Niall Ferguson: “We’re probably in the very early phase of a Christian revival’

I dip into First Things from time to time, usually to my advantage. The other day, a link to “on the intellectual Christian revival” led me to The Great Christian Reset – and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the article led back to a really interesting public talk at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) in Vancouver.

First Things first

Jonathon Van Maren began his January 19 First Things comment with this:

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 16 books to his name, is one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. Twenty years ago, during the heated, raucous New Atheist movement, 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.

Among Niall Ferguson’s best known books are Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and Civilization: The West and the Rest. He received his DPhil from Oxford in 1989 and has taught at many leading universities, including Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Harvard Business School. He was knighted in 2024.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is also a very prominent public figure. Born in Somalia, she has lived in the Netherlands and the United States. Much before her conversion, she was critical of Islam, particularly its treatment of women. Time magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2005.  Along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, she was seen as a leading figurer in the New Atheism movement. She has written several books including Infidel: My Life, Nomad: From Islam to America and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.

Ferguson in Vancouver

During the MLI gathering, Ferguson answered a question from a young man, who asked about sectarianism in a post-Christian world (at 1:14:31 of the YouTube video):

My argument in response to some of Jon Haidt’s recent writing is that the reason young people are highly susceptible to the addictive properties of smartphones and social media is that they’ve kind of been made ready for this assault by the process of secularization.

Secularization is one of these things that sounds benign, but actually the decline of Christianity in the western world has had all kinds of very adverse consequences.

A very striking finding in in Haidt’s most recent writing is that young people from Christian – or I should say religious, because this is also true of Jewish families – conservative families are much less susceptible to the mental health problems that young people from liberal secular families experience.

That’s telling. Now I wouldn’t want to defend sectarianism. I grew up in Glasgow, which is a kind of capital of sectarianism, rivaled only by Belfast. And I think one reason my parents left the church of Scotland was to get away from the sectarianism that pitted Protestants against Catholics.

But I found in the end that atheism was not a basis for a meaningful life, and certainly not for a a happy family life. And so I and my wife recently were baptized and are now practicing and devout Christians and it has made a profound change to my life.

So I have a view which is that we’re probably in the very early phase of a Christian revival – and this reawakening will be the antidote to the great awokening that has caused so much harm. I very much hope that will be the case.

I look around me in in England where I’m spending a lot of time and I think how many unhappy people there are who would be so much happier if they only went to church on a Sunday and open their hearts to Christ. It’s that simple.

Ferguson confirmed on X in late December, 2024 that with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and their two sons he has become a churchgoing Anglican Christian. (The posts are based on an interview with Greg Sheridan.)

He spoke about many topics other than his conversion during his MLI interview. In fact, that portion came more than an hour into a fascinating discussion which ranged over various issues, including:

• Cold War: “We need to remember that in a cold war, you have to recognize there is a fundamental choice between the systems that are hostile to freedom and the systems that protect it.”
• Four things going wrong with Western societies: “Number one, disastrous fiscal policies that created unsustainable debt burdens representing a fundamental betrayal of the social contract between the generations.”
• My favourite bit came when he was asked by host Brian Lee Cowley whether being a Scot has shaped his worldview. His response, to applause: “All the best ideas were had in Scotland; the Scottish Enlightenment. . . .”