ArticleBritish columnist Giles Coren is giving up atheism for Lent. Canadian musician Grimes is “finally getting into Christianity” — to help her stop vaping. Her ex, Elon Musk, as well as arch-New Atheist Richard Dawkins have referred to themselves publicly as “cultural Christians”. Last year Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Muslim turned prominent New Atheist, announced she is now a Christian. And Vanity Fair has declared Christianity the “new religion” of Silicon Valley.
Not a month goes by, it seems, without reports of some high-profile conversion to Christianity — or at least, a new-found interest in it.
Tom Holland, Louise Perry, Niall Ferguson, Jordan Peterson, David Brooks, Paul Kingsnorth, Alexei Navalny. Others who have long professed Christian faith have become more vocal about it in public, including here in Australia, where we’re generally a bit averse to religious talk — people like Nick Cave, Stan Grant, Greg Sheridan.
The celebrity conversions skew male, perhaps — but there are women too. They skew politically conservative, perhaps — but there are lefties as well. If becoming Christian is a “trend”, it’s one that defies easy categorisation. Where is all this coming from?
Attributing motivations to others, and even discerning our own, is a tricky business. On the more cynical end, as Christianity’s public image becomes less stodgy and more — dare I say — popular, churchgoing or reading the latest “it” theologian may carry something with it that, in most of the West, Christianity hasn’t had for quite some time: social cachet. As one Silicon Valley entrepreneur puts it, “I guarantee you there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel” — the billionaire tech venture capitalist who has been speaking openly about his evangelical faith for years.
Others cite their concern for the survival of Western civilisation — human rights, democracy, civic freedoms, scientific truth, the rule of law — if the Christian roots of those principles are not shored up. That logic is perhaps less self-interested, but it still positions religious faith as a means to an end. Can you believe six impossible things before breakfast in order to prevent the collapse of society?
This pragmatism doesn’t have to imply that the turn to faith is insincere, however. As Hirsi Ali wrote upon publicly announcing her conversion:
Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
Are people reconsidering Christian faith because they think it might be useful, or do they think it’s useful because they’ve decided it’s true after all?
The writer and ecologist Paul Kingsnorth, in detailing his spiritual journey from atheism through Zen Buddhism and Wicca, then finally (to his own astonishment and even horror) to Christianity, found that his new-old faith held the key to resisting what he calls “the Machine” — all the ways that contemporary life is geared against human flourishing, and the flourishing of the natural world. But he also describes his conversion as an encounter with an irresistible Other:
I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in the corridor outside. Everything was unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian.
Both the lifelong believer and the staunch atheist may find themselves disoriented by this apparent turn of the tide. The Christian might respond with scepticism (“Are these guys for real?”) or with triumphalism on behalf of their “team” — or genuine joy. The atheist might roll their eyes, or not even notice. Or else be dismayed that another domino has fallen. How influential are the influencers? What difference does it really make for the rest of us if certain celebrities and members of the intellectual elite are suddenly finding Christianity plausible again?
CS Lewis — who was, undeniably, one of the highest-profile converts of the twentieth century — wrote about the erosion of his own previously unassailable atheism:
Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on, “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it has really happened once.” To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not – as I would still have put it – “safe,” where could I turn? Was there then no escape?
Lewis’s experience was that suddenly everyone he read, everyone he knew, seemed to have “joined the other side” — from Dante and the pioneering fantasy writer George MacDonald to his intellectual Oxford friends, J.R.R. Tolkien among them.
To some of the earliest converts to Christianity, the apostle Paul wrote that the Easter message — of a dying God on a cross, and an implausible return from the dead — was not one calculated to win over the social or intellectual elite of the day. Not many of you were influential or prominent when you converted, Paul reminds them: “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”
Christianity has always been, by and large, a religion of the little people, even of the underdog and the underclass. But that “not many of you” implies that some of them, at least, were the success stories of their time (at least until they chose to throw their lot in with Jesus). It’s possible, though by no means certain, that the spate of high-profile conversions we’re seeing will prompt — is prompting — people to take another look at what Christianity has to offer. You have to see it to be it, as the saying goes.
You may find that prospect cheering or chilling, depending on your perspective. From Emperor Constantine onwards, when the powerful have embraced the crucified God, the results have been mixed, and the tenor of the faith — grace, mercy, care for the vulnerable — has been modified as well as honoured. (The rise of Christian nationalism around the world should give all of us pause.) But a genuine encounter with a God who values the humble and upholds the weak things of the world, as an influence on the influencers of our day, may be as hopeful a development as it is surprising.
Natasha Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published in ABC Religion & Ethics.