Quite a few former non-believers have converted to Christianity recently. We might wonder how they are doing. Some of the converts who are well-known enough to have a platform are telling about it.
I would add that while the much-heralded comeback of Christianity among the general public may be exaggerated, there does seem to be a shift among the cultural and intellectual elite, from the “post-seculars” in Sweden we blogged about who now find discussing religion socially acceptable to the prominent writers who have converted to Christianity. As Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter has shown in his book To Change the World, cultural change does not usually emerge from the grassroots, but is elite-driven, with changes in ideas and institutions gradually permeating the culture as a whole.
Van Maren’s article is worth reading for its larger argument. Here, though, I’d just like to highlight two of the thinkers he discusses who have recently embraced Christianity.
He cites the British journalist Louise Perry, a self-styled, pro-life “reactionary feminist,” who announced her conversion to Christianity just last September:
One example is the writer Louise Perry, author of the brilliant book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. While researching it, she said in a recent interview, she found herself “reaching Christian conclusions against my will.” She had read Dawkins’s The God Delusion at thirteen, and “thought it was fantastic because I was thirteen.” Christianity, she observed, was true sociologically. To believe this is to be a “civilizational Christian.” But is it true supernaturally? “I hope so,” she admitted. She and her husband now take their children to church. But she struggles.
“Some weeks I believe, and some weeks I don’t,” Perry said. She worries that being raised in a secular home makes it impossible for her to truly believe, but she and her husband want to send their children to a Christian school because they hope to “give our children the best chance of believing both truths”—that is, that Christianity is sociologically and supernaturally true. She does, however, describe herself as a Christian.
The British-American historian and public intellectual Niall Ferguson has come further, having been baptized since 2023. The husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former “new atheist” convert we have blogged about, he too talks about the different phases of his faith and the growth he has found in going to church:
“I have a view that we’re probably in the very early phase of a Christian revival, and this reawakening will be an antidote to the great ‘awokening’ that has caused so much harm,” he said. “I very much hope that will be the case. I look around me in England where I’m spending much of my time and think: How many unhappy people . . . would be so much happier if only they went to church and opened their hearts to Christ? It’s that simple.”. . .
Ferguson and Hirsi Ali were baptized with their two sons in 2023, and he told the Vancouver audience that they are now “practicing, devout Christians, and it has made a profound change to my life.” He describes himself as a “lapsed atheist,” having been raised in a secular home after his parents left the Church of Scotland. But in the “first phase” of his coming to faith, he realized that from a historical perspective, “no society had been successfully organized on the basis of atheism.” As a conservative or, as Dawkins once described himself, a “cultural Christian,” he occasionally patronized churches as a nod to tradition.
In his “second phase,” it became personal—although in a 2024 interview with The Australian, Ferguson said that one cannot know for certain that Christ rose from the dead. But he also observed that “Jesus taught us . . . there were things we couldn’t know. . . . One can’t reason one’s way to God, at least I don’t think one can. The nature of faith is that one accepts that these apparently far-fetched claims are true. That’s the nature of faith.” . . . .
“What strikes me, as a regular churchgoer now, not having been one before, is how much one learns every Sunday morning,” he said. “Every hymn contains some new clue as to the relationship between us and God. I think the educational benefit of going to church almost equals the moral benefit, the uplift, the sense one gets of being somewhat reset.”
I suspect that less famous new converts often experience much the same thing–at first sometimes believing and sometimes not, the new convictions becoming ever more personal, the growth in coming to grips with what faith is. And being affected just by going to church, learning more every Sunday morning, getting new clues about our relationship with God from every hymn.
Have any of you had this kind of experience?
Photo: Louise Perry by ARC Forum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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