Ayaan Hirsi Ali feels ‘regret’ for mocking Christianity

Women’s rights activist and up to date convert to Christianity, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has said she feels “regret” for having once mocked the religion she now claims as her own. 

She shared a platform with the evolutionary biologist and staunch atheist Richard Dawkins for the inaugural Dissident Dialogues conference in New York on the weekend. 

Ali has been on quite a faith journey, being born a Muslim in Somalia before becoming a latest atheist alongside Dawkins and a fierce critic of her birth religion. Then last 12 months she made headlines when she became a Christian, saying that Christianity was the one “credible answer” to the worldwide challenges of Islam, communism and woke ideology. 

She admitted to conference moderator Freddie Sayers, Unherd editor, that she did “regret” lumping all religions together as destructive forces up to now. 

Now she feels that undermining Christianity simply created an ethical void that has been stuffed with ideas which can be harmful to civilisation.

“What you value in Christianity is something that basically is completely obligatory to pass on to the subsequent generation,” she said.

“And we have now failed the subsequent generation by taking away from them that moral framework and telling them it’s nonsense and false.

“We have also not protected them from the external forces that come for his or her hearts, minds and souls.”

She admitted that she “did mock faith generally and possibly Christianity particularly”.

“But I do not try this anymore,” Ali continued. “I even have come all the way down to my knees to say that the individuals who all the time had faith have something that we who lost faith haven’t got.”

She said that while New Atheism comes from a spot that claims “there’s nothing”, she has come to simply accept that “there’s something”. 

“And if you accept that there’s something, there’s a strong entity — for me, [that’s] the God that turned me around,” she said. 

Dawkins recently admitted to being a “cultural Christian” and said on Saturday that although he considers himself “Team Christianity” he still thinks “Christianity is nonsense” and a “milder form” of “mind virus” than Islam.