Last week, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who escaped fervent Islam for atheism, announced that she has become a Christian. She wrote a fascinating essay describing the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the best of Western civilization, along with her need for assurance that life has meaning. By contrast, those women who are taking to TikTok to announce their conversion to Islam are attracted by only two things: its hatred for the West and its being a “strong horse.”

Ali’s essay, entitled “Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war,” explains that she was raised as a ritualistic Muslim but found purpose in what the Muslim Brotherhood had to say: Through Islam, she would have a straight path to paradise. What the secular world offered, by contrast, ensured eternal damnation. Most especially, the Muslim Brotherhood taught to hate Jews and to work for their destruction.

Eventually realizing Islam’s toxicity, Ali writes, “You can see why…atheism seemed so appealing.” As far as she was concerned, Bertrand Russell was correct when he said, in 1927, “that religion is based primarily on fear.” For Ali, raised in a hellfire faith, “As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear.”

But Ali didn’t lose fear because the world is a dangerous place. Instead, she realized that faith, rather than being based on fear, is the antidote to fear. Looking at the degradation of the West and the rising forces of tyranny, she writes,

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The essay addresses the fact that the Judeo-Christian faith is the mainstay of the best parts of civilization. As we’ve all seen, there were growing pains, to be sure, as both faiths left behind the paganism that preceded them, faced off against enemies that sought to destroy them, and engaged in acts that now embarrass them. But these faiths laid the foundation for individual liberty and freedom of conscience, the end of slavery, the respect and value accorded women and children, scientific discoveries, the free-market system that raised humans to the apex of physical comfort and longevity, and so much more.

Ali also discovered within herself the need for spiritual assurance

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?

Neither reason nor faith in humanity answers any of the fundamental questions about why we are here and why we matter. For Ali, Christianity provides both an answer and consolation.

Those leftist women who have taken to TikTok to boast about converting to Islam seemingly share Ali’s nihilistic fear and fundamental emptiness. For them, the answer is Islam, about which they know nothing but which channels their leftism and antisemitism into purpose:

[Megan] Rice posted on October 20 that she planned to read the holy book for the first time.

‘It just seems that Palestinians have this ironclad faith even in the face of losing quite literally everything,’ she told her then 400,000 followers.

Days later she founded the World Religion Book Club where she conducts live readings of the Quran. The online community now boasts 13,000 members.

Did you catch that? Megan converted because she liked the fact that Gazastinians are willing to kill and die for their beliefs...but she has no idea what those beliefs are, never having read the Koran in the first place.

Also, take a look at Megan’s face when she talks about her moment of “fire and activism” and tell me if this is a mentally healthy person:

There’s a reason that the Japanese, looking at eyes like Charles Manson’s, AOC’s, or Megan Rice’s, where the white is completely visible, describe them as “yang sanpaku,” which means someone who has a “belligerent, even violent temperament and a difficulty controlling inner emotions.”

Or there’s Alex, who describes herself as a “leftist queer gremlin,” and has suddenly decided that Islam is the answer, again because of the certainty she sees in Gazastinians. Clearly, she hasn’t yet grappled with the fact that, to this day, homosexuality is a capital crime in the Muslim world.

The same article also looks at Madison Reeves, who believes that the West is a colonizing monster, so Islam is the answer. In fact, of course, there has been no more bloody colonizing force in the history of the world than Islam, which is estimated to have killed 90 million Hindus in India alone.

So, on the one hand, we have Ali, who looked at Western civilization and saw value in it and grew to hate the lack of purpose that comes with atheism, so she converted to Christianity. And on the other hand, we have women who hate Western civilization and think that Islam will give their lives purpose. I support Ali’s view but think the civilizational energy lies with these dimwitted leftist women. As my cousin, a prison chaplain, wrote about the vast number of prisoners who convert to Islam,

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they remain the same angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.