Peter Savodnik (The Free Press), How Intellectuals Found God:
[S]omething profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”
There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.
“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.
Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”
“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”
The Rise and Fall of the New Atheists
For more than a century, the people at the apex of the so-called thinking classes had insisted that, post-Enlightenment, it was impossible to believe in God. Not all of them put it as bluntly as Friedrich Nietzsche did in his 1882 work The Gay Science, in which he declared that “God is dead.” Nor did they attempt to dismantle the whole religious project the way philosopher Bertrand Russell did in his 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” arguing that religion is based “mainly upon fear.” …
[T]he tech geniuses and media personalities and celebrities who once embodied the new atheism are rethinking what we lose when we lose religion.
Some evidence of that from just this past year: [Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Jordan Peterson] …
The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end? …
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: From Infidel to Reluctant Christian
If anyone had a reason to hate religion, it was Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She was born into a Muslim family in Somalia in 1969, the year the communists came to power, and she was 5 when her grandmother and two of her grandmother’s friends held her down so a man, wielding scissors, could remove her clitoris and inner labia—“like a butcher snipping fat off a piece of meat,” she later recalled.
When she was in her early twenties, she fled to the Netherlands, where she gained political refugee status and eventually won a seat in parliament.
There, she embraced Dutch liberal secular culture. She became an atheist—and a fervent critic of Islam. In 2004, her friend, the director Theo van Gogh, was murdered in the middle of Amsterdam for making the movie Submission, co-written by Hirsi Ali, about Muslim misogyny. A note was pinned to his body with a knife saying Hirsi Ali would be next.
In 2006, she shared her story in her best-selling memoir Infidel. Her detractors called her an Islamophobe, but she carried on, and wrote more books. Then, in 2011, Hirsi Ali married Niall Ferguson. They had two boys.
But Hirsi Ali, 55, was tormented by her past. She battled depression.
“I did it with alcohol,” she told me. ”I tried to get rid of that nagging void.” She saw one psychiatrist after another, and “they would prescribe me drugs, and I would faithfully take them, expecting to be better. And I wasn’t.”
“I thought we were done,” Ferguson told me. “I thought she was going to die. I’d almost completely despaired of finding a way out, all the accumulated traumas of her life.”
Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”
In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?
Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”
In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”
The essay triggered an avalanche of conversations in the independent media universe—including a book, which she is now working on, and a debate, in June, between Hirsi Ali and Dawkins in which she argued that Christianity is a bulwark against “the cult of power, Islamism.” The debate felt like a kind of bookend to the four horsemen meeting in Hitchens’s apartment in 2007.
“It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.
On September 1, Hirsi Ali and Ferguson and their sons were baptized. “I had a spiritual void in my life, and Ayaan certainly did,” Ferguson said. “Her discovery of a Christian God saved her.”
When I asked Hirsi Ali and Ferguson whether their faith was real or just a political balm meant to combat the “cult of power”—whether they were, as Dawkins said, “theological Christians” or a “cultural” ones—they said their faith was “genuine.”
“You cannot help but feel restored by a church service,” Ferguson said. Then, referring to the nineteenth-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who viewed religion as politically useful, he added: “The cynical Tocquevillian Niall who thought church was a useful thing has given way to somebody who looks forward to going to church.”
Hirsi Ali added: “I’m actually very grateful for whatever it was that was ailing me,” because it led her to God. “My life now is much richer, more fulfilling, than before.”
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