Ayaan Hirsi Ali very recently announced that she now identifies as a Christian. She followed up the announcement with an essay in UnHerd explaining somewhat more fully.
I noted the UnHerd essay, and noted its arguable inadequacy, but held counsel, commenting only guardedly in my personal journal. Now two others,* Rod Dreher and Mark Tooley, have published comments, and they’re on roughly the same wavelength with me.
Both note the arguable inadequacies of her UnHerd essay, but both graciously defend her.
Tooley:
It sounds like she is church going but not does not describe herself as a confessional Christian. Maybe she is where the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was after his conversion from atheism (also like Ali disdaining British atheist Bertrand Russell), at which point he affirmed the idea but not the specific historicity of Christianity.
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There are of course many, many people who convert to Christianity not because of an intense personal spiritual crisis resulting in a cathartic acceptance of Jesus Christ but because of revulsion against the world’s distortions. For such converts, Christianity is at first an intellectual and aesthetic oasis to which they flee from an arid desert. Later they often in their spiritual journey become more theologically specific. Muggeridge, in his interview with William Buckley, said he did not care if Jesus Christ physically arose from the dead. Presumably later, upon joining the Catholic Church, he did in fact care.
Dreher, who definitely suffers logorrhea and bouts of exhibitionistic transparency, had more to say:
Absent a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion moment for Hirsi Ali, it seems to these critics that she is merely a ‘cultural Christian’ as opposed to a believing one.
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My fellow conservative Christian intellectuals who call out Hirsi Ali’s ‘instrumentalist’ Christianity may mean well, but they are making a serious mistake. For one, they lack charity. It is an astonishing thing to see a woman who renounced the idea of God because of the cruel and insane treatment she received from Muslims, and who turned herself into a prophet of atheism, now publicly attest to being a follower of Jesus Christ. Note well that she has done this while living around Stanford University in northern California, one of the most woke and anti-Christian places in America. This is difficult and very brave. It seems to me that we owed her more understanding than some of us gave her in light of her news.
More importantly, these critics misunderstand the nature of religious conversion, and do so in a way that is particular to intellectuals. St. Paul’s dramatic experience on the aforementioned road to Damascus is the paradigmatic conversion: in a flash of overwhelming awe, a man experiences God, and is changed instantly. That’s not how it works with most people.
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The thing is, faith is poetry, not syllogism.
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To be honest, I was for a long time ashamed of my conversion to Orthodoxy, because it wasn’t intellectually clean. I wanted to be able to state with the kind of clarity of an expert witness in the dock that I had examined the claims for authority of the Roman church, and of the Eastern churches, and the weight of evidence lay with Byzantium. It didn’t happen that way. I came into Orthodoxy as a drowning man desperate to keep his head above water. In the end, this was the best way for me to have done it. My intellectual pride—my sin, not the Catholic Church’s—had led to my spiritual shipwreck. By showing me the primacy of the conversion of the heart, and teaching me how to achieve it, Orthodox Christianity showed me out of the dark wood.
I say all this not to make a pitch for Orthodoxy, but simply to show, by using my own example, how ragged these things can be.
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When I heard her in London, and read her testimony in Unherd, I felt not like marking down a theology undergraduate paper with a red pen, but like rushing in with my prayers to help a broken angel learn to fly. She is imperfectly Christian today; she may be more perfectly Christian tomorrow. And so, by God’s grace, will you and I.
Note especially Dreher’s identification of an “astonishing thing.” This is not a woman who would just go along to get along with her current post-Christendom milieu; her announcement means something.
Now, please! please! please! please! please!, just leave her alone and don’t try to put her on the Christian speaking circuit. Give this seedling a chance to grow.
* Doubtless more than two have commented, but I try to stay away from the internet’s garbage pails.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 