Why I am now a Christian
Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war
BY AYAAN HIRSI ALI
. (Christian Marquardt/Getty Images)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an UnHerd columnist. She is also a
research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of
The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her new book is Prey:
Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.
Ayaan
November 11, 2023
Filed under:
Faith & Meaning ChristianityGodIslamIslamismReligion
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In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand
Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not
cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a
century after he delivered it to the South London
branch of the National Secular Society, I would be
compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite
title.
The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist
attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets
and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They
had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a
Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly
condemned their actions, then where did that leave me?
The underlying principle that justified the attacks was
religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War
against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for
many members of the Muslim community, simply to
distance myself from the action and its horrific
results?
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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.
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. We have
seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as
millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans
seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as
a justified response to the policies of the Israeli
government.
When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive
dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude
of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my
faith in God and declare that no such entity existed.
Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and
the danger of everlasting punishment.
Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on
fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in
terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me.
While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for
believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire
still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as
something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”
To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you
first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been.
I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated
my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think
I had even understood religious practice before the
coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of
ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and
pointless.
The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this.
They articulated a direction: the straight path. A
purpose: to work towards admission into Allah’s
paradise after death. A method: the Prophet’s
instruction manual of do’s and don’ts — the halal and
the haram. As a detailed supplement to the Qur’an, the
hadeeth spelled out how to put into practice the
difference between right and wrong, good and evil, God
and the devil.
The Brotherhood preachers left nothing to the
imagination. They gave us a choice. Strive to live by
the Prophet’s manual and reap the glorious rewards in
the hereafter. On this earth, meanwhile, the greatest
achievement possible was to die as a martyr for the
sake of Allah.
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The alternative, indulging in the pleasures of the
world, was to earn Allah’s wrath and be condemned to an
eternal life in hellfire. Some of the “worldly
pleasures” they were decrying included reading novels,
listening to music, dancing, and going to the cinema —
all of which I was ashamed to admit that I adored.
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.
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.
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You can see why, to someone who had been through such a
religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing.
Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape
from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment
of other people. For him, there was no credible case
for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was
rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing —
fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”
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.
We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern,
secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and
technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade,
appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of
conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are
either running out of money, with our national debt in
the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our
lead in the technological race with China.
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.
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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.
And so I have come to realise that Russell and my
atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees.
The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-
Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts
and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in
Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too
narrow in scope.
For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of
(former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian
country. Think about how unique that was nearly a
century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western
civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before
any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and
deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a
Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists,
written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in
America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have
been too dangerous to do otherwise.
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.
Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace
of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism
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 — indeed very nearly
self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple
question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
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Russell and other activist atheists believed that with
the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason
and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void
left by the retreat of the church — has merely been
filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma.
The result is a world where modern cults prey on the
dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for
being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-
signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority
or our supposedly doomed planet. 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.”
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.
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.
That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim
apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have
a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a
little more at church each Sunday. But I have
recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness
of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to
manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or
unbelief had to offer.
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