Epiphany yesterday commemorated the wise men from the East who journeyed a long way to find Jesus. Today other wise men and wise women are also, after a long journey, finding Jesus.
We’ve blogged about the “New Theists,” the writers and thinkers who have displaced the “new atheists” and are coming to Christianity. The Free Press has published an article about the phenomenon by Peter Savodnik entitled How Intellectuals Found God, with the deck, “Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion.”
I don’t know if these are “our most important thinkers,” but they include quite a few “public intellectuals,” the ones who interact with the general public as opposed to academic specialists such as Jordan Peterson, plus bright tech entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, and pop culture figures such as Russell Brand. Savodnik, the senior editor at The Free Press, talks at special length with two of his writers, the historian Niall Ferguson and his wife whom we’ve blogged about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both of whom make clear that their newly found faith is much more than a “cultural Christianity.”
Free Press has a paywall, but it makes some articles available to the public and with a free subscription. What I want to do here is simply quote some of the interesting things that were said in the article:
[Niall Ferguson] “You can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism. It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”
[Russell Brand] “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”
[Jordan Peterson] “I would say God is hyper-real. God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”
[Andrew Sullivan] “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary. Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything. The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings. It allows us to express our faith through an act.”
[Paul Kingsworth] “If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen? The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”
[Father Jonah Teller, priest of a Catholic church in Greenwich Village] “The world many people have grown up in is one in which you have the ability to be your own God. You should have it simply because you want it, whatever it may be. Or not have it, and that can include your own existence—a rejection of simply being.” But the fact of our existence is a testament to God’s love for us, he said. “We are always wanted,” Father Jonah said. “We are always loved. This is the most important thing. God is not a mindfulness hack or a wellness exercise. It’s not—‘I found this ethical system that gets results, and therefore, I will choose it.’ It’s not a choice. It’s an encounter with an actual, personal love.”
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