Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Muddled Conversion to Christianity
And the search for a viable Western religion in the conflict between civilizations
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the one-time leading new atheist, has converted to Christianity. And her reasons aren’t as harebrained as you might think.
Hirsi Ali overcame her early indoctrination into Islam, in Kenya, at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, having welcomed Bertrand Russell’s skepticism, as she found the latter expressed in his book Why I am not a Christian. She became a secular activist and an outspoken critic of Islam’s treatment of women.
But as she says in her article, “Why I am now a Christian,” she’s since feared that liberalism is losing the culture war with more united ideologies, including Chinese or Russian authoritarianism, medievalist Islam, and even “the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”
Hirsi Ali’s search for a strong Western ideology
One problem, she says, is that “atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing…
