Defending Ayaan's Conversion

And: The silver lining strategy of Christian hope

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, new Christian

For the European Conservative, I wrote in defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity. I agreed that the way she frames it, yes, it does seem off-puttingly instrumentalist. But, I said, few of us who have converted have done so cleanly. Excerpts:

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. This is ungracious. At this woebegone moment for Christianity in the West, we ought to be grateful that anyone is willing to stand up and be counted as on our side.

Nevertheless, as a theological matter, they have a point. In the end, the incense, the cathedrals, the great art, the humanitarianism—all of these things are epiphenomena of true belief that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. They are signs pointing the way to conversion and what we Orthodox Christians call theosis: ultimate union with God. They are the map, not the territory.

More:

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.

For many of us, conversion is a process, a pilgrim’s road that leads us to a moment of decision. In my case, it took eight years from an awe-filled mystical experience as a teenager in the Chartres cathedral until I could admit, without hesitation, that Jesus was Lord. A year later, I was received into the Catholic faith. The road to faith began as I left the Chartres cathedral, and it took me on a spiritual and intellectual quest that was, in the end, a long process of dying to myself, to my willfulness, and to my intellectual pride.

I had for a time tried to make cultural Christianity an acceptable substitute for real faith, but it didn’t work. With me, the form it took was trying to make a deal with God in which I upheld the things I liked about Christianity, but reserved the right to reject the parts that I found hard to understand or difficult to live. It doesn’t work that way. Either Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as he said, or he isn’t. In the end, nobody is willing to live or die for the sake of a mere useful idea.

Perhaps Hirsi Ali understands that now, and simply has kept the more personal parts of her conversion to herself. Or perhaps she is at the stage of the pilgrim’s path that I once was. It is no minor thing to die to one’s illusions, especially in a culture that has abandoned the Christian faith, and substituted worship of the sacred Self. Like the great ideological dissenter Whittaker Chambers before her, Hirsi Ali has chosen what she has every reason to believe is, in worldly terms, the losing side. We who believe in Christ more conventionally should be there to help her along the road, not tear her down for perceived shortcomings.

The truth is, very few of us came to faith in a clean, intellectually respectable conversion. Intellectuals often have the idea that one arrives at faith by sitting down in the quiet of a library, examining the arguments for the faith, and calmly concluding that yes, this God business seems sound. That’s a caricature, but not much of one. Intellectuals being intellectuals, they place far more emphasis on the rationalistic approach to religion.

Read it all, please.

Liberal Religion A Dying Species

It’s a real dog-bites-man story, to write about how religious liberalism is dying. But Ryan Burge, a political scientist who specializes in religion (and a pastor of a liberal Baptist congregation), notes a new academic paper producing more evidence that liberals abandon religion, while conservatives find churches where they feel comfortable with their politics. Read the paper via the link.

This is why Pope Francis-style Catholicism doesn’t have a prayer in the long run in the United States, at least. I posted a graph last week showing that younger priests and seminarians are overwhelmingly conservative (theologically, more than conservative politically). Once the liberal Boomer generation of clergy and administrators die off, the only ones left in the US Catholic Church will be people who are more or less conservative, simply because the progressives will have lost interest in the faith.