What is truth?
If you’re anything like me, everywhere you look, someone is doing a post-mortem on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity. The reasons people attribute to it are endless: It’s not sincere; it’s convenient; she sees it as a tool to stave off civilizational collapse…
It’s the nature of humanity in the year 2023 to have a take on everything — whether or not we have all the details. Beyond the follow-up interview she did with Unherd, I can’t claim to know what made her change her mind from being a New Atheist darling to a Christian. But I do have personal experience that gives me a glimpse into what might be happening in her heart.
And yes, I realize the subject is a little stale. Also, this is NOT a theological blog by any means. But I have been thinking about (and writing) this for weeks.
Enjoy. Or don’t. Up to you.
There are few stories in the New Testament more contested than that of Pontius Pilate’s interaction with and subsequent condemnation of Jesus Christ.
Only two pieces of tangible evidence that Pilate ever existed have been found: The “Pilate Stone” discovered in 1961 and a small copper ring discovered in 2018. Theologians, historians and believers all have a different take on him. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria portrayed him as a corrupt politician with deep contempt for the Jews. Secular scholars believe he was a brutal and self-serving leader. Many modern Christians view him as sympathetic. The New Testament portrays him as indecisive.
What we do know is that his time as the Prefect of Judaea was tempestuous. During his time in office, he marched golden effigies of the emperor throughout Caesarea and attempted to pay for an aqueduct with funds from the temple treasury. The Jews were willing to die for the sanctity of their land, and leadership roles in ancient Rome offered little job security, so by the time Jesus sat before Pilate, I suspect he learned to sleep with one eye open.
Judea was on the edge of a revolt, Herod refused to litigate the issue, and Pilate’s wife was pestering him about the troubling dreams she had about Jesus. In all four testaments, I am struck that under that pressure, Pilate carefully asks more questions than he responds when speaking to Jesus.
But one question pierces through all the rest — the primal question that has both plagued and blessed humanity for eons.
“What is truth?”
In his voice, I hear a frustrated and overwhelmed man who is unsure what to believe and who to trust.
Recently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali — a tour de force in the New Atheist Movement — declared she was now a Christian.
This prompted a flurry of takes on social media (some better than others), a mountain of criticism, and more essays on Substack titled “Why I Am Now/Am Not a [Insert Ideological Stance Here]” (in reference to her original essay) than anyone ever asked for or needed.
Attempts to explain her decision centered on whether her belief is sincere or whether she fled to the fortress of Christianity for the civilizational stability it provides. In my experience, the reason an atheist turns toward God or away from religion is because they found themselves like Pilate asking, “What is truth?”
The great experiment
Ali was born in Somalia. She was the victim of female genital mutilation when she was five. While living in Kenya, the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated her community as a teenager, and her beliefs grew more extreme. After years of study and a belief system conducive to hatred and rooted in fear, atheism seemed like a welcome respite for her.
Like many atheists I know, she didn’t turn away from truth, but away from the untruths of her old life. And, like many atheists I know who have turned toward God, she turned away from the nagging questions that atheism couldn’t answer.
When I was a Latter-day Saint missionary in Spain, I saw people going back and forth on this path, looking for truth, not knowing where to find it.
Often, their initial contact with God was not filling a spiritual hunger but rather a practical decision or a desire to heal a wound. One family I taught started talking to us because they wanted stability and boundaries for their children. Another young woman was desperately trying to get her boyfriend to marry her when she had a premature baby who only lived a few days before it died. One was a new immigrant from Peru and just wanted a place to meet new friends.
Under all the pretense, the safe harbor of belief was appealing to them. They didn’t want to be tossed about by the waves of life but instead desired the spiritual resilience to guide their ship through a life of choppy water.
My companions and I would always meet them where they were. We addressed their concerns about the kids and the boyfriend and the baby and how to get to church on Sunday, but we always challenged them to nurture their budding faith. We taught them to pray and read the scriptures. We told them to set aside a few hours every Sunday to meet us at church. We helped them give up coffee, alcohol and smoking. Sometimes, we just taught them how to read.
On a practical level, their lives were better. But soon, they believed.
Santiago was a melancholy and depressed person. He found spurts of happiness in life’s tiny pleasures like good food and drink — he had to be coaxed and persuaded to give up wine. He wasn’t an alcoholic, and our only flimsy explanation was that God didn’t want him to drink. I remember sitting across from him in the train station Dunkin’ Donuts the week after he quit. He was light and easygoing. He had a smile on his face. He seemed hopeful about the future.
One could say that this was just the result of going sober — but he changed in a way that a new healthy habit couldn’t explain. It happened little at first, and then his heart changed, and suddenly he was a new person.
Caroline Dooner, the self-help writer of The Fck It Diet*, has spent her time ping-ponging around from yo-yo diets, anti-dieting, new-age spirituality, witchcraft, and finally, her Jesus Situation™️. When asked why she had this change of heart (and if it’s possible to have your own “Jesus Situation”) she said, “Despite my judgment. Despite my hesitance. Despite my aversion, I was drawn. And I now believe.” She tried praying even though it was confusing. She listened to other people’s feelings about their own “situation.” She made an effort to read the Bible. Her perspective on life changed.
Faith is like a seed. There are many reasons why a plant ends up growing (or not). Sometimes you want it to thrive on neglect, and it withers. Other times, you planted it in a bad place. Sometimes, the seed (due to any number of biological or chromosomal abnormalities) is just bad.
In the Book of Mormon, it tells the story of a prophet, Alma, who went to preach to people in another land. He tells them to “experiment” on what he teaches them”
But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.
Often, people’s conversion starts with nothing more than a “desire to believe” — or just a need to solve a personal problem. As people experiment, they see the seed grow and realize it was true all along.
Truths grow when nurtured. Falsehoods wilt even under the best conditions.
The mystery of God’s Kingdom
In John 18, Jesus responds to Pilate’s questioning by saying, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Most of Jesus’ contemporary political leaders probably had no idea what to make of him. When ancient prophets told them someone would come to save them, the Pharisees were looking for a strong military leader to oust the Roman occupation. And when the Romans got word of that, they were most certainly not expecting the comical image of a poor carpenter riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, telling people to turn the other cheek.
Thinkers and leaders from antiquity to the modern day have tried to superimpose their own political understanding on religion. Look no further than the Christian right in America or Islamic theocracies to see how attempts to politicize a faith often result in failure and tend towards self-defeating extremism.
The framework of Christian faith reaches beyond the man-made constructs of politics and culture. While the Romans and Pharisees and Sadducees and Greeks were all quibbling about the law and who should be in power and who was right and what rules to follow, Jesus Christ taught about his kingdom.
In his kingdom, there are no elections except those you make for yourself (2 Peter 1:10). While manmade kingdoms “exercise dominion” over their subjects, the Kingdom of God welcomes those who exercise dominion over their own hearts and minds. (Matt. 20:25) Politics still slide right off of his doctrine even though it was divisive. He described that he did not come to bring peace, but a sword, (Matt. 10:35), and while it might have read as political to his foes (who did not like what he had to say), the sword was always in their court should they want to cut themselves off from the kingdom.
A search for meaning… and, eventually, truth
On my mission, we taught a woman who was reluctant to share many of her thoughts with us. Isabel was an overwhelmed mother and poor Brazilian immigrant living in subsidized housing. A profoundly spiritual woman, she was troubled by disturbing dreams which dominated the bulk of our discussions. We taught her how to pray and encouraged her to read the scriptures daily. As she did, her dreams subsided to the point they disappeared. We no longer knew what to talk to her about.
During one visit, I felt a small nudge in my heart and mind to share with her God’s plan for us after death, and we explained it while she listened, emotionless.
After a silence, she said, “I had always wondered what had happened to my sister.”
Many years ago in Brazil, her sister had left home to find work in a village that was known to be unsafe. She called home weekly to talk to her parents and 10-plus siblings until one day, the calls stopped. The impoverished family didn’t have the means to investigate, and poor victims of violence weren’t a priority for the police. The family assumed she had been murdered. But without a body, grave or funeral, they moved on with their lives to grieve privately.
In Ali’s essay, she describes her experience as a “lapsed atheist.” Much of the reasoning for her turn towards Christianity is based on the desire to avoid civilizational collapse — but she also states a personal yearning for meaning.
… 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?
In her follow-up interview with Unherd, she described an aching anxiety that led her to self-medication, self-destruction and therapy. Her therapist asked her if she could create a god for herself and what it would look like. As she described this ideal god, she discovered that it was effectively in the image of Jesus Christ.
Ali is not the first person I met who found herself on the path to conversion because life got in the way. She found herself on the narrow path that eventually leads to the discovery of truth. It didn’t come about because of a vision or cataclysmic event. It was a tiny miracle precipitated by a very real need for something more.
NOTE: The names of people from my mission and minor details of their stories have been changed to protect their privacy. But I left the core points of the stories intact.