by Jonathon Van Maren, First Things
If it is true that social shifts begin first among the elites, something may be stirring in the West. While taking questions at an appearance at the MacDonald–Laurier Institute in Vancouver last month, historian Niall Ferguson offered a surprising prediction. “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, with sixteen books to his name, is one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. Twenty years ago, during the heated, raucous New Atheist moment, it would have been difficult to imagine a figure of his stature making such a statement, much less calling it “simple.” Ferguson’s wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a prominent atheist back then, but in 2023 she declared in a viral column that she had become a Christian.
Hirsi Ali was criticized at the time for making a primarily civilizational argument for conversion in her column; Richard Dawkins even wrote her an open letter informing her that she was not really Christian. In a subsequent conversation with Alex O’Connor and an onstage discussion with Dawkins, she explained that her conversion came on the heels of a devastating personal crisis that included a struggle with alcohol. A visibly chagrined Dawkins took it back.
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.