Like many left-leaning teenagers during the 2000s, my introduction to hard-line unbelief came from YouTube clips of the so-called “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.” In these videos, commentators Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris would dismantle fundamentalist Christian beliefs with facts and logic. At a time when the Bush administration was using the language of crusade to justify the Iraq War, it was easy to see this uncompromising, combative strain of atheism as progressive.
But in hindsight, the movement offered more defenses than critiques of Bush’s most violent and ignorant policies—particularly toward Muslims. Hitchens infamously turned hawkish, while Harris wrote apologias for airport profiling and torture. Such views followed naturally from the New Atheist conception of Islam as an essentially evil, irrational ideology from which Muslims must be liberated.
Sometimes referred to as the movement’s “Fifth Horseman,” Somali-Dutch writer, activist, and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali lent credibility to this view of Islam with her personal story. After escaping her native Somalia, where she’d been indoctrinated and mutilated by the Muslim Brotherhood, Ali found political asylum in the Netherlands, as well as a career in center-right politics. Her decision to renounce Islam seemed validated when her creative collaborator, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a terrorist over their anti-Islamic short film, Submission.
Unlike most of her fellow New Atheists, Ali rarely aimed her criticisms at religions other than Islam. Her public conversion to Christianity, announced in an essay in UnHerd titled “Why I Am Now a Christian,” is therefore not entirely shocking, especially since the bulk of her essay focuses on the political instrumentality of Christianity over its truth claims.
In Ali’s view, Western civilization is under attack by existential threats at home and abroad: global Islamic terrorism, the geopolitical power of China and Russia, and the spread of “woke ideology.” Secular tools are insufficient to combat these threats. The only credible defense is “our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” a tradition which consists of “an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity.” These ideas and institutions are, for Ali, unprecedented in human history—a defining achievement and bequest of Western civilization.
Predictably, the essay was criticized by many atheist and skeptic publications, and celebrated by many high-profile conservative Christian commentators, who took for granted her claims about Western civilization and its enemies without and within. “The fire of the faith upon which we built a civilization has grown dim in our hearts,” wrote Rod Dreher at the European Conservative, “but to one like her, who ran to be with us out of the darkness of Islamic fundamentalism, even our embers shine like lighthouses.” Meanwhile, Carl R. Trueman at First Things dismisses misgivings over the fact that Ali only mentions Jesus once in the essay while lauding her concern “with how the West is dismantling its traditional cultural norms and with what it intends to replace them.”
But Ali’s reasoning calls for a more critical Christian response. For one thing, the implications of a multipolar world are far more ambiguous than Ali allows. Global Islamic terrorism has declined since the mid-2010s, and this decline seems likely to continue if the West avoids the military interventions that create conditions under which religious extremism becomes attractive. As for “woke ideology,” the censorious and simplistic strains of social-justice discourse that predominate in some online spaces are certainly regrettable, but it is foolish to view such tendencies as a coherent, destructive ideology. In large part, they are symptomatic of polarization fueled by the incentive structure of both legacy media and social media. Those concerned with free speech should be far more alarmed by the censorious response to “wokeness” on the Right. Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act, for example, threatens to ban the discussion in public schools of any facts inconvenient conservative ideology.
Ali inflates these threats to the West while ignoring more genuine threats that are global in nature: climate change, global pandemics, and war, including nuclear war. These are also existential and spiritual threats as much as physical ones, but they cannot be solved through “civilizational war.” They require international collaboration and multilateral action—the kind of cooperation that is hindered by corporate interests, on the one hand, and, on the other, ascendant right-wing nationalist movements, which traffic in the same paranoid fears of cultural contamination that Ali advances.
Faced with such divisiveness, the question Ali aims at Westerners alone—“What unites us?”—must be expanded. What unites us in the West to those cultures with whom we experience real differences, but with whom we must cooperate in order to survive?
One credible answer lies in the classical theist definition of God, explored in Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Written in 2013, Hart’s book debunks an idea of God typically shared by religious fundamentalists and evangelical atheists alike, that of one exceptionally powerful, wise, and moral being among many. Hart draws instead upon a venerable Sanskrit formulation of God, satchitanada, which translates roughly to being (sat), consciousness (chit), and bliss (ananda). In this definition, God is not a being, but Being as such—the absolute, unconditioned reality on which all contingent things depend, and in which all things find their ultimate fulfillment.
Hart uses this definition not only because it recurs through various faiths, from Hinduism to Christianity to Islam, but because being, consciousness, and bliss “are ideal descriptions not only of how various traditions understand the nature of God, but also of how the reality of God can, according to those traditions, be experienced and known by us.” Hart shows how theistic arguments have, for millennia, deduced these attributes of God from the same mysteries of existence experienced by all people, in all times, in every conceivable cultural context.
If everything in the material world is contingent upon something else for its existence, how could anything have come to exist at all? What accounts for the miraculous intelligibility of the material world, the mysterious coherence between the laws of nature and the abstractive faculties of the human mind? And how can we make sense of an apparently fundamental human desire for the fulfillment of absolute values? Of course, reasonable people may disagree with the conclusions classical theistic thinkers have drawn from reflection upon these mysteries. But as Hart points out, they are mysteries universal to the human experience, arising from a primordial awe at the unlikeliness of being. (They also happen to be conspicuously absent from Ali’s conversion narrative.)
Yet it is not only the commonality and immediacy of such experience that makes classical theism a fruitful ground for human unity. Wherever the definition of God as being, consciousness, and bliss has been articulated, ideas and practices honoring human life, freedom, and dignity have been instituted. The most cursory glance at history gives the lie to Ali’s assertion that the Judeo-Christian tradition alone “advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible.”
The contributions of non-Western religions and philosophies to the protection of human life and freedom are too vast to enumerate here. But since Ali makes the bold claim that Islam is fundamentally hostile to free speech and thought, a good starting point might be the emperor Akbar, who ruled over the Mughal empire in South Asia from 1556 to 1604. In his book The Argumentative Indian, economist Amartya Sen points out that at a time when Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome, Akbar “was busy arranging dialogues between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews, and even atheists” while issuing laws that protected the right of people to practice the religion of their choice without interference. A devout Muslim, Akbar nonetheless allowed proponents of the atheistic Cārvāka school into his multi-faith “House of Worship,” undermining Ali’s claim that no Muslim philosopher has ever been able to profess unbelief in an Islamic society.
Akbar is far from an isolated case. Take the individualist spirituality of Sufi mystics, or the prefigurative secularism of the Ottoman millet system, or the fact that Jews fled from medieval Christian Europe to the far more religiously tolerant Islamic Empire. Safeguarding religious freedom is by no means unique to “Western civilization,” nor unknown to Islam. If many contemporary Islamic societies adhere to more fundamentalist and intolerant forms of the religion, we should look to the material conditions and history that led to their triumph over more liberal one—for example, CIA-funded training of Muhajideen during the Cold War. Instead, Ali and her cheerleaders rely on essentialist definitions of Islam that obscure all historical context.
Even the neat division Ali assumes between “Western” and “non-Western” civilization must itself be challenged. It may be true that modern secular humanist values of reasoned analysis over appeals to tradition and authority have roots in Christianity—particularly Scholasticism, with its emphasis on dialectical reasoning and critical engagement with biblical texts. But Scholasticism was deeply informed and influenced by Mu’tazilism, an early medieval Islamic school of theology that privileged the role of reason and intellect in apprehending God while relativizing the authority of hadith, Muhammed’s teachings and deeds. “Western” concepts of freedom of conscience and speech are therefore not only indebted to “centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities,” as Ali claims, but to Islamic theology.
It is no coincidence that such schools of thought developed out of classical theist traditions. Any religion which views God as the infinite consciousness from which all things originate, and to which they are ultimately destined, must presume the intrinsic rationality of the universe, the ability of the human mind to grasp it, and the absolute value of truth as such. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers of these traditions demonstrate an openness to truth wherever it might be found. Rather than confining themselves to their own culture, Scholastics drew from Islam just as Islamic theologians drew from Aristotle. Such openness could not be further from Ali and her allies’ understanding of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” that must remain vacuum-sealed against all contaminants.
Why, then, does the simplistic, isolationist reading of culture, religion, and history appeal at all? Ali herself unintentionally offers an answer when she explains her disillusionment with triumphalist atheism: “[Bertrand] Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the ‘God-hole’—the void left by the retreat of the church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma.” It seems to me that, rather than being a solution, the cult of “Western civilization” is a perfect example of one such dogma.
For one thing, the spiritual and intellectual traditions of the West comprise not only Judaism and Christianity, but atheism, nihilism, paganism, and many other contradictory strands of thought—to say nothing of the chasmic differences of thought and practice that exist within Judaism and Christianity. This diverse history—coupled with abundant examples refuting the idea of freedom, secularism, and humanism as uniquely “Western” values—make clear that the notion of “Western civilization” appeals not as truth, but as narrative. It is a narrative that offers a balm for anxieties shared by fundamentalist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood—in Ali’s words, it offers “the power of a unifying story…to attract, engage, and mobilize.”
In The Experience of God, Hart recounts how, in the modern era, a materialist, scientific worldview eclipsed that of classical theism. The empirical methods of science congealed into a metaphysical picture of the cosmos as a purposeless, mechanistic, closed system, rather than one open to the transcendent. As empiricism became the dominant criterion of truth, Christians misapplied “the rigorous but quite limited methods of the modern empirical sciences to questions properly belonging to the realms of logic and spiritual experience.” Thus, the classical theistic definition of God as a transcendent source of being, consciousness, and bliss gave way to a literalistic, logically indefensible portrait of a benevolent, bearded superman, hiding out in some undiscovered corner of the universe—“Mr. God,” to use Hart’s term.
Torn between nihilism and an illogical picture of God, and unable to shake the perennial longing for meaning and intuition of the absolute, it is understandable why Ali and so many others look for purpose and security in an imagined monolithic cultural inheritance of unique importance to humankind. Yet this chauvinistic view of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a raft of reason and humanity in a sea of barbarism has only made the world more dangerous.
Classical theism provides a much more powerful, comprehensive, and intellectually credible story. It offers a universal morality anchored in many different cultural contexts, not just “Western” ones. Because freedom, dignity, security, and well-being are not uniquely “Judeo-Christian” values, Westerners can join Ali in condemning the misogyny, antisemitism, and violence of sects like the Muslim Brotherhood while avoiding cultural imperialism. Islamic theologians themselves—for instance, Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi—provide their own basis for the critique of such sects. In supporting Muslim allies who adhere to these philosophies, Westerners honor the legacy of their own religious traditions at their most humane without erasing those of non-Westerners.
In The Argumentative Indian, Sen quotes the third-century BCE Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka, who, centuries before Akbar, instituted a legal code of religious tolerance and pluralism: “He who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.” In a time of anxiety, divisiveness, and despair, the classical theist schools of Christianity offer a bounty of resources for expressing meaning and hope, and outlining one path among many toward a transcendent reality accessible to all peoples and cultures. There is no better way to squander and dishonor that legacy than by using it as a cudgel in a self-destructive clash of civilizations.
