I talked to Greg Sheridan of @australian (for the first time...
Niall Ferguson@nfergus
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Dec 21, 2024
~6 min read
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I talked to Greg Sheridan of @australian (for the first time publicly) about becoming a lapsed atheist and embracing the Christian faith. I'm afraid it's behind a paywall (unlike Heaven), so here are the quotes in a thread: 1/17
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Quietly, but with great commitment, Ferguson has become a religious believer. With his wife, @Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and their sons, he has become a churchgoing Anglican Christian. He is, in his own words, a "lapsed atheist". Much more important, he’s a believing Christian. theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/how-h… 2/17
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Though Ferguson sees profoundly the crisis of our times, and the contribution to that crisis brought about by the abandonment of Christianity, this is not primarily a political conversion. It's a deeply personal and deliberate turn to faith by a man who was formerly a
lifelong atheist. 3/17
lifelong atheist. 3/17
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"I have embraced Christianity," he tells me. "We were all baptised, Ayaan and our two sons, together in September ... It was the culmination of a quite protracted process. My journey was from atheism. My parents had left the Church of Scotland, I think even before I was born. I grew up in a household of science-minded religious sceptics. I didn't go to church and felt quite sure of the wisdom of that when I was young. However, in two phases, I lost my faith in atheism." 4/17
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"The first phase was that as a historian I realised no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic. That was an insight that came from studying 18th, 19th and 20th-century history." 5/17
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"But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith. That insight has come more recently and has been born of our experience as a family." 6/17
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"I got my older children baptised because I had a sort of (Alexis de) Tocqueville view that religion was good for society. It was part of Western [civilization] and I felt I should embrace it. But I would attend church (occasionally) in a spirit of scepticism and detachment." 7/17
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"I felt that if I was a conservative, and believed in the institutions of tradition, living in England it was kind of preposterous not to go to one's local church. It was a kind of Tory impulse. I was in that state of mind where if the left was against religion, we should be for it. I was in favour of it. That was enough." Now it’s different: "Now I attend church in a spirit of faith. Also I'm a learner. I learn about Christianity every week. I try to understand it better." 8/17
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"What Jesus taught us was that there were things we couldn't know. We couldn't know God's intent. When I read the Bible I don't say: show me the miracle. My attitude is that this extraordinary document is describing the life of a unique individual whose power to transform the world has never been equalled. That's good enough for me." 9/17
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But does he think it’s true that Jesus rose from the dead, and the rest? "I just don’t think that one can know that with certainty. But I think the teaching about how one should live, and the relationships one should have with one's fellow human beings, is so powerful that I prefer to live as if it's true. I can't know, but it seems to me it’s preferable to live as if those claims are true. It’s hard to feel bound by the teachings if they’re lies." 10/17
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"Faith is fundamentally different from reason. One can't reason one's way to God, at least I don't think one can. The nature of faith is that one accepts that these apparently farfetched claims are true." 11/17
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Does Ferguson pray? "Yeah, I pray."
Do you feel you’re praying to someone real? "Absolutely, just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there aren't many atheists when your child goes missing, when the life of somebody you love is threatened. Is it a kind of delusion to pray to an invisible super intelligence? I probably used to think that it was. But I prefer to think that prayer is meaningful, on the basis of faith in Christ. I don't think of it that I'm on the phone to God but I am trying to convey to that which is beyond reason my fervent desire that my son not be killed or my daughter won’t have gone missing." 12/17
Do you feel you’re praying to someone real? "Absolutely, just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there aren't many atheists when your child goes missing, when the life of somebody you love is threatened. Is it a kind of delusion to pray to an invisible super intelligence? I probably used to think that it was. But I prefer to think that prayer is meaningful, on the basis of faith in Christ. I don't think of it that I'm on the phone to God but I am trying to convey to that which is beyond reason my fervent desire that my son not be killed or my daughter won’t have gone missing." 12/17
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"These are powerful human impulses it seems utterly cruel to deny. To say, as I would have done as an atheist, this is all utterly pointless, the fate of your child is a matter of statistical probability, prayer is the equivalent of voodoo or the witchdoctor, don't pray, it's pointless – this is a cruel injunction. I've spent 60 years on this planet and I'm convinced that we can't be spiritually naked, we can't be spiritually void, it's too miserable. I have five children, and in the life of every child there's at least one disaster that seems as if it might be fatal. If you don't pray in those moments you're not flesh and blood." 13/17
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"I think there are a bunch of militant cults and religions, some derived from Christianity, that compete now in a deeply disorienting pseudosecular civilisation. I say pseudosecular because I agree with Tom Holland (author of Dominion) that a lot of Christianity is still there in the operating system but people are in denial about it. They don't even recognise the Christian roots of much that they believe. This goes to the environmental movement and the strange cult of wokeism. There are lots of curious mutant forms of Christianity afoot, I think. But that's not the bad thing. I suspect throughout history the true culture, or milieu, has always been quite eclectic." 14/17
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Ferguson can live with that. What really upsets him is this: "We've given up on religious observance. This is a mistake – the empty churches on Sundays, people not saying grace at dinner. We've lost observance and in doing that we've lost something very powerful and very healing. It's not so much that we're culturally floating in an eclectic mishmash of half-remembered theology, it's that we've just stopped being Christians. That seems to me a more serious problem." 15/17
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"What strikes me, as a regular churchgoer now, not having been one before, is how much one learns every Sunday morning. Every hymn contains some new clue as to the relationship between us and God. I think the educational benefit of going to church almost equals the moral benefit, the uplift, the sense one gets of being somewhat reset." 16/17
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"All of this matters hugely and as a society we've turned away from it. That explains, much more than the rise of social media, the mental health problems that characterise our societies today. We're all sort of running this experiment, without God and without religious observance. And it's not going well. But we blame it on the smartphone or on Twitter. I think the real explanation for the mental health epidemic is that we've thrown away those wonderful support mechanisms that evolved over centuries to get us through." theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/how-h… 17/17
