New Atheism is now dead

The “New Atheism” burst onto the cultural landscape in 2006. For a while, it seemed as if the movement would change the world. But it didn't, it died.

Its “four horsemen” — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and later Christopher Hitchens — presented themselves as the vanguard of a new age of confident rationalism in Western culture, in which the outdated superstitions of religion and absurdities of postmodernism would be thrown aside.

Yet even as the movement emerged, there were signs of anxiety about its puzzlingly aggressive rhetoric and ambition. Gary Wolf, the journalist who coined the term “New Atheism”, found its asserted certainties to be arrogant and improbable, amounting to a significant intellectual overreach on their part:

People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists.

Wolf could see the dangers of this overconfidence: “Even those who might side with the New Atheists are repelled by their strident tone.”

Yet it wasn’t just that Dawkins and others set out to make religious faith a badge of shame. The “New Atheism” encouraged a discriminatory rhetoric of denunciation and demonisation directed not primarily against religious ideas but against religious people. Many were alarmed at this trend. 

The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from those who suggested that “religious people aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected”. She insisted that The debate should be about assessing ideas, not about publicly ridiculing religious people: “We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.” It didn’t exactly help with the public face of atheism.

Today, the “New Atheism” is generally regarded as having imploded, increasingly (though perhaps unfairly) being seen as the crystallisation of the cultural prejudices of old white Western middle-class males. Many of its former members, disenchanted by its arrogance, prejudice, and superficiality, have distanced themselves from the movement and its leaders.

As the extent of the New Atheism’s intellectual overreach became increasingly apparent, some chose to look again at the alternatives. Perhaps surprisingly, it is now becoming clear that many found that the New Atheism acted unexpectedly as a gateway to religious belief.

I began to notice this about ten years ago, when a steady stream of students in their 20s started visiting me at my office at Oxford University, asking for guidance about studying the relation of science and faith, either through personal study or college-level courses. 

I was intrigued by this surge of interest in this field and asked my visitors why they became interested. To my surprise, many told me substantially the same story.

They were initially attracted to Richard Dawkins’s views, seeing these as simple truths. Yet, as they gave these views closer and more critical consideration, they realised his ideas rested on highly selective readings of the evidence, rhetorical overstatements, and misrepresentations of religious perspectives. 

Dawkins promised them a world of secure certainties and a rational approach to life — yet on closer examination, he offered them only another set of beliefs rather than scientifically or logically secure certainties.

When they visited me, most rejected the “New Atheism”. They wanted to construct a more reliable and intelligent way of thinking about the relationship between science and faith, particularly the nature of religious belief.

I was intrigued by this. In a subsequent conversation with Denis Alexander, director of the Faraday Institute at Cambridge, I discovered that he had also noted this pattern. We began to hatch an idea. 

Could we assemble a group of people for whom Richard Dawkins was a gateway to religious faith and get them to tell their stories, helping us understand what happened and reflect on its significance? 

Happily, we found twelve such individuals, men and women, young and old, from five nations, who were willing to tell their own stories of discovering faith through Dawkins. And so Coming to Faith through Dawkins was born.

While each of these stories makes intriguing reading, they share a common theme of disappointment and disillusion with the New Atheism. Concern often focused on its rhetorical overstatements, evidential overreach, and a misreading or misrepresentation of religious beliefs.

Each of these twelve essays tells a story of false expectations, disillusionment, reappraisal, and resolution. What once seemed secure and unassailable began to crumble in the light of its evidential deficits, its argumentative flaws, and its use of bullying rhetoric to conceal its intellectual inadequacies.

Let’s be clear: these essays do not amount to and are not here presented as an intellectual refutation of atheism. They are much more interesting — accounts of how people’s lives are shaped by a quest for secure beliefs. They help us understand the existential anxiety that often accompanies a growing suspicion that these beliefs are not secure and the renewal of the quest for something intellectually defensible and personally satisfying.

Looking back on the rise and fall of New Atheism, the New Zealand blogger and cultural critic Giovanni Tiso wondered how “such a transparently flawed intellectual project” managed to hold sway “for so long among so many?” 

Undoubtedly, a rich array of books and research articles will one day focus on precisely that question. The cultural mood clearly shifted, as many who had initially embraced the “New Atheism” found that it failed to deliver the secure knowledge they longed for or a sustainable vision of the “good life”.

Perhaps, when the story of the rise and fall of the “New Atheism” is finally written, we will understand why this movement had such an initial appeal and failed to gain long-term traction. But in the meantime, these twelve narratives of disillusionment and discovery shine a revealing light on this remarkable cultural phenomenon and give much food for thought for atheists and religious believers alike.

Alister McGrath recently retired as the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University. He is the editor, with Denis Alexander, of Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity.