Why I'm still an atheist

On Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion to Christianity

Ayaan Hirsi Ali rose to prominence when renouncing Islam and joining the New Atheist movement in the early aughts. Her 2007 autobiography, Infidel: My Life, has been championed by secularists as a scathing critique of an outdated, misogynistic, and harmful strain of Islam, as well as for providing an ethical and social roadmap for leaving indoctrination.

Though Hirsi Ali has been controversial, her activism against forced marriage, honor killings, and female genital mutilation (which she endured at age five in her native Somalia) has helped wake up Westerners to the numerous problems women endure in hardline Muslim cultures.

The story about her origins aren’t clean-cut, however, and she’s been a constant source of controversy. I’m not defending or promoting her body of work. I agree with her activism around female equality and the problems with certain misogynistic strains of Islam. I also don’t feel that her sweeping generalizations about Islam represent the diversity within the faith, a guideline I’ll adhere to in my forthcoming criticisms of Christianity.

Rather, this essay will stay confined to Hirsi Ali’s recent announcement that she’s converted to Christianity. Debating why someone feels spiritually drawn to a faith practice is fruitless. The world is hard enough, and we all seek comfort through various channels.

But when a conversion announcement is filled with questionable claims and outright bigotry, criticism is warranted.

Invasion of the wokes

Hirsi Ali’s essay, “Why I am now a Christian,” is a call-and-response to Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture, “Why I am Not a Christian.” The subtitle to her clap back—Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war—prepares us for the problems ahead.

Hirsi Ali begins with a brief intro to her atheism, which evolved as a response to 9/11. (She’d been working with Somali women in the Netherlands for six years at this point.) That horrific day inspired her to run for politics. She renounced Islam and embraced atheism in 2002. The following year she was elected to parliament.

Reading Russell during this time eased her metaphysical anxiety and helped her focus on real-world political change. She writes,

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.

Hirsi Ali was raised under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group she says offered a straight path through the binaries of good and evil—a seductive prospect to the indoctrinated, as the human brain generally loves easy narratives. The flip side was the inhumane treatment of women, who are treated as second-class citizens. She also grew up being taught that any critic of the Brotherhood’s specific brand of Islam is to be hated and cursed—especially Jews.

Hirsi Ali’s family left Somalia in 1977; she would then leave her Kenyan home in 1992 to escape a forced marriage. A religious refugee, Ali believed her adoption of atheism would alleviate her existential distress. For a while, it did.

Until her conversion to Christianity, which she describes thus:

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.

The first point is true, and not limited to those two countries. Recent elections in Argentina and the Netherlands show the dangers of right-wing extremism under guise of nationalism is a global issue.

The second point is selectively true: Islamism poses a threat to Western democracies, just like authoritarianism. Yet the idea that Christianity is a solution is strange: Ali is responding to geopolitical problems with religious ideology. She criticizes the inefficiencies of a “jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma” currently in vogue in Western societies (her words) without realizing her newfound faith offers the same.

This is a perpetual blind spot with the religious: they believe their brand of faith is the only one that sufficiently answers all questions.

I observed this phenomenon three decades ago, while serving as the religion reporter for The Daily Targum. I regularly interviewed local religious leaders while earning a degree in religion at Rutgers. While some were more open-minded than others, they each believed they had stumbled upon the one true religion. In their minds, the best outcome would be for everyone else to come around to their way of thinking.

Hirsi Ali’s first two forces are related: all involved are authoritarian and dictatorial. She conveniently overlooks the fact that not all Muslims abide by global Islamism, though she’s certainly right that certain groups are striving for dominance.

Then comes the third force.

The religion that never was

Religion exists on a spectrum. Many Christians focus more energy on their faith’s prosocial teachings, like charity and compassion. Scriptural dogma is secondary to being a good person. This is why, even as an atheist, I understand the value of faith communities. Humans crave the comfort and friendship of like-minded people. If a community fosters a sense of shared purpose to make the world a better place—through soup kitchens, clothing drives, homeless outreach, after-school foster kid programs—their faith is actionable. Metaphysics hovers in the background.

That’s not what Hirsi Ali is arguing, however. She brings metaphysics to the front. Believing a god inspires you to spend a holiday preparing meals for the less fortunate requires little dogma. By contrast, Hirsi Ali’s third force opens the door to plenty of discriminatory dogma. Her fear of “woke ideology” has a target: transgender people.

(This isn’t the only target, but it’s one she speaks about often and is apparently a driver of this conversion.)

In her 2022 essay, “The year the West erased women,” Hirsi Ali preempts her conversion by taking people like James Lindsay seriously. (Unironically, Lindsay also fled New Atheism for a metaphysical Christianity that abhors LGTBQ+ rights and critical race theory.) Citing Lindsay’s co-authored book with Helen Pluckrose, Hirsi Ali writes,

Those who would divorce “woman” from its biological implications often present their ideas as innocuous. They are, we are told, simply champions of “inclusion”. But their ideology is hardly uncontroversial, and surrendering to it is not harmless.

While she writes that her ideology is divorced from transphobia, Hirsi Ali believes the West “forgot what it means to be a woman,” a nonsensical sentiment that’s been weaponized in anti-woke discourse. Rather, biologists and gender studies experts now have a wider lens in which to view evolutionary biology and gender, which is how science works: by building on and expanding our previous knowledge base.

In her book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, researcher Cat Bohannon notes that more women and BIPOC entering STEM fields has greatly enhanced the understanding of previously male-dominated disciplines. Not only has research become more inclusive, but the questions being asked have greatly changed. The lens has widened, which is a boon for us all.

As I’ve previously written, even Darwin knew that the common understanding of evolution and gender roles were not limited to “Darwinism.” He wrote an entire follow-up book arguing for the role of female mate selection, which has generally been ignored by “survival of the fittest” devotees.

As with many fundamentalist Christians, Hirsi Ali’s scientific ignorance helps her romanticize a past that never was. Her yearning for a “true” feminism overlooks the spectrum of identity that has always been part of our species. She champions Christianity as the driver of progress rather than as an impediment to it, a rather odd sentiment given that the Enlightenment produced the separation of church and state and toleration, which is actually what modern democratic societies are built on.

I audibly gasped when reading her next sentence.

Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage.

How to qualify such a statement in America, where the man second-in-line to the presidency is an avowed Christian Nationalist? Both Hirsi Ali and Mike Johnson herald the nation’s “Judeo-Christian roots.” While differences in the applications of their theologies likely exist, these two Christians are united in their bigotry against certain groups. To claim Christianity isn’t dogmatic is laughable considering its grievances with inclusion and autonomy, as well as the right’s manic drive to strip women of virtually all bodily rights.

Which all makes Hirsi Ali’s claim that progressives are the real villains, that they “happily ignore or dismiss its material effects” in regards to “woke” ideas, ludicrous. Christianity is not the driver of freedom; it’s often a boundary to it, as any history book (or modern newspaper) shows. Again, this isn’t an indictment of all Christians, many of whom espouse progressive values. It’s just odd that Hirsi Ali would choose to align with the staunchest bigots, and bigoted ideas, of the faith.

In the end, Hirsi Ali’s main complaint returns to metaphysics.

Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

This ruse is often employed by religious seeking converts: your secular system doesn’t address what really matters, such as where our souls go when we die. This form of spiritual bypass is common across faith groups: ignoring real-world solvable problems with metaphysical speculation. Such a philosophy conveniently allows one to ignore society’s actual problems to focus on an imagined special place irrelevant to secularists.

Progress is achieved through legislation and by pressure from activist movements and labor unions, not through prayer or thinking a certain way, especially when that way tramples the rights of others. To demand that heaven and hell are more relevant than social services says more about your inadequacies for dealing with the challenges and complexities of life than it does about an atheist’s lack of concern about what happens after death.

Over-under

In a rather strange essay contemplating Hirsi Ali’s conversion that compares Christianity to UFOs, NY Times columnist Ross Douthat writes “the world is much stranger than the secular imagination thinks.” I’ve heard shades of this assumption for decades, along with the idea that atheism provides no moral roadmap.

This is nonsense. Like any system, religions are invented by humans. The moral guidelines presented by religions are fluid and subject to alteration depending on the evolving customs of the society that adopts the practice. While atheists (and somewhat aligned systems, like agnosticism and “nones”) are not monolithic, there are over 45,000 versions of the six main offshoots of Christianity. Sure, there’s crossover between some groups, yet the belief that any single religion provides a definitive ethical blueprint for humanity is absurd.

Secularism—not a perfect synopsis of non-theists, but close—offers a variety of philosophical and moral traditions to build a society from. A metaphysical entity is not required to treat people well. The notion that people need to be “watched” to engage in prosocial behavior, to borrow from psychology professor Ara Norenzayan, says more about those people than the whole of society. And as our understanding of zoology increases, researchers have found more and more prosocial societies forming without the need for a belief in a higher power.

And so Hirsi Ali has landed on one side of Pascal’s wager, throwing herself into a fundamentalist niche within the broader umbrella of Christianity. I have no problem being on the other side, especially given that Pascal’s argument represents an existential fear that many of us are simply not worried about.

I’m not denying the terrifying power of existential fear: we have plenty to be concerned about thanks to the rapidly intensifying effects of climate change. If Hirsi Ali needs a socially constructive narrative, read Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, or George Monibot. If you prefer a fictional work, more like a bible, Margaret Atwood and Richard Powers will keep you frightened and entertained. Plenty of unifying stories exist without need for Iron Age myths.

Hirsi Ali seems disinterested in such pedestrian discussions when eternity is on the table. She laments virtue signaling over “our supposedly doomed planet,” an audible climate denialist dog whistle. She feels the erosion of civilization is inevitable “unless we offer something as meaningful” as “the power of a unifying story.” Yet we have so many to consider: fighting for things that matter in the here and now, like socialized medicine, climate change legislation, inclusive feminism, and worker’s rights.

Alas, those are too “woke” for her to even entertain.

Perhaps Hirsi Ali should revisit Russell’s lecture. She ends her essay with the rather bland, “Christianity has it all,” without explaining what all entails—or, more tellingly, without considering that “all” encompasses the biases and bypassing listed above. At least Russell offers his listeners a hopeful future worth striving for:

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

Why am I still an atheist? Because the literal hell on earth we’re creating is far worse than any imagined hell no one will ever actually visit. I’ll wager fighting for an inclusive society instead of one filled with people who need safe spaces to shelter from the fact that not everyone is like them.