Muslim, intellectual, turned atheist finds Jesus

Ayanna Hirsi Ali’s conversion is a reminder God can change any heart

Ayanna Hirsi Ali this week announced her conversion to Christianity. The former Muslim who converted to atheism finally found what she had been looking for all along – Jesus Christ. In Christ are the answers to the world’s biggest problems and deepest threats, asserts Ali in an article she published in Unherd titled, Why I am a Christian. 

“The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” she writes, regarding the threats facing Western society. Ali identifies three of the biggest threats facing the world include: 

• 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.
• The viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation. 

It’s these issues and more that led Ali who is also a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to find faith in Jesus. When she examined the ideas and institutions rooted in Christianity and their vital contributions to human flourishing, Ali concluded Christianity is the answer our world needs. 

“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 marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.”

Ali also realized it’s only in faith that true life can be attained and the deeper questions of life can be answered. 

“I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”

Ali goes on to counter the empty beliefs of atheism and Islam and points people to the answers of Christianity, the historical influence of the faith on all things freedom and goodness, though imperfect, and point others to join her in the quest for truth which she has found in Christianity.