The New Atheism Is Dead

Long Live the New Atheism

Wow, has the world changed in twenty years. It’s not like the software merely updated on the old world; it’s like the old world disappeared, and a new one emerged. In this new world, here’s a Very Big Development: the boisterous New Atheism, the intellectual trend so au courant 15-20 years ago, is no more. Let it be pronounced in the highways and the temples: the New Atheism has crashed and burned.

The New Atheism is dead.

Before I expand on this theme, let me note this: I just released a podcast episode on this theme. Watch this episode of Grace & Truth, and indeed all episodes of the very same, at my YouTube channel. Please download, “Like,” and subscribe to this channel; here are the Spotify and Apple podcast links, if you prefer those. (I do this new podcast three times a week for Salem, and am having a blast.)

Media ventures aside, let’s think together about the long tail of the New Atheism. This intellectual movement has shown itself altogether unable to handle the strong gods that have so forcibly asserted themselves in the last five years. By “altogether unable,” I do not mean a little bit unable; I mean completely, totally, absolutely, overwhelmingly unable to handle our late-modern context.

The Confident Message of the New Atheists

In a galaxy far, far away, the New Atheists made the public case that Christianity was holding the world back. According to their narrative, evangelicalism was playing out its long exercise of regression, stopping people from being free. In a broader sense, oppressive religious fundamentalism—whether of the Islamic or Christian kind—was the bane of the earth.

The New Atheists came not only with the diagnosis, though. They came with the cure. What was needed, they argued in different ways, was a deconstructed world. Instead of a world awash in religious intolerance, humanity cried out for a disenchanted world, a realm where reason prevailed, superstition died an easy death, and no “Great Sky God” reigned in terror over innocent and well-meaning people.

This message played well with many folks, especially elites, students, skeptics, and thinkers. In their own form, the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others enjoyed great popularity. They made good money off of this phenomenon; they traveled the champagne speakers’ circuit; they wrote best-selling books; as the coup de grace, they graced the covers of magazines and the front page of newspapers (told you it was a different era).

The New Atheism no doubt had a major effect in the church as well. I am making swift cuts in this essay, but as a theologian who tries to observe trends in the church, you can draw a straight line from the explosion of the New Atheism to our current fixation on “deconstruction.” While Christians sometimes get things badly wrong, the New Atheism made the world a much more unstable, much less friendly place. The New Atheism attacked the only remaining solid foundation found in the modern world: Christianity.

New Atheism Made the World a Much More Dangerous Place

But what came from this attack? Nothing good. Even if you’re not a born-again believer as I am, you can scarcely look at the West in the last 5-10 years and conclude that civilization is in a great place. It clearly is not. The strong gods mentioned above have sown chaos, havoc, and destruction in the West.

If you value free speech, a thriving public square, and global peace in some form, you cannot honestly argue that Christianity is at fault for what ails us today. Wokeness—the new campus religion—has decimated the life of the mind, as I have argued elsewhere. Like a ferocious virus attacking an unsuspecting body, wokeness has subjected intellectual inquiry to thought-codes and speech-codes, dividing fair-minded thinkers into reductionistic “Racist Bad” and “Anti-Racist Good” categories.

Aligned with paganism, wokeness has presented your average garden-variety man as both “toxic” and “oppressive,” as I show in this new book. Not to be outdone, the true-blue feminists have of late contracted a bargain with the gender-constructionists in which they keep their seat at the “Hope and Change” table while denying the very nature of womanhood itself.

What a harvest of happiness this has yielded. “Hope and Change” as a move away from a society marked by supposedly toxic Christian gender roles entails, it turns out, that hulking adult men with the shoulders of Spartans in wartime can enter the women’s restroom, where women change naked before the game to be played, and then complete the revisionist cycle by breaking women’s facial bones once the actual sporting event begins. Behold, friends: progress!

Of course, many people do make the case that the above scenario is progress. Notwithstanding the fact that such an argument is literally crazy, one cannot help but think as well of the leftist fathers and mothers who must—in dutifully lining up on The Right Side of History—close their eyes and wince at the prospect of their own daughters being observed in the nude, and subsequently battered in the brain, by the men who now regularly invade the spaces of women. Progress, it turns out, allows no protest, nor any deviation at all.

There are other major threats at hand today. Regarding Islam, anyone entertaining the idea that this religion had softened must be having quite a moment as we watch cities across the globe flood with activists supporting the actions of martial Hamas. On still another front—there are so very many now—those who enjoy personal liberty have watched in horror as our world locked down, freedom suffering one cut after another in the name of “public health.” The sickness itself was real and bad, but the societal cure was worse, much worse, than the physical affliction.

The Shocking Shift of Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In sum, it has been a terrible decade for those who invested hope in the non-Christian liberal project. The New Atheism, to be clear, was not the only force that cleared the way for these ill influences to take hold in the West. But it was a key player. For this reason, it was remarkable to see Ayaan Hirsi Ali—at one time a self-declared atheist and friend of some New Atheist thinkers—publicly embrace Christianity at the October 2023 ARC conference in London.

The podcast episode linked above includes my fuller reflections on Ali’s shift. For my humble part, I’m not entirely sure where she is spiritually; furthermore, becoming a theist is not the same as becoming a born-again Christian, to be sure. That said, Ali is a gifted and brave woman, and I am thankful for this development in a general sense.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is, I sense, not alone. (Tracking this trend, Justin Brierley of the UK recently published a book along these lines that I need to read.) For my part, I believe that Ali represents not merely a striking individual occurrence, but a trend that will only grow with time. I don’t write this in a proud or triumphal spirit, as if we’re cheering for Team Christianity to beat Team Atheism in the ping-pong match at summer camp. I write this in a hopeful and joyful spirit, praying—as I encourage you to do—that fellow sinners will find the grace and truth of Jesus Christ (John 1:17).

At the aforementioned ARC event in London, near the thoroughly modern skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, Jordan Peterson made an ancient declaration. Discussing how the family’s shared life at home is greatly meaningful despite its humility and normalcy, Peterson said this: What happens around the dinner table is real, absolutely real, and so is what is at the pinnacle. The “pinnacle” in context meant God—divine reality.

It is far beyond me to know what precise spiritual course Peterson is traveling. I have appreciated him for years, have prayed for his conversion, and beyond his story was inspired by different elements of the ARC event in London organized around him. (More to be said on that later.) Peterson, like Ali, is brave, bold, and principled. Even as he now sees the horrifying darkness of the non-Christian world, I pray he sees the blinding brilliance of the glory of the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Christ.

There Is a Fire in the Wilderness

This is a strange and bewildering time. It is not unlike England in the 1920s, when a range of thinkers and artists left behind skepticism in the wake of a shattering world war and vacuous higher culture. They saw, rightly, that the key cultural ideas of that day did not offer what they needed, whether societally or individually.

In our day, we must see the same, and stand for what is good. Tempted by authoritarianism of both a “rightist” and leftist flavor, we must not succumb. We must stand for the good of the Bible-influenced Western tradition: the rights of the individual, the goodness of religious liberty and all the liberties that flow from it as the “first freedom,” the need for a reenchanted public square ordered around the reality of God’s existence and the dignity of the God-made person, and a political process that respects the voice of the people and the rule of law.

Even as we honor these goods, we acknowledge that the world, as I said early on in this essay, has changed, and profoundly so. The New Atheists have suffered such complete and humiliating cultural defeat. Dawkins has been cancelled, Harris gives extended thought-exercises on his podcast expressing support for mass death in the face of resistance to lockdowns, and many others have either disappeared or lost heart.

This is now clear as a referendum on the New Atheism: it did not prove up to the task of equipping our world to repel the strong gods. It proved shockingly inadequate to the task, for it has no program of human dignity, creatureliness (before a Creator), and liberty. Many atheists are gifted and courageous people in natural terms, but they simply do not have the horsepower needed to overcome the strong gods. In truth, none of us do. Only God does.

Conclusion: The New Atheism Is Dead, But Jesus Christ Is Alive

This is what Ali grapples with in her recent UnHerd piece, “Why I Am Now a Christian.” Her account of the strength of Christianity largely centered in the functional power of the faith for society. But at one point, she noted a gift that Christianity gives: “spiritual solace,” she termed it.

She is quite right. There is no spiritual solace in atheism, not even a little. In fact, back in the day, the New Atheists went helmet-headfirst against spiritual solace, mocking it and savaging it. But now, in the tragedy of human pride, they find themselves—at least some of them—wanting it. Comfort—like hope—is a hard instinct to quiet, it turns out.

The New Atheism is gone, friends. It will never breathe again. But truth, beauty, and goodness are not dead. In embodied and personal form, they are very much alive. Jesus Christ is on his throne, and try as the devil and his minions might, he will never be overcome. He is the only one who can defeat the strong gods out there. But he is also the only one who can win the war raging in every human heart—in here.

The New Atheism is dead, but Jesus Christ is alive.