| New in Telos Insights
by Anna Sutter
The following article is a slightly revised translation of an essay originally published in German as “Konversion zwecks Konservation: Eine Standortbestimmung des Christentums dies- und jenseits des Atlantik anlässlich Ayaan Hirsi Alis Bekehrung,” in casa|blanca 1/2024. Translated by the author.
In a nod to the Book of Revelation, “The Four Horsemen (of the Anti-Apocalypse)” was the playful moniker chosen for themselves by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens when they gathered for their first joint discussion around 2007. The quartet soon became known for its sharp polemics not only against religious fundamentalism but against religion in general. Strangely unconcerned with the wide range of theoretical as well as historical developments that have challenged the basic premises of Enlightenment rationalism over the past 250 years—from Adorno to the atomic bomb—they prided themselves on promoting a strictly scientific outlook on the world, be it against veritable religious fanaticism or ultimately any kind of speculative thought.
The Fifth Horsewoman
For many years, the Dutch-American politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was considered a key figure in the movement known as New Atheism. Growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, she received an orthodox Islamic education and, as a teenager, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood before eventually fleeing a forthcoming forced marriage by illegally entering the Netherlands in the early nineties. There, she became an apostate and began to engage in political activism. As an uncompromising critic of Islam, she not only faced accusations of Islamophobia but also a constant threat to her life, which peaked after Theo van Gogh, with whom she had made the short film Submission (Part I) about Islam’s degradation of women, was murdered by an Islamist in 2004. The attacker, a Moroccan-Dutch dual citizen born in Amsterdam, had pinned a note with a death threat to Hirsi Ali on the victim’s clothing. She was forced to go into hiding. The price she paid for openly confronting Islam, rather than resorting to nebulous generalizations that make all religions appear as mere shades of the same gray, distinguished Hirsi Ali from antitheists like the biologist Richard Dawkins. Nonetheless, there was a proximity to the “four horsemen.” They appeared on the same YouTube channels and participated together in conferences such as the Global Atheist Convention, where Dawkins gave Hirsi Ali the nickname “Fifth Horsewoman” in 2012.
It came as no surprise, then, that her fellow New Atheists were quite perplexed when the critic of Islam announced in November 2023 that she had converted to Christianity. In an essay titled “Why I Am Now a Christian,” echoing Bertrand Russell’s famous “Why I Am Not a Christian,” she explained the reasoning behind her decision: With the expansionist authoritarianism of Russia and China, along with the rise of global Islamism and woke ideology, liberal Western democracies face three interconnected, internal and external threats. Hirsi Ali attributes the West’s weaknesses on all these fronts, at least in part, to a disorientation regarding what fundamentally holds the West together: “The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient,” Hirsi Ali states. “So, too, does the attempt to find solace in ‘the rules-based liberal international order.’ The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” According to her, this legacy ought to be understood as an ensemble of “ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity—from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning.” Consequently, the process of secularization that made these modern institutions possible in the first place is presented not as a development in opposition to Christianity but as one that emerged within and through it: “Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage.” In stark contrast to the historical interpretation of her former neo-atheist allies, who conceive of modern freedoms as having been won in bloody battles against Christian orthodoxy, Hirsi Ali understands the church as a forerunner of liberalism.
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