could probably write an entire essay just focusing on the problems with this one sentence. Why, for example, is Russian expansionism and authoritarianism being described as a “resurgence” when there’s been a continuous and well-documented pattern of expansionism over the entire history of the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union? We’ve also got the “wokeness” bogeyman that the Right drags out at every opportunity. But the one that really gets me is Islamism—fundamentalist Islam—threatening to “mobilise a vast population against the West.” What is she even talking about? What “vast population”? If she’s suggesting—and I think she is—that the West is under threat from a military mobilization of the entire Muslim population of the world, that a full quarter of the world’s population is a cohesive, monolithic threat, then she’s reached a truly remarkable level of bigotry and ignorance.
This is an opportune moment to point out what’s absent from Hirsi Ali’s essay. This is an essay written by one of the most prominent atheists in the media. She has written and spoken extensively about her reasons for not believing that God exists. Christianity is unique among religions with regards to the role of belief: all religions entail belief, but in Christianity alone, belief itself is salvific. Yet Hirsi Ali offers no reasons for her beliefs having changed and in fact does not even indicate that her beliefs about God have changed in any way. She only mentions God in reference to her past Islamic and atheist beliefs, and Jesus is only mentioned once, and that in passing reference to his teachings and not in any way to his supposed divinity or role as savior. In this essay about Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity, Christianity itself is a glaring absence.
Hirsi Ali is in fact explicit that the core reason for her “conversion” has nothing to do with Christianity itself and only with upholding the “legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition” against the aforementioned external threats. She mentions that atheism lacks structures to give life meaning (and I dispute that but will not do so here), but she gives no reason as to why adopting the Christian religion in particular is necessary to answer questions of meaning or to uphold the legacy of Judeo-Christianity. If I were to acknowledge that the somewhat artificial construct of “Judeo-Christianity” has indeed made positive contributions to the world (and I would do so only with some hefty caveats), that wouldn’t require me to adopt either religion. I’ve said many times before that I find the Bible a valuable and interesting book, but I don’t and am not required to take it as Jews and Christians do in order to make that claim.
What’s more, Hirsi Ali has an enitrely fantastical conception of what the “Judeo-Christian legacy” actually entails.
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 marvelous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.
There’s no entry for “market” in Dominion’s index—when the word appears in the text it is either in reference to slave-markets or metaphorical “marketplaces of ideas”—and when Holland talks about capitalism it’s only in reference to Marxism, which he criticizes only in terms of its failing to fully acknowledge its being derived from Christian values. Holland sees communism as having been derived from Christian principles, and its ultimate failure, in his mind, was due only to its having unmoored itself from its Christian foundations. And that’s complete nonsense—it’s a pretty garbage book all around—but the point is that Hirsi Ali is blatantly misrepresenting her sources.
Here’s more from Hirsi Ali on the same topic:
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.
First of all, “diminished cruelty” is a remarkable claim, and guarantees are free. Nothing would prevent me from guaranteeing that you, the person listening to this podcast right now, will come into the possession of five million dollars tomorrow afternoon. Nothing whatsoever prevents me from making that completely baseless guarantee. Similarly baseless are guarantees of freedom offered by genocidal patriarch slavers to all citizens when in practice said guarantee was only extended to the white male aristocracy.
Notably absent from Hirsi Ali’s discussion here is the role of the Abbasid Caliphate in maintaining and advancing scientific and philosophical discourse during the Middle Ages. The 11th century text al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb, “The Canon of Medicine,” by Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), was a key medical textbook in Europe from its translation into Latin in the 12th century all the way up to the 18th century. The works of Aristotle, which became the keystone of European thought for most of the 2nd millennium, were translated, preserved, and expanded upon with valuable commentary, by Muslims. After the Spanish city of Toledo was reconquered by Christians in 1085, it became the center of a remarkable collaboration between Jews, Christians, and Muslims to translate Greek and Arabic works into Latin. The resulting reintroduction of lost knowledge to the West was a major influence on the European Renaissance. The works of Aristotle in particular, along with their Arabic commentaries, were the key influence on Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential figures in Western Christianity over the entire history of the religion.
There is in fact no basis for separating the Islamic world from the supposed Judeo-Christian legacy which does not derive from the modern geopolitical status of the religions and cultures in question. Western civilization is not a monolithic thread that extends from Judaism through Christianity to modern Europe, America, and Australia; it is essentially and inextricably Mediterranean, the product of the unique geopolitical environment created by the Mediterranean Sea, which simultaneously separates and connects three continents. The ancient Mesopotamians, ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Berbers, Turks, and Arabs both before and after the rise of Islam, as well as many other peoples, have had a hand in its creation and growth.
The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.
It’s really quite bizarre that, at the end of a polemical essay condeming Islamic ideology and indoctrination, Hirsi Ali praises precisely those things.
I’m actually sypathetic to the political constitution of Hirsi Ali’s new found religion. Religion is unavoidably political and I think Hirsi Ali is correct to reconcile herself to the political status of both her birth religion of Islam and that of her adopted religion of Christianity. I do the same; in fact, I would go so far as to say that my religion is constituted by the total configuration of global Abrahamic religion. I am a Satanist in virtue of the fact that the John Jay report uncovered 4,392 clergy in the Catholic Church who have been accused of child sexual abuse. I am a Satanist in virtue of the fact that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who voted in favor of the Dobbs decision which rolled back American reproductive rights, has been taking bribes from billionaires with conservative religious interests.
The difference between Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s religion and my own is that mine is not a matter of political convenience. It is not convenient for me to be a Satanist. I am identified as a Satanist, accused as a Satanist, by the symbolic order. I am what I am, made a Satanist by Abrahamic religion as it exists in the contemporary world. I’ve really had no say at all in the matter; for me it’s just a recognition of what is. Hirsi Ali sees religion as a means to accomplish a political end; my religion is an end unto itself.
One last thing I want to look at before concluding is another essay responding to Hirsi Ali’s, entitled “Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali Became a Christian.” The essay, also published in November, was written by Carl Trueman, an English theologian. I first encountered Trueman when I heard him in an interview on a Christian radio station; he was promoting a recent book, Strange New World, which summarizes his prior book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, a philosophical attack on what conservatives often derisively refer to as “identity politics.” I’ve been wanting to take on Trueman’s work for some time; I’ve read a bit, and unlike most Christian culture writers I encounter, Trueman is a rhetorical force to contend with. I don’t expect to find myself agreeing with his conclusions but he’s clearly done some serious thinking in developing his arguments. But there’s another matter I’d like to address here.
Trueman’s essay is quite disingenuous. He points out, much as I did, how odd it is that an essay about a conversion to Christianity has so little to do with Christianity, but claims to give her the benefit of the doubt, saying, “It is… unreasonable to expect a new convert to offer an elaborate account of the hypostatic union in the first days of faith.” It’s clear from the rest of his essay, though, that he’s quite dubious of Hirsi Ali’s conversion and the motives thereof. On that account I have to give him credit for holding to his principles, because he agrees with Hirsi Ali’s politics, but is regardless uncomfortable about what he calls the instrumentalization of the gospel in the service of social activism, stating, “God does not exist because he is useful for combatting wokeness or any other threat to Western civilization. He is useful because he exists, in holiness and transcendence.”
It’s commendable for Trueman—whose politics I find repugnant—to take a stand for the true meaning of the Sacred against its political instrumentalization when such instrumentalization agrees with his own politics. But let’s take a look at how he concludes his essay:
I write this merely to echo the emphases of the Apostle Paul, whose understanding of this world was rooted in his understanding of, and preoccupation with, the glories of the next. Even the collapse of Western civilization would be a light, momentary affliction in light of the weight of eternal glory that is to come. (emphasis mine)
In this, Trueman, penning an essay which is critical but nevertheless supportive of Hirsi Ali and her conversion, comes to sound very much like the Islamists for whom she converted, ready to destroy themselves and the world for the greater glory of God. What’s more, what Trueman is saying here is an entirely biblical and orthodox interpretation of Christianity, very much in keeping with contemporary Christian eschatology. The God whose religion Hirsi Ali converted to has never expressed the least concern for the reasons for which she converted and does not value Western civilization or any civilization. Hirsi Ali’s god is not the transcendent God of Christianity but rather a lesser god, a national god: Yahweh—not the God whose name is signified by the Tetragrammaton yod-heh-vav-heh but the national god of the ancient Israelites. That god was subsumed into monotheism only after the destruction of the Israelite civilization in the 6th century BCE; national gods tend to disappear or assimilate when their nations fall, and so too in time will fall the god of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Works Cited or Referenced
- Harris, S. (7 November 2023). The bright line between good and evil. https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-bright-line-between-good-and-evil
- Hirsi Ali, A (12 September 2020). Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ have much in common. The Australian.
- Hirsi Ali, A. (11 November 2023). Why I am now a Christian. In UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
- Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: The making of the Western mind. Little, Brown.
- Skinner, A. (15 June 2023). Pro-Trump pastor suggests Christians should be suicide bombers. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/pro-trump-pastor-suggests-christians-should-suicide-bombers-1807061
- Trueman, C.R. (30 November 2023). Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali Became a Christian. In First Things. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/11/why-ayaan-hirsi-ali-became-a-christian