Celebrity Converts

You might have heard or seen on socials that the renowned Muslim-turned atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has announced that she’s now a lapsed atheist and has become a Christian. This is a big deal. She has been a prominent public atheist for decades, often sharing a stage with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
 
In a piece titled ‘Why I am now a Christian’ on the website Unherd she details how she read the book by Tom Holland Dominion (one of my favourites from the last few years) and came to the conclusion that the things she values: the nation state and the rule of law, the institutions of science, health and learning, free and fair markets, freedom of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.
 
The news of her conversion lit up my socials – but the intensity of celebration made me nervous. Not about her conversion – I’m glad it’s happened; I’ll join with the angels in heaven in rejoicing for her. What I’m concerned about is we’ve been here before.
 
Ever since I was little, I’ve heard people say “ohh if only [insert celebrity here] became a believer then…” and the sentence kind of trailed off after that.
 
A few years ago, another prominent atheist announced, to great fanfare, that he too had become a Christian – Kanye West. At the time, the Christian world was falling over itself to celebrate. His music was being played in churches and he was leading worship in the megachurches of the world.
 
But like seed growing in the third soil, his conversion seems to have metastasised into something quite dark. I listened yesterday to his new single, Vultures, which seems to be about him justifying his new-found antisemitism.
 
Paul warns in 1 Timothy 3 not to elevate people to leadership within churches who are recent converts, and the reason he offered for this is the danger of conceit. That conceit is not only a problem lurking in the heart of the individual, it’s actively fed up by us.
 
Part of the challenge for famous people when they become Christian is our expectations of them. We’re used to being led by celebrities. We expect celebrities to be immediately adept at articulating the things of faith, because we expect them to be adept at articulating everything else.
 
Kanye needed time to sit in church, experiencing the indignity of bumping on every misplayed note by the non-professional musicians up the front and being humbled by the experience. He needed time to be re-formed by the King of the Jews.
 
I hope Ayaan Hirsi Ali can take a bit of time now to sit in church, get immersed in a Christian community, and get to know her new Lord. My hope for her is that through the nourishment of meditation on the words of God in the scruptures, she’d be like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
 

grace and Peace,

Steve

Diwali

This Sunday is Diwali and my Indian neighbours across the street will be hosting a party. Last year we got an invite, much to the delight of sugar-seeking-missile-children. The sub-continental community is growing rapidly in Canberra – with 12 000 Indian and 5 000 Nepali migrants moving here between our last two censuses, many of these people identify with Hinduism, Jainism or Sikhism. How should Christians approach a holiday like Diwali?

Before we answer that, let’s get clear on what we’re talking about. Diwali is a Hindu celebration and part of the 5-day festival of lights. Hindus follow a lunar calendar, like the ancient Hebrews, and so the date changes each year, much like Easter. Diwali derives from a Sanskrit word that means “row of lights.”

Diwali enacts a set of mythic stories – celebrating the day the god Rama returned to his kingdom in Ayodhya with his wife Sita after defeating the demon-king Ravana. It is also widely associated with Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, and Ganesha, the god of wisdom and the remover of obstacles. These stories come to symbolise spiritual victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.

All this talk of gods might make you think this one is best avoided, but it’s worth noticing too that Diwali marks the beginning of the Hindu New Year, it’s a public holiday in India and plenty of Indians celebrate Diwali without much consideration of the spiritual aspects of the day – much the same as Christians in Victoria this week might’ve been glad to take Tuesday off while also saying, “Nup to the Cup” and ignoring the whole horsie thing.

I take my queues on this one from Paul in Athens in Acts 17. Paul was internally distressed by the Athenian idolatry. I can imagine him walking around, penning Romans 1 in his mind as he read the plaques on the city’s monuments. But he processed that distress into engaged persuasion. He looked for points of resonance between the gospel and the worship around him and showed how the longings of the Athenian heart are satisfied in the person of Jesus.    

So how do we do that for Diwali? If you’re invited to a party this weekend, be winsomely curious. Ask heaps of questions about what this celebration means to them. If triumph of good over evil and light over darkness comes up, ask what that means about how we face darkness and evil now.

And should you get the chance, you can share your story of light overcoming darkness and good overcoming evil too. On the first Easter day John tells us that the women arrived at the tomb “while it was still dark” (John 20:1). The sun did rise the day before, but the time between Jesus’ death and that morning were perpetual gloom for Jesus’ followers. Discovering the open tomb, Mary Magdalene even assumes that some unnamed “they” had taken Jesus away. Darkness and evil looked for all money like the victors. Light had been extinguished.

But then the gardener calls her by name, and the glow of recognition flashes into Mary’s heart and the light that overcomes the darkness embraces her, and with her the whole world.

Jesus is God from God, Light from Light. He is the true and better Diwali and welcomes us out of ignorance, evil and darkness and into light and goodness and true knowledge and delight in God.

grace and Peace,

Steve