They want my soul!

Allegiance, Ayaan Hirsi, and why I am still a Christian

Click the album art to listen to it from beginning to end.

I started writing this months ago. First, it was going to be a Christmas essay¹. Then it was going to be a rebuttal to a 15-year-old song. Until mid-February, I thought about deleting the draft entirely. But here we are.

The urge first came in November, after reading in Nick Cave’s excellent newsletter about Ayaan Hirsi, a former Muslim turned outspoken atheist who had just published a statement publicly converting to Christianity².

With almost no context (only having the faintest idea who Hirsi is), I identified strongly with Cave’s response, and after reading it, I went looking for info about Hirsi and her essay, even while harboring fears that it would reignite frustrations I have with the current state of organized Christianity³.

This sentence from Cave in particular sparked my suspicions:

“Upon reading Ayaan’s essay, though, I found little I could connect with, in so much as my interest in religion, and in particular Christianity, is non-political and fully personal and emotional.”

Like Cave, I would prefer to describe my “interest” in Christianity as “non-political.” I only hesitate to do so because I don’t know how possible it is. Can one be a Christian non-politically? I fully understand the impulse to try. And yet, the more I think about it, the less feasible it seems to be.

For me, the impulse stems from statements like Hirsi’s that reduce the religion and its teachings to a political costume. Why is she now a Christian? In order to protect the thing she really believes in—the West. In her eyes, Christianity is the best ideological armor available to hold off the belligerent authoritarianism coming from Russia and China, the ongoing growth of “global Islamism,” and—you guessed it—the “viral spread of woke ideology.” After 20 years, atheism’s attempts at a uniting narrative have left her feeling cold, so she’s trying Christianity on for size.

I have a problem with this. And I’m not just talking about Hirsi equating Hamas, Putin, and Jinping with wokeism⁴. You see, it seems to me that she left a little something out of her reason for converting to Christianity:

Jesus Christ.

Do you want to get understood?

I don’t know whether it’s a product of the times or my age, but now more than ever, I feel the constant pressure to choose sides. It’s gone beyond the regular conservative/progressive dichotomy. Whether we’re talking about the Gaza/Israel conflict, the free speech/ban Nazis debate here on Substack, or, most recently in Canada, whether we should fight climate change by taxing carbon, everyone wants to know where everyone else stands.

…Or at least the environment I’m in makes me feel this way. It’s more likely that no one particularly cares about my opinions. But the more other people share their own, the more I feel the need to share mine. It probably has more to do with the fact that, thanks to this newsletter, I’m online more than I used to be.

And yet, I hesitate.

And if I’m honest with myself, it’s partly out of fear. Fear that I’ll be misunderstood. Fear that I won’t communicate clearly enough. Fear of how people will respond. Fear of being pigeon-holed, both by those who (think they) agree with me and those who (think they) don’t. I’m not

Freddie deBoer

. I care about what people think of me. I want to be liked.

But that isn’t the only reason. I also hesitate because I, generally speaking, don’t like choosing camps. I don’t follow any sports team religiously. I wouldn’t consider myself a “stan” of any artist or popular figure. More importantly, I don’t believe anyone—any individual, political party, nation, or religion—can claim exclusive ownership of what is ultimately good or true. So yeah, ask me about my politics, my beliefs—heck, ask me for my favourite genre of music—and I will hesitate.

I don’t think I’m alone here. Conversations on most of these topics have a reputation for making people feel uncomfortable. But the more I see the thing I actually believe in⁵ being associated with bigotry and used as a political bludgeon to divide and dominate others, the harder it is for me to keep my mouth shut.

I can hear the counter-arguments from Christians already. Yes, in the Bible, Jesus says things like “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me,” and, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”⁶ But I think, with the slightest bit of context, it’s easy to see that he did not say these things in order to exclude or condemn outsiders, justify violence, or subjugate people labelled “sinners” by the religious elite to some narrow understanding of right and wrong. Just the opposite, actually.

Break out of character for me

Jesus doesn’t fit any mold easily. In fact, immediately following the latter, sword-wielding statement above, he says the following:

“For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household.”⁷

So Jesus says he plans/expects to create divisions within families—a phrase conveniently overlooked by the conservative, “family values” crowd usually associated with Christianity.

Not to say I think Jesus Christ was necessarily opposed to the nuclear family unit. It’s to say that despite our fervent, incessant attempts throughout history, he’s the kind of figure that refuses to fit into the ideological boxes we try to put him in. He won’t go gently into that good night.

Ironically, this particular Bible verse highlights an aspect of Christianity’s influence on our Western thinking, one that was highlighted by

Naomi Kanakia

in a recent post⁸ about how the West perceives what she calls “pagan religions”—meaning Hinduism (her family’s religion) and other polytheistic theologies from around the world. She starts off with this story about her mother:

“To this day my mom gets confused when a white person is like ‘I'm not Christian.’ She's like, ‘But you're either Christian or Jewish. Those are the only things you can be! There's no other option.’ I'm like, ‘No, they're saying they don't believe in Christ or his divinity.’ And she's like...‘Oh, who cares what they believe?’”

I first caught wind of this way of thinking back in my “Intro to Reason” class in university. The prof asked for one of us to volunteer their religious identity, and a fellow student told us he was Hindu. But when he was asked what he believed, he said he didn’t really know. He was Hindu because his family was Hindu. His beliefs on the subject didn’t really matter.

Before Christ (based on my limited understanding of the history of world religions), this was more or less true about every religion. More than anything, your god and your religion signified your heritage—which tribe you belonged to.

Jesus spoke in direct opposition to this. As a Jew speaking to other Jews, he said over and over again that blood relation to Abraham wouldn’t save anyone. In his message, being a “son of Abraham” became symbolic: you belonged by doing the will of the God of Abraham, not by literally being related to the guy.

Christians haven’t done a great job of holding onto this idea. Sure, it’s resulted in the difference of perspective our culture has from the one presented in the block-quote above. But throughout history, from Constantine’s adoption of it as the official belief system of the Roman Empire to the Christian Nationalism of today⁹, the religion’s symbols and words have been co-opted to bolster our established, human hierarchies. Only instead of acknowledging that this kind of power is, more often than not, inherited, we’ve cloaked it in the guise of “choice,” that it’s what you believe¹⁰ that determines whether you’re in or out rather than your genealogy. At the end of the day though, it’s still the very thing Jesus spoke out against: tribalism.

A travesty.

Not sure that’s accurate? Again, it’s easier to see with a little context. Like, for example, how, right after his classic call to “love your neighbor as yourself,” when asked who should be considered a neighbour¹¹, Jesus answers with the (also classic) story of the good Samaritan, a story that’s meant not only to expand his community’s definition of who they consider a neighbour, but to specifically include the people they look down on, the people they (a legitimately oppressed group of people, mind you) have power over, see as heretics, consider beneath them.

Jesus’ goal is to have us face our criticisms inward, to be self reflective. Not to legitimize the power of our oppressors (in the historical context, the Romans), but also not to encourage our tendency to react to the hammer by turning it on someone else. To reject being the hammer and the nail.

It’s these dichotomies that I see Jesus offering freedom from, these frames of mind: that you are your culture, your religion, your family, your opinions. And he offers freedom from them without rejecting them outright. Because while he says our enemies will be those of your own household, he also tells us to love those enemies. So he doesn’t make it easy. But by breaking down the role of religion in people’s lives, he presents a new frame of mind to choose—one set on love, respect, and acceptance of others rather than us vs. them.

In a way, this emphasis on choice has bled into the culture of the West. Whether you believe in Christ’s divinity or not, if you were raised in a Western culture, you probably think of religion as something people decide for themselves. Even an atheist chooses to be an atheist. With this in mind, you can see why Christianity has blended so well with democracy and other self-deterministic ideals that the West claims to uphold.

Jesus’ rejection of tribalism though? Not so much. That root’s been more stubborn. But his charge for us to keep pulling at it is what, in my eyes, sets him apart from other religious figures. It’s what’s drawn me to ideas like Christian anarchism and other unpopular spiritual concepts that divert from the religion’s current cultural norm.

Because, in my view, Jesus was an anarchist—up until the point of direct, violent revolt. He participated in society (paid taxes, worked, etc.) while also subverting society’s oppressive power structures. That’s why I still find him inspiring. That’s why I see more of him in people like bell hooks, Noam Chomsky, and Alexei Navalny than in the “culture warriors” often identified as today’s church leaders. That’s why I keep trying to follow his example.

For lambs to slaughter

Saying this publicly feels risky, like I might be sticking my head out too far, like I’m liable to get it chopped off¹². But it also feels necessary. If I’m going to call myself a Christian right now, I feel the need to add this *, this footnote of an essay, to clarify what I mean.

Because if Jesus was a dick, I don’t think it would matter to me that he rose from the dead. I believe in him because of everything he said and did. I want to follow him because of what he called his followers to do—to be light in the world, to be salt, to give love freely. I’m not saying I’m good at this. I’m not good at it. But I want to try. That, to me, is what being a Christian means. That’s why I’m still owning up to the label.

1. With a decidedly different music component.

2. That’s some Yusuf/Cat Stevens-level worldview hopping right there.

3. And yes, most of my frustrations apply to organized religion in general, but I’m specifically focusing on Christianity because a) I’m a part of it, and b) it’s the dominant religion of the culture around me.

4. Give me a fucking break.

5. Yes, I mean Jesus.

6. Matthew 10:34, for any nerds looking for references.

7. Matthew 10:35-36. So yeah, like literally right after.

8. Or what was a recent post when I started writing this.

9. Of which the great Margaret Atwood says “bears as much to the core tenets of Christianity as gravel does to breakfast,” quoted from this recent video on democracy.

10. Or in the case of capitalism, what you make of yourself.

11. A depressingly human question.

12. Figuratively speaking, of course.