The Place of Christianity in the West: On Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Theologico-Political Conversion
by Anna Sutter
The following article is a slightly revised translation of an essay originally published in German as “Konversion zwecks Konservation: Eine Standortbestimmung des Christentums dies- und jenseits des Atlantik anlässlich Ayaan Hirsi Alis Bekehrung,” in casa|blanca 1/2024. Translated by the author.
In a nod to the Book of Revelation, “The Four Horsemen (of the Anti-Apocalypse)” was the playful moniker chosen for themselves by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens when they gathered for their first joint discussion around 2007. The quartet soon became known for its sharp polemics not only against religious fundamentalism but against religion in general. Strangely unconcerned with the wide range of theoretical as well as historical developments that have challenged the basic premises of Enlightenment rationalism over the past 250 years—from Adorno to the atomic bomb—they prided themselves on promoting a strictly scientific outlook on the world, be it against veritable religious fanaticism or ultimately any kind of speculative thought.
The Fifth Horsewoman
For many years, the Dutch-American politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was considered a key figure in the movement known as New Atheism. Growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, she received an orthodox Islamic education and, as a teenager, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood before eventually fleeing a forthcoming forced marriage by illegally entering the Netherlands in the early nineties. There, she became an apostate and began to engage in political activism. As an uncompromising critic of Islam, she not only faced accusations of Islamophobia but also a constant threat to her life, which peaked after Theo van Gogh, with whom she had made the short film Submission (Part I) about Islam’s degradation of women, was murdered by an Islamist in 2004. The attacker, a Moroccan-Dutch dual citizen born in Amsterdam, had pinned a note with a death threat to Hirsi Ali on the victim’s clothing. She was forced to go into hiding. The price she paid for openly confronting Islam, rather than resorting to nebulous generalizations that make all religions appear as mere shades of the same gray, distinguished Hirsi Ali from antitheists like the biologist Richard Dawkins. Nonetheless, there was a proximity to the “four horsemen.” They appeared on the same YouTube channels and participated together in conferences such as the Global Atheist Convention, where Dawkins gave Hirsi Ali the nickname “Fifth Horsewoman” in 2012.
It came as no surprise, then, that her fellow New Atheists were quite perplexed when the critic of Islam announced in November 2023 that she had converted to Christianity. In an essay titled “Why I Am Now a Christian,”1 echoing Bertrand Russell’s famous “Why I Am Not a Christian,” she explained the reasoning behind her decision: With the expansionist authoritarianism of Russia and China, along with the rise of global Islamism and woke ideology, liberal Western democracies face three interconnected, internal and external threats. Hirsi Ali attributes the West’s weaknesses on all these fronts, at least in part, to a disorientation regarding what fundamentally holds the West together: “The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient,” Hirsi Ali states. “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.” According to her, this legacy ought to be understood as an ensemble 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.” Consequently, the process of secularization that made these modern institutions possible in the first place is presented not as a development in opposition to Christianity but as one that emerged within and through it: “Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage.” In stark contrast to the historical interpretation of her former neo-atheist allies, who conceive of modern freedoms as having been won in bloody battles against Christian orthodoxy, Hirsi Ali understands the church as a forerunner of liberalism.
An Atheist’s Belief in Christianity
In this context, Hirsi Ali implicitly ties into the work of a well-known predecessor, Benedetto Croce. In 1942, Croce, a Vico and Hegel scholar and a leading figure in the intellectual resistance against fascism in the liberal tradition of the Risorgimento, published an essay titled “Perché non possiamo non dirci ‘cristiani’” (“Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves ‘Christians’”).2 Deviating quite significantly from some of his earlier writings, Croce describes the rise of Christianity as the greatest revolution mankind has ever brought about. All other human innovations either fall short of it or, like the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, are dependent on it. To Croce, the spread of Christianity, first in Galilee and Judea and then throughout the Roman Empire, did not in fact result from a divine act of salvation, but constituted a profound change in human consciousness, laying the foundation for the idea of freedom that was to be realized through the centuries that followed.
Croce’s cultural affirmation of Christianity, rather than of Christ, must be understood against the backdrop of his firm rejection of fascism and Nazi barbarism, both of course decidedly anti-Christian. The fact that Croce doesn’t even hint at this connection in his 1942 text and instead praises the civilizational blessings of Christianity in a curiously carefree manner indicates that his concept of history only includes events that contribute to the development of the principle of freedom. Thus, Croce places fascism and National Socialism as footnotes outside a continuous and teleological narrative leading from Jesus to the Risorgimento and finally to the First Republic of 1946. The question of why liberalism failed to prevail and whether some of the necessary preconditions of fascism were in fact immanent to it is not even considered.
This blind spot points to an inherent inconsistency of the liberal belief in Christianity: If the valuable contents of Christianity have entirely migrated into the secular sphere, or conversely, if secular liberalism constitutes the highest stage in a historical development that began with Jesus teaching a morality of freedom, this does not explain why a return to its Christian origins is necessary. It would be, at most, a matter of intellectual honesty to recall the religious roots of modern institutions, but this reminder would lack the urgency with which Hirsi Ali and, in a different way, Croce present it. If, however, as in the case of Hirsi Ali, the insistence on preserving a specifically Christian heritage of the West is motivated by the reference to a crisis in secular Western societies, and if this crisis is not simply to be passed over in favor of a linear conception of progress, one must consider the possibility that something essential was lost with the Enlightenment’s liberation from the religious yoke. Is modernity indeed the bearer of a torch inherited from the Christian Middle Ages, or does it owe itself to a break with tradition, the consequences of which have not been fully reflected upon to this day?3 Anyone who recalls the particular origins of Western universalism would have to confront this question of discontinuity in the process of secularization—even at the risk of jeopardizing cherished liberal certainties. Instead of facilitating the Western self-reassurance Hirsi Ali evidently aims for, this endeavor would then take on the character of self-reflection or even self-doubt.
Unlike Croce, who leaves no doubt that he understands himself as an atheistic advocate of a Christianity measured by human standards, Hirsi Ali, in her own words, experienced existence without any solace from above as unbearable and almost self-destructive, further stating that she has come to believe that the question of the meaning of life can only be answered by turning to God. However, this reference to the personal dimension of her conversion remains vague, and the most interesting aspect of it is what Hirsi Ali does not say: that she believes in the life, death, and resurrection of God’s begotten Son, Jesus Christ. This gap, which marks the text’s close proximity to Croce’s despite its declared intention, became the subject of a minor journalistic controversy in its aftermath. Paradoxically, it was mainly her former comrades from the New Atheism circle who accused Hirsi Ali of not having genuinely converted and of merely instrumentalizing Judeo-Christian “values” as a weapon in a political conflict.4 Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali’s Christian supporters—more humanistic in this regard than the self-proclaimed humanists on the other side—declared that conversion is not a matter of total, overnight transformation but often a process lasting years; they also criticized their secular opponents for their almost inquisitorial zeal to dissect souls.5
In this dispute over the apparently instrumental character of Hirsi Ali’s conversion, the underlying assumption of her explanation has scarcely been questioned: namely, the assumption that Christianity today actually has the potential to serve as a weapon in the conflict with the mentioned internal and external enemies of the West. In short, is the trust in Christianity as a civilizational force defending the West even justified? The treatment of this question is complicated by the fact that Hirsi Ali remained silent about her newfound denominational affiliation. If a conversion at least to some degree owes itself to political considerations, one would think that the real political-theological condition of the institution one is joining would have to play a decisive role in these considerations. To put the question more succinctly: Which Christianity can today be invoked as a credible force defending the West against external and internal threats? In the following, this question shall be considered by focusing on Lutheran, Catholic, and Evangelical responses to Islamic and Islamist ideologies that operate globally and frequently materialize into concrete violence, the destructive force of which has (again) become painfully apparent following October 7.
Europe’s Churches in Decline?
Invoking the Protestant churches of Western Europe in this context would be delusional. While certainly assuming an avant-garde role, the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) is not at all alone in diligently striving to align the interpretation of Holy Scripture as closely as possible with the statutes of government-affiliated NGOs. The ever-increasing similarity between the churches and a wide civil society promoting sustainability, social justice, and democratic values is not only politically harmful but also precludes the possibility of an institutionally framed religious reorientation. Of genuine spiritual interest would be precisely those elements of the Christian heritage that cannot easily be made to fit into activist discourses. By occupying and concealing this heritage with dull contemporary buzzwords, official Evangelical Christianity leaves little room in its ranks for a struggle with transcendence mediated through revelation.
This is not a new phenomenon but rather the radicalization of a long-standing tendency within Protestantism. Karl Barth had already succinctly criticized nineteenth-century Protestant theology for having lost sight of its own fundamental questions and problems in its effort to assert itself in the face of modernity. With all the energy put into communicating “through the open doors and windows to the outside,” he wrote, Protestant theology had “hardly any time, love, and desire left for the work to be done inside the house,” while “the air blowing in from outside” was, according to Barth, “not always fresh, but in many cases decidedly foul.”6 Today, the question arises whether the walls of the house are still standing; whether there is still a meaningful distinction to be made between an inner life of Protestant theology and its external environment. The erosion of the autonomy of theology—the same can be said for science and art—is both a result of and a contributor to the pre-totalitarian encroachment of an activist state apparatus on all areas of life. The constant encouragement in churches, as well as in schools and universities, to think freely without regard for authority produces subjects who, precisely because they have not been taught any law to rely on, readily comply with every new regulation.
Thus, in the crisis of the West, Protestant theology not only is unsuitable as a remedy but is itself involved in the symptomatic processes. This is evident, for example, in the fact that Annette Kurschus, then-chairwoman of the EKD council, declared at the synod in November 2023 that Jews in Germany should “not have the slightest doubt that they can count on the churches,” while in the same breath insisting that we must “resist anti-Muslim resentment at all costs.” She continued: “I have received countless letters following my recent statements on migration, letters that essentially say: ‘You want to let in masses of people who incite against Jews here, shame on you!’ Thus, shameless hatred of Muslims disguises itself as friendship with Israel. In reality, it is pure racism, and our faith compels us to speak out strongly against it.”7
Her statements on migration, to which she refers here, were made at the end of October 2023 in an interview with the FAZ. Among other things, she had said: “Does the capacity for intake have limits? From the perspective of neighborly love, this limit lies where self-abandonment occurs. I believe we are far from reaching this limit.”8 A bit of semantic subtlety is needed to clarify the implications of this statement. Limits, if they are to prevent self-abandonment, must be set long before the point of self-abandonment is reached; however, Kurschus’s statement implies that the limit of intake capacity should coincide with the point of self-abandonment. And indeed, the signs of the times point in this direction: only a few months after Kurschus’s FAZ interview, a Mexican tourist was physically attacked in Munich by a group of six German, Eritrean, Syrian, and Yemeni nationals because he wore a kippah; a woman and a man conversing in Hebrew were spat on, attacked with a chair, and punched in the face by an Arabic-speaking man in a fast-food restaurant in Neukölln, a notorious Berlin district where Islam has long come to dominate everyday street life; Jewish student Lahav Shapira was brutally beaten up by a classmate with Arab origins for having opposed anti-Zionist activism at the Free University of Berlin; and in Zurich, an orthodox Jew was stabbed by a naturalized Tunisian youth who professed allegiance to ISIS in a video. These events likely will not change anything about Kurschus’s assessment, for it is her unwavering “faith” that compels her to see nothing but a racist delusion in the connection between Muslim immigration and the concrete threat to Jews in Western Europe.
When it comes to its stance on migration policy and Islam, the Catholic Church is generally guided by a similar sentiment. In hindsight, the legacy of Pope Benedict—who had warned of political Islam most notably, but not exclusively, in his famous “Regensburg Address”—now appears as a brief interlude in a trend that predates and outlasts him. As early as October 1965, the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate set the Church’s course for a new attitude toward Islam. Initially planned as a declaration exclusively about the Church’s relationship with Judaism that intended to lay the foundation for overcoming Christian anti-Judaism, it was perceived in a paranoid manner by both Christians and Muslims in the Arab states as a commitment to the State of Israel and an act of favoritism toward the Jews. Vehement protests resulted in a lengthy struggle over the declaration, with the bishops’ conferences of the partly decolonized, partly decolonizing Global South opposing what they described as a one-sidedly Western stance of the Church. In the end, a draft was agreed upon that addressed Judaism within the framework of a broader discussion of the Church’s relations to non-Christian religions, Islam among them. The declaration exemplifies how the Church’s attempt to live up to its self-understanding as “all-encompassing” (kat holon) and its claim to the universality of reason turn into relativism and political recklessness. Most notably, the text states that the Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions”—which, as it refers to all religions worldwide, cannot but be regarded as a papal endorsement of the postmodern “anything goes” mindset. In the section on Islam, then, the declared “esteem” for Muslims is combined with the call to “forget the past” and to strive for “social justice and moral welfare, peace and freedom” for all mankind, thereby indicating the Church’s recent tendency to concretize its emphatic concept of humanity in an ethic of defeatism.9 Pope Francis’s Easter call for a #CeasefireNow in Gaza further illustrates the point: when the Christian ideal of loving one’s enemies is made the standard not only in the moral and spiritual but also in the political sphere, the hope for universal salvation may lead to a reckless denial of reality.
A German View of the Christian Right
While there may be an indeterminate number of church members who regularly shake their heads at the actions of their spiritual leaders, Europe by and large has become accustomed to the Islam-friendly positions of the largest churches. Consequently, there is a significant sense of bewilderment regarding the situation across the Atlantic. Since at least the 2016 presidential election, Evangelicals, who made up a significant voting bloc for Trump, have in Germany become an ideal vehicle for projecting both anti-American and anti-Christian resentment. Little is known in Germany about their history, theological profile, and political influence, but the images of protests in front of abortion clinics are familiar, and there is a consensus that these people pose a threat to democracy in the United States.
The success of journalist Annika Brockschmidt, who published a bestseller in 2021 with the sensationalist title America’s Holy Warriors: How the Christian Right Endangers Democracy (and followed up in January 2024 with The Arsonists: How Extremists Took Over the Republican Party), is based on this gut feeling widely shared among Germans.10 The tireless emphasis on the “diversity”—that is, the indeterminacy and indiscernibility—of the Christian Right allows the author to absolve herself of the responsibility of coming to terms with actual religious and political developments in the United States. Rather than adopting an analytical approach to issues like racism, misogyny, homophobia, and theocratic political ideas—all tendencies that undeniably exist within Neo-Evangelicalism and the religious right to some degree—Brockschmidt’s book comes across as a collage of unwelcome quotes. The incontestability of a left-liberal normative consensus on pandemic policy, climate, Islam, migration, and gender is silently assumed, and anyone who expresses differing views is portrayed as part of a diffuse yet all-encompassing “Christian nationalist” conspiracy. Whenever her protagonists fail to match the image of the fanatical white supremacist she tries to paint, she takes this not as a challenge to her claims but as evidence for the movement’s aspiration to present a friendly face to the outside world. She then diagnoses a “coded version” of Christian nationalism, supposedly recognizable by the emphasis on “Judeo-Christian values.” According to this logic, Ayaan Hirsi Ali would have already qualified as a “Christian nationalist” with her declaration of her conversion.
Among the accusations Brockschmidt makes against the Christian right, the charge of Islamophobia cannot be missing. Her substantiations, if one chooses to call them that, read, for instance, as follows: “Jerry Falwell called Mohammed a ‘terrorist’ on television in 2002—a statement that caused a diplomatic scandal and even led to riots in India in which five people died.”11 Implicitly suggesting that Falwell is somehow responsible for these deaths, while completely glossing over the bizarre hypersensitivity of the prophet-followers to which this story attests, is clearly absurd. Brockschmidt is not wrong, however, to point out that leading Evangelicals have repeatedly made critical as well as polemical remarks about Islam in recent decades. This should come as no surprise, for they also make up the most uncompromising supporters of the Israeli cause in America. Consider, for example, the unequivocal clarity of the statement of support published on October 11, 2023, and signed by numerous leading figures of American Evangelicalism: “Since the inception of the modern state of Israel in 1948, Israel has faced numerous attacks, incursions, and violations of its national sovereignty. The Jewish people have long endured genocidal attempts to eradicate them and to destroy the Jewish state. These antisemitic, deadly ideologies and terrorist actions must be opposed.”12
These lines merely express what had been more or less unchallenged American common sense for several decades. And yet they deserve special mention at a time when half of all 18- to 24-year-old Americans are in favor of “ending Israel and handing it over to Hamas,” and when support for Israel is declining even among young Republicans.13 In light of these findings, it is crucial to take a sober look at the history and present of Evangelicals as a political force when considering the potential role of Christianity in defending an increasingly fragile West.
Eschatological Zionism and Historical Experience
The roots of Evangelicalism lie in Pietism, Presbyterianism, and Puritanism, as well as the interdenominational Protestant revival movements in the New World since the 1730s, though most of its characteristic features likely emerged only from the late nineteenth century onward.14 At that time, postmillennialism was prevalent among American protestants of all denominations. Focused on Revelation 20, this teaching asserted that Jesus Christ would return only after a thousand years of divine reign on earth. Throughout this time span, the millennium, good would progressively triumph over evil, with the parousia being the ultimate endpoint of this positive development within the secular realm. Because of the optimism at its core, postmillennial eschatology is mostly compatible with Enlightenment liberalism’s progressive view of history.
By contrast, premillennialism, initially less popular, expected Christ’s return and the end times to come about before the establishment of his thousand-year reign, and potentially at any given moment in time. The doctrine originated in the early Church but was rejected by Augustine and lost significance in the Middle Ages before experiencing a revival among Puritans in the seventeenth century. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, dispensationalism, a specific form of premillennial eschatology popularized by the Irishman John Darby, spread increasingly in the United States. Followers of this movement fervently anticipate the moment when Jesus will return and instantly rapture devout Christians along with the dead into the clouds to join the Lord. Nonbelievers, left behind, will then witness the Antichrist’s seven-year reign on earth, culminating in the Battle of Armageddon, in which Christ shall defeat the Antichrist to finally establish his millennial kingdom.
For many premillennialists, Israel plays a crucial role in this eschatological schema. Darby posited that the return of Jews to the Holy Land would signal the start of the end times, with the Battle of Armageddon eventually occurring on Israeli soil. Evangelical William E. Blackstone, author of the influential 1878 book Jesus Is Coming, significantly contributed to popularizing this doctrine. Learning about the rapid increase in pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire and the nascent Zionist movement in the 1880s, he convened American Christian and Jewish leaders who in turn issued a resolution in solidarity with Eastern European Jews. In 1891, he addressed the Blackstone Memorial petition to President Harrison, urging the United States to support the return of Palestine to the Jews in response to Russian pogroms. Thus, it was with him that “Christian Zionism,” to which (Neo-)Evangelicals still adhere, became a political force in America for the first time.
The close connection between Evangelicals’ end-time beliefs and their support for Israel is an easy target for ridicule and, as such, often used by anti-Zionists as a tool to delegitimize Israel. The vivid retelling of unfulfilled eschatological predictions is guaranteed to provoke politically charged laughs and sneers. Yet it does not do the matter justice, for it omits important historical context. The rise of Evangelicalism in its current form is closely tied to the experiences of the two world wars. Dispensationalists have embedded their apocalyptic visions in a continuous and often meticulous inquiry into geopolitical developments since at least the 1910s. Their end-time message was grounded in a distinctly anti-German foreign policy stance and gained much of its traction precisely because it appeared increasingly plausible in light of the catastrophes of the twentieth century—while at the same time aiming to alleviate the horrors by integrating them into a divine salvation plan. The relative success of premillennial eschatology can therefore be regarded as indicating a collective unwillingness to confront the unspeakable negative that was the Holocaust. But a similar repressive reflex is also at work when left-leaning Germans abstract from this historical background and treat Evangelical end-time expectations as deranged Yankee delusions.
That being said, it is simplistic to reduce Evangelicals’ support for Israel to their end-time beliefs. Blackstone’s example shows that “Christian Zionism” has always involved other motives, such as moral outrage over the suffering of Russian Jewry. And anyone who has read the aforementioned “Statement of Support” must admit that Evangelicals are indeed capable of justifying their support for Israel in political terms. How else could it be, considering that they succeeded in establishing numerous pro-Israel lobby organizations with close ties to other Zionist groups in America and Israel after World War II? They built on an already existing network. The mainline churches had been advocating for the establishment and survival of the Jewish state since the 1920s. Similar to the New Left, they only began distancing themselves from the Zionist project in the 1960s and today sometimes express openly anti-Israel views.15 It could be argued that this change of heart is the real issue in need of explanation, while the Neo-Evangelicals, increasingly isolated in this stance, merely continue an originally interdenominational American Protestant tradition.
Fundamentalists without a Fundament
On a political level, despite occasional antisemitic remarks from within their ranks, Evangelicals can certainly be considered an objectively anti-antisemitic force. However, the theological substance of their teachings is fundamentally questionable. The self-designation as “fundamentalists,” which conservative Evangelicals adopted during and after World War I, is misleading: their doctrines are not the result of a return to the fundamentals of Christian faith, but rather a creatio ex manipulo—a creation not out of nothing, but from only a handful of connections within Christian tradition. Pivotal influences were Darby’s dispensationalism, with its unique interpretations of the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, and a specific understanding of biblical infallibility. Guided by the philosophical empiricism of Francis Bacon, premillennialists applied his inductive method to biblical exegesis: the collection and sorting of “hard facts”—i.e., literally interpreted Bible verses—should come first, and only thereafter may a system of general statements be formulated. The fact that Christian fundamentalists would build on a sensualistic epistemology may seem bewildering to outsiders. However, given the fierce anti-Catholicism that characterized the Evangelical movement for many decades, it makes sense when understood as a demarcation from Aristotelianism, scholastic theology, and the dogmatic tradition of the old Church.
After World War II, the movement’s leaders began to distance themselves from the banner of fundamentalism, under which they had maneuvered themselves into cultural isolation due to their aggressive anti-Darwinist agenda. Now calling themselves Evangelicals, they sought new ways of mobilization. Both a catalyst for and a result of this realignment was the rise of Billy Graham. In September 1949, two days after President Truman announced that the Soviets had built an atomic bomb, the young Baptist preacher gathered his followers in Los Angeles for the first of a series of revival meetings, subsequently touring the states for weeks as a celebrated star. By the mid-1950s, he was so well-known that he was flown to Paris, where Roland Barthes, among others, attended the spectacle. “If God is really speaking through Dr. Graham’s mouth, it must be acknowledged that God is quite stupid,” noted Barthes afterward. “In any case, assuredly, God is no longer a Thomist, He shrinks from logic.” Barthes’s point here is that Graham’s performance broke “with a whole tradition of the sermon, Catholic or Protestant, inherited from ancient culture,” and more specifically, with its “requirement to persuade” through rational discourse. Instead of the logocentric method of preaching, Graham employed “a method of magical transformation,” substituting “suggestion for persuasion: the pressure of the delivery, the systematic eviction of any rational content from the proposition, the grandiloquent designation of the Bible held at arm’s length like the universal can opener of a quack peddler, and above all the absence of warmth, the manifest contempt for others, all these operations belong to the classic material of the music hall hypnotists.”16
With some good will, a publication influential in Evangelical circles from the 1990s can be seen as a belated reply to Barthes. In 1991, theologian and pastor Douglas Wilson published Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education, significantly contributing to popularizing the idea of a classical Christian education and explicitly criticizing Christian anti-intellectualism.17 The movement, now known as “Classical Education” and supported by a substantial network of private schools and homeschooling parents, aims for a holistic education oriented toward “classics” of the Western canon, and more specifically toward classical antiquity. This is pursued both formally, through a tiered model progressing from grammar to logic to rhetoric, and substantively, engaging with works by Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, and Plotinus. The future of Classical Education, whose influence extends beyond Evangelical circles, hinges on whether it will genuinely address and try to overcome the specifically Evangelical as well as more broadly modern alienation from this tradition, or whether it will merely adorn itself with the aura of lofty historicity in the culture war against woke ideology and the public education sector.
To the West of Athens and Jerusalem
At first glance, the results of this brief political mapping of Christianity today might seem disheartening for those who share Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conservative impulse. When asked which denomination truly embodies the desire to uphold the “Judeo-Christian tradition” and can “equip us for civilizational war” (to echo Hirsi Ali’s somewhat dramatic phrasing), no positive answer can be given. While the decidedly pro-Israel and pro-Western Neo-Evangelicals cannot credibly be said to represent a tradition extending back to the intellectual roots of the West, Catholic and Protestant clergy of the Old Continent have over recent decades consistently aligned themselves with forces that threaten the further survival of what remains from this tradition.
However, claiming that they betray their own heritage is only half the truth. Christian Europe has, in its two-thousand-year history, been characterized by an unparalleled ability for self-questioning and self-relativization. An early model for this is Herodotus, who, in the fifth century BCE, was the first to aim at a prejudice-free depiction of some cultural practices of non-Greek peoples in his Histories. As noted by Allan Bloom, this proto-ethnological method presupposes the understanding that one’s own customs are not to be taken as an absolute standard. In this sense, the Western universalism of reason goes hand in hand with the willingness to consider the possibility that certain foreign ways of life might be superior to one’s own traditions. It therefore cannot be defended in the same identitarian fashion as a community that is inherently convinced of the superiority of its own particular makeup. For this reason, Western societies are vulnerable in a way that non-Western ones are not. The phenomena that today represent a tendency toward self-dissolution in the churches of Western Europe—excessive sensitivity to the concerns of other cultures, insistence on an abstractly understood human dignity used to justify open-border policies and the appeasement of political Islam, blindness to Europe’s civilizational achievements—are thus not so much a straying from the right path as they are manifestations (or in some instances parodies or perversions) of a problem as old as the West itself.18
French philosopher Rémi Brague attributes this fundamental difference between Europe, on the one hand, and Islam or China, on the other, to a specifically Roman awareness of cultural “eccentricity.” The uniqueness of Rome—if we take the name not merely as a designation for a historical empire but as a symbol in the same way “Athens” and “Jerusalem” have become symbols—consists in its recognition that the sources of its cultural life lie outside itself. It knows itself to be dependent on origins that are foreign to it and therefore must be consciously and continually reappropriated: Hellenism and Judaism. Christianity, specifically the “Roman” Catholic Church, is defined by Brague as the paradigmatic embodiment of this attitude. Thus, it is not merely a content but the form of Western civilization, which becomes endangered together with it.
It should now be apparent why the response to such danger cannot be a mantra-like invocation of the Christian tradition. This tradition is not an object lying around somewhere and waiting to be taken up to serve a political purpose. It is not readily available and never has been. On the contrary, it is characterized by a specific mode of absence, for it owes itself to a movement of appropriation of foreign and contradictory origins—Greek on one side, Jewish on the other—that is driven by a painful sense of cultural lack: the sense that something is missing and must be searched for in a distant and ambivalent past.19
The various “renaissances” on European soil emerged from such a sense of lack and were characterized by their ability to wrest new perspectives from old texts, shifting or disrupting the existing horizons of meaning. In consequence, they did not immediately lend themselves as armor for “the West” against internal and external threats. Conversely, the politically motivated attempt to bring Greek philosophy, Roman law, scholastic theology, and modern Enlightenment together under a common slogan often obscures the understanding of each individual subject, thereby contributing to the freezing into clichés of the very tradition from which salvation is hoped. Contrary to the implications of Hirsi Ali’s essay, activities aimed at a political defense of the West can never be fully aligned with the rejuvenation of its intellectual substance. The two purposes are obviously intertwined, but they can never be reconciled. While pragmatism in forming alliances and the courage to define enemies are required politically, only the radically open and non-instrumental immersion into forgotten words will show the spiritual way forward. Though she does not fully recognize the complexities and contradictions that come with such an endeavor, Hirsi Ali’s turn to the Christian foundations of the West certainly points in the right direction.
Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues • Israel Initiative
After completing a degree in philosophy and Judaic studies, with frequent excursions into classical philology, Anna Sutter is currently studying law in Berlin. She is a contributing editor at the magazine casa|blanca – Texte zur falschen Zeit and regularly publishes articles there. Her interests include political philosophy, ideology critique, and theology.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I Am Now a Christian: Atheism Can’t Equip Us for Civilisational War,” UnHerd, November 11, 2023, https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/.
Benedetto Croce, “Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christians,” in My Philosophy, and Other Essays on the Moral and Political Problems of Our Time, trans. E. F. Carritt (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949), pp. 37–47.
Both Hans Blumenberg and Eric Voegelin held that the latter is the case, though they argued about whether modernity is characterized by the ultimate overcoming of the “gnostic” worldview or, on the contrary, by its resurrection. See, among others: Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays (Chicago: Regnery, 1968); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).
Richard Dawkins, “Open Letter from Richard Dawkins to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali,” The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins, November 16, 2023, https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/open-letter-from-richard-dawkins.
Carl R. Trueman, “Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali Became a Christian,” First Things, November 30, 2023, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/11/why-ayaan-hirsi-ali-became-a-christian; Sohrab Ahmari, “In Defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion,” American Conservative, November 14, 2023, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/in-defense-of-ayaan-hirsi-alis-conversion/.
Karl Barth, Evangelische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Zollikon/Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1957), pp. 10f., my translation.
Her speech can be watched at Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, “Bericht des Rates der EKD Annette Kurschus #synode2023,” YouTube video, 51:34, November 12, 2023.
Reinhard Bingener, “Wir benötigen deutlich mehr legale Zugangswege nach Europa,” FAZ, October 29, 2023, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/interview-mit-ekd-ratsvorsitzender-kurschus-19276804.html, my translation.
Pope Paul VI, “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian Religions: Nostra Aetate,” October 28, 1965, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html.
Annika Brockschmidt, Amerikas Gotteskrieger: Wie die Religiöse Rechte die Demokratie gefährdet (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2021).
Ibid., p. 85. Falwell had said: “I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough of the history of his life written by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to know] that he was a violent man, a man of war. . . . Jesus set the example for love, as did Moses. I think Muhammad set an opposite example.” He even apologized afterward, which Brockschmidt leaves unmentioned. See Mary-Jayne McKay, “Falwell Sorry for Bashing Muhammad,” CBS News, October 11, 2002, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/falwell-sorry-for-bashing-muhammad/.
“Evangelical Statement in Support of Israel,” Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, October 11, 2023, https://erlc.com/resource-library/statements/israel/.
See “Poll: Most Young Americans Think Israel Should Be ‘Ended and Given to Hamas,’” Times of Israel, December 17, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/; and Maayan Jaffe-Hoffmann, “Younger Republicans Are Less Supportive of Israel, Poll Finds,” Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/younger-republicans-are-less-supportive-of-israel-poll-finds-587810.
See here and for the following passages on Neo-Evangelicalism and Christian Zionism: Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2014); and Paul C. Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism, 1891–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1998).
See Chris Herlinger, “Reckoning with Israel: Thorny Issue for Mainline Churches,” Christian Century, May 22, 2002, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2002-05/reckoning-israel; and Tom Copeland, “Dangerous Trends in American Protestant Support for Israel,” Jerusalem Post, March 28, 2022, https://www.jpost.com/christianworld/article-702574.
Roland Barthes, “Billy Graham at the Vel’ d’Hiv’,” in Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), pp. 109–12.
Douglas Wilson, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1991). The same Douglas Wilson engaged Christopher Hitchens in a debate from 2007 onward, which resulted in the production of a documentary film, Collision (2009), and a jointly published book, Is Christianity Good for the World? (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2008).
This argument has been famously and lucidly put forward by Allan Bloom in the introduction to his book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
Rémi Brague, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, trans. Samuel Lester (South Bend, IN: Saint Augustine’s Press, 2002).