05/10/2025
How Intellectuals Found God -2
Paul Kingsnorth: The True Believer
In the ’80s, when he was a kid, Paul Kingsnorth used to take long walks on the trails that cut through the mountains of Wales and Scotland and the south of England. That was when he fell in love with nature—the sloping vistas, the undulating patches of dark green and gold and chestnut and amber. The woodlands, the waterways, the air, the mist.
“My dad got really obsessed with those trails when I was young, and he used to take me out for long periods,” Kingsnorth, 52, told me.
He wasn’t religious then, but “I had a very religious attitude to nature when I look back on it,” he said. “Nature was God, and nature had to be worshipped.”
In retrospect, “I see a religious impulse that was not quite directed in the right direction—it was directed toward creation rather than the creator.”
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ our most important thinkers like Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are getting religion.
PAUL KINGSNORTH (PHOTOSHOP BY THE FREE PRESS)
He studied history at Oxford, and then he ping-ponged around the worlds of journalism and environmental activism. His love of nature “was very genuine,” he said, “but it never quite fulfilled me the right way.”
In 2009, Kingsnorth co-founded The Dark Mountain Project. The goal was to create an environmental journalism that reported on the natural world but without the alarmism that has gripped much of the movement. Five years later, Kingsnorth and his wife, who is a Sikh, moved to County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. They wanted to homeschool their kids, to live off the land.
They found a small house on a two-and-a-half-acre plot. “We have a well, and we grow our own firewood, and we have chickens and ducks,” he said. “We have a whole poultry situation that my daughter tends to manage. She’s the poultry girl.”
It was also part of a bigger, spiritual migration. At first, Kingsnorth was a Zen Buddhist. Then he was a “neopagan.” Then he discovered a Romanian Orthodox monastery 40 minutes away from their little house in the country. “That was the end point of a long process of spiritual journeying,” he said.
It was not surprising, looking back, that he had found his way to Orthodoxy, which had a way of connecting the natural and the divine. Our political and technological crises, Kingsnorth said in a 2023 conversation with the American conservative writer Rod Dreher, stemmed from “a loss of connection to the earth. You’re not going to get that in the Church of England. But you do get it in the Orthodox faith, interestingly. It’s not earth-worshipping, but it fills in what’s lacking in Western Christianity: the mysticism.”
In January 2021, he was baptised at the monastery, in the River Shannon. “My family were all with me, and it was deeply transformative,” Kingsnorth told me. Since then, he has become one of the most important and thoughtful voices of the newly converted—the new theists, if you will. His Substack newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, with 64,000 readers, has become something of a go-to for this nascent but rapidly growing community of seekers.
When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”
“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”
“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”
He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: From Infidel to Reluctant Christian
If anyone had a reason to hate religion, it was Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She was born into a Muslim family in Somalia in 1969, the year the communists came to power, and she was 5 when her grandmother and two of her grandmother’s friends held her down so a man, wielding scissors, could remove her cl****is and inner labia—“like a butcher snipping fat off a piece of meat,” she later recalled.
When she was in her early twenties, she fled to the Netherlands, where she gained political refugee status and eventually won a seat in parliament.
There, she embraced Dutch liberal secular culture. She became an atheist—and a fervent critic of Islam. In 2004, her friend, the director Theo van Gogh, was murdered in the middle of Amsterdam for making the movie Submission, co-written by Hirsi Ali, about Muslim misogyny. A note was pinned to his body with a knife saying Hirsi Ali would be next.
In 2006, she shared her story in her best-selling memoir Infidel. Her detractors called her an Islamophobe, but she carried on, and wrote more books. Then, in 2011, Hirsi Ali married Niall Ferguson. They had two boys.
But Hirsi Ali, 55, was tormented by her past. She battled depression.
“I did it with alcohol,” she told me. ”I tried to get rid of that nagging void.” She saw one psychiatrist after another, and “they would prescribe me drugs, and I would faithfully take them, expecting to be better. And I wasn’t.”
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ our most important thinkers like Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are getting religion.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI. (PHOTOSHOP BY THE FREE PRESS)
“I thought we were done,” Ferguson told me. “I thought she was going to die. I’d almost completely despaired of finding a way out, all the accumulated traumas of her life.”
Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”
In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?
Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”
In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”
The essay triggered an avalanche of conversations in the independent media universe—including a book, which she is now working on, and a debate, in June, between Hirsi Ali and Dawkins in which she argued that Christianity is a bulwark against “the cult of power, Islamism.” The debate felt like a kind of bookend to the four horsemen meeting in Hitchens’s apartment in 2007.
“It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.
On September 1, Hirsi Ali and Ferguson and their sons were baptized. “I had a spiritual void in my life, and Ayaan certainly did,” Ferguson said. “Her discovery of a Christian God saved her.”
When I asked Hirsi Ali and Ferguson whether their faith was real or just a political balm meant to combat the “cult of power”—whether they were, as Dawkins said, “theological Christians” or a “cultural” ones—they said their faith was “genuine.”
“You cannot help but feel restored by a church service,” Ferguson said. Then, referring to the nineteenth-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who viewed religion as politically useful, he added: “The cynical Tocquevillian Niall who thought church was a useful thing has given way to somebody who looks forward to going to church.”
Hirsi Ali added: “I’m actually very grateful for whatever it was that was ailing me,” because it led her to God. “My life now is much richer, more fulfilling, than before.”
She wondered: “What does Dawkins say to that?”
Richard Dawkins: ‘Cultural Christian’
Richard Dawkins, 83, was flabbergasted by Hirsi Ali’s turn to God, which he acknowledged in an open letter that he posted on his Substack five days after her essay was published.
When we spoke—via Zoom, Dawkins in a brightly lit room at home in Oxford, England—he was a tad irritable. He was in a navy blazer, and there was a wall of books behind him, and he seemed a little exasperated with all the God talk.
Dawkins had created a furor when, in the midst of the often violent, pro-Hamas demonstrations in London and New York and elsewhere, he appeared on a British radio program and called himself a “cultural Christian.” He went on to say, “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”
“I rather regret” having said all that now, he told me.
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ our most important thinkers like Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are getting religion.
RICHARD DAWKINS. (PHOTOSHOP BY THE FREE PRESS)
Dawkins underscored that he, like Sam Harris, is still very much an atheist. He did not see any contradiction in saying, as he had to Rachel Johnson on the Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) radio show, that he was “happy” with the number of Christians declining in Britain and that he “would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.”
“The tendency you’re talking about,” he told me, alluding to Hirsi Ali, “is, I think, mostly people who don’t necessarily believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin, or rose from the dead, but nevertheless think that Christianity is a good thing, that Christianity would benefit the world if more people believed it, that Christianity might be the sort of basis for a lot of what’s good about Western civilization.”
And yet, Dawkins did admit he was worried about losing the world that had been bequeathed to us by Christianity. “If we substituted any alternative religion,” he said in his April interview, “that would be truly dreadful.”
It wasn’t just about the danger of what was coming. It was about what we were losing, or might lose.
“Some of the greatest music ever written is church music, music inspired by Christianity,” he told me, echoing Roger Scruton. J.S. Bach would never have composed his Mass in B Minor—with all those violins, cellos, sopranos, and tenors weaving together, pointing us toward the heavens—without the divine, he said. Nor would Dostoevsky, as Paul Kingsnorth said, have written The Brothers Karamazov had he not been a believer. Had the world not been changed in countless unbelievable ways by that art? Had that art not changed us?
When I mentioned Dawkins’s distinction between cultural and theological Christianity to Kingsnorth, he said he thought Dawkins was deliberately sidestepping a deeper conversation about the nature of belief.
“As far as he’s concerned, it’s just chemicals in the brain,” Kingsnorth said of Dawkins. “But the reason religion persists is people keep having experiences of God, and Dawkins doesn’t seem to want to deal with that.”
Jordan Hall: The New Revivalists
For two decades, Jordan Hall, 52, had been on this hypercharged, neon-lit journey through the whirlwind of Web 1.0: Burning Man, Big Sur, Aspen, private islands, cross-country RV treks, the jungles of southern Ecuador.
He’d made a bundle—he took the video technology company DivX public in 2006—and then he’d retired at the ripe old age of 35.
He had always been looking, wondering what else was out there, never finding The Thing.
Then, in 2022, Hall and his then-girlfriend Vanessa arrived in the green, rambling, rolling Blue Ridge Mountains of westernmost North Carolina. Billy Graham country.
That was where he and Vanessa stumbled on the Swannanoa Christian Church.
Red brick. White steeple. Small congregation with a few hundred souls.
He felt it immediately.
“There was a liveness here,” Hall told me in an even, pensive tenor. “A brightness and a richness—not like the frenetic optimism you’d see in Silicon Valley 10 or 15 years ago, but like a calm, grounded sense of rightness, like everything is stable and good, and moving through life is a thing that can be done by ordinary people even though there are going to be ups and downs, and that’s because you have a community of people who actually care.”
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ our most important thinkers like Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are getting religion.
JORDAN HALL. (PHOTOSHOP BY THE FREE PRESS)
That was when Hall knew his frantic casting about for meaning was finally over. He didn’t expect it. His mother was Jewish; his father, Catholic, but only technically.
The emptiness he’d spent years fleeing was not just his emptiness, as far as he could tell. It was society-wide.
“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger,” Hall said. “It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”
He meant plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. “The horrifying brokenness of people.”
This brokenness may explain why, for the first time in American history, young men—who have been especially hard hit by the opioid crisis, and are getting fewer college degrees, and finding it harder than ever to land a job—are more religious than young women. A survey of Orthodox churches in the United States, for example, reported a 78 percent rise in converts from 2019 to 2022, with the new male believers outnumbering the female.
It may also explain why so many young people are pushing back against the idea that religion is unfashionable. One of the largest Christian revivals in U.S. history, which happened in 2023, in Wilmore, Kentucky, was led almost entirely by young people. The Latin Catholic Mass is making a return, partly driven by young parishioners craving a greater sense of tradition and ritual. Young Catholic women are donning veils to express their devotion.
Father Jonah Teller, the 36-year-old assistant priest at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, a Catholic church a block west of Washington Square, told me he has seen this shift of young people toward God. When he started at the church, in the summer of 2023, his weekly Sunday discussions would attract maybe 20 people, and they would sit in a circle, one row deep. Now, they’re averaging 100 attendees—mostly twenty- or thirtysomethings who had graduated from top-tier colleges and worked on Wall Street—and they’re four rows deep. They serve wine and cheese, usually from Trader Joe’s, and talk about the most important questions: Why are we here? What does it mean to be good? Or to love? Or to know something is true?
He wasn’t sure how the new parishioners had found their way to St. Joseph’s. Word of mouth, friends, friends of friends.
Father Jonah thought that a new fervor, a more authentic connection to the faith, was emerging out of the loneliness of the last few years. There was a “genuine happiness” that he could feel at Mass, “an excitement, a love.”
It wasn’t that complicated in the end. It was, he said, a kind of turning away from a radical atomization. “The world many people have grown up in is one in which you have the ability to be your own God,” said Father Jonah. “You should have it simply because you want it, whatever it may be. Or not have it, and that can include your own existence—a rejection of simply being.”
But the fact of our existence is a testament to God’s love for us, he said. “We are always wanted,” Father Jonah said. “We are always loved. This is the most important thing. God is not a mindfulness hack or a wellness exercise. It’s not—‘I found this ethical system that gets results, and therefore, I will choose it.’ It’s not a choice. It’s an encounter with an actual, personal love.”
Hall acknowledged that accessing that love, incorporating it into one’s life, was a process—shedding the rhythms and mores of secular society, burrowing deep into oneself. “You’re not going to solve anything if you don’t go down deeper,” he told me. “That’s where the heart of the crisis lies.”
