Activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali quoted from Scripture in an impassioned defense of the nation-state and advocated for a return to Christian morality at a conference in London.
The Somali-born former Dutch parliamentarian and research fellow at the Hoover Institution used her platform last month at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference to attack what she depicted as modern liberalism’s rejection of nationalism.
“Modern liberals trashed the nation-state and nationalism, invoking Hitler and Mussolini and arguing that nationalism had caused World War II, not to mention the Holocaust,” she said. “They failed to make a distinction between bad nationalism and good nationalism.”
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Hirsi Ali, 55, identified these “modern liberals” as a murky coalition of “social democrats,” “tenured intellectuals who transformed the modern university into a place for brainwashing young minds into hating their national identity and history,” “editors in charge of legacy media,” “activists within the web of think tanks and NGOs,” and “the administrative state, the bloated bureaucracy that has come to see itself as the benign guardian against fascism while routinely suppressing liberty.”
The founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of “The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast” also took aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, calling them a “radical pursuit of heterogeneity in the name of multiculturalism and diversity.” She pointed to powerful “international and supranational entities designed to transcend or sidestep the nation-states, such as the United Nations or the European Union,” which, Ali argued, have proven “dysfunctional, tyrannical rule of bureaucracy and wasteful, chronically prone to fraud and abuse.”
Citing the failure of what she called the “experiment based on the virtuous theory of multiculturalism to bring about heterogeneous societies in Europe” even amid the “ghastly hellscapes” of Muslim-dominated states, Ali said the solution, in her mind, is simple and unequivocal: “Stop the post-national experiment — it has already gone too far.”
After detailing the decline of the post-war “rules-based international order,” Ali speculated that era might have officially ended “on the 20th of January 2025” — the date of President Donald Trump’s inauguration — or perhaps even earlier with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Celebrating this shift, she hailed the weakening of globalism in the U.S., claiming, “The Democratic Party today [has] no clear leadership … no funding … no media monopoly … no control of government. … In short, they have no power, and that is good news.”
The speech’s most provocative moment came when Ali extolled the virtues of a Christian-dominant Europe, one which she recalled vividly from her journey from Somalia to Holland in 1992. “When I came to Europe … fleeing a forced marriage that was part of a failed clan system, this was the type of nation-state that I found — wealthy, peaceful, stable and optimistic, but still rooted in the Calvinist and Catholic traditions.”
Since then, said Ali, she’s witnessed in both America and Europe what she described as “a sustained effort to drive Christianity to the margins of our society.”
“I believe this gamble on secularism will go terribly wrong,” she added. “It already has.”
Quoting Bible verses like Genesis 1:27, “All humans are created in God’s image,” and Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself” — Ali argued these principles underpin Western values such as human rights and limited government.
“Biblical ethics stress that rulers and citizens are accountable to a higher moral law, ensuring that government acts justly and protects the vulnerable,” she said. “Romans 13:3-4, these principles collectively shaped Western values, like democracy, human rights and constitutional government.”
Hirsi Ali closed her remarks with a call to “stress that responsible citizenship in the West is inseparable from Christian morality.”
“Please, let’s aspire to build or restore the nation-states on which our security depends, and let’s ensure that they run as they used to on that Christian operating system without which we can have no moral compass,” she added.
Last year, Hirsi Ali announced that she had become a Christian and explained her journey to faith to atheist apologist Richard Dawkins. “I had a personal crisis … I lived for about a decade with intense depression and anxiety, self-loathing. I hit rock bottom. I went to a place where I actually didn’t want to live anymore, but I wasn’t brave enough to take my own life. I was self-medicating. Over a long period of time, I saw psychiatrists and other doctors. I was trying to understand my condition, and I was trying to treat it with the help of pure evidence-based science.”
Dawkins asked Hirsi Ali, “You don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, surely?” She said, “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.” Every follower of Christ believes in the Lord’s death on the cross for our sins, as well as His resurrection from the dead. Hirsi Ali then said, “It has to go back to, ‘Is there something or is there nothing?'”
