In 2002, a young Somali woman sat alone with a lecture by Bertrand Russell titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.”
She had survived genital mutilation at five.
She had fled an arranged marriage.
She had watched the smoke rise from the towers and known, with a clarity that broke her, that it had been done in the name of the faith she was raised in.
So she walked away from God.
Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
For the next two decades she became one of the most famous atheists on earth.
She stood on stages with Richard Dawkins.
She debated Christopher Hitchens.
She wrote bestselling books arguing that religion was the great deception of mankind.
She lived under fatwas.
Her closest collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered on an Amsterdam street, a knife pinning a death note for her to his chest.
The world she chose to escape into, the world of pure reason, could not protect her.
It could not even comfort her.
In November 2023, she sat down to write an essay. The title was a quiet inversion of Russell’s: “Why I Am Now a Christian.”
She wrote: “I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable, indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question. What is the meaning and purpose of life?”
The woman who spent twenty years insisting there was no God had finally admitted she could not live without Him.
An Egyptian intellectual called it one of the most pivotal cultural moments since 9/11. But the real story is older than any headline.
The real story was written long before her, in a parable Jesus once told about a son who took his inheritance, ran into a far country, spent everything, and one day stood up in a pig pen and said, I will arise and go to my Father.
The Father did not wait at the gate. He ran down the road.
Some of you reading this think you have argued your way too far from God to ever come back.
You have not.
The Four Horsemen of New Atheism stood together at the height of their movement. Three are gone now.
One came home.
No mind is too sharp. No past is too dark. No exile is too long.
The road back is shorter than you think.