The Fifth Horseman of New Atheism Converts to Christianity.

New Atheist Christopher Hitchens once referred to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali as “the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa”, and yet in November 2023, she publicly announced her conversion to Christianity in a controversial essay. 

As a former New Atheist, she had stayed true to the doctrines of the other horsemen, in accepting Western liberalism and criticising Islam, and it would seem that she remains dedicated to these principles, but now as a Christian. She states at the start of her essay that “atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war”. From the outset, her conversion appears to be a tool of culture war rather than the conclusion of ‘soul-searching’ or religious experience. However, when Ali details her entire religious life, explaining the trauma of the Muslim Brotherhood, and how she was compelled to “curse[d] the Jews multiple times a day”, she shows the rationale behind her eventual atheism, perhaps suggesting that her alignment with the New Atheists represented a reaction to her past rather than a rejection of the truth-claims of religions. 

Around halfway through her essay, she eventually addresses the question of why she is now a Christian. Her immediate explanation is that “Western civilisation is under threat” from “the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia”. Perhaps not an orthodox reason for conversion to Christianity, then. She goes on to list the threats of “woke ideology”, “losing our lead in the technological race with China”, and the loss of “freedom of conscience and speech” as further justification for her conversion. She is entitled to her view on issues of culture, foreign policy, and freedom of speech. However, we are now over three-quarters of the way into her essay, and she has still not made a single argument in favour of the existence of god, detailed a single religious experience that she has had, or engaged with any of the claims made by the religion she now follows. 

Finally, in the closing parts of her essay, she claims that in this “nihilistic vacuum”, Christianity is the only viable way of understanding the meaning and purpose of life. She disregards secular humanism and Islam, and laments the great hole left in public life by the decrease in religious thought. Although somewhat belated, this represents an engagement, at least, with an argument in favour of following Christianity. The final line compounds Ali’s largely cultural argument for the existence of God. She states that Christianity “is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.”

In reflecting on this bombshell essay, it is for us to decide the nature of Ali’s conversion, which although diametrically opposed to the doctrines of New Atheism, appears, in a peculiar way, to stay true to the political and social features of the pop-cultural scientific phenomenon. Is Ali a truly devoted Christian, who has had an unprecedented religious experience, or rationalised the arguments for the existence of God? Is she someone who has suffered immensely in her life, and has travelled between different, flawed understandings of purpose and meaning? Or is she an anti-woke culture warrior, for whom atheism has become too liberal to advance her political convictions? You decide. 

Remember to comment below if you have any thoughts on the above article, and if you have any suggestions around Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s controversial conversion. You can find her full essay on UnHerd.