Despite the increasingly anti-Christian culture we live in, it seems more and more celebrities from the entertainment, intellectual and business world are having the courage to speak up about how they are embracing the faith and acknowledge that they are not celebrities in the eyes of Jesus, that they are just like everyone else. Steven McAlpine who’s an award-winning Christian author, commentator, pastor and national consultant for churches and Christian schools, has been investigating the phenomenon.
He told Vision Radio’s 20Twenty program: “It’s certainly not a time to keep your head up if you are Christian. You would lose a lot of followers I would have thought if you were a celebrity at the moment. But at the same time, there’s a tension in our culture that has seen [actor and comedian] Russell Brand, in particular, over the past 3 or 4 years, lean into spirituality.’
“It’s very easy to use the ‘God’ word. But Russell Brand’s become more and more focused and eventually got baptised in the River Thames [by adventurer Bear Grylls] about 4 or 5 months ago. And on every Tik Tok, Instagram or YouTube video, he’s talking about something from the Scriptures as none of those other things that he was pursuing seemed to satisfy him. It went from an intellectual curiosity to: I need something in myself as I look at the way the world is, but also as I look at how I am. And that’s the same with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a former figurehead of the New Atheism movement, a global activist, social commentator, women’s rights advocate, author, podcaster and fierce critic of Islam. The Somalia-born Dutch American intellectual is a former Netherlands MP and a researcher for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as well as the American Enterprise Institute. Her conversion is remarkable as she publicly expressed regret for her previous critiques of Christianity, openly recanting her past assertions that all religions, including Christianity, were equally damaging.
Stephen McAlpine told Vision Radio: There’s a deep interest in cultural Christianity at the moment, that the Christian framework gave the West something that we’re now losing. And even if they’re not becoming Christian, a lot of other intellectuals particularly, are going: There’s something in the framework that we would not want to give out too easily, but people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Russell Brand have gone the whole hog, I think.”
“Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote an article last year which was called Why I am Now a Christian. And it blew categories out of the water. She said that she’d moved to Christian frameworks because of the cultural stuff as she read history, but she stopped and looked and said it’s something about her that needed to change. [Fellow New Atheism champion] Richard Dawkins was so upset about this that they had a public debate and at the end of the conversation he said: I came here today Ayaan to convince you that you’re not a Christian. Now, I see that you are a Christian and Christianity is stupid. It makes no sense.”
“Dawkins was shocked that his former atheist ally had switched. He is a cultural Christian. He likes the fruit of the Gospel, but he doesn’t like the root of the Gospel. She spoke in her talk about how she’d been humbled to realise that she had been proud. And that’s a huge shift. I think you’re seeing that across historians like Tom Holland, who is inching his way towards Christian frameworks. You see it in people like [musician and writer] Nick Cave, who sort of dabbles around the edges of it, and Justin Brierley, whose book The Surprising Rebirth of the Belief in God documents the fact that we haven’t reached the New Atheism heights. We’ve sort of moved away from that.”
“One of the things that’s interesting about these recent converts to Christianity is that they don’t go in for Christianity Lite. They want the creeds, they want the historical documents. They want deep Christianity. They want the Bible. I think if we thought that the way a celebrity becomes a Christian is to make Christianity cool, they’re not going for the cool versions of Christianity, necessarily.”
“I remember watching something from the late, great [Christian singer] Keith Greene who said that he explored ten different religions. And they all said: We believe this and we like Jesus. He eventually said: Why don’t I just look at what Jesus says?”
“It’s the compelling nature of Jesus I think that saw people like Russell Brand saying: I’m not a celebrity. When I wake up in the morning, in my head, I’m Russell. And I just realised that I was proud and addicted and selfish and something about Jesus changed that. You have to be very careful not to dismiss that and say, well, people like Russell Brand can’t become Christian because he’s bad. But various prostitutes, tax collectors and thieves on crosses somehow became Christian while the good people didn’t. And I just think we’ve got to be very careful how we navigate this.”
“I think you should check the fruit of the person who’s making the claim, but also be very careful because Jesus said: No one will speak ill of me who’s not with me. And I just say, be very careful because those people have to live their lives in their heads as they are, not as a celebrity. And I think that’s part of the issue. That we have to realise that we make them celebrities. But in front of Jesus, they’re just the same as us. That makes us not despise them, but it also makes us not hero worship them beyond what Jesus would do.”
“We do need leaders in our context who have a sharp mind and wisdom. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a formidable intellect. And when she writes something that non-Christians are reading, there are other people who are going to stop and think: Well, I can’t dismiss her as someone who hasn’t thought about anything and is just sucking up this Christianity stuff. You know, like the Kool-Aid.”
“One thing I noticed about Russell Brand is that he’s a very good exegete (interpreter) of a [Scripture] text, and he’s been able to bring that to the Bible. And I thought, well, that was interesting. I had not thought about that passage that way. And if you’re coming new to the Bible and you’re a smart person who God has gifted intellectually anyway, you’re going to be able to say, I’m coming with fresh eyes to a text that some of us have fogged over. And I think that’s helpful for Christians as well as non-Christians.”
Author Justin Brierley is optimistic about a steady resurgence of belief in God and suggests a revival of sorts is already underway in the UK. “Significantly, both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and [tech pioneer] Jordan Hall have mentioned the influence of author and historian Tom Holland’s thesis that Christianity is the foundation on which the ethics of the West sits. Holland believes the confident atheism spearheaded by the likes of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the 2000s has “crumbled and collapsed,” he wrote. As a self-described ‘cultural Christian’ Professor Dawkins recently lamented the faith’s waning cultural influence in Europe, despite deriding its key tenets as “nonsense.”
“They say God moves in mysterious ways. As a believing Christian, I see signs that He is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals. Many of them are recognising that secular humanism has failed and, against all their expectations, seem to be on the verge of embracing faith instead,” the author continued.
“The impact of Christianity on the West is intrinsically linked to the living faith of those who established its institutions and values. If people hadn’t actually believed in the Christian promise of redemption and if they hadn’t been able to hope in the face of death, they wouldn’t have had the courage to change the world in Jesus’s name,” he concluded.
To listen to the full interview with Stephen McAlpine click on the link below:
