For Once, Richard Dawkins is Right
Richard Dawkins recently published an open letter to Ayaan Hirsi Ali after her public conversion to Christianity. Ali had written in an article for Unherd that she has turned to Christianity for two reasons: as an apparent unifying system in order to fight the “formidable forces” she describes as “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.”
Ali also spoke about a personal vacuum of meaning atheism was not filling, but led mostly with the political need for Christianity. She has gone strongly down the “Tom Holland” route (for clarification, Tom Holland is a british historian who wrote a book called Dominion essentially arguing almost everything morally and culturally that we value is the product of the saturation of Christianity), and she seems to believe that re-establishing Christianity as an identity is key to our future in the West.
Dawkins naturally does not agree. He agrees about the political threats, agrees that Christianity has cultural value, and although he does not…
