The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild – G.K. Chesterton
Ayaan Hersi Ali has converted to Christianity. Her road to
the live and beating heart of Christianity has been a tortuous journey. Such is
the usual progress of the pilgrim. She now joins other converts, among them G.
K. Chesterton, whom she quotes in her most recent essay, “Why I am now a Christian.” In her
essay, Hersi Ali is playing upon the title of Bertram Russell’s essay “Why I am not a Christian,” an influential atheist tract.
I’ve written about Hersi Ali before here, and here.
Chesterton, a prolific author, is eminently quotable, always
the sign of a great writer. Malcolm Muggeridge, also a quotable writer,
summarized Chesterton’s view of atheism this way: “When people cease to believe
in God, they do not then believe in nothing, but in anything.” Our postmodern
age, by rejecting God, is capable of believing in anything. Chesterton, of
course, is not the first writer to stumble across this verity. When God has
been bleached out of a Christian culture, Dostoevsky wrote, men become gods:
“If there is no God, then anything is possible.”
Dostoyevsky’s writings were prophetic rumblings in
opposition to a world shattering practical atheism.
A comic writer such as Lucian might have regarded such
atheist strongmen as Stalin, Hitler and Mao – the 20th
century’s secular atheist trinity – as laughable, but it is difficult to laugh
through tears and mass murder.
Taken seriously, these nihilist strongmen are simply
monstrous misshapen souls. Hitler fell from Christianity into a noxious
pre-Christian paganism, and Stalin, before he became a petty thief and later a
murderer on a grand scale – condemned even by such fellow communists as Nikita
Khrushchev – was a seminarian booted out of two religious institutions after
having been arrested for being in possession of proscribed literature, probably
the world destroying socialist tracts of Marx and Lenin. Bitterly resentful even
of other communists, Stalin eventually would enact a perverse revenge on
believers. He shuttered churches, synagogues and mosques and ordered the
killing and imprisonment of thousands of religious leaders in his failed effort
to destroy the concept of God in the minds of the Russian people. His only
operative commandment was: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
Hersi Ali was born into an Islam that had not yet been
hijacked by anti-Western reactionaries who hold that Islam can be a religion of
peace only for those who submit to Islam. When they arrived at her doorstep,
she fled an arranged marriage to the Netherlands, where she later was elected a
member of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the States General
of the Netherlands, representing the centre-right People's Party for Freedom
and Democracy (VVD). But the avenging angels of a militant Islam were
everywhere, she soon discovered.
The terrorist – Stalin, we may recall, was the chief
terrorist of a militant communism -- may be himself a practical atheist hiding
behind a militaristic creed in which peace is only possible for those who bend
their necks to the sword of some redeeming ideology.
In Islam, Hersi Ali notes, “a special hatred was reserved
for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jew multiple times a day
and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had
allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy
Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and
soul.”
Hersi Ali fled from Islam to atheism, little realizing that
the atheist credo provided no space for the development of the spirit of true
freedom she felt moving like the hand of God in her vitals.
“So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?”
she asks herself in her most recent essay.
And her answer is worth quoting in full:
“Part of the answer is
global. Western civilization 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 mobilize a vast population against the
West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral
fiber of the next generation.
“We endeavor to fend
off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic
and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or survive. And
yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are
either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of
dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.
“But we can’t fight
off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that
unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. 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.
“That legacy consists
of an elaborate set 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. As Tom Holland has shown in his
marvelous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the
market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.
“And so I have come to
realize that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the
trees. The wood is the civilization built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it
is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those
contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in
scope.”
Both atheism and its more cowardly widely dispersed variant,
practical atheism, Hersi Ali writes, “can't equip us for civilizational war.”
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