What Fills a Soul?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

There are two news items I came across recently that provide a curious contradiction—and point us to the biggest question of our era.

One is the unexpected conversion to Christianity of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the famous apostate from Islam who for a long while embraced secularism. She now proclaims that Christianity is the necessary foundation for a defense of Western values.

But the story I want to start with is a newer development that seriously complicates Hirsi Ali’s claim.

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Twice as Many Dabo Girls

Late last week, a news item came flashing across social media that was so deliciously good I had to reflexively guard myself against it. I wanted to believe it too much.

The story is that Florida police are investigating a charge of rape against Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a key ally of Governor Ron DeSantis. That’s the tragic part of the story; here’s the comic part. The woman he allegedly attacked had previously had a consensual “three-way sexual encounter”—that’s the phrase the newspapers are using—with Ziegler and his wife, Bridget Ziegler.

Bridget Ziegler was one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, the organization that has been banning books they imagine to have inappropriate sexual content. And more: Mrs. Ziegler was also a prominent advocate of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, an extremely broad ban on discussion of sexual orientation in public schools. So the woman leading the charge in the latest Christian gay panic was having sex with another woman.

You can understand my caution with this story. The Zieglers read like a couple of cardboard villains dreamed up by a third-rate television screenwriter—the puritanical holy rollers who are secretly swingers. I mean, did he actually have to be named “Christian”? Isn’t that a little too on-the-nose?

On the one hand, I wanted to resist this story because it so obviously validates my prior assumptions about religious conservatives. On the other hand, how do you think I formed those prior assumptions? By watching a series of similar stories, from the televangelist scandals of the 1980s, to the head of the National Association of Evangelicals doing meth with a male prostitute in 2006, to the saga of Jerry Falwell, Jr., and his wife, who engaged in their own “three-way sexual encounter” with the pool boy. As cartoonish as they were, those stories were all true.

And so is this one. The allegation of rape has not yet been tried in court, but affadivits indicate that Bridget Ziegler admitted to investigators her past “three-way sexual encounter.”

I guess there’s a reason this sort of thing is a cliché and a staple of fiction. Somebody remind Quark he’s going to need twice as many dabo girls.

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The Culture War Christians

You can see how this undermines the rationale for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s supposed religious conversion.

First, a refresher on her background. Hirsi Ali gained fame in the years after 9/11 as a refugee from Somalia who had become a critic of Islam. Her case became an international cause when her collaborator, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, was murdered by an Islamic fanatic in 2004. She went into hiding and subsequently moved to the United States.

Given her background as an opponent of religious fanaticism, her conversion back to religion—particularly at this moment of heightened Christian fanaticism—is startling.

What is more startling is the strange case she makes for it.

Western civilization is under threat from three different but related forces: 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; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fiber of the next generation.

We endeavor to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic, and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease, or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground….

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us?... The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

What you may notice about this case for Christianity is how hollow and instrumental it is, making no mention of the actual religious doctrines of Christianity or even of that somewhat important figure in the religion, Jesus.

This fits a broader pattern, the rise of the “Culture War Christian,” the intellectual or—since deep thought it not evident in many of these cases—the activist who adopts Christianity in this instrumental way, as a way of taking sides in the culture war.

Hirsi Ali initially quotes Bertrand Russell, whose essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” was part of her conversion from Islam, as saying, “Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.” And then the only reason she can give us for becoming a Christian is fear of China, fear of Islam, fear of wokeness.

This is typical of the Culture War Christians. For supposed defenders of Western values, they have little confidence in the West and adopt the kind of pessimism summed up by Hirsi Ali: “With every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground.” She is echoing the religious right, which takes its own despair at losing its dominant position in the culture and projects it onto the state of “the West” in general.

Stuart Hayashi referred me to an excellent overview by Jerry Coyne of these Culture War Christians, such as self-described “Christian atheist” Douglas Murray, and their instrumental view of religion. In the current context, the one that stands out is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s husband, historian Niall Ferguson, who says, “I know I can’t achieve religious faith, but I do think we should go to church.” It’s not surprising that this outlook spread to both sides of the family.

Yet the basic claims here are wildly implausible. Hirsi Ali’s only attempt to explain why we need Christianity is to outsource it to somebody else’s argument, a book by a British Christian polemicist. “As Tom Holland has shown in his marvelous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience, and of the press—find their roots in Christianity.”

Anyone familiar with the history of Christianity just spit out their coffee. As I have discussed elsewhere, the rise of Christianity was followed immediately by a crackdown on all of those freedoms. Christian zealots fought, not for some kind of intellectual perfection of the Classical tradition, but for its wholesale destruction. The entire modern structure of liberalism, particularly freedom of conscience, had to be established more than a thousand years later in a series of battles against and among various denominations of Christianity.

I am reminded of Jonah Goldberg’s insistence, in his own book on Western Civilization, that “we got where we are because of God”—followed by the admission that “Christianity’s emphasis on human dignity and equality did not destroy monarchy, aristocracy, and serfdom, or slavery for more than sixteen centuries.” A cause that has no effect for nearly two millennia is not a cause. Something else—the humanist philosophy of the Renaissance and Enlightenment—must have made the actual difference.

But we don’t need to survey the whole sweep of history to understand this. For example, Hirsi Ali says that we need to embrace Christianity to defend liberalism against Vladimir Putin—yet Putin’s most ardent admirers in the West are American Christians, who are currently working to abet his conquests by cutting off aid to Ukraine and withdrawing the US from NATO. And it is their favored candidate who is openly threatening to impose dictatorship if elected.

Whatever reasons there might be for being a Christian, winning the culture war on behalf of liberalism is the least convincing.

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Travelogues of the Lost

In this seeming conversion of convenience, we also see a glimpse of the tribalism that so often characterizes not just politics but our cultural debates. There’s a confession of this buried in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article. Here’s how she describes her prior conversion from Islam to secularism.

I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them—people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins—the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

I’m not sure we ever became less clever or fun, but it’s also clear that Hirsi Ali has been the target for some time of a recruitment effort by religious nationalists. (See the early warnings of that here.)

This is a key to the weird transformations you often see in politics, particularly recently as religious traditionalism has been making a comeback as the creed most people on the right feel the need to pay lip service to. Many people are afraid to go it alone and stand on their own chosen principles. They are more comfortable being part of a group or movement, and they tend to evolve their views under the influence of their circle of friends.

Yet despite the seemingly superficial and instrumental basis she gives for her conversion, we can see hints in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article about what lies underneath.

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?

This is such a short and desultory line in her original article that it is easy to dismiss it, but in a (paywalled) follow-up interview, Hirsi Ali indicates that this was more important than it seems.

I went through a period of crisis—very personal crisis: of fear, anxiety, depression. I went to the best therapists money can buy. I think they gave me an explanation of some of the things that I was struggling with. But 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 sterilize 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.”

Jerry Coyne rather tartly sums this up as “Jesus is better than drink.”

There is a genre I think of as Travelogues of the Lost, descriptions of the intellectual journey taken by someone who doesn’t really know where he is or where he is going but who seems capable of drawing some readers to go along for the ride. Sohrab Ahmari is one of the more prominent practitioners of this genre, taking us along on his journey from Islam to Marxism to neoconservatism to Christian nationalism to who knows what next, and at every point being equally strident and contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with him.

We seem to be getting something similar from Hirsi Ali, though in a less off-putting manner. And while we might be sympathetic to her sense of spiritual crisis, it makes her argument for Christianity a lot less compelling. We are supposed to be taking advice on what principles are needed to defend our entire civilization, based on the internal meandering of someone who confesses to being spiritually confused and still just trying out a new identity.

Being lost does not qualify one to be a guide.

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What Fills a Soul?

I don’t want to be entirely dismissive of Hirsi Ali’s plight, because it indicates a challenge posed to our increasingly secular and irreligious society. We do need to find a sense of meaning and purpose in life. As I argued recently, this is particularly urgent given the economic, political, and social trends that give us far greater choice than we have ever had—and confront us with the dilemma of how to use it.

Hirsi Ali follows her new circle of intellectual friends in being glibly dismissive of secular sources of meaning.

We can’t withstand China, Russia, and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilization that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

There is a lot in between the Nicene Creed and TikTok videos, and Hirsi Ali knows this. (See a gently scolding response to her from Richard Dawkins.) And while the subjectivist left has largely failed at providing an appealing alternative to the religious right, she also knows that these are not the only two alternatives.

And this is where I’m going to bring you back to the salacious story of Bridget and Christian Ziegler. If Christianity were the cure-all for our civilizational woes, shouldn’t it have cured them? And if Christianity is necessary for a liberal society, why did it not prevent them from seeking and abusing power, as it has not prevented many previous religious leaders from doing the same? And if the worst of the allegations are true, why did it not restrain Christian Ziegler from committing a heinous crime?

Like I said, there is a long and ongoing history of this in Western Christianity. We’ve all heard the horrible stories about sexual abuse under the Catholic Church. But as David French has detailed, American protestants have their own similar problems. Rather than restraining those in power, Christianity has a very long history of unleashing them.

You could argue, as I am sure David would, that these people were not true, sincere Christians, that they were merely paying lip service to Christian spirituality while using it to advance their own power. Yet isn’t this precisely what the Culture War Christians are advocating—to use Christianity as an instrument for fighting political battles but without a sincere belief? The Zieglers look to me like the real-world embodiment of that advice.

If we clear away these dubious claims, the really interesting question that remain is this one: What fills a soul? As a lifelong atheist who has never changed to or from anything else, I have had quite a few decades to explore the spiritual possibilities of a world without a god.

Secular spirituality begins with the acknowledgment that humans have complex brains capable of understanding the world, devising new tools to improve our lives, and forming a general view of the world. This is achieved by scientific and philosophical inquiry, and in a far fuller and more substantial way than mere faith in authorities, since it is grounded in detailed observation and in thoroughly considered and constantly challenged argument. Such a view of the world can be embodied in art: in sculpture, in novels, and most profoundly and movingly in music. And all of these activities are pursued in fellowship with colleagues and friends and shared with family and loved ones.

There is enough here, in my experience, to fill a life to overflowing—in the sense that there are more activities in which I find meaning and fulfillment than I could ever find time to pursue.

And if your life is spiritually filled in this way, perhaps you will find less need to use your values as a cudgel to defeat other people in a culture war. Or rather, if our lives are filled, we will engage in the only proper kind of cultural contest. We will engage in the creation of art and ideas and the sharing of our spiritual lives with others—not in banning or canceling what we don’t like.

This is what really gives the lie to the idea that religion is the only answer to spiritual emptiness. Under the Zieglers and their ilk, religion is not about filling souls but about depriving them of whatever religious authorities have decided is forbidden.

The culture war should be a contest over who can fill our souls to the fullest. That today’s Christian aren’t doing this indicates that perhaps they don’t have as much to offer as they claim.