More thoughts on doubt and faith
How consistent am I in living in imitation of Christ, and what makes for the gaps in that consistency?
When I first came across Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s UnHerd piece, “Why I Am Now a Christian,” my reaction was one of enthusiasm. As I thought about it, though, there seemed to be an essential level of what being a Christian means that was missing. Granted, for someone of her incisiveness to cap off the kind of life journey she’d experienced by finding Truth was a gem of encouragement in a darkening world. But when someone reaches that juncture, there’s usually some indication that he or she is pouring his or her heart into it. One expects a declaration of surrender.
I then encountered Andrew Sullivan’s observations about her essay, and they resonated with me. The title of his response to her, “Christianity Is False But Useful,” holds her feet to the fire. It’s an insistence that she step up and demonstrate why that is not her position.
He makes a case that she must reckon with:
When I first heard about and read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essay on converting to Christianity, I have to admit I bristled a bit. It read, at first blush, like a political conversion rather than a spiritual one, the kind of argument a neoconservative might make. “False but convenient” is the Straussian takeon Christianity, and it strongly suggests that faith is simply an organizing tool for society. It keeps the masses in line, tamps down their earthly expectations, and inculcates socially useful virtues. “Atheists for Christianity” is, in fact, a pretty good synopsis of neoconservatism. And Ayaan has, after all, long been a neoconservative.
Her defense of the Christian faith therefore makes almost no mention of Jesus of Nazareth, nor of the Creed — the core of Christian belief. There are no saints or pilgrims or miracles in her account. We don’t know which denomination Ayaan has joined. We have no discussion of the Incarnation, or the Resurrection, let alone the Trinity. We don’t even have a first-person testimony of the process of conversion, how it happened, and when. There is not a trace of the supernatural or the eternal. We do not know the key religious texts that moved her; or the prayers that might sustain her; or about the voice she may or may not have heard.
What we do have, in Ayaan’s case, is the civilizational challenge of defending the West against the latest axis of evil: Russia/China, Islamism, and critical theory, the latter via the madrassas of the Ivy League. And Christianity, Ayaan argues, is the primary unifying force that can stiffen our sinews against all these threats to the West, dispatching Xi, Putin, Hamas and Kendi into their respective historical dustbins. And wouldn’t that be lovely?
The book that seems to have had the deepest impact on Ayaan is not the Bible but Tom Holland’s Dominion, on the civilizational gifts Christianity bestowed on the West: concepts of universal love, individual dignity, freedom of expression, reason, and toleration. Ayaan notes that this was not always the case — centuries of sometimes brutal sectarian conflict somewhat complicate things — but that Christianity has long since left its “dogmatic” phase toward an emphasis on logos, of reason, as inextricable from the divine.
And Ayaan is right that Western elites have been far too sanguine about the collapse of Christianity in the West, and have overlooked its role in inculcating the virtues essential for liberal society to work. The God-shaped hole left by Christianity’s demise has been filled by the cults of Trump and wokeness, or the distractions of mass entertainment and consumption, in our civilizational heap of broken images.
All of which is well taken. But none of it is a reason for an individual soul to convert to Christianity.
A bit later, Sullivan. demonstrates that, rather than wishing to be merely combative, he brings his own measure of heart to what he wants her to get from what he’s saying:
Ayaan [is] a human being with a life, rather than [just] Ayaan, an intellectual with a rather brief, shallow essay. And in a subsequent interview yesterday with the great Freddie Sayers, Ayaan filled in some of the blanks. She was, we find out, converted by her therapist! Money quote:
I continued to have this big spiritual hole or need. I tried to self-medicate. I tried to sedate myself. I drank enough alcohol to sterilise a hospital. Nothing helped. I continued to read books on psychiatry and the brain. And none of that helped. All of that explained a small piece of the puzzle, but there was still something that I was missing. And then I think it was one therapist who said to me, early this year: “I think, Ayaan, you’re spiritually bankrupt.”
The therapist asked Ayaan about the kind of God she might be more open to — not defined by the brutalism of her Muslim past. A light bulb went off, and “as I was going on I thought: that is actually a description of Jesus Christ and Christianity at its best. And so instead of inventing yet another new God, I started diving into that story.”
This, then, is her actual conversion story, or the beginning of it. It was spiritual desolation that led to exploring the story of Jesus, and discovering — surprise! — that she was, in ways she hadn’t fully appreciated, already a kind of Christian, a person who values love and forgiveness over judgment and pride, who tries to be indifferent to the lure of power and wealth, who is concerned about the poor and marginalized, humble, knowing what she cannot know, believing what she can, and accepting of others in whatever stage of the journey they are in. And I wish Ayaan had started there, with her personal search, rather than in the essay she wrote. She left out the heart of the matter, which may be why some of the attacks on it have been so heartless.
And Ayaan is no different than the elite Romans who converted because Constantine did, or because they were impressed by the way Christians led their lives. She’s no different than many cultural Christians in which the meaning of the faith is less salient than the fact that you were just brought up that way, and your parents were too. She’s not that different than many Westerners who are already Christians in the lives they lead and the values they cherish but who don’t regard themselves as religious.
And the path to faith is not usually a simple, Damascene leap, like Saint Paul’s or Pascal’s, let alone a crude obeisance to an “inerrant” text, but a meandering process of discovery, and reflection, and the living of life itself. It is, especially in modernity, more like Ayaan’s evolution than Pascal’s revelation. Demanding of modern humans an instant acceptance of the supernatural, let alone a set of esoteric doctrines, is rarely going to work. And in this respect, Ayaan is showing us the way.
Start with the spiritual sense all humans have and currently do not feel; and start to explore it. Merely seeking faith, however fitfully, is itself a form of faith, as Pope Francis has said. Pick up one of the Gospels and read it. (I’m amazed by how many super-educated people haven’t.) Understand, as I have through some dark, dark moments, that this is not something you can ultimately control. It’s something greater and more ineffable than anything we can understand, and leads in due course to both mystery and revelation.
And it’s worth adding that those of us who call ourselves Christians are also often bereft of spiritual comfort and hope, our doubts and fears overwhelming us, our worldly distractions always beguiling us. We are in no place to cast judgment on anyone sincerely seeking the truth, even if we can rightly criticize certain arguments they make. All I can say, as a human being and friend, is that I’m thrilled Ayaan is on that journey, and will pray it continues for her, and that she will also come to see that those with the deepest faith never write essays about it, never declare themselves anything, and do not try to believe in order that Western civilization can endure.
They believe because it’s the deepest truth about our human existence. And in the face of that truth, in the eyes of eternity, sustaining and protecting any temporary civilization — Roman, Western, or Anglo-American — is utterly, completely irrelevant.
In other words, he very much wants her to have a conversion that’s going to stick, that’s going to have depth.
I guess the reason it took a little while for my enthusiasm for Ali’s piece to be tempered by a wait-a-minute-where’s-her-adoration-for-Jesus perspective is that high-profile conversions of people with world-class minds focused on the pressing matters of our time merit celebration whenever announced.
I also think that I see such declarations as confirmation that I’ve personally been on the right track.
And that’s because, speaking of resonance, I identified, with a great deal of discomfort, with what Sullivan had to say about how “those of us who call ourselves Christians are also often bereft of spiritual comfort and hope, our doubts and fears overwhelming us, our worldly distractions always beguiling us.” It sure doesn’t take me long to get mired in that stuff. To see the ranks of brothers and sisters in Christ get swelled even by one makes me feel that there’s that much more encouragement being extended to me on my own faith walk.
The signals that one is inevitably subject to those doubts, fears and distractions the moment one sets foot outside one’s door abound. Encouragement in the other direction is hard to come by.
Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute is able to put some quantification on that assertion:
As recently as 2008, most Americans agreed with the statement “It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.” A lot has changed over the last fifteen years. When we asked this same question in a recent poll, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the public rejected the once-popular idea. Only about one in three (34 percent) Americans still believe that morality and good values require belief in God.
The growing rejection of theistic morality is certainly related to the rising number of religiously unaffiliated Americans. The percentage of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated increased dramatically from 16 percent in 2008 to 27 percent today. These Americans are far less likely to say that belief in God is necessary to be moral than those who belong to a religious tradition. Only seven percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans agree with this statement. But even among this group, attitudes are changing. In 2012, 22 percent of the religiously unaffiliated embraced the notion that morality is contingent upon belief in God or a higher power.
America’s growing religious diversity may play a role in this shift as well. Fewer Americans embrace religious exclusivity—the idea that there is only one true religion—in favor of broader acceptance of religious differences and belief in religious pluralism. Americans today are far more likely to have a close friend or relative who identifies as atheist. These social relationships profoundly affect personal attitudes towards non-believers. In American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell dubbed this the “Aunt Susan” effect. They write:
We all have an Aunt Susan in our lives, the sort of person who epitomizes what it means to be a saint, but whose religious background is different from our own. Maybe you are Jewish and she is a Methodist. Or perhaps you are Catholic and Aunt Susan is not religious at all. But whatever her religious background (or lack thereof), you know that Aunt Susan is destined for heaven. And if she is going to heaven, what does that say about other people who share her religion or lack of religion? Maybe they can go to heaven too.
The authors argue that social connections with individuals belonging to different religious groups, including atheists, lead to greater acceptance and more positive assessments of these groups.
Religious Americans who have a close personal connection with someone who is not religious are much more inclined to reject the notion that people need to believe in God to behave morally. In a 2020 survey, religious Americans who had at least one close contact who was not religious were far less likely to agree that believing in God is critical to personal morality than those with none (33 percent vs. 54 percent).
This is the milieu in which I - we - swim daily in 2023 post-America.
I kind of thought I’d progressed beyond where I was when I wrote this post last December, but I’m not so sure:
When I went to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in history, I wrote my thesis on the role of mainline Protestantism’s preoccupation with a leftist view of foreign policy in its denominations’ bleeding of membership from the 1960s to the 1990s, when I was writing it.
Meanwhile, college in America came to serve two dual, and not mutually exclusive, purposes: partying and preparing for a career.
So these are elements that must be part of the discussion. An ever-more outlandishly razzle-dazzle popular culture that offered the possibility of sexual liberation and chemically induced mystical experience, mainline Protestantism abnegating its role as the most influential force in institutional Christianity in order to peddle a nihilistic view of America’s role in the world, rapid changes in communication technology, and higher education’s abandonment of its notion of its own mission as helping young minds grapple with life’s largest questions.
While the rise of the nonverts has characterized the overall picture, even the most ostensibly doctrine-embracing force within institutional Christianity, evangelicalism, has felt the effects of what’s been going on:
Almost one-in-five (18 percent) believes the “Holy Spirit can tell me to do something which is forbidden in the Bible.” A significant majority (65 percent) believe that “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God” while only 29 percent disagree. (Because this is a true/false question, they may have mistakenly assumed “created” was synonymous with “begotten.”)
On the issue of salvation, slightly more than half (57 percent) agree that the “Holy Spirit gives a spiritual new birth or new life before a person has faith in Jesus Christ.” Slightly more than half (51 percent) believe, “Even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation,” and 84 percent agree that “God counts a person as righteous not because of one’s works but only because of one’s faith in Jesus Christ.” More than one-third (38 percent) agree with the statement, “God chose the people he would save before he created the world,” while nearly half (44 percent) disagree.
Almost half (46 percent) believe, “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature and that “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam” (42 percent).
One hundred percent agree that “God created male and female,” yet more than one in five evangelicals (22 percent) also believe that “gender identity is a matter of choice.” Almost all agree that “abortion” (88 percent) and “sex outside of traditional marriage” (90 percent) are sins, and only about one-in-ten (11 percent) believe the “Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn’t apply today.”
Almost one-in-four (23 percent) think that “religious belief is a matter of personal opinion; it is not about objective truth.” More than one-in-three (39 percent) believe “worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church,” while more than one-in-four (26 percent) believe “churches must provide entertaining worship services if they want to be effective.” More than one-in-three (39 percent) believe the prosperity gospel claim that “God will always reward true faith with material blessings in this life.”
We’re kind of back to the scene in the garden in Genesis 1 in which the serpent tempts Eve, aren’t we?
His spiel to her was predicated on the argument that the special tree - the one that imparted the knowledge of good and evil - didn’t look one bit different from any other tree in the grove. Neither did the fruit. Also, that it had been a while since God had directly dealt with the two humans.
Isn’t that where we are right now?
We see Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine and the attendant rise in risk of a nuclear conflagration. We see on a daily basis political figures and celebrities engage in behavior that until recently we would have called “embarrassing oneself.” We’ve taken two of the most basic elements of what it means to be human - sexuality and language - and completely obliterated them.
And what is the answer to the smart-ass postmodern agnostic who pelts us with taunts of “Where is your God?”
Where, indeed?
So I actually owe Ayaan Hirsi Ali a debt of gratitude. She’s given me the opportunity to ask myself just how deep and sincere my own faith is. Does it fill my heart? Am I inclined to tearfully and with trembling drop to my knees at the mention of my Lord’s name?
Not most of the time, but I’m in considerably better shape than I was when I was a clueless agnostic.
Every last one of us is a work in progress. God’s patience is surely among his most precious gifts.
It therefore behooves us to heed Paul’s instruction in 1 Thessalonians 5:11:
Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.
We must check in with regularity on each other’s present state and bring the requisite wisdom, compassion and steadiness of faith to wobbliness where we find it.
I’ll thank you in advance for doing this for me.