But Now I See

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Tammy Peterson, and the apologetic of grace

I hope the full video of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s last-week New York dialogue with Richard Dawkins gets a proper release at some point, but so far, even the short audience-filmed clips have been intriguing. [Update: It’s out now.] Like a lot of people, I’ve been following Hirsi Ali’s public “coming out” as a Christian with great interest. You can catch up with my initial thoughts here and some follow-up thoughts on Dawkins’ response here. More recently, I wrote about Dawkins’ own self-identification as a “cultural Christian.” This is where he places himself in his own little three-way categorization schema. Roughly, he thinks there are cultural Christians, political Christians, and believing Christians. He suspected Hirsi Ali was a political Christian.

I say “suspected” in past-tense, because in the course of their new dialogue, Dawkins admitted, with some bafflement, that he had to reassess. In this clip shared by Thomas Chatterton Williams, there’s a touch of nervousness in Dawkins’ voice when he says, “It sounds like you actually believe it.”

Here, moderator Freddie Sayers neatly cuts to the heart of Dawkins’ bafflement—that Hirsi Ali obviously possesses a “highly trained rational mind,” which would seem difficult to “square” with “what the vicar says.”

Hirsi Ali responds that she does indeed choose to accept “what the vicar says” on “a personal level,” though she’s careful to distinguish this “subjective” experience from what everyone can observe by the natural light—that “the history of Western civilization is mainly Christian.” But in a different clip, she notes that these things aren’t cleanly separable from each other, because “what the vicar says” is “layered with the wisdom of millennia,” the same wisdom that gave us Western civilization. You can depart from it if you like, but you certainly shouldn’t mock it as “stupid,” the way she herself once did and now humbly regrets.