Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Richard Dawkins, who once bonded over their disdain for religion, still have common ground. They both agree that Christianity is a force for good in Western civilization whereas Islam is not. But Ali goes further. She believes Christianity is true. Dawkins thinks it’s “nonsense.”
“What the vicar is saying no longer sounds nonsensical,” Ali said at a recent New York gathering, Dissident Dialogues, where she debated Dawkins. “It makes a great deal of sense.”
Dawkins, at the same event, suggested Christianity is “obsessed with sin,” but Ali pushed back, “I think Christianity is actually obsessed with love.” She described how its message of hope helped her recover from a severe depressive episode:
I’m a brand new Christian. But what I’m finding about it, which is the opposite of growing up as a Muslim, the message of Islam — but the message of Christianity I get is that it’s a message of love. It’s a message of redemption. It’s a story of renewal and rebirth. And so, Jesus dying and rising again for me symbolizes that story. And in a small way, I felt like I have died and I was reborn. And that story of redemption and rebirth, I think makes Christianity actually a very, very powerful story for the human condition and human existence.
Dawkins accepted that he was wrong to presume before the debate that Ali — in expressing Christianity’s civilizational benefits — was “no more a Christian than I am.”
“I think you are a Christian,” he concluded. “And I think that Christianity is nonsense.”
In recent years, Dawkins, who was one of the key players of the anti-theist New Atheist movement of the 2000s, has adopted the argument that Christianity, while nonsense, has evolved into a relatively harmless (even helpful) nonsense that is much better than the alternatives.
Toward the end of the debate, he framed Christianity as a potential “epidemiological” solution to Islam: “We have a vicious mind virus. The question is: Do we combat it by vaccination with a milder form of the virus [Christianity]? Or do we say no viruses and go for enlightened rationality?”
Dawkins said he is on “Team Christianity.”
Still, Ali worries that the New Atheists “have failed the next generation by taking away from them that moral framework and telling them it’s nonsense and false. We have also not protected them from the external forces that come for their hearts, minds and souls.”
Ali feels “regret” for mocking Christianity, which with her newfound “humility” she recognizes as being “layered with the wisdom of millennia.”
I suspect that, on some level, Dawkins feels the same.