Ayaan Answers: Can Art Restore the West?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses beauty, faith, and the cultural traditions that once gave Western civilization its sense of meaning.

In this conversation for Restoring the West’s Media, Arts, and Culture pillar, Ayaan reflects on how beauty, artistry, and faith can guide the revival of Western culture.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Chief Editor of Restoring the West and a leading writer on freedom, religion, and Western civilization. After fleeing Somalia to escape a forced marriage, she built a life in the Netherlands and served as a Member of Parliament. Her journey from Islam to atheism and ultimately to Christianity shapes her perspective on faith, family, and the future of the West.

Drawing on her experiences across continents and cultures, she considers why Western art and culture feel adrift today, how centuries of faith and creativity have guided human meaning, and what it would take to restore a sense of shared purpose, moral depth, and aesthetic wonder back into our society today.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

RtW: Many great works of art seem to wrestle with uncomfortable truths about human nature. Do you think the role of art is to comfort people or to confront them?

AHA: I think it’s both. Some art—especially Christian art—is about worship. If you visit the Sistine Chapel or look at centuries of paintings of Jesus, the disciples, angels, or scenes from Dante, hell, purgatory, heaven, and God’s kingdom, they all show worship. And it’s not just paintings —cathedrals, music, and literature do this, too. Many stories and works put us in moral dilemmas and ask questions about God and suffering. These questions show up in prose, paintings, and statues. Art can comfort us with the hope of salvation and praise, but it can also challenge us. Art deals with times when people have done terrible things, like the Holocaust, and makes us face hard truths about human nature, which Christianity calls the fallen nature.