Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who made headlines last November when she announced she was a Christian – after growing up as a Muslim before turning toward atheism – last week took on the issue of the nuclear family being subverted by malign forces.
Her highlighting of this issue included explaining why the nuclear family based on life-long marriage has always been promoted and defended by the Catholic Church. It is because the nuclear family serves the best interests of children amid wider benefits to society, as Ali highlights in almost forensic detail:
“The strength of the nuclear family determines children’s prospects and, to a lesser degree, fertility rates. Statistics robustly show that the educational and psychological outcomes of children in single parent households suffer by comparison to their two-parent counterparts.
“Data also suggests that no-fault divorce laws have a negative effect on fertility rates. When women can initiate divorce easily, the window of time in which a couple has children is shortened, so married couples have fewer children. This means that marital fertility declines on a large scale. Research shows that even extra-marital fertility declines in response to no-fault divorce laws coming into effect.
“Marriage, for many, is still an ideal condition for having children, as it should be. It is no surprise, then, that no-fault divorce laws and the loss of pressure to ever marry in the first place together deplete family life of its social value and institutional authority. Where there are high rates of children being born out of wedlock, women overwhelmingly suffer the burden of single parenthood. All the evidence we have tells us that the nuclear family is good for children and for mothers.”
Ali also appreciates the damage done by the Sexual Revolution: “Since the Sexual Revolution, attitudes towards the nuclear family have been transformed in the West. Sacrificing career progression for children is increasingly deemed an unattractive prospect (even if that career is soullessly administrative or bureaucratic) and more women than ever use the contraceptive pill to avoid pregnancy, often until after they have exited their peak fertility window.
“Besides this, a fifth of Americans now think polygamy is acceptable and extramarital sex and child-rearing are overwhelmingly socially accepted. Despite this last cultural shift – which erases the most powerful constraint on women having children out of wedlock – the national birth rate has fallen since 1950 and is projected to stagnate.”
Critically, Ali ends the piece by noting the venerated position mothers are given in Christian religions, especially the Catholic tradition:
“My readers may be surprised that I have begun to advocate for Christian cultural norms, since my turn to atheism was brought about by my experience of the vicious oppression of women under Islam. But women enjoy a venerated and protected role as mothers in Christian communities in the West, unlike their typical orthodox Jewish and Muslim counterparts.
“They are not made to veil their beauty or occupy a different section of their church; they are not forced out of education. As the masterful art historian Kenneth Clark discussed in his essential series Civilisation, the female principle lies at the heart of Christian civilisation. Catholics in particular venerate Mary as the only person, besides her son, who was without sin; the first people to testify to the resurrection of Christ were two other Marys.”
Ali concludes: “This is not to say that mothers are given all the praise they deserve: It’s rare that a dutiful mother is showered with the gratitude and praise she deserves, since her sacrifice leaves her children in her lifelong debt. But, as the need for healthy marriages and babies to sustain Western civilisation grows ever more urgent, I have faith in the propensity of revived Christianity in the West to treat motherhood – and mothers – with the utmost respect.”
When she became a Christian, Ali highlighted that one of the reasons behind her conversion was the fact that Western civilisation is under threat. She saw the threat coming from three different but related forces:
“The resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”
She also noted how our best efforts to fend off these threats are simply working:
“We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.
“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.”
Ali is not alone in recognising the fine pickle that Western societies have got themselves into. Richard Dawkins, although still firmly not a believer, now says he is a cultural Christian who fears that the void he had a part in creating by his atheistic attacks on God, will now be filled by Islam.
Like Dawkins, Ali was a central figure in the New Atheism movement from its foundation. She was strongly associated with the movement, along with the late Christopher Hitchens, who regarded Ali as “the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa”.
I have long admired Ali for her courage, even when she was an atheist. Her atheism, unlike the atheism of others such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris, was the result, I believe, of a traumatic childhood. She was subject to female genital mutilation when she was only 5 years old; her father was detained and could not prevent it.
Her village was then ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, who introduced an extreme form of Islam. From this she eventually fled to the Netherlands where she became a Dutch politician. There, unlike the male New Atheists, who benefited from the relative safety of their Christian cultures even though they argued that Christianity was just as dangerous as Islamic extremism, Ali became an outspoken critic of Islamic extremism.
The cowardly attempt of the other New Atheists to lump Christianity in with its complete opposite, stands in stark contrast to the bravery of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She suffered numerous death threats and fatwas for standing up to radical Islam, and required round the clock security after the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh, following the making of the short film Submission, a 12 minute movie in which Ali took Islam to task for its treatment of women. The Dutch government had to remove Ali from the country for her own protection.
Today, and in what can be seen as a continuing part of her Christian conversion, Ali is now highlighting the dangerous attacks on the family that Catholics have been pointing out for decades. This is a welcome development, and although some Catholics might be tempted to respond to Ali: Tell me something we don’t know, or, What took you so long! it should be noted, and appreciated, that Ali is an influential voice who wields a significant media platform.
We should all rejoice at the conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has always been a courageous woman and mother, and at her speaking out on issues that Catholics hold dear, such as the importance of the nuclear family and the protection and nurturing of children.
Photo: Activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, 7 April 2015. Ali spoke about ISIS, Islam and the West. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)
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