David Quinn
Christianity is suddenly becoming a respectable intellectual choice again. It will take some time for this news to reach Ireland, maybe even another couple of decades, but next door in England, and in the US and Canada, we are seeing some movement by some leading intellectuals, and other people of influence towards Christianity. Some have come through the door fully and become baptised, worshipping Christians, while others are just outside, tempted to join, but have not yet made the final move.
In the second group belong people like the historian, Tom Holland. He is the author of numerous very successful popular histories, especially of the ancient world, and is the co-host of a hugely successful podcast called ‘The Rest is History’.
He realised that Rome was extremely cruel for a reason; while it had many fine philosophers and lawyers it did not have the notion, not in any significant way at least, that we are all morally equal”
Holland’s most famous and influential book is ‘Dominion’, which came out in 2019. In that book, Holland examines the influence of the Christian idea on the world, and by ‘idea’ here is mainly meant its view of the human person, that is, the belief that we are all made in the Image and Likeness of God, and therefore we are all morally equal with one another, whatever our rank in society might be.
Impact
He traces the revolutionary impact of this idea through the centuries, and how it began to transform society bit by bit, even when the institutional Church was sometimes resisting its transformative effects because it had allowed itself to become too close to the powers-that-be, mostly the nobility of the day, who did not want their position in society threatened by ideas about equality.
Holland’s book played a big part in making some people wake up to the fact that Christianity has had a profound and positive influence on Western culture, often in ways we now overlook or take for granted”
What is interesting about Holland is that his chief early interest was in the Roman Empire, which seemed glamorous to him (we are all familiar with how Hollywood movies used fact this to good effect), but then he realised that Rome was extremely cruel for a reason; while it had many fine philosophers and lawyers it did not have the notion, not in any significant way at least, that we are all morally equal. It took Christianity to introduce this idea into our societies.
There had been other books like Holland’s before his came along, but for some reason they did not have the impact of ‘Dominion’, maybe because a lot of them were mainly aimed at other scholars and so failed to have a wider impact. Whatever the reason, Holland’s book played a big part in making some people wake up to the fact that Christianity has had a profound and positive influence on Western culture, often in ways we now overlook or take for granted.
Holland himself is now visibly moving personally in the direction of Christianity, although he does not seem to be fully in the door yet. For now, he seems to find it difficult to accept doctrines that involve accepting the existence of the miraculous, and without that it is hard to accept beliefs like the Virgin Birth or that Jesus rose physically from the dead.
Someone else who is hovering just outside the door is the Canadian academic, writer and speaker, Jordan Peterson. Like Holland, he is extremely pro-Christian and he has drawn many young people, men especially, in the direction of the Church by making them view it with new eyes. He talks in a compelling way about how Christianity meets our deep need for meaning, purpose and direction in life.
Mind you, Peterson does now say he believes that Christ rose physically from the dead, although in longer interviews he can be ambiguous, in my opinion, about what exactly he means by that.
It’s worth noting that his wife, Tammy, recently became a Catholic.
Journalist and writer, Douglas Murray, is another who fits into the Peterson/Holland category. He is not a believing Christian but he says he has moved from being a ‘Christian atheist’ to being a ‘Christian agnostic’, by which I suppose he means that he has always been Christian-influenced at some level, but he is not so sure now whether God exists or not whereas formally he was sure He did not. Murray is one of the most widely read journalists in the world today.
Converted
One person who has fully converted is the in-coming American Vice President, JD Vance. Vance had been an atheist, but a series of encounters with, for example, an Anglican theologian, a Catholic writer, members of the Dominican order among others, began to shift his thinking and he became a Catholic in 2019.
Two more examples are worth noting. The first is Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was raised in a fundamentalist Islamic setting and underwent female genital mutilation as a child, before finally fleeing to the West, becoming a fierce critic of Islam and joining the ‘New Atheist’ set which included people such as Professor Richard Dawkins and the writer/journalist Christopher Hitchens.
But recently she became a baptised Christian. She found that atheism did not satisfy her search for meaning and did not offer a viable path for her life.
Now we find that her husband, Professor Niall Ferguson has also converted. Ferguson is a historian and one of the best-known public intellectuals in the English-speaking world today.
Ferguson was raised in Scotland by non-religious parents and was a non-believer himself for years. He now describes himself as a “lapsed atheist”.
He says his conversion was partly personal in nature and partly intellectual.
In a recent interview he says: “The first phase [in his conversion] was that as a historian I realised no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic. That was an insight that came from studying 18th, 19th and 20th-century history.
“But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith. That insight has come more recently and has been born of our experience as a family.”
A conservative in this sense, is quite likely to view Christianity as the best means of preserving what is best in our cultures because it created so many of these things in the first place”
What is interesting about all the figures mentioned above is that they are broadly conservative in outlook. Should this bother us? Well, it shouldn’t be entirely surprising if by ‘conservative’ we someone who wishes to preserve and conserve what is best in our histories, cultures, traditions and if such a person is worried that these are all being eaten away by various forces including atheism, secularism, and moral and cultural relativism.
A conservative in this sense, is quite likely to view Christianity as the best means of preserving what is best in our cultures because it created so many of these things in the first place. This was then hopefully lead them to a personal faith in God and in Jesus.
But what we are seeing should be encouraging. Where intellectuals go, others soon follow. These recent conversions and semi-conversions might not lead to the wholesale reconversion of our societies, but they do point towards enough of a revival to keep the Christian faith alive in the West so that later a wider conversion can be built on this foundation.