Giving New Atheism What It Deserves

A new book and podcast prompt reflections on New Atheism from a professional atheist who saw it all first-hand

New Atheism? I Lived It

Justin Brierley - former host of the Unbelievable? podcast, YouTuber, TikToker, and Christian author - has released a new podcast book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. The book argues that despite demographic trends in the west that show rapid disaffiliation of the population from traditional religion, there are signs that the tides of faith are turning, and that Christianity is on the cusp of a renaissance. The book is accompanied by a podcast of the same name, which makes broadly the same case - just accompanied by rather over-dramatic (though compelling) music.

Reading the book and listening to the podcast is a strange experience for a number of reasons. Much of the Brierley’s argument is based on conversations he’s had on his various podcasts and YouTube channels, and since I’ve followed Brierley’s career for many years I recall listening to the interviews he quotes from a sense of déjà vu ensues. Indeed, as I was a guest on Brierley’s podcast multiple times, I feel I’ve been part of the conversation being narrated, so reading it is unusually personal.

More than that, Brierley’s 15+ years hosting Unbelievable? roughly parallels the 15+ years I’ve spent working as an activist, speaker, and community leader in the atheist and Humanist movements. Brierley says in the first episode of his new podcast that he, having interviewed many of the key players, had “a ringside seat” for the rise and fall of the New Atheism. Well, if he had a ringside seat, then I was in the ring: I was part of the atheist movement all through the events Brierley describes.

Brierley talks about the first Reason Rally. I was there, dancing in the mosh pit toward the front of the massive crowd.

Brierley references multiple events which took place at atheist conferences. I was literally present at some of them. During my most active period of public speaking I addressed every major national atheist conference, countless regional ones, and some international ones too. I spoke at conferences for American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, Center for Inquiry, and Skepticon. I traveled the USA to speak for local and state atheist groups in Massachusetts, Missouri, Arkansas, California, Tennessee, Texas, Illinois, Milwaukee, Minnesota, and many points in between.

Brierley examines the influence of the Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens). I spoke at events featuring all of them. Though I’ve rarely been a headliner at atheist events, the atheist speaking circuit - even at at height of the movement’s popularity - is very small, so at one time or another I met every one of the protagonists of Brierley’s story, sometimes at buffets and receptions for conference guests, sometimes in green rooms or at after parties. While they will not remember me, I have exchanged words with all of them. Some of the characters in Brierley’s story I consider friends, or at least friendly colleagues: we still get drinks together and catch up when our paths cross at a conference.

So Brierley’s account, at the start of his podcast series and of his book, of the “rise and fall of New Atheism” describes a formative period in my personal and professional life, features some people I know, and analyses events I attended and controversies I witnessed.

I was there. I saw New Atheism happen.

Perhaps that’s one reason why I feel the desire to offer a response: I swum the discursive currents Brierley charts, so I feel well-placed to say my piece. But also, if I’m honest, something about the argument presented rankles: there is just enough truth to it to be seductive, but too much missing to be convincing. Hence, this article (which might become a series) reflecting on the New Atheism and on Brierley’s interpretation of it. What did New Atheism get wrong? Did it get anything right? How good is Brierley’s analysis of what happened?

What eulogy does New Atheism deserve, now that it is dead?

What Surprising Rebirth Gets Right

There’s lots that Brierley gets right. He is right that New Atheism, from the start, was more of a popular movement than a scholarly effort in the philosophy of religion. New Atheism tended to present rather simplistic arguments in a forceful and sometimes compelling way - it did not engage with the most sophisticated forms of religious thought or practice. In this way it mirrored most Christian apologetics, the vast majority of which is targeted to a lay audience and completely ignores scholarly work on atheism.

He’s right, too, that there was always an unpleasant edge to the movement: some of the New Atheism was indeed animated by a genuinely anti-religious sentiment. This was not - let me be clear - a principled opposition to the problems religions frequently cause, nor even a sophisticated philosophical objection to religion as a social or psychological phenomenon. There is a perfectly reasonable form of “anti-religious” view which is based on sober reflection on the whole phenomenon. This is not what New Atheism tended to promote.

New Atheism, at its worst, instead offered a smug certitude, a way of asserting the superiority (intellectual and moral) of atheism and atheists to religion and the religious. I attended many conferences where speakers not only critiqued harmful religious practices, but mocked and ridiculed religious believers as well. There was a sense in some quarters that offering kindness and respect to religious people was to betray one’s own side, and there was an almost competitive nastiness in some online communities.

This in-group / out-group thinking led to a sort of dogmatism which particularly hampered clear thinking about religion itself. Some New Atheists came to reject literally any practice culturally associated with religion on the flimsiest grounds, just because religious people or communities tended to do it. Group singing? Religious and therefore bad. Ritual? Religious and therefore bad. Any sort of rules or structure? Religious and therefore bad. There was a reflexive repugnance, an anti-religious allergy, that made it nigh on impossible to talk thoughtfully about religion and its role in life.

Finally, New Atheism was too reactive and anti, and didn’t have much of a positive programme to offer. A lot of the presentations at atheist conferences I would attend would be about why some aspect of religion is bad, but beyond some sessions on science and skepticism there was frequently little said about how to live life without religion. This became a major problem when the movement began to examine questions more broad than simply the direct effects of religion on people’s lives, because there was no base of shared values from which to construct a response to those questions.

Yes, New Atheism had many flaws. I wrote and spoke about them at the time, trying to promote a more humanistic version of nonbelief. As a result I was frequently a target for some of the more angry atheist bloggers, who took me to task for being too conciliatory to religion and too polite to religious believers. I take comfort in the fact that many of those I blog-warred with have come round to my way of thinking, and I don’t hold a grudge. But I think it is impossible to look back at that cultural moment now and fail to see its simplistic dogmatism, it sense of superiority, and emptiness beyond a religious critique. All this is captured well in Brierley’s book and in the first episode of his podcast series.

What Surprising Rebirth Gets Wrong

Yet the portrait Brierley sketches still comes off as a caricature, to me: bad features are exaggerated or decontextualized, while good features are left out. Something in me, despite the problems I’ve just described, wants to defend some things about the New Atheism.

The main failing of Brierley’s analysis of the New Atheism is that it dramatically underestimates the political significance of religion (and particularly Christianity) in the USA, and therefore fails to fully appreciate the very important things it was trying to do. I think this is because religion is in large part a spent force in the UK: it has relatively little political influence. But this is not the case in America, where conservative Christianity in particular still has enormous power.

Having grown up in the UK before moving to the USA to study and work, I have had the opportunity to see first hand how different the two countries are when it comes to the power of religion. I can tell you for certain that the USA is massively more religious than the UK, to an extent most UK authors do not comprehend.

Even Christian commentators in the USA frequently miss or deny the influence of Christianity, in large part because they benefit from it. When your religion is at the top of the heap, you tend not to notice how that affects everybody else. That’s why Bethel McGrew (a Christian author) could say, in Brierley’ podcast, that the US was not much of a Christian country even when the New Atheists got started: the fish doesn’t see the water in which it swims, and America is drowning in Christian privilege.

It’s worth quoting McGrew at length because this section from the first podcast episode is so telling:

This narrative [the New Atheists] began to create…the atheists are telling you that these Christianists are coming to take away your rights as an atheist. They’re coming to take away your abortion rights, they want to police your sex life, they want to take over the schools, take over politics…They are dangerous zealots and they have to be stopped at all costs.

McGrew presents this analysis as if the fears the New Atheists were articulating were merely rhetorical devices to get people to work against religion. Later in the podcast she calls the narrative a “ridiculous” story meant to paint atheists as the oppressed underdogs fighting against Christian oppressors. But - how can I put this? - every element of this description was literally true when New Atheism was at its height and remains true to this day!

To wit:

Christians in the USA have for decades campaigned against abortion rights, and have recently succeeded in overturning them by offering their support to a President who appointed conservative Christian judges to the Supreme Court.

Christians in the USA are consistently less supportive of sexual freedom than nonreligious people, and are less supportive of LGBTQIA+ rights and equality (a 2023 report from the Public Religion Research Institute found “clear partisan and religious divides on [LGBTQ] issues”: a majority of white evangelical Protestants support overturning the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriage, and 40% think it should be legal to discriminate against LGBT people in the workplace).

Christian conservatives have for years been mobilising to take over school boards and, when they are successful, frequently attempt to influence school curricula and teaching in ways which reflect their religious views - including banning books they disapprove of. I was involved myself in a campaign to prevent a shadowy coalition of far-right Christians from taking over a school board in St. Louis, Missouri, so I have seen this first-hand.

Christian Nationalism and Christian Dominionism are on the rise. A well-funded and concerted campaign, Project Blitz, seeks to embed Christian Nationalism at the highest levels of the US government. Again, I saw this myself when a model bill from the Project Blitz Handbook was introduced in the Missouri state legislature, and we had to mobilise against it.

The influence of Christian Nationalism has only increased since then. Major political figures like Republican Senator for Missouri and stolen-election-conspiracist Josh Hawley and newly-elected Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson both espouse Christian Nationalist views. These people are dangerous zealots, and all responsible citizens should oppose the political project they promote. (It is telling that McGrew herself seems to be a fan of both: just this week she made supportive tweets about both Hawley and Johnson as well as, rather worryingly, British far-right YouTuber Carl Benjamin).

McGrew doesn’t see the Christian waters in which she is swimming in part because they buoy up her particular religion and partly, it seems, because she has some sympathy with the Christian Nationalists. Brierley doesn’t appreciate how deep those waters are partly because he lives in a much more secular country, with no analogue to the massive political power of American Christianity. Both present a distorted analysis of the New Atheism, because it was was in many ways a phenomenon which makes best sense in the context of America’s profoundly Christian religious politics and culture.

In Defense of New Atheism

Seen within its proper context - a very Christian United States with a highly politicized conservative Christian movement - New Atheism should be appreciated for having two genuinely laudable objectives. The first was to destigmatize atheism in a nation where to be openly atheist was then - and is still now - seen as an admission of immorality and untrustworthiness. The second was to promote the separation of church and state.

It is hard to convince people, sometimes, that there is a genuine and debilitating stigma against atheists in the United States: many Americans won’t admit to it while Brits refuse to believe it. But it is absolutely true: I traveled the country speaking to atheist groups and communities, I worked with numerous atheist nonprofits, and I heard hundreds of stories from people who were isolated, lonely, discriminated against, demeaned, kicked out of their homes, divorced etc. because they admitted to being an atheist.

I saw this prejudice personally many times. One example: when I led a workshop on atheism for a diversity conference a couple of years ago, I asked participants to say what words came immediately to mind when they thought of the word “atheist”. Some participants said simple definitional things like “nonreligious” or “nonbeliever”, but a surprising number offered responses with a negative valence: “bad”, “Satanic”, “evil”, “I don’t like that!” I kept the tone light in order to facilitate honest sharing and to encourage learning, but part of me was disgusted: these professionals, attending a conference on diversity in the workplace, were openly admitting to demeaning stereotypes about atheists they would never admit to about another religious group.

Atheists still have to deal with such negative stereotypes even today: a 2023 Pew study found that despite recent gains atheists are still one of the least favourably-viewed religious groups in America, with 24% of Americans admitting to a very or somewhat unfavourable view of us. making atheists about as unpopular with the American public as Muslims. This prejudice runs deep, and anyone who has a shred of commitment to freedom of religion - the idea that people should be free to explore religious ideas and beliefs for themselves, and choose their own path - would want to eradicate anti-atheist stigma.

New Atheism should be lauded for attempting to tackle this problem directly.

As we’ve seen, in the USA conservative Christians are constantly infringing on people’s rights, and is constantly attempting to change the law to force everyone to live by its own values. While I was serving my humanist congregation in St. Louis I constantly had to respond to attempts by Christian lobbyists, religious groups, and politicians to promote Christianity using public money: they wanted to teach the Bible (and only the Bible) in state-funded schools, put the Ten Commandments outside court buildings, put “In God We Trust” on police cars, use the sex education curriculum to promote Christian sexual teachings, and funnel public money to churches - the attempts to enshrine Christian privilege were endless.

This is representative of the fact that, for decades, conservative Christian organisations have been chipping away at the dividing line between church and state, ever more expecting non-Christians to live according to Christian beliefs. That campaign has culminated in the contemporary emergence of Christian Nationalism as a major force in US politics - a problem which will only become more visible during the upcoming presidential election.

New Atheism, by absolutely insisting on secular government, played a role in pushing back against these trends. It successfully made the relationship between religion and government - a rather esoteric and wonkish issue much of the time - a part of the political debate. We could use a forceful voice for secularism today, to push back the Christian Nationalists and Dominionists seeking to take over.

I appreciate that neither of these objectives of New Atheism make as much sense in the UK context. Certainly being an atheist does not carry anywhere near the same level of stigma in the UK (or in most of Europe) as it does in the USA, outside some very small and closed religious communities. And, while there are anti-secular elements to the UK constitution (such as the presence of Bishops in the House of Lords and the public funding of discriminatory state schools), in large part the UK is a secular nation in practice. So of course UK commentators might view the intensity of US-based New Atheism with a sort of bemusement and even disdain: it never made full sense in their context, and they could view it with the sort of wry, slightly superior detachment that (in my experience) the British tend to adopt toward anything we see as distinctively American.

But that the New Atheism doesn’t make sense in the UK context doesn’t mean it didn’t make sense at all. At the time, in the USA, it was doing something important. It was pushing back on genuine, entrenched Christian privilege that warped (and continues to warp) American politics and culture. And it was creating spaces for atheists - a distrusted and disliked minority subject to genuine religious marginalisation - to find community and assert their rights and dignity.

(They were also very important in many other countries where religion has a large political footprint - when I spoke at international atheist conferences it always surprised me that delegates from India and African nations were often the most enthusiastic New Atheists in part, I think, because they experienced very vividly what can happen when religion and government are intertwined. This deserves its own article, however!.)

New Atheism pursued its goals imperfectly - the problems with the movement were deep and more numerous than I have explored here. But there was, at the heart of it, the desire to do things that are both necessary and laudable - and New Atheism deserves credit for that, even if it failed, even if it has caused harm.

Where Now?

The question is, what comes next? After the New Atheism, where do nonreligious people go? Brierley’s book and podcast continue the story by exploring how New Atheism interacted with social justice culture - so that’s what I’ll examine next.