The Great Christian Reset

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.

In his “second phase,” it became personal—although in a 2024 interview with The Australian, Ferguson said that one cannot know for certain that Christ rose from the dead. But he also observed that “Jesus taught us . . . there were things we couldn’t know. . . . 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 far-fetched claims are true. That’s the nature of faith.” 

Ferguson’s story is a microcosm of the struggle of many intellectuals who want to believe but find themselves unable to force their modern minds to accept supernatural claims. In his landmark work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor described what he called the “bulwarks of belief” of the pre-modern era; the cultural and social structures and lived experiences that made belief in God seem natural. In his 2023 work, Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich observes that our societies are hemmed in by precisely the opposite. Many intellectuals today are engaged in a very public struggle with “bulwarks of unbelief,” wanting to believe but finding it difficult or impossible.

One example is the writer Louise Perry, author of the brilliant book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. While researching it, she said in a recent interview, she found herself “reaching Christian conclusions against my will.” She had read Dawkins’s The God Delusion at thirteen, and “thought it was fantastic because I was thirteen.” Christianity, she observed, was true sociologically. To believe this is to be a “civilizational Christian.” But is it true supernaturally? “I hope so,” she admitted. She and her husband now take their children to church. But she struggles.

“Some weeks I believe, and some weeks I don’t,” Perry said. She worries that being raised in a secular home makes it impossible for her to truly believe, but she and her husband want to send their children to a Christian school because they hope to “give our children the best chance of believing both truths”—that is, that Christianity is sociologically and supernaturally true. She does, however, describe herself as a Christian.  

As I noted in a previous column for First Things, Perry is not alone. Charles Murray, who has long acknowledged the civilizational value of Christianity, now calls himself a Christian, describing his ongoing struggle in Taking Religion Seriously, published last year. Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, and Jordan Peterson have similarly grappled with these topics; the title of Peterson’s chaotic 2024 book sums it up: We Who Wrestle With God.

The paradox, of course, is that those who wrestle with God must lose. As Chesterton famously put it: “It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” For the learned to learn to subject even their intellect to God is impossible without divine grace. Niall Ferguson, one of the most influential historians alive, appears to understand this. Sitting in the pews, he is learning.“

What strikes me, as a regular churchgoer now, not having been one before, is how much one learns every Sunday morning,” he said. “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.”