Shugart Lecture 2026

Few stories capture the stakes of faith in the modern world more vividly than Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s. Born in Somalia, she survived female genital mutilation, fled a forced marriage, rose to serve as a member of the Dutch parliament, survived assassination threats following the M**der of her collaborator Theo van Gogh, and spent decades as a globally recognized critic of religion.

And then, in 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—one of the most famous atheists in the world—became a Christian.

Her conversion was not a quiet, private affair. It announced itself as a reckoning—with the limits of secular reason, with the question of what holds civilization together, and with the deeper hungers that neither Islam nor atheism had been able to satisfy. Hirsi Ali’s journey is the subject of her forthcoming book, Why I Am Now a Christian, and it is this journey—personal, intellectual, and civilizational—that she will share with us as our 2026 Ian Shugart Lecturer.

What makes Hirsi Ali’s voice singular is that her case for Christianity does not begin in theology or philosophy. It emerges from a life that led her unexpectedly to Christ: from the mosque, to parliament, through exile and grief, and into the slow discovery that the secular tools of the West—military, diplomatic, technological—cannot answer the question that undergirds them all: What is it that unites us? For Hirsi Ali, the answer lies in the Judeo-Christian inheritance that gave rise to free conscience, the rule of law, and the dignity of the person. It is a conviction forged by a lifetime of struggle and suffering.

In conversation with Brian Dijkema—Cardus’s President, Canada—Hirsi Ali will speak about what drew her to the Christian faith, how her conversion has shaped her understanding of the civilizational challenges now facing the West, and what it means to live—as Ian Shugart himself did—with convictions that are at once deeply personal and publicly consequential. In a moment when many formerly secular people are searching for cultural renewal, and returning to religion as the moral and cultural wellspring of Western civilization, Hirsi Ali will show us why Christianity cannot simply be a civilizational project—before all else, it is an encounter with a person who fulfills the needs of every human heart. That encounter reshapes us entirely, and it is only from the divine gifts of this relationship—mercy, forgiveness, and love—that a civilization worth building is born.