One woman’s simple, moving testimony

Richard Dawkins had come to New York with a simple plan. He intended to convince his dear old friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali that, despite the title of her Christian conversion essay, she is not really a believing Christian. He was all ready to explain that she might be a political Christian—someone who sees Christianity chiefly as a means to the end of fighting off more insidious cultural forces—but that’s not the same thing as believing. As we’ve covered here at WORLD, Dawkins even thinks of himself as something of a “cultural Christian.” He discusses all these distinctions in a Substack written in March, enthusiastically looking forward to his planned May conversation with Hirsi Ali. This seemed to be his way of processing the initial shock expressed in his open letter when she first shared her testimony last year. “Seriously, Ayaan?” he asked. Seriously?

But when the anticipated day arrived, and the two friends took the stage after sharing a warm embrace, Dawkins was in for another shock. With great affection and winsomeness, teasing her “dear Richard” ever so gently, Hirsi Ali explained that becoming a Christian wasn’t just a political calculation for her. It was very real.

Dawkins could have prepared himself by carefully watching an in-depth video interview Hirsi Ali gave to UnHerd last November. There, she had already discussed some of what she shared again with Dawkins and the crowd at Dissident Dialogues. She had explained how she had struggled with suicidal depression and substance abuse, how she had hit rock bottom, how her exploration of Jesus had begun as a deeply personal search for a loving god. Interestingly, it was her secular therapist who first suggested that she was “spiritually bankrupt.” But there was no way Hirsi Ali could return to the fundamentalist Islam she had escaped as a young woman. Allah wasn’t the god she sought or desired. When her therapist suggested she make up her own god instead, Hirsi Ali had an epiphany. Like her New Atheist friends, she had mockingly rejected all religion wholesale, including Christianity. But at her lowest point, the god she began to invent was starting to look a lot like Jesus. 

This appeared to leave Dawkins utterly baffled, perhaps even embarrassed on his friend’s behalf. It would be one thing if she had described an intellectual conversion journey à la C. S. Lewis, inspired by books and deep study and long, erudite chats in the woods. But this was not even that. This was the stuff of Alcoholics Anonymous, of earnest middlebrow testimonies about getting on your knees and discovering a “higher power,” or in Hirsi Ali’s own words, “the God who turned me around.” Dawkins surely must be wondering what a brilliant, poised, high-status woman like her is doing with a conversion story like that. There’s a touch of nervousness in his voice as he admits, “It sounds like you actually believe it.”

At one point, he tried to call Hirsi Ali back to their once-shared atheist stoicism, reminding her that “the universe doesn’t have to offer you anything.” If atheism left her feeling dark and hopeless, so what? What if it’s true anyway?

Hirsi Ali framed her thoughts carefully and humbly, distinguishing her “subjective” personal experience from the truths anyone can observe about how Christianity undergirds Western civilization. She hadn’t come to clash swords with Dawkins like a Christian apologist. At the same time, she pointed to her strong sense that “there is something,” in tension with Dawkins’ belief that “there is nothing.” She doesn’t demand that he agree with her, but she makes it clear that “what the vicar says” is not “stupid.” It’s “layered with the wisdom of millennia.” She also believes Dawkins is wrong to caricature Christianity as “obsessed by sin.” If it’s “obsessed” with anything, she has found it to be, in the best sense, “obsessed with love” (a line which drew applause).

These responses might seem tentative and inadequate to some Christians. In a discussion thread, I saw someone lamenting that some celebrated apologist wasn’t there to smack down Dawkins’ arguments on his own terms. The desire for a rational smackdown is understandable, and we can certainly hope that Hirsi Ali continues gaining confidence in her new faith. (We can also hope she finds clearer theological resources than the sort of watered-down “defense of Christianity” presented in this Rupert Shortt guest essay on her blog. The essay is long on Jesus’ humanity but, well, short on His divinity, and consequently short on the gospel truth of His death and resurrection.) 

Still, I think people can underestimate the impact that a simple, vulnerable testimony can make in the public square. There is something particularly refreshing about the hopeful joy of a new Christian that simply can’t be captured in the well-worn arguments of a seasoned apologist. A changed life is its own apologetic, its own witness to a watching world.

Arguments have their time and place. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in the right place at the right time—and headed in the right direction.