Historian Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals, is the latest high-profile academic to convert to Christianity after decades of rejecting it. He is not alone. Other notable converts include his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali, historian Tom Holland, philosopher Roger Scruton, and environmentalist and author Paul Kingsnorth. Psychologist Jordan Peterson recently discussed his journey towards Christianity with Spectator UK Editor Michael Gove, though Peterson’s faith is heterodox, to say the least.

Even the globe’s most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, has described himself as a cultural Christian – although he swiftly clarified that this does not include accepting any of the faith’s supernatural claims. Rather, he likes cathedrals and Bach.

What is going on, and why now? The answer is simple: Christianity in the West has been in decline for long enough for people to see what the post-Christian world looks like, and it’s not pretty.

Today’s rising secular orthodoxy can be just as judgmental and censorious as the worst of the 1950s churches, but without the compassion, the community, the forgiveness, the self-deprecation, or the humour. As comedian Dominic Frisby sings in one of his parodies, wrong opinion has become a hate crime. Shame, which helped shape a level of public restraint, is way out of fashion, and civil discourse is now an oxymoron.

Many who had been tempted to believe Dawkins’ claim that ‘the universe has no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference’, find that it conflicts with their human yearning for lives that have meaning and purpose.

Niall Ferguson put it eloquently in an interview with The Australian’s Greg Sheridan last month. Calling himself ‘a lapsed atheist’, he observed that as a historian he realised that every attempt to organise society on the basis of atheism had been catastrophic, then he further realised that no one can be ethically secure without religious faith.

Ironically, some have credited the famous ‘new atheists’ of the early 2000s with helping to undermine the faith by the ugly stridency of their language, and their barely undergraduate understanding of theology and philosophy. Philosopher of science Michael Ruse, an eminent atheist, said some of their arguments were so simplistic that it made him ashamed to be an atheist.

What helps to send these ideologues astray is that they see Christianity primarily as a set of propositions that must be assented to a purely cerebral collection of (false) truth claims.

This totally misses the point. Christianity has doctrines and a framework of belief (as does the faith of scientism), but the new atheists are blind to the ‘rich history of Christian practice, sacramental life, community building, and prophetically embodied witness against the world’s injustices’ as Episcopalian priest Luther Zeigler has put it.

For Christians, ‘Faith is as much a way of life as it is a system of thought; as much a rhythm of life-giving practices as a collection of beliefs; as much a way of relating to others and the created world as a prescription for understanding it.’ Indeed, in New Testament times, the faith was known as ‘The Way’ – Zeigler observes that the early Christians gave to the poor; cared for the sick; established communities without regard to class, social status, privilege, or gender; shared their resources without possessiveness; practiced hospitality to strangers and foreigners; repented of their sins with humility; sought and extended forgiveness; exercised an unrelenting ministry of reconciliation; prayed with regularity; and tried, individually and in community, to embody the fruits of a Spirit-filled life (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control).

Of course, these may be honoured more in the breach than the observance, but they are aspirations that are waning in the post-Christian West, which saddens many, such as Ferguson. Christianity provided a template of public restraint which is scarcely relevant in a ‘just do it’ society.

Today, as William Butler Yeats warned in The Second Coming, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world … the best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.’ He wrote in 1919, another difficult time for Christianity, but it is not hard to see him as a prophetic voice today.

From another perspective, the modern West has never had more capacity to do good, to solve problems, and sometimes – think antibiotics or the polio vaccine – it has succeeded. Yet never have society’s failures been so spectacular, and never have we been so culpable for them. No wonder people are looking for hope.

The news provides daily examples. Corporate greed and exploitation, political expedience, union bullying, violence, international flashpoints – the list is almost endless. The massive rise of anxiety and depression, especially among young people, and the growth of loneliness across all sectors of society, highlight this depressing trend.

To take a political example, the failure of the federal government to take rising anti-Semitic attacks seriously – at least until the Adass synagogue arson in Melbourne – is a shameful example of cowardice and betrayal. Such expedience may not be new, but it has exacerbated the massive loss of trust in all our institutions, from governments to the churches, courts to the news media.

It is the unfortunate facts of human nature that led Voltaire to observe that if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent him (and, even if there is no God, he wanted his servants to be Christians so they would not rob him or murder him in his bed). It seems that Ferguson, Hirsi Ali, Scruton, Holland, Peterson and others are observing the same flaws.

In his poem Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold laments that the Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round Earth’s shore, but now he hears only its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. Twenty years ago, many atheists believed religion was rushing toward oblivion; today there are more believers on Earth than ever before. Perhaps the tide of faith is on the turn.

Barney Zwartz is a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity.